Shakespeare's earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be
placed about 1591-3. There would then have been no specious
appearance of miracles to be credited by Stratfordians to Will. But
even so, we have sufficient to "give us pause," says Mr. Greenwood,
with justice. It gives ME "pause," if I am to believe that, between
1587 and 1592, Will wrote Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors,
A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. There is a limit
even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we
now possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the
man. But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is
apocryphal.



CHAPTER VI: THE COURTLY PLAYS: "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST"



We now come to consider another "miracle" discovered in the plays,--a
miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent is the
courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make
the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen
and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests is
often conspicuously absent. How could the rude actor learn his quips
and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits? This question I have
tried to answer already,--the whole of these fashions abound in the
literature of the day.

Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the
ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse,