Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/239

Rh the latter in 1599. If my view be correct then, "More" should date not earlier than 1598-9.

This view may perhaps be held to find some confirmation in the fact that the name of Mundy, previously one of the most active and constant of the writers for Henslowe, drops out of the famous diary for a period of 14 months from August 1598. If in the interval he was concerned in the writing of a play for the King's men, it is not perhaps without significance that when he returned to the Admiral's men it was as part-author of a drama, "Sir John Oldcastle," written in obvious rivalry of Shakspere and to clear the memory of a man whom the great dramatist had most unjustly traduced. It is however to be noted that during this period, when Mundy is not known to have done anything for Henslowe, Dekker was kept pretty busy, though not too busy to have been able to take a hand in the writing of "More." It seems to me probable that the play was written for the Admiral's men, perhaps about the end of 1598, but that it did not appeal to the business instincts of Henslowe, and was thereupon offered to the King's men, and accepted by them, as altered by Shakspere. So late a date may be held to be against Shakspere's authorship, since the resemblance of the work is not to the Shakspere of 1598-9, but to the younger Shakspere whose hand is to be seen in the "Henry VI" plays. The difference may be accounted for by the fact that his work here is hurried and exceedingly careless. He would seem to have been working against his will and not to have had his heart in what he was doing. I am very much inclined to agree with Fleay that the writer of the insurrection scenes and the writer of the scenes leading up to it had in view the troubles of the year 1595. If so, we get an upward limit of date.

The difficulty in dealing with the authorship of "More" has been largely the result of there being so much material for the forming of a decision. It was quite, natural that the question of authorship should be held to be bound up with the question of handwriting. From that fetter I have sought to free myself, with the result given above. As regards Shakspere's participation, I make no undue claims for the value of my judgment in the matter: all I claim is that my finding affords at least some confirmation of Sir Edward Thompson's, reached, as it has been, by such totally different means.