unlikely that, if he had been a member of the company in 1593, he would not have been mentioned in the Privy Council warrant of 6 May. Further, it seems to me impossible to resist the inference that the attribution to him of Titus Andronicus both by Francis Meres in 1598 and in the First Folio of 1623 can only be explained by his revision under that name of Titus and Vespasian, and that this was for the second production of the play as 'ne' for Henslowe by Sussex's men on 24 January 1594. There is, therefore, really some basis for the suggestion made long ago by Halliwell-Phillipps that he is to be looked for during these years in Pembroke's company until its collapse and then in Sussex's, and that it was from this rather than directly from Strange's that he went to the Chamberlain's.[1] On the other hand, it may be that for a time he was not attached as an actor to any company at all. It is possible that he took advantage of the plague-interval to travel in Italy and only resumed the regular exercise of his profession when the Chamberlain's company was formed. In any event, it must have been he who revised The Contention as 2, 3 Henry VI, and the close stylistic relation of these plays to 1 Henry VI makes it probable that the work on all three belongs to about the same date. The limitations of conjecture on so intricate a question are obvious, but I can conceive the order of events as being somewhat as follows. Shakespeare's first dramatic job, which earned him the ill will of Greene, was the writing or re-writing of 1 Henry VI for Strange's, in the early spring of 1592. During the winter of 1592-3 he revised The Contention for Pembroke's and completed the series of his early histories with Richard III, and, as I am inclined to suspect, also an Ur-Henry VIII. He also wrote The Jealous Comedy or Comedy of Errors for Strange's. In the summer of 1593 Sussex's took over the plays of the bankrupt Pembroke's, including the Shakespearian histories Titus and Vespasian and The Taming of A Shrew. Some at least of these Pembroke's had themselves derived in 1592 or 1593 from Strange's. During the winter of 1593-4 Sussex's played either Richard III or Henry VIII as Buckingham, and also Titus and Vespasian revised for them by Shakespeare as Titus Andronicus. Alarmed at the further inhibition of plays in February, they allowed the revised Titus and unrevised texts of The Taming of A Shrew and The Contention to get into the hands of the booksellers. Whether Shakespeare had already revised A Shrew or did so later for the Chamberlain's (q.v.) I am
- ↑ Outlines, i. 122; ii. 329.
