of Malone. It is true that in that case the Jacobean books would naturally have been added to the 'proper presses' which Musgrave says that he had provided for the Elizabethan ones, whereas Cunningham found the two sets apart. But as Cunningham also says that he had redeemed the Elizabethan bundle from 'a destructive oblivion', it is possible that Musgrave's successors had been neglectful. Moreover, although the 1604-5 list does not appear in the 1821 Variorum, it is difficult to see on what other grounds Malone can have stated of Othello (Variorum, ii. 404), 'We know that it was acted in 1604'. Probably, indeed, he had seen the list, before he abandoned in a note of 1800 to Dryden's Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy his earlier opinion that Othello was one of Shakespeare's latest plays. Further, there is similar indirect evidence that he had also come across the 1611-12 list. In 1808 he privately printed and in 1809 published an Account of the . . . Tempest, written 'some years ago'. The chief object of this was to fix an inferior date by Shakespeare's use of a pamphlet of 1610. The superior date he took for granted, saying (p. 31) 'That it was performed before the middle of 1611, we have already seen', and adding the foot-note 'Under a former article'. There was no former article, but in the preface Malone describes the essay as making 'a part of the Disquisition concerning the order of the plays in an enlarged form', and no doubt the former article would have been included in the disquisition, had Malone ever completed his own work. Boswell, reprinting the essay in Variorum, xv. 414, altered the foot-note to refer to the essay on the Chronological Order of Shakespeare's Plays in 'vol. i'. This is in fact in vol. ii, but though Boswell here states (ii. 465) that there is evidence that the Tempest 'was produced in 1611', he does not give any evidence beyond the pamphlet of 1610. Probably he did not know everything that Malone knew. But how did Malone arrive at 'the middle of 1611', since the 1604-5 list does not take us beyond 1 Nov. 1611? I suppose he assumed that public production preceded performance at court. Later in the essay (Variorum, xv. 423) he says that the play 'had a being and a name in the autumn of 1611'.
Since Halliwell-Phillipps's discovery the prevalent view, suggested by him, has been that if the lists, or at any rate that of 1604-5, are forged, the forger had before him a genuine original. More recently, however, the matter has been fully investigated by Mr. Ernest Law, who stimulated the Record Office to a minute examination of the 1604-5 document, including chemical and microscopical tests of the ink conducted by Professor J. J. Dobbie at the Government Laboratories. As a result, Mr. Law's own view that the list is genuine is confirmed by such high palaeographical authorities as Sir George Warner of the British Museum and Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, Mr. Scargill-Bird, and other officers of the Record Office, as well as by Professor Feuillerat, than whom no one knows the Revels documents better, and Professor Wallace. Mr. Law set out the evidence and the whole history of the case in Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries (1911). His view was controverted in a review and a number of subsequent communications in the Athenaeum for 1911 (i. 638; ii. 101, 131, 421) and 1912 (i. 469,
