actors in the original performance of Ben Jonson's Every Man in his Humour (1598) which would correspond to the part of "Knowell, an old gentleman," first in the dramatis personæ, of that play. In the original cast of Sejanus the actors' names are set down in two columns; Burbage heads the first, Shakespeare the second column. In the folio edition of the plays, Shakespeare's name heads the list of "Principall Actors in all these plays.'

We know that Burbage took the heroic parts and Kemp the clown's invariable rôle, that Shakespeare's only identified parts are those of Adam in As You Like It (his brother Gilbert's testimony) and the King's Ghost in Hamlet, which Rowe describes as the "height of his performance.' He must therefore have been slated for the "old parts" for which his premature baldness fitted him. We know that he abhorred wigs,

Those spoils of sepulchres that dare inhabit on a living head.

His appearance was probably mature, for while still quite young he speaks of himself in a sonnet

as being "beated and chapped, with tanned antiquity." So with a little powder on his beard and the historic "false paunch" we may find the key to Lady Southampton's allusion, and to Sir Toby Matthew's nickname of Falstaff.

Until a short time ago, no one, to my knowledge had attempted to link the personality of the woman of the Crown tavern with her of the sonnets.

But lately, Mr. Acheson has published a book where the same theory is developed on different evidence. He has not used some of the above material, and my courage was inferior to his, in wading through the minor Elizabethan poets to find "Willobie his Avisa." Nor would I counsel any one to plod through this "weary work." Suffice it to say, that this lengthy poem was published in the same year as Lucrece (1594) and contains the first known reference to Shakespeare as a poet. Two years later it was ordered out of print by the London Censor, as being eminently libellous to some great person, probably Southampton.

Mr. Acheson thinks that he has conclusively

proved that this poem was written by Mathew Royden, the fast friend of Chapman and enemy of Shakespeare.

We certainly find in this contemporary document a parody of the drama of the sonnets in libellous and vulgar form.

I will quote only such portions as most plainly bring out this parody-there are more than a hundred pages of it!-and particularly note that the "Epistle Dedicatory" purports to be from Oxford, thus fixing the scene in the Davenants' town. The persons who figure are: A beautiful innkeeper's wife, a dissolute nobleman, an old player, and a troop of other suitors. The innkeeper's wife is constantly tempted by these admirers; she is called the chaste AVISA, but the author admits that this is not her real name; he chooses it, says he, to describe her chastity: “A rare bird indeed! indeed a Rara Avis," hence Avisa or the English "Lucrece."

Mr. Acheson supposes Mrs. Davenant's maiden name to have been "Byrd," as a man of that name is mentioned as trustee of her husband's will and was probably a relation. It may be hoped that