ABSTRACT
The critic and historian of art would certainly find it advantageous for the studies that he was about to undertake, to know the chronology, the circumstances, the details, the compositions, the recompositions, the recastings and the collaborations of the Shakespearean drama. Were the authenticity of the works all clearly settled, the critic would be preserved from proclaiming that certain works or parts of works are Shakespeare’s, when they are really, say, Greene’s or Marlowe’s, which is an inexactitude of nomenclature, as also is the treating of Shakespeare’s work as being by someone else or anonymous. No value also is to be attributed to conjectures as to the models that Shakespeare sometimes had before him: for Shylock in the shape of some adventurer of his time, or for Prospero in the person of the Emperor Rudolph II, who was interested in science and magic, and the like, because the relation between art and its model is incommensurable.
