Note 235 — XIV—THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY

These dates are drawn from a memorandum of plays performed at Court in 1604 and 1605 which is among Malone’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was obviously derived by Malone from authentic documents that were in his day preserved at the Audit Office in Somerset House. The document cannot now be traced at the Public Record Office, whither the Audit Office papers have been removed since Malone’s death. Peter Cunningham professed to print the original document in his accounts of the revels at Court (Shakespeare Society, 1842, pp. 203 et seq.), but there is no doubt that he forged his so-called transcript, and that the additions which he made to Malone’s memorandum were the outcome of his fancy. Collier’s assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton’s residence at Harefield on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere’s MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton’s household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be ‘a shameful forgery’ (cf. Ingleby’s Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5).