Note 21 — SUPPLEMENT.

Dunlap gives the full cast of the “Merchant of Venice,” the first play enacted by the Hallam Company in America, at Williamsburg, September 5, 1752, as he received it from Lewis Hallam, Jr., by which it appears that Mrs. Hallam, the manager’s wife, was the Portia, that Miss Hallam represented Jessica, “her first appearance on any stage,” and an actor named Malone played Shylock. The author of the novel states that his wish was simply to depict some Virginia scenes and personages ten years before the Revolution, or the Virginia of 1765, and trusts that his picture is at least truthful as far as it goes, which it probably is, with the anachronism of the appearance, in the year 1765, of Miss Hallam, a young girl of about eighteen, as Portia, thirteen years after she had made her first appearance on the stage in the same play as Jessica. But liberties of this kind are pardonable in a novelist. They are taken by great authors. Scott, in his novel of Kenilworth, the scene of which romance is laid in the year 1575, represents Lord Leicester, in passing through the court-rooms, stopping to compliment Shakespeare on the success of his recent poem of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare being then eleven years of age. The poem was printed in 1593, eighteen years after the event described by the novelist, or when Shakespeare was twenty-nine years of age.