Note 100 — Front matter

The arguments of Dr. Karl Elze, in his Essays on Shakspere (Eng. tr., p. 15), to show that the Tempest was written about 1604, seem to me to possess no weight whatever. He goes so far as to assume that the speech of Prospero in which Shakspere transmutes four lines of the Earl of Stirling's Darius must have been written immediately after the publication of that work. The argument is (1) that Shakspere must have seen Darius when it came out, and (2) that he would imitate the passage then or never.