Revels fix the company. The date is more difficult. It cannot be earlier than 1607, since the reference to a play at the Red Bull in which the Sophy of Persia christens a child (IV. i. 46) is to Day's
Travels of Three English Brothers of that year. With other allusions, not in themselves conclusive, 1607 would agree well enough, notably with Ind. 8, 'This seuen yeares there hath beene playes at this house', for it was just seven years in the autumn of 1607 since Evans set up plays at the Blackfriars. The trouble is IV. i. 73, 'Read the play of the Foure Prentices of London, where they tosse their pikes so', for this implies that the Four Prentices was not merely produced but in print, and the earliest extant edition is of 1615. It is, however, quite possible that the play may have been in print, even as far back as 1594 (cf. s.v. Heywood). Others put it, and with it the K. B. P., in 1610, in which case the production would have been at the Whitefriars, the history of which can only be traced back two or three years and not seven years before 1610. On the whole, I think the reference to Don Quixote in the Epistle is in favour of 1607 rather than 1610. It is, of course, conceivable that Burre only meant to claim that the K. B. P. was a year older than Thomas Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, which was entered in S. R. on 19 Jan. 1611 and published in 1612. Even this brings us back to the very beginning of 1610, and the boast would have been a fairly idle one, as Shelton states in his preface that the translation was actually made 'some five or six yeares agoe'. Shelton's editor, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, has shown that it was based on the Brussels edition of 1607. If we put it in 1608 and the K. B. P. in 1607 the year's priority of the latter is preserved. Most certainly the K. B. P. was not prior to the Spanish Don Quixote of 1605. Its dependence on Cervantes is not such as necessarily to imply that Beaumont had read the romance, but he had certainly heard of its general drift and of the particular episodes of the inn taken for a castle and the barber's basin. Fleay, Boyle, Moorman, Murch, and Alden are inclined to assign to Fletcher some or all of the scenes in which Jasper and Luce and Humphrey take part; but Macaulay, Oliphant and Gayley regard the play, except perhaps for a touch or two, as wholly Beaumont's. Certainly the Epistle suggests that the play had but one 'father'.
The Faithful Shepherdess. 1608-9
N.D. The Faithfull Shepherdesse. By John Fletcher. For R. Bonian and H. Walley. [Commendatory verses by N. F. ('Nath. Field', Q_{2}), Fr. Beaumont, Ben Jonson, G. Chapman; Dedicatory verses to Sir Walter Aston, Sir William Skipwith, Sir Robert Townsend, all signed 'John Fletcher'; Epistle to Reader, signed 'John Fletcher'.]
S. R. 1628, Dec. 8. Transfer from Walley to R. Meighen (Arber, iv. 206).
1629. . . . newly corrected . . . T. C. for R. Meighen.
1634. . . . Acted at Somerset House before the King and Queene on Twelfe night last, 1633. And divers times since with great applause
