PREFACE. It was at one time believed that Twelfth Night was among the latest of Shakespeare's plays. The use of the word ́undertaker'in iii. 4. 301 induced Tyrwhitt to suppose that the play was written in 1614, when this word had an unenviable notoriety; and Malone at first adopted Tyrwhitt's opinion, though he afterwards referred the play to an earlier date, 1607, on account of a supposed allusion in iii. 1. 133 to Dekker's Westward Ho, which was printed in that year. Chalmers thought that the internal evidence pointed to the year 1613 as the date of the composition of the play. But these various conclusions, which were arrived at from very insufficient premises, were set aside by a discovery made by Mr. Hunter in 1828 of a piece of evidence the existence of which had up to that time been unknown. Among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum is a small duodecimo volume (No. 5353) containing, among other things, the Diary of a member of the Middle Temple from Jan. 1601-2 to April 1603. Mr. Hunter's subsequent investigations led him to identify the writer of the Diary with John Manningham, who was entered at the Middle Temple 16 March 1597-8, and called to the Bar 7 June 1605. In 1612, on the death of a distant relative, Richard Manningham, a retired merchant, he succeeded to an estate at Bradbourne, near East Malling, in Kent, and died in 1622. The Diary was edited for the Camden Society by the late Mr. John Bruce in 1868 at the cost of the President, Mr. (afterwards Sir) William Tite. The only entry which concerns us is the following (p. 18), compared with the original MS. : |