Various attempts have been made to arrange the plays of Shakespeare, each according to its priority in time, by proofs derived from external documents. How unsuccessful these attempts have been might easily be shown, both from the widely different results of men, all deeply versed in the black-letter Books, Old Plays, Pamphlets, and Manuscript Records and Catalogues of that age, as also from the fallacious and unsatisfactory Nature of the Facts and Data on which the Evidence rests. In that age, when the Press was chiefly occupied with controversial and practical Divinity; when the Law, the Church and the State engrossed all honour and respectability; when a degree of Disgrace, quaedam levior infamiae maculae, was attached to the publication of Poetry, and even to have sported with the Muse, as a private relaxation, was supposed to be a venial fault, indeed, but yet something beneath the gravity of a wise Man.

This fact might be proved from a letter of Dr Donne, wherein he expressed his mortification that any of his poems should have been published, and he thereby have incurred the disgrace of being a poet:

Another cause of the obscurity hanging over the works of Shakespeare is the poverty of the professed Poets, so poor they that the very expenses of the press demanded the liberality of some wealthy Individual, so that two thirds of Spencer's poetic works, and those most highly praised by his learned admirers and friends, remained for many years in Manuscript, and in Manuscript perished. Half his Fairy Queen, his Comedies, his Hymn and a number of his Epistles were thus lost to the world.