From Shakespeare “To ye Q.”

Discovery, Ascription, and Doubt

In 1972, William A. Ringler and Steven W. May suggested that the poem “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598” (also known as “the Dial Hand” poem) was an epilogue probably recited before Queen Elizabeth during a theatrical performance for the Shrovetide entertainments of 1599.¹ The poem survives in a manuscript miscellany (Cambridge Dd. 5.75, item 228, fol. 46) apparently compiled by Henry Stanford, a tutor in the household of George Carey, Lord Chamberlain from 1597 to 1603.² Ringler and May cautiously attributed “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598” to Shakespeare. They acknowledged Jonson (the only other playwright that can be confidently connected to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599) as another possible candidate, but they also observed that the style of the verses “does not resemble that of Jonson . . . but it is similar to Shakespeare’s.”³ Specifically, certain formal features of the epilogue are “consistent throughout with Shakespeare’s usage”: “the uninflected genitive in line 16, ‘father Quene,’ the use of ‘which’ as a personal pronoun in line 9”; the use of trochaic meter, which “was a favorite with Shakespeare”; and “each word in the epilogue occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works, with the exception of ‘circuler.’”⁴ This evidence was generally but not universally accepted by the scholarly community, and “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598” was included in the RSC Collected Works and The Riverside Shakespeare (as “by Shakespeare?”).⁵ In 2003, Juliet Dusinberre argued that the epilogue was specifically tailored for a performance of As You Like It during the Shrovetide entertainments at Richmond Palace in 1599.⁶ She included the epilogue in an appendix to her Arden edition of that play.⁷ Dusinberre’s claims provoked responses by Michael Hattaway and Helen Hackett that independently opposed an attribution of “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598” to Shakespeare and consequently challenged the epilogue’s possible connection to a play by Shakespeare.⁸ As a result of these recent rejoinders, Shakespeare’s authorship of “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598” can now only be described as “contested.”

Dusinberre does not provide any new evidence for the authorship of “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598.” Instead, she accepts the conclusions reached by Ringler and May in 1972 without further elaboration or confirmation. Her “reconsideration of the epilogue” is not an attribution study; it is a work of theater history primarily concerned with providing a new date for the first performance of As You Like It (traditionally dated 1599–1600 by modern scholars).⁹ Dusinberre accepts Shakespeare’s authorship of the verses, and she proceeds to speculate on the play that was most likely paired with the epilogue in 1599.¹⁰

Michael Hattaway does not agree with Dusinberre’s hypothetical provenance of “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598.” For Hattaway, Ben Jonson is “a strong candidate for authorship” of the epilogue.¹¹ He makes use of additional evidence provided in Ringler and May’s Elizabethan Poetry that suggests Dekker, Jonson, and Shakespeare as the only playwrights to use trochaic meter from 1559 to 1603, and believes that Jonson’s trochaic tetrameters “are very close in style to the dial poem and have roughly the same proportion of feminine endings.”¹² Hattaway then proceeds on the same path as Dusinberre: once he has seemingly settled on a candidate, he uses the process of elimination to determine the likeliest Jonson play to pair with “To y^e Q. by y^e players 1598.” Hattaway eventually claims that the verses are probably “a prayer of the sort that was offered up at court or in private performances by the players.”¹³ This alternative (and possibly more accurate) categorization permits Hattaway to link the conceits of the dial hand poem to the terminal prayer in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (in iambic pentameter). This leads him to conclude that “Dekker may be author of the dial poem as well...