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The smartness, the fine epithets, the recondite conceits, the bits of effect, are beyond all praise; but as for one spark of life, of poetry, of real belief, you will find none; not even in that famous Lavacrum Palladis which Angelo Poliziano thought worth translating into Latin elegiacs, about the same time that the learned Florentine, Antonio Maria Salviano, found Berenice's Hair worthy to be paraphrased back from Catullus' Latin into Greek, to give the world some faint notion of the inestimable and incomparable original.
In addition to the Palladis Tamia, Meres was the author of a sermon published in 1597, a copy of which is in the Bodleian, and of two translations from the Spanish, neither of which is of any interest. Meres's Discourse is, like the rest of his work, mainly a compilation, with additions and remarks of his own.
In 1598, as we saw, Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia credits Shakespeare with Venus and Adonis, with privately circulated sonnets, and with a number of the comedies and tragedies. How the allusions "negative the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a nom de plume is not apparent," says Mr. Greenwood, always constant to his method.
"How now, man," he said; "what! hast thou not a word of oily compliment to me on my happy marriage? not a word of most philosophical consolation on my disgrace at Court? Or has my mien, as a wittol and discarded favourite, the properties of the Gorgon's head, the turbatae Palladis arma, as Majesty might say?"
Two years earlier, on August 3, 1581, had been entered 'A Shadowe of Sannazar. Again we know, alike from Wood's Athenae and Meres' Palladis Tamia, that Stephen Gosson left works of the kind of which we have now no trace; while Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy mentions an eclogue of his own, addressed to Edward VI, and entitled Elpine.
Accordingly in 1597 appeared a small volume containing various apothegms, extracted principally from the Classics and the Fathers, compiled by Nicholas Ling and dedicated to Bodenham. It was entitled Politeuphuia: Wits Commonwealth. In the following year appeared 'Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury: Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth.
As the "Palladis Tamia" was published in 1598, this play was produced before that year, and all the evidence, internal and external, goes to show that Shakespeare wrote it soon after "Love's Labor's Lost," and as a counterpart to that comedy.
The first three the excerpt from Wilson's Art of Rhetoric, Sir Philip Sidney's Letter to his brother Robert, and the dissertation from Meres's Palladis Tamia are, if minor, certainly characteristic examples of pre-Elizabethan and Elizabethan literary criticism.
We have a record in Francis Meres's "Palladis Tamia" of a play by Shakespeare called "Love's Labor's Won"; and there is no reasonable doubt that that was the first name of "All's Well that Ends Well."
In 1598 his name is mentioned as one of the better-known writers of comedies, by Francis Meres, in his 'Palladis Tamia. His first successful comedy was, 'Every Man in his Humour. Fama says that the manuscript which the author had sent in to the Lord Chamberlain's Company, was on the point of being rejected when Shakspere requested to have the play given to him, read it, and caused its being acted on the stage.
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