Shakespeare’s first formal editor, Nicholas Rowe, was mildly interested in the problem of chronology, but lacked the equipment and the intellectual curiosity to solve it. “It would be without a doubt”, he wrote in 1709, “a pleasure to any man, curious in things of this kind, to see and know what was the first essay of a fancy like Shakespeare’s. Perhaps we are not to look for his beginnings, like those of other writers, among their least perfect writings, art had so little, and nature so large a share in what he did, that, for aught I know, the performances of his youth, as they were the most vigorous, and had the most fire and strength of imagination in them, were the best.” To which Dr Johnson wisely replied in 1765 that “Shakespeare, however favoured by nature, could impart only what he had learned; and as he must increase his ideas, like other mortals, by gradual acquisition, he, like them, grew wiser as he grew older, could display life better, as he knew it more, and could instruct with more efficacy, as he was himself more amply instructed”.