Excerpt from The Merry Wives of Windsor: The Players' Text of 1602, With the Heminges and Condell Text of 1623Two statements referred back to this tradition have been generally conceded without examina tion: first, that Queen Elizabeth ordered William Shakespeare to write a play in fourteen days, for the purpose of showing Falstaff (with whom her majesty had already become acquainted in the two parts of the Henry I V.) in love, and that T/ze Merry Wives of Windsor, as printed in 1623, was the result of that order; and second, that the 1602 quarto is a short-hand transcript of the 1623 ver sion, as surreptitiously captured from the actors' mouths.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.