"Shall never Frenchman say an English maid Of threats of foreign force will be afraid,"
indicate that the play was produced about 1590. Gayley suggests that it was presented by Greene's company at court on 26th December 1590, or as one of their five performances in 1591. A pretty point is also made by the same scholar based upon a resemblance between lines in this play and certain lines of Peele's. Though the matter is too confused to serve well as chronological data it seems worthy of review if only for the reason that slightly different results may be reached than those indicated by Gayley. In the first scene of the first act of _James IV._ Ida has the following lines:
"And weel I wot, I heard a shepherd sing, That, like a bee, love hath a little sting."
Comparing this with lines in the fragment of Peele's _The Hunting of Cupid_, preserved in a manuscript volume of extracts by Drummond of Hawthornden, the conclusion is reached that it is Peele, the writer of pastoral, to whom Greene refers as "shepherd," and that Greene's lines are a direct transcription from Peele. Referring to the Stationers' Registers we learn that Peele's _The Hunting of Cupid_ was listed for 26th July 1591, certainly later than we should be willing to place the beginning of composition on Greene's _James IV._ The formal proviso, "That if it be hurtful to any other copy before licensed ... this to be void," may or may not indicate the existence of an earlier copy. That the general motive was in the air and had caught the ear of Greene is clear from the snatches and fragments of it we find in his late work. In the _Mourning Garment,_ registered 1590, are lines moving upon the same rhyme and answering the same interrogation as Peele's verses:
"Ah, what is love? It is a pretty thing. As sweet unto a shepherd as a king."[16]
One who gets this haunting strain in mind cannot fail to notice how frequently Greene uses the rhyme of _thing, bring, king,_ and _sting_ in _James IV._ Once it is:
"Although a bee be but a little thing, You know, fair queen, it hath a bitter sting."
And in the first scene of the second act Greene plays upon the repetition of this rhyme. Peele himself again uses the refrain in _Decensus Astræ_, licensed October 1591. The argument from the fact that "weel I wot" in Ida's line seems to reflect the same clause in _The Hunting of Cupid_ would be stronger were it not that "weel I wot" occurs only in the Drummond manuscript and is not found in the fragment quoted by Dyce[17] from the Rawlinson manuscript. Here instead of "weel I wot" is found "for sure." As Greene himself has used the refrain in a song sung by a shepherd's wife it leaves room to doubt that either the swains of _The Hunting_ or Peele himself was the shepherd. It is clear that the first general use of the motive had occurred in Greene's _Mourning Garment_. The positive objections to placing _James IV._ subsequent to July 1591 lead one to one of three conclusions: (1) Peele's lyric had long been written before it was entered in the _Stationers' Registers_, and in manuscript form inspired the strains in the _Mourning Garment_ and _James IV._; (2) Greene himself provides the prototype of Peele's lyric in his _Mourning Garment_ verse and its cognate form in _James IV._; (3) or, as seems most probable, fragmentary strains that have been found are reminiscences of a popular song that has not yet been traced.