Mr. Ray Heffner's article, “Shakespeare, Hayward, and Essex,” is confused and at times self-contradictory; but the main points which he attempts to maintain against my paper, “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” seem to be these:1. That the play, founded on Hayward's history of Henry IV, which Essex is said, in Item 5 of the “Analytical abstract of the evidence in support of the charge of treason against the Earl of Essex,” to have witnessed, could not have been the play on the deposition of Richard II which the Essex conspirators are known to have attended in a group on February 7, 1601, the day before the rebellion; and that the performances referred to in this Abstract were not of a play by Shakespeare, nor acted by his company, but of an unknown play, performed perhaps by Essex's own actors at his house on some unknown occasion, which Mr. Heffner dates first as necessarily “after February, 1599,” later, as “in February, 1599,” and, in conclusion, as “in January, 1599.”