Humphrey Moseley - Shakespeare

Shakespeare

Moseley has earned the respect and praise of bibliographers and collectors for the quality and selection of his output. He is also a footnote in Shakespeare studies, due to two sets of entries Moseley made in the Register of the Stationers Company that touch upon Shakespeare. (Such registrations were claims to the rights to publish a given work, and had to precede any legal publication.) On 9 September 1653, Moseley registered the play Cardenio as the work of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and plays titled Henry I and Henry II as the work of Shakespeare and Robert Davenport. On 29 June 1660, he registered three plays, The History of King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy, and Iphis and Iantha, or A Marriage Without a Man, a Comedy (a treatment of Ovid's story of Iphis and Ianthe) — all allegedly by Shakespeare. Scholars have generally rejected the idea of such plays as Shakespearean works, but now the Cardenio attribution and the supposed derived work Double Falshood have been given some standing.