Locrine - Authorship

Authorship

The title page of the 1595 quarto advertised the play as "Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, / By W. S." An identification of "W. S." with William Shakespeare apparently led to the play's inclusion among the seven works that Philip Chetwinde added to the second impression of his Shakespeare Third Folio in 1664 — which in turn led to the inclusion of Locrine in the Shakespeare Apocrypha. The play's stiff, formal verse is un-Shakespearean — but the extant text of Locrine does show evidence of revision. Some commentators have accepted the possibility that Shakespeare might have performed a revision — while others have rejected the idea. The authorship of the original play has been assigned to several dramatists of the era, George Peele and Robert Greene being the two most common candidates.

A manuscript note found in a copy of the 1595 quarto, and apparently by Sir George Buck, who was Master of the Revels under King James I from 1609–22, states that his cousin, Charles Tilney, was the author:

Char. Tilney wrot

Tragedy of this mattr

hee named Estrild:

I think is this. it was

by his death. & now s

fellow hath published

I made dube shewes for it.

wch I yet haue. G. B.

(The note is trimmed along its right edge, obscuring some words.) Samuel A. Tannenbaum disputed the authenticity of the note, claiming it was a forgery, probably by John Payne Collier, but it has been demonstrated that the handwriting is genuine. If Charles Tilney wrote the play, it must date before his 1586 execution for participation in the Babington Plot. There is no evidence, however, that Charles Tilney did any dramatic writing, other than his alleged connection with Locrine.