Shakespeare Apocrypha - Background

Background

In his own lifetime, Shakespeare saw only about half of his plays enter print. Some individual plays were published in quarto, a small, cheap format. Then, in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, his fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell compiled a Folio collection of his complete plays, now known as the First Folio. Heminges and Condell were in a position to do this because they, like Shakespeare, worked for the King's Men, the London playing company that produced all of Shakespeare's plays (in Elizabethan England, plays belonged to the company that performed them, not to the dramatist who had written them).

In theory, it ought to be clear what Shakespeare wrote, and what he did not: the plays that were included in the First Folio must be by Shakespeare, and those that were excluded must not, since Heminges and Condell were in a better position to know what Shakespeare wrote than subsequent scholars or other sources. However, there are a number of complications that have created the concept of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. The Apocrypha can be categorized under the following headings.

In addition to plays, poems were published under Shakspeare's name. The collection published as The Passionate Pilgrim contains genuine poems by Shakespeare along with poems known to have been written by other authors, along with some of unknown authorship. Unattributed poems have also been assigned by some scholars to Shakespeare at various times.