Shakespeare Apocrypha - Plays Attributed To Shakespeare After The 17th Century

Plays Attributed To Shakespeare After The 17th Century

A number of anonymous plays have been attributed to Shakespeare by more recent readers and scholars. Many of these claims are supported only by debatable ideas about what constitutes "Shakespeare's style". Nonetheless, some of them have been cautiously accepted by mainstream scholarship.

• Arden of Faversham is an anonymous play printed in 1592 that has occasionally been claimed for Shakespeare. Its style and subject matter are very different from Shakespeare's other plays. Full attribution is not supported by mainstream scholarship, though stylistic analysis has revealed that Shakespeare likely had a hand in at least scene VIII (the play is not divided into acts). Thomas Kyd is often considered to be the author of much of Faversham, but still other writers have been proposed.
• Edmund Ironside is an anonymous manuscript play. Eric Sams has argued that it was written by Shakespeare, but has convinced few, if any, Shakespearean scholars.
• Sir Thomas More survives only in manuscript. It is a play that was written in the 1590s and then revised, possibly as many as ten years later. The play is included in the Second Edition of the Complete Oxford Shakespeare (2005), which attributes the original play to Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, with later revisions and additions by Thomas Dekker, Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood. A few pages are written by an author ("Hand D") whom many believe to be Shakespeare, as the handwriting and spellings, as well as the style, seem a good match. The attribution is not accepted by everyone, however, especially since six signatures on legal documents are the only verified authentic examples of Shakespeare's handwriting.
• Thomas of Woodstock, sometimes also called Richard II, Part I, is an anonymous late-sixteenth century play which depicts the events leading up to the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, and which occur immediately prior to opening scenes of Shakespeare's history play Richard II. Thomas of Woodstock survives only as an anonymous and untitled manuscript, lacking its final page (or pages), and is now stored in the Egerton Manuscript Collection, in the British Library. Some scholars, noting how closely the play describes the events immediately prior to those set forth in Richard II, and how it offers explanations for the behaviour of many of his characters such as John of Gaunt and Edmund of Langley, have attributed authorship of the play to Shakespeare. The work has frequently been conceded to at least have been an influence upon Shakespeare's own play. Historically, though, few of Thomas of Woodstock's editors supported the position of Shakespeare as its author. The Malone Society editor makes no reference to the Shakespeare theory. A. P. Rossiter states "There is not the smallest chance that he was Shakespeare", citing the drabness of the verse, while acknowledging that the play's aspirations indicate that "There is something of a simplified Shakespeare" in the author. MacDonald P. Jackson argued that Samuel Rowley was the play's author. However, more recently some critics have reconsidered that position, and have conceded Shakespeare may have had a hand in its creation. Corbin and Sedge concede that the style and talent of the play is consistent with Shakespeare's skill as reflected in the early works Henry VI Part I, Henry VI Part II, and Henry VI Part III, though they stop short of attributing him as author. Most recently, yet another editor of the manuscript Thomas of Woodstock, Michael Egan, has made a case for authorship of the work by Shakespeare, and against Rowley. Ian Robinson also supports the attribution to Shakespeare.