Thomas of Woodstock (play) - Text and Origins

Text and Origins

The play survives only as an anonymous, untitled and incomplete manuscript, part of a collection in the British Library catalogued as MS. Egerton 1994. It is one of fifteen plays included in the collection discovered by James Halliwell-Phillipps, which also includes Edmund Ironside, another play whose authorship has been attributed by some scholars to William Shakespeare.

The collection of manuscripts in which Thomas of Woodstock survives was compiled by a seventeenth century actor in the King's Revels Men, William Cartwright (ca. 1606-1686; not to be confused with his contemporary poet/dramatist of the same name), who later became a bookseller and collector of plays during the English Civil War.

There is no confirmed recorded production of the play during Shakespeare's lifetime, although the well-worn state of the Egerton manuscript, the presence of notations referencing specific actor's names, and the inclusion of instructions within the text's margins suggesting censorship by the Master of Revels, all suggest that the play enjoyed heavy use even during the Jacobean period. Significantly, it is not known which acting company owned or performed the play.

A transcript of the text was published by the Malone Society in 1929, and in fully edited texts by A. P. Rossiter in 1946, Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge in 2002, and Michael Egan in 2003.