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Title page William Shakespeare's First Folio 1623

Title page of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), commonly referred to as the First Folio, which established the canonical status of the 36 plays included therein.

About Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's life
Religion • Sexuality
Bibliography
Collaborations • Attribution
Criticism
Reputation • Influence
World Bibliography
Folger Shakespeare Library
Books on Shakespeare

Poems

Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespearean sonnet
Petrach vs. Shakespeare
"A Lover's Complaint"
"Venus and Adonis"
"The Rape of Lucrece"
"The Phoenix and the Turtle"

Chronology • Early texts
First Folio • Second Folio
False Folio • Style

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love's Labour's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
All's Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night

Histories

King John • Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2
Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3
Richard III • Henry VIII

Tragedies

Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet''
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth • Hamlet
King Lear • Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra

Romances

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rowe • Pope • Theobald
Johnson • Steevens • Malone
Chalmers

Contemporaries

Elizabeth I • James I
Richard Barnfield
Beaumont and Fletcher
Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle
Robert Davenport
Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton
Thomas Heywood • John Ford
Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd
John Lyly • Gervase Markham
Christopher Marlowe
John Marston • Tho. Middleton
Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe
George Peele • William Percy
Walter Raleigh • William Rowley
Cyril Tourneur • John Webster
Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth
Elizabethan miscellanies

In performance

Shakespeare's Globe
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Theatre companies
Film and TV adaptations
BBC Television Shakespeare

Miscellaneous

Shakespeare Apocrypha
Authorship question • History
Jubilee • Bardolatry
Shakespeare's Birthplace
Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare garden

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Shakespeare attribution studies is a term used to denote the scholarly attempt to determine the authorial boundaries of the William Shakespeare canon.

Overview[]

The studies examine the accuracy historical attributions of works to Shakespeare, the extent Shakespeare's possible collaborative works, and the identity of his collaborators, which began in the late 17th century and continues to the present day.

It is based on the axiom that every writer has a unique, measurable style that can be discriminated from that of other writers using techniques of textual criticism originally developed for Biblical and Classical studies.[1] Those criteria include the assessment of different types of evidence, generally classified as internal, external, and stylistic, of which all are further categorised as traditional and non-traditional.

The Shakespeare canon[]

The Shakespeare canon is generally defined by the 36 plays published in the First Folio (1623), some of which are thought to be collaborations or to have been edited by others, plus 2 co-authored plays, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634); 2 mythological narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" (1593) and "The Rape of Lucrece" (1594); a collection of 154 sonnets and "A Lover's Complaint", both published 1609 in the same volume; 2 passages from the manuscript play Sir Thomas More; and a few other works[2] In recent years, the anonymous history play The Reign of King Edward III (1596) has been added to the official canon, with Brian Vickers proposing that 40% of the play was written by Shakespeare, and the remainder by Thomas Kyd (1558–1594).[3]

The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore[]

Main article: Sir Thomas More (play)

Sir Thomas More is an Elizabethan play that depicts scenes from the life of Thomas More. It is believed that it was originally written by playwrights Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, then perhaps several years later heavily revised by another team of playwrights, including Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, and possibly Shakespeare, who is generally credited with 2 passages in the play. It survives only in a single manuscript, now owned by the British Library.[4]

The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in certain scenes was originally made in 1871-2 by Richard Simpson and James Spedding, based on stylistic impressions. In 1916, paleographer Sir Edward Maunde Thompson judged the addition in "Hand D" to be in Shakespeare's handwriting. However, there is no explicit external evidence for Shakespeare's hand in the play, so the identification continues to be debated. (Citation needed)

A Funeral Elegy[]

In 1989, Donald Foster attributed A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter to William Shakespeare based on a stylometric computer analysis of its grammatical patterns and idiosyncratic word usage. The attribution received much attention and was accepted into the canon by several highly respected Shakespeare editors. However, analyses published in 2002 by Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers showed that the elegy more likely was one of John Ford's non-dramatic works, not Shakespeare's, a view to which Foster conceded.

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. Love, pp. 12, 24–25.
  2. Evans, p. 27.
  3. Malvern
  4. Michael Dobson, Stanley W. Wells, (eds.) The Oxford companion to Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.433

External links[]

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