
Shakespeare apocrypha

The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is separate from the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which addresses the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.
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 addition to plays, poems were published under Shakespeare'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. See below.
The apocrypha can be categorized under the following headings.
Plays attributed to Shakespeare during the 17th century, but not included in the First Folio.
Several plays published in quarto during the seventeenth century bear Shakespeare's name on the title page or in other documents, but do not appear in the First Folio. Some of these plays (such as "Pericles") are believed by most scholars of Shakespeare to have been written by him (at least in part). Others, such as "Thomas Lord Cromwell" are so atypically written that it is difficult to believe they really are by Shakespeare.
Scholars have suggested various reasons for the existence of these plays. In some cases, the title page attributions may be lies told by fraudulent printers trading on Shakespeare's reputation. In other cases, Shakespeare may have had an editorial role in the plays' creation, rather than actually writing them, or they may simply be based on a plot outline by Shakespeare. Some may be collaborations between Shakespeare and other dramatists (although the First Folio includes plays such as "Henry VIII", "Henry VI, Part 1" and "Timon of Athens" that are believed to be collaborative, according to modern stylistic analysis). Another explanation for the origins of any or all of the plays is that they were not written for the King's Men, were perhaps from early in Shakespeare's career, and thus were inaccessible to Heminges and Condell when they compiled the First Folio.
C. F. Tucker Brooke lists forty-two plays conceivably attributable to Shakespeare, many in his own lifetime, but dismisses the majority on the face, leaving only most of those listed below, with some additions.
Plays attributed to "W.S." during the 17th century, and not included in the First Folio.
Some plays were attributed to "W.S." in the seventeenth century. These initials could refer to Shakespeare, but could also refer to Wentworth Smith, an obscure dramatist.
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.
Hoaxes.
The dream of discovering a new Shakespeare play has also resulted in the creation of at least one hoax. In 1796 William Henry Ireland claimed to have found a lost play of Shakespeare entitled "Vortigern and Rowena". Ireland had previously released other documents he claimed were by Shakespeare, but "Vortigern" was the first play he attempted. (He later produced another pseudo-Shakespearean play, "Henry II".) The play was initially accepted by the literary community—albeit not on sight—as genuine. The play was eventually presented at Drury Lane on 2 April 1796, to immediate ridicule, and Ireland eventually admitted to the hoax.
Apocryphal poems.
Several poems published anonymously have been attributed by scholars to Shakespeare. Others were attributed to him in 17th century manuscripts. None have received universal acceptance. The authorship of some poems published under Shakespeare's name in his lifetime has also been questioned.
"The Passionate Pilgrim".
"The Passionate Pilgrim" is a collection of poems first published in 1599 by William Jaggard, later the publisher of Shakespeare's First Folio. Though the title page attributes the content to Shakespeare, many of the poems were written by others. Some are of unknown authorship and could be by Shakespeare. Jaggard issued an expanded edition of "The Passionate Pilgrim" in 1612, containing additional poems on the theme of Helen of Troy, announced on the title page ("Whereunto is newly added two Love Epistles, the first from Paris to Hellen, and Hellen's answere back again to Paris"). These were in fact by Thomas Heywood, from his "Troia Britannica," which Jaggard had published in 1609. Heywood protested the unauthorized copying in his "Apology for Actors" (1612), writing that Shakespeare was "much offended" with Jaggard for making "so bold with his name." Jaggard withdrew the attribution to Shakespeare from unsold copies of the 1612 edition.
"A Lover's Complaint".
This poem was published as an appendix to Shakespeare's sonnets in 1609. Its authorship has been disputed by several scholars. In 2007 Brian Vickers, in his monograph, "Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint", and John Davies of Hereford", attributes the "Complaint" to John Davies. Other scholars continue to attribute it to Shakespeare.
"To the Queen".
"To the Queen" is a short poem praising Queen Elizabeth, probably recited as an epilogue to a royal performance of a play. It was first attributed to Shakespeare by American scholars William Ringler and Steven May, who discovered the poem in 1972 in the notebook of Henry Stanford, who is known to have worked in the household of the Lord Chamberlain. The attribution was supported by James S. Shapiro and Juliet Dusinberre. It was included in 2007 by Jonathan Bate in his complete Shakespeare edition for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The attribution has since been challenged by Michael Hattaway, who argued that the poem is more likely to be by Ben Jonson, and by Helen Hackett, who attributes it to Thomas Dekker.
"A Funeral Elegy".
In 1989, using a form of stylometric computer analysis, scholar and forensic linguist Donald Foster attributed "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter", previously ascribed only to "W.S.", to William Shakespeare, based on an analysis of its grammatical patterns and idiosyncratic word usage. The attribution received extensive press attention from "The New York Times" and other newspapers.
Later analyses by scholars Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers demonstrated Foster's attribution to be in error, and that the true author was probably John Ford. Foster conceded to Monsarrat in an e-mail message to the SHAKSPER e-mail list in 2002.
"Shall I Die".
This nine-verse love lyric was ascribed to Shakespeare in a manuscript collection of verses probably written in the late 1630s. In 1985 Gary Taylor drew attention to the attribution, leading to widespread scholarly discussion of it. The attribution is not widely accepted. Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells state that Shakespeare's authorship "cannot be regarded as certain".
Epitaphs.
Shakespeare has been identified as the author of two epitaphs to John Combe, a Stratford businessman, and one to Elias James, a brewer who lived in the Blackfriars area of London. Shakespeare certainly knew Combe and is likely to have known James. A joking epitaph is also supposed to have been created for Ben Jonson.
The was on a memorial in the church of St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe. The memorial no longer exists but was recorded in the 1633 edition of John Stow's "Survey of London". The text is also present in the same manuscript which preserves "Shall I Die", where it is ascribed to Shakespeare. The epitaph is a conventional statement of James' godly life.
The are different. One is a satirical comment on Combe's money-lending at 10 per cent interest. The verse says that "he lent money at one-in-ten, and it's ten-to-one he'll end up in hell". This is recorded in several variant forms in the 17th and 18th centuries, usually with the story that Shakespeare composed it extempore at a party with Combe present. Shakespeare is said to have written another, more flattering, epitaph after Combe died in 1614. It praises Combe for giving money in his will to the poor. This was said to be affixed to his tomb, which is close to Shakespeare's. However, there is no sign of it in the surviving tomb. The first epitaph, in variations, has also been attributed to other writers, addressed to other alleged usurers.
An anecdote recorded in the mid-17th century has Jonson beginning an epitaph to himself with the conventional ""Here lies Ben Jonson" ...", and Shakespeare completing it with the words "... "who while he lived was a slow thing / And now being dead is no thing.""
A counter-orthodox Shakespeare canon and chronology.
Building on the work of W. J. Courthope, Hardin Craig, E. B. Everitt, Seymour Pitcher and others, the scholar Eric Sams (1926–2004), who wrote two books on Shakespeare, edited two early plays, and published over a hundred papers, argued that "Shakespeare was an early starter who rewrote nobody's plays but his own", and that he "may have been a master of structure before he was a master of language". Shakespeare found accusations of plagiarism (e.g. Greene's "beautified with our feathers") offensive (Sonnets 30, 112).
Trusting the early 'biographical' sources John Aubrey and Nicholas Rowe, Sams re-assessed Shakespeare's early and 'missing' years, and argued through detailed textual analysis that Shakespeare began writing plays from the mid-1580s, in a style not now recognisably Shakespearean. The so-called 'Source Plays' and 'Derivative Plays' ("The Famous Victories of Henry V", "The Taming of a Shrew", "The Troublesome Reign of King John", etc.), and the so-called 'Bad Quartos', are (printers' errors aside) his own first versions of famous later plays. As many of the Quarto title-pages proclaim, Shakespeare was an assiduous reviser of his own work, rewriting, enlarging and emending to the end of his life. He ""struck the second heat" / upon the Muses' anvil," as Ben Jonson put it in the Folio verse tribute.
Sams dissented from 20th-century orthodoxy, rejecting the theory of memorial reconstruction by forgetful actors as "wrong-headed". "Authorial revision of early plays is the only rational alternative." The few unofficial copies referred to in the preamble to the Folio were the 1619 quartos, mostly already superseded plays, for "Shakespeare was disposed to release his own popular early version[s] for acting and printing because his own masterly revision[s] would soon be forthcoming". Sams believed that Shakespeare in his retirement was revising his oeuvre "for definitive publication". The "apprentice plays" which had been reworked were naturally omitted from the Folio.
Sams also rejected 20th century orthodoxy on Shakespeare's collaboration: with the exception of "Sir Thomas More", "Two Noble Kinsmen" and "Henry VIII", the plays were solely his, though many were only partly revised. By Sams' authorship- and dating-arguments, Shakespeare wrote not only the earliest "modern" chronicle play, "The Troublesome Reign", c. 1588, but also "the earliest known modern comedy and tragedy", "A Shrew" and the Ur-"Hamlet" ( = the 1603 Quarto).
Sams also argued, more briefly, that "there is some evidence of Shakespearean authorship" of ""A Pleasant Commodie of Fair Em the Millers Daughter, with the loue of William the Conqueror", written before 1586, and of "The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine" written mid-1580s and "newly set foorth, ouerseene and corrected, by W.S." in 1595.
Volume two was unfinished at the time of Sams' death.