Collaborative Plays by Shakespeare and Others

Shakespeare's fellow-actors John Hemings and Henry Condell selected 36 plays for inclusion in their authorised folio edition of his plays. He may therefore be assumed to have been principal author of these plays, though several centuries of scholarship has revealed an element of collaborative authorship/revision in some of them. Two further collaborations, *Pericles* and *The Two Noble Kinsmen*, have such strong claims, both external (early attribution) and internal (stylistic analysis) to Shakespearean co-authorship that they are included in all modern editions of the Complete Works.

There is, however, a fascinating body of other plays for which there are grounds to believe in an element of Shakespearean involvement. His authorship of the riot scene in *Sir Thomas More* is almost universally accepted by modern scholarship, not least because of the near-certainty that it is the single scene from any play for which his manuscript draft survives. The Countess of Salisbury scenes in *Edward III* have often been attributed to him, since Capell in the eighteenth century; this play is sometimes included in complete editions and has been staged by the RSC. Lewis Theobald's 1728 *Double Falsehood* is now widely regarded as a reworking of a theatrical reworking of Shakespeare and Fletcher's lost *Cardenio*. Recent scholarship has greatly strengthened the case, also first made in the eighteenth century, for Shakespeare's hand in *Arden of Faversham*. Some scholars see a case for Shakespeare as well as, or instead of, Middleton in the writing of *A Yorkshire Tragedy*. The revisions in the 1610 edition of *Mucedorus* are closely related to Shakespeare's late style and came from his acting company. Several other plays were attributed to him on their title pages or in othr sources such as bookseller's catalogues and libraries (e.g. Charles I's bound volume containg *Fair Em*, *Mucedorus* and *The Merry Devil of Edmonton*, labelled 'Shakespeare Vol.I').

This broad body of work has long been known as 'The Shakespeare Apocrypha'. Exactly a century ago, the 14 plays with what was then considered the best provenance (the starting-point being the additional plays included in the Third Folio) were edited under this title by C. F. Tucker Brooke. This collection has never been replaced. Oxford University Press commissioned an updated version by Richard Proudfoot, but it was abandoned. Tucker Brooke has no annotation, no critical introductions, no stage history. The editorial principles are a hundred years out of date and the texts are old-spelling.

Several, but by no means all, of the plays have benefited from excellent 'solus' editions, but there is an urgent need for a new edition of the collected apocrypha. The time is especially ripe for such a project, because (i) stylometric attributional analysis has made huge advances because of computerised databases and search programs, and (ii) notions of 'collective dramatic authorship' and 'company style' have altered our sense of the kinds of involvement that Shakespeare may have had with these plays.

The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works developed a format for the presentation of plays that has received immediate acclaim: a substantial general introduction, brief introductions to each play, 'key facts' such as sources/textual question/indications of part distribution, a modern-spelling single-column text that is conservative in its policy for emendation, an on-page commentary that explains allusions, grammatical difficulties, textual cruces etc., but in which the principal focus is on thorough glossing of obsolete and multiple meanings, using the latest resources such as LEME and EEBO, a supporting website with stage history and other materials. This will be the template for our edition. Whereas the Complete Works had the commercial capacity to be created without grant money, this project canonly be done with a grant, since publishers are unwilling to fund origination costs.