Travelling Back in Time To Determine Exactly What Shakespeare Really Wrote
A review of all title pages and documents of the era is actually quite shocking:
This is the most stunning fact about the Shakespeare authorship question, and almost no one knows about it: Most of the plays that were attributed to Shakespeare while he was alive are NOT the same plays that we think he wrote today!
[This is adapted from a previously paywalled post]
Let’s Travel Back to 1620 and Review All the Title Pages
Let’s say you are a Shakespeare enthusiast who wakes up on a summer morning in a London Inn in 1620. First, of course, you have to recover from the initial shock of the space-time jump—and acclimate to the God-awful smells of a cramped, muddy city that had not yet discovered modern forms of hygiene or sanitation. But then you gather yourself and join the nearly toothless hostess at the Inn dining room for a breakfast of some stale bread and butter, along with a small cup of ale. Eventually, in your conversation, she tells you that the nearby Globe Theater is going to be performing William Shakespeare’s Hamlet that afternoon. Shakespeare himself, you know, actually died four years earlier in 1616. But this is still a great chance for you to see the play in essentially its original condition—in the way that Shakespeare wanted his plays performed.
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see the play in the original Globe Theater, as it burned down during a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in 1613. But a new Globe was built in the same place a year later—just across the Thames in Southwark and just a short walk from London Bridge. Also, you won’t be able to watch Shakespeare’s friend and renowned actor, Richard Burbage, play the title role because he died the year before at the age of 54. But it will still be performed by Shakespeare’s old theater company, the King’s Men, and many of the players would have been acquaintances of the great playwright.
Also, let’s imagine that before you attend this performance, you want to purchase a copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from one of the bookstalls at St. Paul’s Churchyard. In fact, heck, you want to purchase every Shakespeare play then available—every one that carried Shakespeare’s name or initials on the title page. But as you continue purchases at the various bookstalls, you would begin to notice something strange. You don’t recognize some of the titles at all: A Yorkshire Tragedy? The London Prodigal? Locrine? Thomas Lord Cromwell? These don’t sound like Shakespeare’s plays—even though his name or initials are displayed prominently on their title pages, even though each vendor assured you that it was by Shakespeare and performed by Shakespeare’s theater company.
Moreover, other plays sound like a strange rendition of a Shakespeare play. One of the plays, The Troublesome Raigne of King John “written by W. Shakespeare,” is about the same king of Shakespeare’s King John, but you soon realize that they aren’t the same plays.
One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.
Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:
To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes...
What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real "To be or not to be" soliloquy, which starts like this:
"To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die to sleep
No more, and by a sleep, to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’t. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream, Aye, there’s the rub...,"
(3.1.56-65)[i]
In fact, this entire staged version of Hamlet up until this point seemed wrong—a kind of briefer, simplified, swifter-paced, funnier version of the real tragedy. So you quickly pull out your recently purchased text of the play, turn to that monologue —and you find the same simple monologue the actor just recited—the one that began “To be or not to be, aye, there’s the point.” You then look frantically through all the pages and discover essentially everything in the performance has been following this briefer, staged adaptation. And you check the title page once more:
The title page reads, “by William Shake-speare” and “as it hath been diverse times acted by his Highness Servaunts in the Cittie of London …” And his Highness Servaunts refers to the King’s Men—which was Shakespeare’s company and the group you are watching now. This was the first Hamlet that was ever printed (1603), and its title page description is straightforward.
You look around at the crowd and think to yourself: is everyone in Shakespeare-era London really wrong about what Shakespeare really wrote? Was there a massive, decades-long conspiracy involving publishers, printers, booksellers, and even his fellow actors to foist mediocre plays and lesser-staged adaptations upon Shakespeare? Was everyone just confused?
Or is the explanation much simpler—yet far more mind blowing?
The First (Bad) Quartos
The single-play publications available in the early 1600s are known as quartos—so named because eight pages are printed on one sheet of paper, four on each side, and then that sheet is folded into one-quarter size, with each quarter containing a single page on each side. Thus, this seemingly brief, inferior version of Hamlet first published in 1603 is often known as the first quarto (or sometimes the bad quarto) of Hamlet (or, at times, Q1 Hamlet.)
As we have seen, the title page of this first quarto of Hamlet stresses that this was the version that was seen on stage and performed by the King’s Men—and many editors and scholars do agree with that assessment. They observe that this Q1 Hamlet, though demonstrably poorer in literary quality, is still quite effective dramatically. It sparks and jumps. This is why, even today, theater companies will still occasionally perform this staged version.
About this adaptation, scholar Leah Marcus wrote, "Q1 Hamlet, if recent testimony by actors, directors, and audiences is any guide, can work wonderfully well in the theater." Marcus described it as "Hamlet with the brakes off," and noted that "what it lacks in terms of philosophic range and refinement of language, it compensates for through an abundance of theatrical energy."1 Kathleen O. Irace, the editor of The First Quarto of Hamlet, also underscored the simplicity but dramatic effectiveness of this staged adaptation, detailing numerous "features that make Q1 easier to understand (the streamlined plot, the simpler villain, the more appealing queen) or more amusing (the added puns and gags) or more convenient to play (the shorter running time)…."2
Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.
The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)
What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.
Modern scholars also assume some kind of conspiracy led to Shakespeare’s name on the title pages of the apocryphal plays too—plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, etc. Again, as we shall see, these are also plays that Shakespeare adapted.
All the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare by 1620: Bad Quartos, Apocryphal Plays, and the Whole Shebang
In a heated and insulting attack on the typical anti-Stratfordian position, W.M. Murphy helped solidify the view of the orthodox. "Equally important…" wrote Murphy, "is the fact that none of the plays or poems is attributed to anyone but Shakespeare not only during his lifetime but for a century and a half after his death."3 If we were to strip away all of the extraneous details of the authorship debate, this is the armored and unyielding core of the orthodox position. As various conventional scholars have stated, it is simply inconceivable…
that Shakespeare would be ascribed authorship of plays that were performed by his acting troupe but that he had no part in writing;
that Shakespeare would willingly accept this authorship designation or at least do nothing to correct publicly this misconception;
that the real anonymous author of the play(s) would allow the error and not try to take credit for the work(s) or change the misconception;
that even after 400 years of searching, we have found no contemporaneous title page or document that explicitly attributed the work to some other author.
This conventional argument is thoroughly persuasive and is accepted here sans quibble. All the scholars like Murphy who have made this claim are precisely correct, which is why we necessarily have to accept that Shakespeare wrote…Yorkshire Tragedy, London Prodigal, and Thomas Lord Cromwell.
Again, to many people familiar with Shakespeare, these three works probably still seem decidedly unfamiliar. That is because they have now been removed from the official "Shakespeare canon"—even though each of these plays fulfills all of the aforementioned criteria for Shakespearean authorship: Each was attributed to Shakespeare by the title page while he was alive. Each was performed by Shakespeare’s theater company. Shakespeare never did anything to correct the misconception that he wrote any of these plays. The alleged anonymous authors of these works never came forward to demand recognition for their work. No external evidence has ever been found positively linking any of the plays with any other writer. In fact, the later editors of the First Folio—specifically the editors of both the Third and Fourth Folios—included these plays with the other "authentic" works. So even by the 18th century, these "apocryphal plays" were still officially part of the "Shakespeare canon," and all the respected literati and scholars of that time were just as sure William of Stratford authored these works as they were that he wrote Othello.
So why do scholars then deny that Shakespeare penned them? When attempting to construct a consistent view of Stratfordian authorship, all researchers, whether orthodox or dissident, have carefully excised certain works "written by William Shakespeare" because they do not fit in with their preconceived views of his authorship or abilities. They refuse to accept the title pages and contemporary references for what they clearly state and instead have tried to make the facts conform to theory. Incredibly, conventional editors currently exclude from the canon more than half of the works attributed to Shakespeare while he was alive and up to 1621.
The following is a list of all those dramas—apocryphal plays in peach, bad quartos in yellow. Notice, incredibly, that in the orthodox view today, the majority of these title pages are wrong.
One of the questions I keep getting asked is why North would allow Shakespeare to get credit for his masterpieces. But while North and Shakespeare were alive, Shakespeare did not get credit for the masterpieces. Shakespeare was known as an adaptor and he got credit for his lesser adaptations—and his revisions of other writers’ works.
Brief Notes on This Pictured List of Shakespeare’s Plays
1) First, it must be stressed, these title pages are really the only official, pre-1621 documents that we have that detail precisely what plays Shakespeare wrote. Other than this, we also have some comments that contemporaries made about Shakespeare, but, as I have repeatedly shown in this Substack (and will show again in an upcoming post), every contemporary statement by literary insiders either proves or is consistent with precisely what these title pages declare: Shakespeare was a smart, capable, but unschooled adaptor of the works of other writers. In other words, this list above is not a matter of selective evidence. There is no other pre-1621 evidence other than these title pages and insider comments!
As is clear, the list does not really provide much of a "whodunit?" regarding the authorship of the bad quartos and "apocryphal" works. Whether by title pages or theater companies, William Shakespeare is the only writer linked to all these plays.
2) The plays are listed in chronological order based on when they were first printed. But six of these plays — The Contention (2 Henry VI), True Tragedy (3 Henry VI), Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, part 1, the first quarto of Henry V — were, like many plays of the era, originally published anonymously. The dates following the printer-publisher indicate the year the work was first assigned to Shakespeare. As clear, there were many cases, particularly in the early 1590s, when the Shakespearean designation did not occur with the first printing. Also, note that the first plays attributed to Shakespeare on their title pages were actually Locrine (though only indicated by "W.S.") and Love’s Labour’s Lost, which came out a few months before Richard II.
3) The occasional hyphenation of "Shake-speare" above was a common spelling of William’s name on title pages. Also, other apparent misspellings of Shakespeare’s name above were also part of the original title pages. In Elizabethan England, spelling had yet to be standardized, and variations in the spelling of authors’ names were quite common.
4) The printing history of Richard III is complicated. It is a slightly briefer version of the longer play, but since it has not been amended as aggressively as other “bad quartos,” some scholars don’t consider it a “bad quarto.” Also, it was originally published anonymously in 1597, then its title page read: "By William Shake-speare" (Simmes-Wise) in 1598. This was changed to "Newly augmented, by William Shake-speare" (Creede-Wise) in 1602.
5) Three other plays relevant to Shakespeare were published anonymously and remained anonymous while he was alive: Titus Andronicus (1594), a staged adaptation (bad quarto) of Romeo and Juliet (1597) and a genuine version of Romeo and Juliet (1599.)
6) If, as many or perhaps most researchers agree, Shakespeare was with the Pembroke’s Men in the early 1590s,4 then nearly all of the plays were produced by each of Shakespeare’s various theater companies while he was with the company.
7) The Queen’s Men seem to have performed the Troublesome Raigne of King John by 1591, perhaps indicating that prior to the formation of the Pembroke’s Men, Shakespeare got his start with the Queen’s Men. There are other reasons for also supposing this early Queen’s Men connection, including the fact that this theater group produced other adaptations of the works of North (like The Taming of a Shrew and Famous Victories of Henry V). They also played in Stratford in 1587, and Shakespeare may have picked up with them at that time. Also, the Queen’s Men was a a spin-off of Leicester’s Men, which was the theater troupe for whom North wrote.
7) Now, we also know why some of these plays “by William Shakespeare” were eventually designated as apocryphal and jettisoned from the official canon. These are the plays that Shakespeare adapted that were written by writers other than North. So they lacked North’s masterful style, plotting, humanist soliloquies, and brilliant touches. For example, scholars have identified Thomas Middleton as the original author of A Yorkshire Tragedy based on stylistic considerations—and I agree with their arguments. But Shakespeare then purchased, adapted, and produced Middleton’s play—and since Shakespeare’s name was the most widely recognized, his name was then placed on the title page. The same is true for North’s plays that Shakespeare purchased, adapted, and produced.
8) "Jaggard-Pavier … 1619" refers to the 1619 "Jaggard/Pavier collection" of Shakespeare plays, named after the printer William Jaggard and the publisher, Thomas Pavier. The three plays—The Contention, True Tragedy, and Henry V — were originally published anonymously but were then attributed to William Shakespeare in this collection. Here is a complete list of the "Jaggard/Pavier" plays ascribed to Shakespeare:
The First Shakespeare Collection (1619)
Merchant of Venice
King Lear
Midsummer Night’s Dream
Yorkshire Tragedy
Sir John Oldcastle
The Contention (bad quarto)
True Tragedy (bad quarto)
Merry Wives of Windsor (bad quarto)
Pericles (bad quarto)
Henry V (bad quarto)
According to the conventional view, this Jaggard/Pavier Collection was a "False Folio," with only the first three of the ten plays listed above being authentically "Shakespearean." The remaining seven were allegedly the dastardly product of shadowy literary pirates who, over the course of decades, had managed to frame Shakespeare as author of these plays, convincing the reading public that they were his works. In the view here, the Jaggard/Pavier group is a particularly authentic collection of Shakespeare’s works—with only Sir John Oldcastle serving as a possible exception.5 In reality, no one was trying to frame Shakespeare. This is what he had written.
9) Finally, three of the plays listed in the table — Hamlet Q2; King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida — are in red boxes because they have ambiguous title pages or authorial claims that are easy to misinterpret. We will discuss their title pages in greater detail in an upcoming post—along with contemporaneous comments about Shakespeare also confirming that he was indeed the adaptor of the bad quartos and apocryphal plays.
The Significance of These Title Pages / Were the Majority of Them Really Wrong?
In that same attack on challengers of Shakespeare’s authorship, William Murphy placed title-page designation at the very top of his list of reasons why we believed Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. Murphy observed correctly that this "is the same kind of evidence we use to determine what Geoffrey Chaucer wrote, or Dante, or George Washington."And Murphy is precisely right.
The problem is Murphy neglected to consider carefully just what plays were actually being attributed to Shakespeare, and he did not carefully make the distinction between the original masterpieces and the staged renditions. Still, Murphy’s point stands: Other than brief comments, these title pages represent the only contemporaneous documentation we have available to us. And there is no rational reason for doubting our eyes.
Thus, while orthodox scholars have rightly ridiculed the idea that Elizabethan playwrights, printers, and publishers would conspire to frame Shakespeare as an author, they themselves must suppose no fewer than a dozen such conspiracies—involving numerous and competing printers and publishers all trying to run otherwise respectable businesses.
Likewise, while orthodox scholars reject the possibility of an anonymous contemporary author allowing Shakespeare to get full credit for work that was entirely his own, they must assume the existence of five such anonymous authors—the writers of Troublesome Raigne, Locrine, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Yorkshire Tragedy, and London Prodigal—who did exactly that. More, orthodox scholars must believe all of the "bad quartos" were written anonymously as well—and, again, that credit was mysteriously transferred to William’s name.
Typically, dissident researchers known as anti-Stratfordians have shied away from careful analyses of title pages, perhaps because they believed they injure their cause. Thus, the orthodox are always the ones referencing title pages as proving their case while the anti-Stratfordians must focus on facts gleaned from within the plays themselves. But the rebels would have done well to attack the mainstream theorists at their supposedly strongest point. Incredibly, the only writer in history whose authorship has been challenged by a variety of intelligent outsiders due to the spacious gap between the plays and his background is also the only writer in history who allegedly became the patsy of countless conspiratorial actors and printers operating for more than two decades, the only writer who was falsely linked to a dozen works, the only writer whose canon has been thoroughly altered and carefully curated, the only writer with a "False Folio."
Yet the rationale behind the orthodox view is not unintelligible. Literary scholars have indeed identified the thread of a single literary genius that runs through many of the works attributed to Shakespeare—but not all of them. And they have presumed that Shakespeare was the exclusive source of this grand style. So they have carefully removed the weaker works from the canon—regardless of what title pages and contemporary references clearly state—resulting in a meticulously constructed and unrealistically pro-Stratfordian view of Shakespeare’s artistry. In brief, editors and researchers have carefully matched William of Stratford with only the works that display a certain similar and extraordinary manner of writing. But, as can no longer be denied, this most famous of all literary styles was not Shakespeare’s; it was Thomas North’s.
In Summary
Given the list of plays “By William Shakespeare” above, one may well wonder how there could have ever been any uncertainty over what Shakespeare wrote. If indeed it is well known that:
1) Shakespeare was a reviser of older source-dramas;
2) the "bad quarto" versions were inferior, shortened, staged revisions of older literary source-dramas;
3) Shakespeare’s theater company performed those adaptations; and
4) these adaptations, along with at least five other mediocre plays, were printed in London prior to 1621 with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages;
then how could there be any confusion over what he wrote?
Indeed, the real question is not, what did Shakespeare write? The title pages and all cotemporaneous documents make this clear. No, the real question is, why does anyone think Shakespeare was the literary genius who penned the original, refined dramas?
We will answer this question in an upcoming post. But regardless, the true genius of the canon has already been identified: And that’s Thomas North.
Quick reminder: on Thursday, April 24, 6 PM, I’m going to give a brief and (hopefully) fun talk on “Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare’s Plays” at North Hampton Public Library in NH. I will also be selling /signing books, and answering any questions.
Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York: Routledge, 1997), 145.
Kathleen O. Irace, The First Quarto of Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 19.
William M. Murphy, Thirty-six plays in search of an author, (Schenectady, NY: Union College Symposium, 1964). Murphy felt that, in libraries, anti-Stratfordian books should be categorized under "abnormal or pathological psychology."
Some of the orthodox scholars who agree that Shakespeare was with Pembroke’s Men include: Halliwell Phillips, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), I:122, II:329; Peter Alexander, Shakespeare Life and Art (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1939), 56; Karl Wentersdorf, “Shakespeare erste Truppe,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 84:86 (1950): 117; G.M. Pinciss, "Shakespeare, Her Majesty’s Players and Pembroke’s Men," Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 134-5. And all references were collected by David George, “Shakespeare and Prembroke’s Men,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32:3 (1981): 305-323. George, nevertheless demurs from their opinion. Finally, Gabriel Egan also assigns Shakespeare to Pembroke’s Men; See Gabriel Egan, "Pembroke’s Men," in M. Dobson and S. Wells, ed., Oxford’s Companion to Shakespeare, (New York: Oxford UP, 2001), 339.
Pavier/Jaggard may have confused the Sir John Oldcastle in their collection with a different Sir John Oldcastle performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The authorship of Oldcastle remains somewhat murky because there appears to have been at least two plays performed with that title around the turn of the century—one by Admiral’s and Worcester’s Men for Philip Henslowe (and written by Anthony Munday) and another by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. [In the Spring of 1599 or 1600, Rowland Whyte referred to a "Sir John Old Castell" performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (i.e., Shakespeare’s group) in a letter to Sir Robert Sidney : Quoting Whyte’s letter: "All this weeke the Lords have bene in Londen, and past away the tyme in feasting and plaies…on Thursday afternoon the Lord Chamberlain’s players acted before Vereken Sir John Old Castell, to his great contentment." See Douglas A. Brooks, "Sir John Oldcastle and the Construction of Shakespeare’s Authorship," Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38:2 (Spring, 1998): 333-361.
The problem is that the Oldcastle of the Jaggard-Pavier collection is the same as the 1600 quarto of the play, which does not identify the author and ascribes the play to the Admiral’s Men. Thus, it is possible that when Oldcastle was attributed to Shakespeare in 1619, the printer or publisher was confusing it for a similar play of the same title, written by William Shakespeare, and performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. I suspect, after some investigation, that the extant Oldcastle was Shakespeare’s adaptation of Munday’s work, and he wrote it to apologize publicly for Oldcastle’s characterization in Shakespeare’s first staged adaptations of Henry IV, part 1 (before Shakespeare changed the name "Oldcastle" to "Falstaff".) The reason why Shakespeare’s version was originally identified as having been performed by the Admiral’s Men may that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men rarely played their version publicly, so the printer advertised it as the extremely similar version best known to theater-goers. Still, it is also possible that it was Pavier/Jaggard who were making the mistake in 1619—and confusing Munday’s Oldcastle for the one written by Shakespeare. Since there remain relatively innocent and understandable explanations for either situation, I have not included Sir John Oldcastle in the list above. However, if my speculation is right, then Sir John Oldcastle would increase the list of Shakespeare plays, now deemed allegedly "apocryphal", to thirteen.
Also, some scholars may note that The Puritan (1607) should be added to the list. The Puritan was performed by the Children of Paul’s, one of the boys’ acting companies, and was published in 1607 with the initials W.S. on the title page. Since this was not a King’s Men’s production, it is possible these initials do not refer to William Shakespeare—and could refer to one of the lesser-known dramatists, Wentworth Smith or William Smith.
Hope you come to California to speak! Please let those of us here that admire your work
Dennis, if W.S. was something of a hack, how do you explain the poems?