Jump to content

Chronology of Shakespeare's plays

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ThaddeusFrye (talk | contribs) at 22:28, 7 August 2009 (Restored "anti-stratfordian" to refer to anti-Stratfordian theories. Please note that this term is not jargon, but the standard on Wikipedia and elsewhere. It's also more precise in this context.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article presents an estimated chronological listing of the plays of William Shakespeare.

Overview

Difficulty of creating a chronology

The precise chronology of Shakespeare's plays as they were first written and performed is impossible to determine, since no authoritative records survive and many of the plays were performed years before they were published.

Several of the plays appeared first in pirated editions, and about half of Shakespeare's plays remained unpublished until the First Folio (1623). Two plays mentioned as Shakespeare's by his contemporaries have not survived, Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won, and his exact role in writing other existing plays is not known and is still debated.

Shakespeare scholars beginning with Edmond Malone have reconstructed the plays' relative chronology by various means, including contemporary allusions and records of performance, entries in the Stationers' Register, dates of publication as reflected on the title pages of individual plays, visceral impressions and computer studies of the development of the playwright's writing style over time, and (particularly) a 1598 list of many of Shakespeare's plays then extant by Francis Meres.

Dissenting viewpoints

While most scholars have adopted a generally accepted order[citation needed] (see below), many dates continue to be debated and all dates should be taken as highly speculative. A number of orthodox scholars, as well as many anti-Stratfordian researchers (so called because they argue that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the Shakespearean canon), disagree with the conventional dating (dissenting view: Chronology of Shakespeare's plays – Oxfordian). Also see Shakespeare authorship question.

Dates in the following lists are estimates. (Dates in parentheses indicate the date of first publication.)

Shakespeare's plays

Other plays

Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha

Possible collaborations

  • 1612 (1623) Henry VIII (probably written in collaboration with John Fletcher)
    Was performed on 29 June 1613, when the Globe Theatre burnt down.
  • 1612 (1728) Cardenio (written in collaboration with John Fletcher)
    Was performed in 1613. Published only in an adaptation by Lewis Theobald entitled Double Falshood; essentially a lost play.
  • 1612 (1634) The Two Noble Kinsmen (written in collaboration with John Fletcher).

Misattributions

The following plays have been attributed to Shakespeare but are in fact of different or uncertain authorship:

References

  1. ^ The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works
  2. ^ * Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York, 1998.
  3. ^ Shaksperian Scraps, chapter: "The Forman Notes" (1933). Tannenbaum reports that "Malone had at first decided that it was written in 1594; subsequently he seems to have assigned it to 1604; later still, to 1613; and finally he settled on 1610–11. Hunter assigned it to about 1605."

See also

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chronology_of_Shakespeare%27s_plays&oldid=306686214"