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Unfortunately the First Folio does not give the dates at which the plays contained in it were written or pro duced ; and the endeavour to supply this deficiency has been one of the main preoccupations of more than a century of Shake spearian scholarship, since the pioneer essay of Edmund Malone in his An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays of Shakespeare were Written (1778). The investigation is not a mere piece of barren antiquarianism, for on it depends the pos sibility of appreciating the work of the world's greatest poet, not as if it were an articulated whole like a philosophical system, but in its true aspect as the reflex of a vital and constantly develop ing personality. A starting-point is afforded by the dates of the Quartos and the entries in the Stationers' Register which refer to them, and by the list of plays already in existence in 1598 which is inserted by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia of that year, and which, while not necessarily exhaustive of Shakespeare's pre-1598 writing, includes The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II., Richard
Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, as well as a mys terious Love's Labour's Won, which has been conjecturally iden- , tified with several plays, but most plausibly with The Taming of the Shrew. There is a mass of supplementary evidence, drawn partly from definite notices in other writings or in diaries, letters, account-books and similar records, partly from allusions to con temporary persons and events in the plays themselves, partly from parallels of thought and expression between each play and those near to it in point of time, and partly from considerations of style, including the so-called metrical tests, which depend upon an analysis of Shakespeare's varying feeling for rhythm at differ ent stages of his career. The total result is certainly not a demon stration, but in the logical sense an hypothesis which serves to colligate the facts and is consistent with itself and with the known events of Shakespeare's external life.
The following table is an attempt to arrange the original dates of production of the plays according to the theatrical seasons, from autumn to autumn, in which they may have fallen. It is framed on the assumption that, as indeed John Ward tells us was the case, Shakespeare ordinarily wrote two plays a year; but some slackening of production in the later years seems probable. It will be understood that neither the order in which the plays are given nor the distribution of them over the years lays claim to more than approximate accuracy.
A more detailed account of the individual plays may now be attempted. The figures here prefixed correspond to those in the table above.
1, 2. The relation of The Contention of York and Lancaster to 2, 3 Henry VI. and the extent of Shakespeare's responsibility for either or both works have long been subjects of controversy. The extremes of critical opinion are to be found in a theory which regards Shakespeare as the sole author of 2, 3 Henry VI. and The Contention as a shortened and surreptitious version of the orig inal plays, and in a theory which regards The Contention as writ ten in collaboration by Marlowe, Greene and possibly Peele, and 2, 3 Henry VI. as a revision of The Contention written, also in collaboration, by Marlowe and Shakespeare. A comparison of the two texts leaves it hardly possible to doubt that the differences between them are to be explained by reporting rather than by re vision; but the question of authorship is more difficult. Greene's parody, in the "Shakescene" passage of his Groats-woith of Wit (1592), of a line which occurs both in The Contention and in 3 Henry VI., while it clearly suggests Shakespeare's connection
with the plays, is evidence neither for nor against the participa tion of other men, and no sufficient criterion exists for distin guishing between Shakespeare's earliest writing and that of pos sible collaborators on grounds of style. But the blank verse style of 2, 3 Henry VI. may quite well be an earlier stage of that found more fully developed in Richard III., and it is difficult to assign to any one except Shakespeare the humour of the Jack Cade scenes. Views which exclude Shakespeare altogether may be left out of account. Henry VI. is not in Meres's list of his plays, but its inclusion in the First Folio is an almost certain ground for assigning to him some share in the work.
3. A rather different problem is afforded by 1 Henry VI., and here it is difficult, in view of the variety of style in the play, and the poor level of much of it, to hold by Shakespeare's sole re sponsibility. The Temple Gardens Scene (ii. 4), which is that most obviously his, was probably a later addition. Thomas Nashe refers to the representation of Talbot on the stage in his Pierce Penilesse, his Supplication to the Divell (1592), and it is prob able that I Henry VI. is to be identified with the "Harey the vj." recorded in Henslowe's Diary to have been acted as a new play by Lord Strange's men, probably at the Rose, on March 3, 1592. If so, it is a reasonable conjecture that 2, 3 Henry VI. were originally written at some date before the beginning of Henslowe's record in the previous February, and that 1 Henry VI. was added later as an introduction to them.
Henry VI. series can only be intended to lead directly up to Richard III., and this relationship, together with its style as compared with that of the plays of 1594-96, suggests the short winter season of 1592-93 as the most likely time for the produc tion of Richard III. There is a difficulty in that it is not included in Henslowe's list of the plays acted by Lord Strange's men dur ing that season. But it may quite well have been produced by the only other company which appeared at court during the Christ mas festivities, Lord Pembroke's. The mere fact that Shakespeare wrote a play, or more than one play, for Lord Strange's men dur ing 1592-94 does not prove that he never wrote for any other company during the same period; and indeed there is plenty of room for guesswork as to the relations between Strange's and Pembroke's men. The latter are not known to have existed before the latter part of 1592, and many difficulties would be solved by the assumption that they originated out of a division of Strange's, who had amalgamated with the Admiral's, and may have found their numbers too much inflated to enable them to undertake as a whole the autumn tour of that year. If so, Pembroke's prob
took over the Henry VI. series of plays, since part of The Contention, under the name of the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, was published as performed by them, and com pleted it with Richard III. at Christmas. It will be necessary to return to this theory in connection with the discussion of Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew. The principal his torical source for Henry VI. was Edward Hall's The Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1542), and for Richard III., as for most of Shakespeare's later historical plays, the second edition (1587) of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577). An earlier play, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third (1594), seems to have con tributed little if anything to Richard III.