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.

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. Note that in Elizabethan England, plays belonged to the company that performed them, not to the dramatist who had written them.

In theory, it ought to be clear what Shakespeare wrote, and what he did not: the plays included in the First Folio must be by Shakespeare, and those that were excluded must not, since Heminges and Condell were in a better position to know what Shakespeare wrote than subsequent scholars or other sources. In practice, however, a number of complications have created the concept of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.

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.

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.

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