For those who wrote for the early modern stage, collaboration was a frequent, if not an inevitable, condition. Writers worked often in pairs or in smallish teams in an effort to meet the huge demand for theatrical entertainment: devising new plays, refurbishing old favourites, and tailoring more recent scripts to suit the size and capabilities of their companies. Much of Shakespeare’s day-to-day work as sharer and lead writer for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later the King’s Men) involved joint labour of just this kind. In the surviving manuscript of the never-acted play of Sir Thomas More, as many as seven different hands have been identified, of which one, known as Hand D, has now been accepted by most, but not quite all, scholars to be that of Shakespeare. The sole palaeographical evidence against which this claim can be tested are half a dozen signatures which are generally thought to be in Shakespeare’s own hand. Stylistic arguments have also been adduced to support the identification, yet even with the development over recent years of ambitious stylometric computer programs, the results don’t always settle the case beyond all doubt. Even more treacherous are the claims of publishers for works written ‘by William Shakespeare’ or ‘by Mr W.S.’. Of the ten plays contained in the present volume, the four least likely to have been written by Shakespeare – Locrine, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The London Prodigal, and A Yorkshire Tragedy – all identify him confidently on their title-pages as author, while the three most plausible candidates – Arden of Faversham, Edward III, and Sir Thomas More – are supported by no such claims.

Portrait of Shakespeare (artist unknown)

Authorship and attribution studies form, in short, a decidedly boggy field of enquiry, on which it is often not easy to find a secure footing. Even amongst the last-mentioned group of plays commonly ascribed to Shakespeare, disputes about authorship continue to muddy the ground. Shakespeare is often regarded as the principal author of Arden of Faversham, yet one leading authority (Sir Brian Vickers, doyen of British Shakespearians) assigns the play to Thomas Kyd, while others claim it for Christopher Marlowe. Though one recent editor of Edward III (Eric Sams) passionately believes that play to have been written entirely by Shakespeare, few scholars accept this view, detecting also in the play the imprint of Kyd or Marlowe or George Peele – they can’t agree which. Nothing is really known for sure about the play’s authorship, provenance, or date, or about the company for which it was written. Similar uncertainties, to a greater or lesser degree, surround most of the plays presented in this volume. These are the great undecidable pieces, the teasers, the dodgers, hovering at the very margins of the Shakespearian canon.

Faced with comparable problems of classification more than a century ago, the American scholar C.F. Tucker Brooke produced a similar volume of fourteen pseudo- or quasi-Shakespearian plays (nowadays freely readable online) that he called appropriately The Shakespeare Apocrypha. ‘Apocrypha’ – the word in Greek means ‘hidden’, hence by extension ‘of unknown authorship’ – has become over the years an accepted term to describe this intriguing yet elusive set of plays. Yet the word is rejected by the present editors, along with its antonym, canon, ‘in order to keep the many unresolved questions open and to avoid the quasi-biblical (and thus unhelpfully bardolatrous) associations’ they believe such terms may invoke. This is a doubly curious position to adopt: first, because ‘canon’ has for many years been used to denote the accepted list of works by any author, not just the seemingly divine Shakespeare, and really has nothing ‘unhelpfully bardolatrous’ about it; and secondly because, through some odd editorial oversight, both terms are in fact used persistently throughout the volume, even in the essay that stoutly declares they are quite off limits.

To multiply the confusion, another descriptive term, collaborative, is introduced in the book’s title. But this volume is not, as an innocent buyer might assume, a definitive gathering of plays that Shakespeare wrote in collaboration with others. It excludes, for example, Two Noble Kinsmen and Pericles, Prince of Tyre, two plays that were also left out of the 1623 Folio but are now generally agreed to have been written by Shakespeare in partnership with George Wilkins and John Fletcher respectively. It likewise omits Henry VIII, a play which was on the other hand included in the First Folio as a work by Shakespeare, but – ever since Tennyson sniffed the presence of a second pen – is now generally seen as another joint venture by Shakespeare and Fletcher. The volume also excludes Timon of Athens, Macbeth, and Measure for Measure, all of which are presented in their entirety in the Oxford edition of Thomas Middleton’s Collected Works (2007) as works co-written by Shakespeare and Middleton, which may legitimately be regarded as part of the agreed canon of both authors. All of the plays just mentioned are to be found in another volume prepared by the same general editors for the Royal Shakespeare Company and published in 2007, William Shakespeare Complete Works: a title that makes no concession to the work of ‘others’ which the volume happens to contain. The Complete Works volume, though nominally an edition of plays represented in the First Folio, pulls in a number of other texts, including the collaboratively written Pericles and Two Noble Kinsmen.

While these quirks and oddities may suggest some overall uncertainty in the RSC’s publishing strategy, they should not detract from the tangible virtues of the volume under review, which in price alone – ten full-length plays and nearly eight hundred pages of editorial riches for a mere $35 – represents in itself a small publishing miracle. The plays are introduced with characteristic verve by Jonathan Bate, and their claims to Shakespearian authorship meticulously examined in an extended essay by Will Sharpe, who also ponders the case to be made for a further eight plays excluded from the present edition. In a set of interviews with actors and directors involved over recent years with plays represented in the volume, Peter Kirwin coaxes some suggestive opinions from his subjects. Terry Hands, who has directed Arden of Faversham on three occasions over the past thirty years, confesses that he ‘can’t see any evidence of Shakespeare in any part of the play, and nor could three different casts of experienced actors’. Michael Boyd, who in 1997 directed for the RSC Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy – that thundering drama, which so deeply affected Shakespeare’s own practice – finds more of a ‘Shakespearian’ quality in the play itself than in its later additions – which we now know, thanks to the researches of Australian scholar Hugh Craig among others, to have been almost certainly written by Shakespeare and not, as previously believed, by Ben Jonson.

This interchange between theatrical scholars and practitioners is one of the highlights of the RSC publishing venture, and much to be applauded. Anyone interested in this form of collaboration, and in the collaborations which so occupied Shakespeare himself, will undoubtedly wish to add this volume to their shelves.