William Shakespeare & Others: Collaborative Plays. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen with Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe (The RSC Shakespeare).

• Dieter Mehl

It was more than a hundred years ago that Tucker Brooke’s well-known and frequently quoted anthology The Shakespeare Apocrypha appeared, Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays Which Have been Ascribed to Shakespeare (Oxford, 1908). A great deal of work has been done since then about which plays might legitimately be described as belonging to such a group; some have been more or less accepted as part of the canon, a number have been ascribed to Shakespeare as co-author, while the claims of the majority have been almost universally denied on the grounds that they lack any particularly Shakespearean character or dramatic idiom. Jonathan Bate and his team, in a brave, but perhaps a little hasty attempt to provide a modern equivalent, have left out some plays whose right to be discussed in this connection at all is tenuous, as well as those that have already found a place within modern Shakespeare editions or series. The remaining titles are all plays whose relation to Shakespeare as collaborator in the widest sense has been established by recent research.