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The Non-Fantastic Shakespeare Apocrypha and Where to Find It


The Marquis de Leech

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(Originally a blog post) (Alas, I can't include the links in this post without buggering up the formatting for some reason)

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I clearly can’t leave well enough alone. I have run out of actual Shakespeare to read (or re-read) during my current December binge, so I have now turned to a place even the most sad of Shakespeare Geeks generally don’t bother with… the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Much like Plato, these are the works that have been occasionally claimed as Shakespeare’s over the centuries, only to be dismissed as spurious on closer inspection. These days, with a growing interest in collaborations, the barrier between some of the canonical works (Pericles) and some of the apocryphal ones (Sir Thomas More) seems to be breaking down a bit, but, generally speaking, the apocryphal works tend to get a bit neglected, especially in terms of performance.

If I had to hazard a guess, it’s because the anonymous ones aren’t very good, and the ones that have been identified as the work of other authors don’t get thought of as Shakespearean Apocrypha any more.

(Speaking of the anonymous plays, I’d also suggest that once a work has been decreed as definitively not Shakespeare, people lose interest to some degree. It’s a sentiment I find interesting – the idea that a work is more interesting for its author than for its actual content. These are still the same plays as they have ever been, yet without the hallowed stamp of Shakespeare authorship, they get ignored, while the likes of Pericles only gets read because one of its co-authors was the bloke who wrote Hamlet. Human beings are funny creatures).

To illustrate this neglect, the definitive compendium of the major apocryphal plays for over a century has been C.F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908). Tucker Brooke is at pains to explain how much editorial cleaning he needed to do, in terms of getting these obscure works in a presentable condition, and in the case of Sir John Oldcastle, Tucker Brooke states that his reprint is the first reliable one in three centuries. I’d also note that in borrowing this book from my local public library, I discovered that I was the first person to borrow the book since March 1953. Yes, I’m the first person in 66 years to have ventured into this literary attic. If the plays weren’t so bad, it’d be almost exciting.

(I see the RSC put out a volume called Collaborative Plays in 2013. Which means the next major edition of the apocryphal plays is due out well into the 22nd century. Alas, my library continues to make do with Tucker Brooke, and to be honest I don’t blame them. If I’m very lucky, I might even live long enough to see someone else get the book out).

Anyway, in the interest of assisting sad completists (and insomniacs) in actually finding the individual plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, I thought I’d list links and locations for the ones with an online existence. When even Wikipedia offers little help in finding stuff, you know you’ve got a task on your hands. I thought I would also offer some thoughts as to my experience in binging through these things – don’t worry, I’ve read every linked play in this entire bloody article, and my pain is very real.

Let’s start with the obvious. There are fourteen plays contained in Tucker Brooke’s 1908 volume, which is available (second-hand) on Amazon, et cetera, in the event your library doesn’t have it, and readable here if you are willing to wade through the thing online. The fourteen are as follows:

Arden of Faversham

Locrine

Edward III

Mucedorus

Sir John Oldcastle

Thomas Lord Cromwell

The London Prodigal

The Puritan

A Yorkshire Tragedy

The Merry Devil of Edmonton

Fair Em

The Two Noble Kinsman

The Birth of Merlin

Sir Thomas More

Note that The Two Noble Kinsman has largely been upgraded to canon in the past century, and Wikipedia makes suggestions about Edward III too. Also note that the plays – being neglected for so long – are printed in the old Elizabethan spelling, which does not help their accessibility. I personally found The Birth of Merlin, which goes to town on fantasy elements, pretty fun. Arden of Faversham brings to mind The Murder of Foul Prince Romero and His Enormously Bosomed Wife from the third Blackadder series, and The London Prodigal has a scene reminiscent of the second Blackadder series, where one character encourages another to take up prostitution (“Why, turne whore, that’s a good trade”). The rest of them, however, are varying degrees of heavy going. It really makes you realise that the Shakespeare canon is so far above most (but not all…) other works floating around Elizabethan and Jacobean drama that it might as well be on a different planet. Tucker Brooke himself compares the apocryphal plays to Falstaff’s bunch of misfits (maybe they’re easier to deal with when drunk?).

But Tucker Brooke is the easy bit. What about the rest of the Apocrypha? The plays that Shakespeare might have had a reviser’s hand in somewhere (or not as the case may be)? Well, to judge by this, there’s about eighty apocryphal plays in total, but I can’t find a nice convenient list outside the handful mentioned on Wikipedia. In the interests of keeping track of current online versions of texts I can find… here goes, and (thank Christ) there’s only sometimes Elizabethan spelling to worry about:

Double Falsehood

Edmund Ironside

The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (a necrophiliac villain!)

Sejanus: His Fall (a link to a version that is, alas, solely Johnson’s. The lost stage version had an anonymous collaborator).

The Spanish Tragedy (Elizabethan spelling)

Thomas of Woodstock (sadly, this does not involve a time-travelling Shakespeare visiting music festivals in 1969. It’s actually a prequel to Richard II).

Vortigern and Rowena (actually a forgery by William Henry Ireland in the 1790s).

That completes the list of apocryphal plays featured on Shakespeare’s Wikipedia page, save for the missing Love’s Labour’s Won and Cardenio. I would single out Vortigern and Rowena for special comment. It was ridiculed (correctly) on its first performance in 1796, with Ireland being forced to admit his forgery, and was not featured on stage again until the early 21st century. Having now read the play, it is indeed a very bad attempt at forgery – it honestly reads like poorly-written Macbeth fanfiction, with a dash of King Lear. Not actually boring, just So Bad It’s Good, and deservedly scorned by the actors.

As for Ireland’s other forged Shakespearean play, Henry II (1799), it is featured in this collection (Google Books comes in handy here…). Henry II, which deals with Plantagenet family issues and Thomas Becket, is a much better written play than Vortigern. Alas, that means it’s just dull, rather than So Bad It’s Good. Ireland’s language skills aren’t even up to those of popular history, never mind Shakespeare – the “who shall rid me of this turbulent priest?” scene is strangely underwhelming.

But enough on the forgeries. In addition to the above, the Wikipedia page for the Shakespeare Apocrypha also suggests one further play with potential for attribution:

A Knack to Know a Knave

(There are scanned versions of the original book pages floating around, but that involves having to make sense of archaic font as well as spelling. The above link is a bit more user-friendly, in terms of both font and spelling).

So much for Wikipedia. It turns out, however, that there are also various old history plays floating around, which were not written by Shakespeare, but which have the whiff of apocrypha about them. They certainly would have given Shakespeare some source material. And by source material, I mean an opportunity for Our Billy to loot like a Spanish Conquistador let loose in El Dorado:

Famous Victories of Henry V

The Troublesome Reign of King John

King Leir (Elizabethan spelling)

The True Tragedy of Richard III (Elizabethan spelling, if you can find it at all)

The True Tragedy of Richard III is uniquely difficult, in that there does not appear to be an easily accessible online text at the moment. By good fortune, my local University library subscribes to Early English Books Online, so I was able to follow that up via proxy. Alas, however, there is no direct link I can give to the play, though I have read it.

(Curious oddities: Richard’s famous line here is “a horse, a horse, a fresh horse,” the new Henry VII orders Richard’s corpse dragged naked through the streets of Leicester, and there’s a potted history summary at the end, covering the reigns of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I).

Honestly, the Powers That Be need to get to work, and restore The True Tragedy to the internet. It’s not as well-written as Billy’s later version of Richard III, but it still makes for a fascinating companion piece. Although strictly outside the scope of the Apocrypha, I would also cite Richardus Tertius, by Thomas Legge (1579), an Elizabethan play in Latin (and now thankfully in English translation). Legge’s Richard is a villain (of course he is), but he’s not quite the Satanic figure Shakespeare gives us – he plans for the peaceful future of the realm, muses on his lost son, and worries about public relations. Quite apart from the politically-motivated adultery accusations, he raises the quite valid point that a realm ruled by a child will end badly.

And speaking further of Shakespearean source material, there is also Romeus and Juliet, by Arthur Brooke (1562). This isn’t a play. It’s a three thousand-line narrative poem (so about the length of Beowulf), and you can guess the subject matter. Curiously, Brooke’s poem makes a more concerted effort to tie-up loose ends than Shakespeare, so if you’ve ever wondered what happens to the Friar and the Apothecary after our teenage lovers kill themselves, this is the poem for you.

Moving along, there’s also this play, with all the headache-inducing debate about its relationship to The Taming of the Shrew. The two major explanations are either (1) it’s one of Shakespeare’s earlier drafts/alternative versions, or (2) it’s an entirely separate play that Shakespeare stole and tinkered with. For the purposes of completeness, I’m listing it and moving on:

The Taming of a Shrew

(I am also aware that we’re starting to stray into areas pertaining to the Authorship Question. Let me lay my cards very firmly on the table here: William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works traditionally ascribed to him, with the odd bit of collaboration and/or overt plagiarism depending on the play. Shakespeare as pragmatic plagiarist is different from “Shakespeare as pen name” – I have very little time for the inherently snobbish Anti-Stratfordian position, and my interest in the Apocrypha is about the plays and poems themselves, rather than trying to demonstrate the viability of Alternative Candidate X. Moving right along…).

In trying to find more apocryphal plays, it’s now back to Tucker Brooke. You see, the fourteen plays actually featured in the book is a result of the editor whittling down an initial list of forty-two. The fourteen are based off “reason and tradition”, whereas the wider forty-two represent any historical attribution to Shakespeare. Let’s take a look at that forty–two…

Already Covered (20): Sir John Oldcastle, The London Prodigal, A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Troublesome Reign of King John (two parts, apparently – the version I found was a complete whole), The Taming of a Shrew, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, The Birth of Merlin, Fair Em, Mucedorus, The Puritan, Thomas Lord Cromwell, Locrine, Double Falsehood, Edward III, Arden of Faversham, King Leir, and Sir Thomas More.

No longer extant, due to history’s most infamous pie-cover, or otherwise (6): Henry I, Henry II (not to be confused with Ireland’s effort), Cardenio (which Tucker Brooke distinguishes from Double Falsehood), King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, and Iphis and Ianthe.

Alternative versions of canonical plays (4): The First Part of the Contention (aka 2 Henry VI), The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (aka 3 Henry VI), First Quarto Hamlet, and First Quarto Merry Wives. As I am not a Shakespeare scholar, and in no position to comment on the complexities and theories surrounding Bad Quartos, I will content myself with following Tucker Brooke’s list here.

Does exist, but not easy to find online (1): The True Tragedy of Richard III.

No clue, seemingly missing (2): The Prodigal Son, and Titus and Vespasian.

Remaining (9): The Arraignment of Paris (actually by George Peele), Edward II (actually by Christopher Marlowe), Edward IV (actually by Thomas Heywood), Wily Beguiled (Elizabethan spelling), Satiro-Mastix (actually by Thomas Dekker; the Introduction to the linked version is in German), A Warning for Fair Women, George a Greene, A Larum for London, and Albumazar.

The alternative versions of the canonical plays are all inferior, which, given that we’re talking Henry VI and The Merry Wives of Windsor here, isn’t great. The First Quarto Hamlet, however, is worth checking out on its own, even if you have zero interest in the rest of the Apocrypha – it’s shorter than the canonical Hamlet, has Polonius under a different name, and actually offers a different characterisation of Gertrude. Following up Wikipedia’s article on Bad Quartos, in addition to Hamlet and Merry Wives we also have First Quarto Henry V, First Quarto Romeo and Juliet, and First Quarto Pericles. Henry V’s “Pistol’s cock is up” gets turned into “Pistol’s flashing fiery cock is up!” All good, clean fun.

In terms of the Tucker Brooke plays listed as remaining, they’re a diverse bunch. Classical myth re-tellings (The Arraignment of Paris), romantic fluff (Wily Beguiled), uptight morality plays (A Warning for Fair Women), historical fluff (George a Greene, with a cameo from Robin Hood), and other unimpressive bits and pieces. Personally, I found a couple of the more serious histories the most interesting.

Edward II is not Shakespearean Apocrypha in the real sense – we know it’s Christopher Marlowe – but it winds up on this list courtesy of completeness and a seventeenth century bookseller who mislabelled the play as Shakespeare’s for quick cash. Unlike most of the other plays I have been talking about, I think it’s also a powerful piece of work when read on its own terms. Less poetic and abstract than Shakespeare’s Richard II (with which it shares the odd feature), but more visceral. I just wonder how the hell Marlowe got an openly homosexual – yet vaguely sympathetic – King past the censors, leaving aside that this aforementioned King also gets overthrown (a touchy subject for the Elizabethan era), and murdered on stage via having a red hot poker inserted up his behind. Yes, Marlowe went there, so to speak.

Edward IV, which is a two-part effort from Heywood, is something a bit different, in that the action follows Jane Shore, a married woman who sleeps with Edward… and much of the story is how she and her husband deal with that. The second part shows Richard III’s seizure of power, but in contrast to basically every other Richard III play, it actually leaves Richard in charge at the end – the focus remains on how the Shores deal with the Ricardian regime (which, of course, isn’t a pleasant one). Richard’s really a dark backdrop to two very ordinary people who have stumbled into royal politics via Edward’s womanising. As I say, it’s something different. Rather like a War movie that wheels out Hitler for a bit of drama, before putting him back in his box.

As extras on top of the forty-two, Tucker Brooke mentions the forgeries: Vortigern and Rowena, and Henry II, by Ireland, and The Fifth of November, by George Ambrose Rhodes (1830). Unlike Ireland, Rhodes’ work isn’t fanfiction – it’s a satirical piss-take, with Guy Fawkes managing not one but two attempts on the life of the King (he escapes from the Tower, and tries again…). King James himself is portrayed as a buffoon, obsessively interested in his royal prerogative, and in asking people whether they have read his books (he swears like a sailor too). This is the sort of play that no-one until at least the eighteenth century would have dared write about the monarchy… and the kicker is that there’s a couple of occasions where a character says “as Will Shakespeare says…” Rhodes is clearly having a laugh.

Phew. We are definite making a decent amount of progress through the Apocrypha.

But we’re not finished. Stumbling around the internet throws up a Google Books chapter of Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare, by George Harold Metz (1982). In addition to the four titular plays, this book also references various other scholarly attributions over the centuries. Note that Metz thinks these attributions are generally pretty absurd, but we’re talking fringe cases, and suggestions where Shakespeare may have had a hand in revising a single scene within a wider play. There was a time when people were seeing Billy’s ghost everywhere.

Anyway, the list of additional attributions referenced in Metz:

The Chances (actually by John Fletcher)

The Tragedy of Hoffman (actually by Henry Chettle)

Hieronimo (an alternative title of The Spanish Tragedy listed earlier)

The Roman Actor (actually by Philip Massinger)

A Trick to Catch the Old One (actually by Thomas Middleton)

The Witch of Edmonton (actually by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford)

Eurialus and Lucretia (a lost play)

Lorrino (either lost or, as suggested by Metz, a misspelling of Locrine)

Oldrastes (either lost, or as suggested by Metz, a misspelling of Oldcastle)

The Battle of Alcazar (actually by George Peele)

The Fair Maid of Bristow (alas, this scanned Gothic font version is the only online copy I could find. It is every bit as reader unfriendly as you would think)

Captain Thomas Stukeley (another case of a scanned Gothic font manuscript being the only thing available)

Nobody and Somebody (scanned manuscript, but not Gothic and therefore readable. Mere Elizabethan spelling is but a small matter)

Histriomastix (actually by John Marston. Scanned non-Gothic manuscript, and quite short – I believe the appropriate expression involves “small mercies”)

Jack Drum’s Entertainment (actually by John Marston. Scanned non-Gothic manuscript)

The Cobbler’s Prophecy (actually by Robert Wilson. I cannot find a single online version of this text)

The Pedlar’s Prophecy (actually by Robert Wilson)

Hester (lost play. As per Metz, it has been suggested that Hester was reworked as the German Esther und Haman)

Grim the Collier of Croydon

Selimus (actually by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge)

Tamburlaine (Part I and Part II) (actually by Christopher Marlowe)

The Birth of Hercules (I cannot find a single online version of this text)

Tamburlaine by Marlowe towers above everything else here. It’s only in the list at all because someone once suggested Shakespeare had a hand in one of the scenes, but honestly, even categorising this as Shakespeare Apocrypha does Marlowe a severe disservice. This gloriously mad and bloodthirsty portrayal of one of humanity’s most vicious tyrants (Timur the Lame. Think of him as Genghis Khan without the redeeming features) is tons of fun. We don’t have Shakespearean-style psychological depth, but we do wind up with a cross between Napolean and Caligula, who (curiously) gets brought down after burning the Koran and cursing the Prophet Mohammmed. Remember that this is a play written by a sixteenth century Englishman. That Tamburlaine’s enemies keep snarking about his lowly birth (prior to him doing unspeakable things to their armies, women, and cities) adds an additional edge to a thoroughly edgy work.

Of the other plays, I was pleasantly surprised by Fletcher’s Chances. The plot’s a bit convoluted – I would strongly recommend checking out the Wikipedia Synopsis first – but it occurred to me that this would actually be pretty fun to watch as a performance (more so than reading it). It was apparently pretty popular for centuries afterwards.

One line in The Chances that jumped out at me was this: “… his Devil Comes out of Lapland, where they sell men Winds For dead drink, and old Doublets.” Olaus Magnus’ History of the Northern Peoples (1555) had described the custom of sailors buying knotted wind ropes from local Finnish magicians … and here we have an allusion to this practice in an English play from 1617. Legends clearly get around.

Another one I liked was A Trick to Catch the Old One. I went in expecting that there would be the Devil involved, but no. It’s a decidedly non-supernatural comedy, with enough satirical bite to raise it above mere fluff. It says something that after four centuries, Dampit’s insult “out, you babliaminy, you unfeathered, cremitoried quean, you cullisance of scabiosity!” still evokes a chuckle. By contrast, The Witch of Edmonton – which actually continues to get modern performances – is much more serious, and really does feature the Devil. Specifically, a devil in the form of a dog. As for the play itself, I can see why it attracts modern interest. The language may be flat, but the story portrays the titular Witch as a broadly sympathetic victim… not bad for an early seventeenth century piece.

(On the other hand, how anyone could ever imagine Shakespeare’s involvement is a mystery, seeing as the real-life event that inspired The Witch of Edmonton took place five years after Billy died).

Rounding out the ‘good’ plays, Nobody and Somebody is another fundamentally comic play with some bite to it. There is another plot in there somewhere, but the spotlight gets stolen by poor Nobody, who does everything good, and gets blamed for everything bad, when it is really the villainous Somebody at fault. Yes, it’s a joke as old as Homer, but in a social satire context (Nobody builds hospitals! Somebody sleeps with married women, but Nobody gets blamed!), it raises a smile.

The remainder of the plays on Metz’s list are varying degrees of forgettable. Let’s first tackle the elephant in the room: the two plays in the list that are essentially illegible, due to the scanned manuscript pages being in (smudged) Gothic font. Compared to the font problem, the Elizabethan spelling is a minor headache. My solution to this difficulty? Pour myself a stiff drink, soldier on through it, and take hints from the (non-Gothic) stage directions about what the hell is going on.

My back-of-the-vellum guesses as to the nature of each play are as follows. Suffice to say, the pain involved in making sense of the writing outweighs any enjoyment of the literature: 

The Fair Maid of Bristow: The titular maid, Annabel, marries. Her husband (wrongly) thinks she’s unfaithful, so (unsuccessfully) tries to poison her. He is sentenced to die by the King, but is saved via the intervention of Annabel. Ergo, the thing counts as a comedy. I think.

Captain Thomas Stukeley: My advice on this one is to read Peele’s Battle of Alcazar first (it’s in readable format, for a start). This one is a lengthy prequel, starring one of the major characters. We follow Stukeley from marriage and financial issues, to defending a town against an Irish rebellion, to working for the King of Spain, to the Moroccan disaster/adventure. Or that’s the story I extracted anyway – and the sheer length of this bastard doesn’t help.

The poor quality of the scanned copies even affects the manuscripts that aren’t plagued by Gothic font – Grim the Collier of Croydon loses material at various points via the scanning, especially in the final scene. Ditto Jack Drum’s Entertainment, which is seriously smudged at points. It goes without saying that, if at all possible, we need better copies. Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg, my kingdom for Project Gutenberg!

Jack Drum’s Entertainment, via Elizabethan spelling, does, however, manage the truly hilarious line “will fuck you vp”, for “will suck you up.” That alone makes me forgive it, and to be fair to John Marston, the play is pretty raunchy. One character says to another:

 

Come laie thy head then in my virgin lappe,

And with a soft sleeke hand Il’e clappe thy cheeke,

And wring thy fingers with an ardent gripe:

Ile breathe amours, and euen intraunce thy spirit,

And sweetly in the shade lie dallying.

.

Then there are the plays I could make sense of, but on the whole would have preferred not to. These range from nonsensical melodrama (Hoffman), to pompous moralism (The Roman Actor), to enthusiastic xenophobia (The Pedlar’s Prophecy), to the just plain weird (Histriomastix, which beneath its broad incomprehensibility seems to be some sort of six(!) act meta-commentary on drama). Plus, The Battle of Alcazar, which is pretty underwhelming – given that George Peele may have co-written Titus Andronicus, I was expecting something more bloodthirsty. On the other hand, The Battle of Alcazar actually makes the important bits of Captain Thomas Stukeley comprehensible, so there is that.

(Oh, and speaking of weirdness, the Tragedy of Selimus leaves the titular character victorious at the end of the play. Not quite what you’d expect from the title, though in the play’s defence, there is copious killing of other characters).

**

That completes my December 2019 Shakespeare Odyssey – as much of a binge through the apocryphal texts as it is actually possible to do. Emphasis on “possible” – it is truly an eye-opening experience as to the scarcity and obscurity of these things, to a degree that is actually disturbing. I have been snarking a bit about the quality of these plays, and, yes, most of them aren’t great, but (with the exception of the three forgeries), they’re also four hundred years old. At some point, I imagined the weight of history would mean something. I had previously visualised the 500-600 surviving Elizabethan dramas as sitting in dust-covered, leather-bound volumes edited by some Victorian scholar… not necessarily an inviting read, but at least accessible to an enthusiastic reader.

Nope. Even a text as interesting and important as The True Tragedy of Richard III, a Shakespeare source play, isn’t easy to access. Many of these others? I only know about them at all from Tucker Brooke, a real dust-covered volume, and who knows what I’ve skipped. A couple I literally could not find online at all, and others are just illegible scanned pages from ancient manuscripts. In a strange way, this venture into the Shakespeare Apocrypha was less about sampling great literature – with various exceptions (Marlowe!), I found it a frequent chore – and more about a service to human knowledge. Maybe even bad Elizabethan plays deserve their place in the sun, and I hope that at least someone out there finds these links useful.

Anyway, for those keeping count, here’s the summary of my compilation effort:

Apocryphal plays: 47 (double-counting the Edward IV and Tamburlaine two-parters)

Bad Quartos: 5

Other alternative versions: 3 (includes The Taming of a Shrew)

Source plays: 4 (not double-counting The Troublesome Reign of King John. Includes The True Tragedy of Richard III, if you’re lucky enough to have a helpful institution in town)

Other sources: 2 (Richardus Tertius and Romeus and Juliet)

Forgeries: 3

Lost plays: 11-13 (depending on Oldrastes and Lorrino. Includes Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won)

Play exists, but not online: 2 (3, if you can’t get The True Tragedy)

Including the lost and unavailable stuff, that’s seventy-seven to seventy-nine items, all up, on top of the traditional thirty-seven plays. Of that, I have read and listed sixty-four in the present discussion. Not bad going for a casual reader, and if Robert Wilson’s Cobbler’s Prophecy is anything like his Pedlar’s Prophecy, I suspect I’m not missing much in terms of the stuff I can’t find.

(I see Wilson has also been suggested as an author for the anonymous A Larum for London. In which case, yes, he really is the sixteenth century Daily Mail).

On a lighter note, a couple of final thoughts:

Between Middleton, Kyd, Lodge, Heywood, Legge, and Dekker, is it just me, or is Thomas a strangely common name for Early Modern English playwrights?

Tamburlaine and the Bad Quartos would make an awesome name for a band.

**

Addendum: Drat. Forgot the apocryphal poetry. Taking Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, A Lover’s Complaint, and The Sonnets as canonical, that leaves the following in various states of dubiousness:

The Passionate Pilgrim

A Funeral Elegy

To the Queen

Shall I Die?

Epitaph on Elias James

Epitaphs on John Combe

 

(Yes, I am aware some people have also questioned A Lover’s Complaint, but it’s much more ‘canon’ than ‘apocrypha’ by any standard).

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Odd that the formatting seems to be working for other people - for me, it literally blanks the entire top-half of the page. I tried to put the links in here, but in the end gave up (yes, they are accessible here)

As for editions, I used the original 1908 Tucker Brooke and the (online) 1982 Metz, plus wikipedia. As I've suggested, there is very little attempt in most places to actually compile convenient lists of the apocryphal plays, outside the big dozen. As for the versions of the plays, well, I read the linked ones (plus the physical Tucker Brooke). 

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