Locrine, first edition

Locrine was published by Thomas Creede in 1595 with a title page claiming that the play is “Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, By W.S.” This Senecan revenge tragedy, with close thematic and plot links to Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus and Robert Greene’s Selimus, is notable for its lengthy dumb-shows and stately speeches.

Several critics, from Baldwin Maxwell (1956) to Lukas Erne (2013, 270), assume that the W.S. must refer to another writer with those initials, and much ink has been spilled on names such as Wentworth Smith for whom no other works survive. Others, including Sonia Massai (2009, 7-8) and Peter Kirwan (2015, 127-38), focusing on the nuances of what may be implied by “Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected,” suggest that these initials may well refer to the first appearance of Shakespeare’s initials in print as a reviser or editor of the play, which is universally agreed to date from some years earlier.

The play was first attributed to Shakespeare explicitly by its inclusion in the 1664 Folio, and it has subsequently appeared in all major editions of spurious plays, including Bate and Rasmussen’s 2013 edition of Collaborative Plays. Attribution scholars have largely sought likeness with one of the university wits such as Greene or Peele, and the presence of shared passages between Locrine and Selimus indicates some form of close relationship between those plays. Peter Berek and Will Sharpe have pursued the possibility that a manuscript note by George Buc on one of the extant copies may suggest the original author was Charles Tilney (Sharpe 2013, 659-60).