The London Prodigal, first edition

The London Prodigal was published in 1605 attributed to William Shakespeare, as performed by the King’s Men. On the basis of external evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime, The London Prodigal in fact has a much stronger claim to Shakespearean authorship than even most of the canonical plays, many of which were first attributed to Shakespeare posthumously. It is only the omission of the play from the First Folio (1623) that casts any doubt on its authenticity.

The 1605 quarto was published by Nathaniel Butter, who three years later printed the authoritative quarto of King Lear. Both quartos display Shakespeare’s name with unusual prominence, suggesting Butter’s confidence in the saleability of Shakespeare’s name, which may account for the attribution. Nonetheless, no persuasive alternative candidates have ever been put forward for The London Prodigal. Some stylistic tests indicate a likeness to John Fletcher’s style, but that would make the play Fletcher’s earliest known (Sharpe 679-704).

There is no serious dispute about the play having belonged to the King’s Men, and it shares important thematic and dramatic concerns with several other plays in the same repertory, especially Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well and The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, which consider state and community intrusions into the institution of marriage (Kirwan 75-89).

Following the publication of the quarto, The London Prodigal was not printed again until Philip Chetwinde added it, along with six other plays, to the Third Folio of 1664. It remained in the canon through the Fourth Folio (1685) and Nicholas Rowe’s 1709-11 edition, and resurfaced again in Alexander Pope’s 1728 edition and in single editions published in the mid-1730s by Robert Walker and Jacob Tonson. Following Edmund Malone’s inclusion of it in his 1780 Supplement to the edition of George Steevens, the play appeared in several collections of spurious Shakespeare plays through the nineteenth century, culminating in C.F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908). Despite it having one of the best and least-resolved bibliographic claims to Shakespearean authorship of the disputed plays, The London Prodigal has received very little modern critical, editorial or theatrical attention, causing Richard Proudfoot to dub it “Shakespeare’s most neglected play.” (Proudfoot 149-57)