Edward III, first edition

Edward III was published anonymously in 1596, and was one of three plays attributed to Shakespeare in the catalogue of books appended to Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess in 1656. The other two plays, Edward II and Edward IV, were written by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Heywood respectively, and the attribution  to Shakespeare carries no verifiable weight. The play was not included in the 1623 First Folio, but it is unknown whether the play (which dates perhaps to 1593-4) ever entered the repertory of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

In 1760, Edward Capell published Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry, in which he made the first substantial claim that Shakespeare was the author of this play. Although Capell did not include it in his own edition of Shakespeare in 1768, several compilers of doubtful plays in the nineteenth century included the play and debated its authorship, and it was included in C.F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha (1908).

In the twentieth century, a consensus has emerged that Shakespeare collaborated on this play, and is particularly responsible for the scenes featuring the Countess of Salisbury and perhaps some other sections (Watt 2009, 116-33; Sharpe 2013, 663-70). A very few critics, notably Eric Sams, have attributed the play in its entirety to Shakespeare, but this is a minority view. The play was added to the Riverside Shakespeare (2nd edition, 1997), the Oxford Shakespeare (2nd edition, 2005) and published as an individual volume in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (1998). At the time of writing, it remains the only anonymously printed non-Folio play that has achieved canonical status. The identity of Shakespeare’s collaborator is a matter of ongoing dispute, but candidates include Marlowe and Thomas Kyd.