Sir John Oldcastle Part 1, second edition

The 1619 quarto of Sir John Oldcastle Part 1 is the first to attribute the play to Shakespeare, some three years after his death. The several plays published by Thomas Pavier in 1619, many with errors of date or authorship (probably deliberate) on their title pages, indicate Pavier’s interest in compiling a collection of “Shakespeare” plays around this time. The introduction of Shakespeare’s name onto an edition carrying the false date of 1600 had a significant impact on the Shakespeare canon for some time as, in 1664, Philip Chetwinde added to the second impression of the Third Folio all the plays published in Shakespeare’s lifetime with his name or initials on the title page (except The Troublesome Reign of King John (1611)). Therefore he also included Oldcastle.

The play remained in the Shakespeare canon through the Fourth Folio (1685) and the editions of Nicholas Rowe and the 1728 reprint of Alexander Pope’s edition (though Pope excluded it from his first edition in 1725). The play, along with the other 1664 additions excepting Pericles, formed the core of the several editions of disputed plays and Apocrypha in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, its explicit ownership by the Admiral’s Men and the evidence from Henslowe that the play is by Munday, Drayton, Hathaway and Wilson means that there have been no serious scholarly attempts to attribute the play to Shakespeare or to anyone else. The play was one of only two of the 1664 additions excluded from Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen’s 2013 edition of disputed plays as having no ongoing connection to Shakespeare. The play’s relationship to Shakespeare has been championed, however, by Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, whose The Oldcastle Controversy seeks to understand the plays associated with this historical figure in relation to one another.