It is these considerations that make the ten plays collected in William Shakespeare & Others worth serious attention, however uneven in quality some of them may seem. For these are all plays which, although they were excluded from the First Folio, were nevertheless either associated with Shakespeare in his lifetime, or have a retrospective claim to include some Shakespearean writing. Some, such as The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy, were actually published with the name W. Shakespeare or William Shakespeare on the title page. Others, such as Locrine and The True Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell were published under the initials W.S. Whether or not Shakespeare wrote these plays in their entirety (very doubtful) or whether he simply added touches to them or composed particular scenes (more likely, but still hard to put beyond reasonable doubt), the fact that his contemporaries were prepared to accept them as his makes them worth pondering.
Bate and Rasmussen have also included other plays in which there are grounds for thinking that Shakespeare had a part. In the case of The Book of Sir Thomas More, which survives only as a manuscript in seven different hands, that involvement is attested by the fact that a portion of the manuscript has been identified as written by Shakespeare after comparison with his signatures on legal documents. In the case of other plays, such as Edward III, the detection of a Shakespearean presence rests on stylometric analysis, a technique which in recent years and with the advent of large machine-searchable corpora has become much more sophisticated (if not therefore necessarily more reliable).
This is not the first time these plays have been published. In 1908 C.F. Tucker Brooke published 14 plays "which have been ascribed to Shakespeare" under the title of The Shakespeare Apocrypha — a title with biblical connotations very expressive of "Shakespeare worship". This was an old-spelling edition, and has long been out of print. It has had a good run for its money, but it has been handsomely superseded by William Shakespeare & Others, which gives us most of the "doubtful" Shakespearean plays in modernised texts, presented with succinct annotation, helpful introductions, and some useful ancillary textual apparatus. Those interested in pursuing the outer reaches of the authorship attribution question will find much guidance in Will Sharpe's elegant and clever essay, "Authorship and Attribution". Another appendix gives transcriptions of interviews with those who have acted in these plays.
It is difficult to imagine anyone seriously interested in Shakespeare who would not want also to read these plays, which Shakespeare's contemporaries — at least some of them — were happy to accept as his. Bate and Rasmussen deserve our gratitude for re-presenting these fascinating dramas so handsomely and conveniently for today's readership.
But will any school be brave enough, I wonder, to try to satisfy the Shakespeare requirement for GCSE by having its pupils study Edward III?
