Hi,
I’ve read that Shakespeare wrote 37 or 38 plays. Is there any consensus yet on the exact number?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
“Traditionally, the 37 plays are divided into the genres of tragedy, history, comedy and tragic comedy”
See a list of 38
“It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 1590 and 1612. This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in the order in which they were first performed.”
It depends on whether or not you count co-authored plays, I suppose. And do you count the lost plays? I don’t believe there is a consensus.
Moved to Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
When was *The Two Noble Kinsmen *accepted into the canon? It isn’t in the “complete” Shakespeare volume I have (which dates from the '70s), nor was it in the version we had in the house when I was a kid.
Depends what you mean by ‘write’, if you can get anyone to agree on how much of a play Shakespeare wrote, if any of it. The First Folio published in 1623 has 36 plays listed in it. It misses The Two Noble Kinsmen, which has a dual attribution with John Fletcher, published in 1634. It also omits Pericles, Prince of Tyre, but scholars generally accept Bill wrote about half of it, probably with George Wilkins.
Counting the lost plays (Love’s Labour’s Won, Cardenio), and several collaborations (including TTNK, PPoT and Edward III; the authorship has been argued about), wiki comes up with a chronology of 41 plays. There’s also a possible early version of Hamlet along with the rest of the apocrypha.
Oh gods, no. not the 78/79 episodes debate again. AAAIIIEEE!!! hides under the bed
Is there any evidence that Ben Jonson co-authored any of Shakespeare’s plays?
Isn’t there some debate about Henry VIII, too? Or is that just one of those things where there’s one solitary but loud crank that nobody serious pays any attention to?
The Riverside Shakespeare I used in college includes it. The copyright date is 1974, I took the course a few years later.
Henry VIII, like TNK, is probably about a 50-50 collaboration with John Fletcher. Unlike TNK, though, it made it into the First Folio, so it’s been part of the canon from the beginning.
Authorship in early modern drama is complicated. Most playwrights collaborated at least some of the time. Even when a play is nominally single-authored, it wasn’t uncommon for a second playwright to do a bit of script-doctoring if, for example, the play were being revived and the original author were dead or unavailable. (This is probably how we got the Hecate scenes in Macbeth, for instance – by the late 1610s the fashion was for more supernatural elements and more dancing, so Thomas Middleton got hired to add some in.)
I had no idea Henry VIII was in the First Folio. Interesting.
Someone upthread mentioned Love’s Labours Won - I’ll point out (to the OP) it’s either its own play, or an alternate title of The Taming of the Shrew. Nobody knows. If it is its own play, it’s lost (like Mr. Kobayashi said).