Editorial treatment of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, 1664-1737

The third edition (F3) of the collected plays of Shakespeare appeared in 1663, and to its second issue the following year was added a particularly disreputable group of plays comprised Pericles, The London Prodigal, Sir John Oldcastle, A Yorkshire Tragedy, Thomas Lord Cromwell, The Puritan, and Locrine. Of these, only Pericles remains in the accepted Shakespeare canon, the edges of which are imprecisely defined. (At the moment it is unclear whether Edward 3 is in or out.) The landmark event for defining the Shakespeare canon was the publication of the 1623 First Folio (F1), with which, as Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor put it, "the substantive history of Shakespeare's dramatic texts virtually comes to an end" (Wells et al. 1987, 52)...