Shakespeare and Juvenilia

George Wither (1588–1667) is the first recorded English author to use ‘juvenilia’ as a title description for writings completed while still young.³ Wither made his literary debut in 1612, at the age of twenty-four, composing an extravagant set of elegiac writings upon the death of Prince Henry.⁴ By the time Wither published his Juvenilia (1622), he was in his mid-thirties. In the address to the reader, quoted above, Wither describes these writings or ‘youth-pastimes’ as sometimes ‘childish’ and declares them the product of ‘what Nature could impart,/ E’re he had Time, or Meanes, to compasse Art’ (sig. ¶^r–v). Such diminutio is commonplace in prefatory material of the period, but Wither’s apologia for the immaturity of the subsequent materials rings slightly untrue. The works included had all been, as the title-page openly records, ‘heretofore imprinted’, and the earliest work included is the set of Henry elegies. The latest work included, Fidelia (1615), was published three years later, by which time Wither was at least twenty-seven years old. Composing his address to the reader only six or seven years later, Wither appears to have experienced an extraordinary period of personal development; his ‘early’ works can scarcely be separated chronologically in his lifetime from those of his new-found maturity.⁵

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark the age in which literary precocity was most celebrated. As Laurie Langbauer observes, ‘[young] people with resources have always written, but this [meaning 1750–1835] was … the period when juvenile writers formed a recognizable writing presence’.⁶ The authors Langbauer describes, including Thomas Chatterton, Leigh Hunt, and Jane Austen, either published early in life or had their early writings preserved and later published. Other examples abound. Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford aged nineteen for his incendiary The Necessity of Atheism (1811). Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein (published 1818) in her late teens. John Keats’s earliest extant writing, ‘Imitation of Spenser’, was composed while he was still a teenager. Alfred Lord Tennyson described the poems he published in 1830 at the age of twenty-one as ‘juvenilia’.⁷ The Brontë children wrote fantasy fiction as teenagers, of which most is lost, inventing a fictional land named ‘Glass Town’. Literary precocity continues to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with figures such as Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, et al.⁸ The prodigious James Joyce composed an elegy for Charles Stuart Parnell at the age of nine, ‘Et tu, Healy’, of which but a snippet remains.⁹ Daisy Ashford wrote her first story at the age of four, and her first novel, The Young Visiters, or, Mr. Salteena’s Plan, at nine years old.¹⁰

In Shakespeare’s lifetime, young writers were also producing significant works, and I shall later note the literary precocity of Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, and Francis Beaumont, but the idea of celebrating youthful literary endeavour in this way was somewhat alien to that culture. Of the texts that survive from child writers in the period, very little found its way into print. As Kate Chedgzoy observes, ‘mostly it has survived in family archives’.¹¹ In her childhood and early teenage years, Elizabeth I translated devotional writings by Marguerite de Navarre (Le Miroir de l’âme) and Katherine Parr, as well as the parts of works of reformist theology by Jean Calvin (Institutio Christianae Religionis) and Bernardino Ochino (Che Cosa è Christo, & per che vienne al mondo). Chedgzoy notes further examples in Jane Lumley’s English translation of Erasmus’ Iphigenia, a manuscript verse by William Paget and George Berkeley, and Rachel Fane’s manuscript dramatic writings.¹² Lucy Munro has discussed the early-life productivity of mid-seventeenth-century authors such as Abraham Cowley and Thomas Jordan (‘the Infant-Poet of our Age’).¹³

For Shakespeare, like most early modern authors, we have little record of his first literary endeavours. Of Shakespeare’s surviving writing, the work with the earliest hypothesized date is Sonnet 145. It features a perceptible pun on his wife’s name in the poem’s final couplet:

This sonnet, uniquely for Shakespeare written in tetrameter rather than pentameter, may represent an early experimental effort that Shakespeare kept and, perhaps notably, included within the final group of sonnets, 127–154, that have been dated to the early 1590s. If we date Sonnet 145 to the year or so of Will and Anne’s courtship, betrothal, and marriage, 1581–2, Shakespeare wrote this in his late teens. The evidence supporting such a dating is plausible but any conclusion about its date is necessarily speculative.¹⁵ Beyond this poem, what follows are several years of silence for Shakespeare.

That silence, the ‘lost years’, is frustrating but not unusual for this specific period of the 1580s. There are many gaps in our knowledge for the decade in which Shakespeare first began writing professionally for the stage. Only thirty-two plays performed by London boy and adult companies in the 1580s survive (see Table 1.1).¹⁶ The survival rate is poor, and we know this because the dramatic output of the 1580s can be supplemented in several ways. Perhaps most importantly there are surviving plays from the 1580s and 1590s that are near impossible to securely date; Table 1.1, though curated with all due care, may err with some of its inclusions and exclusions.¹⁷ Had Shakespeare begun writing plays professionally in the early to mid-1580s, we could not be surprised that what he wrote did not survive given the attrition rate. But at least with those thirty-two plays we have a text to work with. The Lost Plays Database records a further thirty-six lost plays performed by London boy and adult companies from the decade. Some caveats apply here, as the individual dating and authorship of certain of the works included is often conjectural. Warnings aside, it is clear that many more plays were lost from the 1580s than survive; the ‘lost plays’ in the Database are those for which we have some form of documentary evidence, however slight.

Those dramatists perhaps most often associated with London theatre of the 1580s, Lyly and Marlowe, account for more than one-third of the surviving plays (twelve of the thirty-two). At least, that is, in terms of the works surviving in some version. Table 1.1 documents a situation in which certain 1580s works by certain dramatists survive, but these dramatists’ bodies of work may be radically over- or under-represented by what has survived. There can be little doubt about the importance of Lyly and Marlowe for 1580s drama. If you are a student of that decade, you must continually take recourse to these totemic figures. And yet, when their surviving work accounts for more than one-third of all of the 1580s drama still available to read and perform, it would be difficult to avoid them, or to construct another critical narrative about their significance for this period. By the standards of those authors, the early early Shakespeare cupboard seems pretty bare. But as author or co-author of three of the surviving thirty-two playhouse plays, Shakespeare is not an entirely insignificant presence.

Twenty of the thirty-two surviving plays can be reasonably or firmly dated to the last two years of the decade. It is within these twenty-four months that Shakespeare is also supposed to emerge as a dramatist for the first time. The coincidence of Shakespeare’s emergence and the proliferation of extant drama is surely suspicious. Can it be that Shakespeare only began to first write for the playhouses in the exact year or so for when we have a significant number of surviving plays by other dramatists? Or, if we are feeling generous towards the author’s early craft, does the popularity of Shakespeare help drive the commercialization of printed drama? Either or both scenarios may be partially correct, of course. But much more plausible is that plays written by Shakespeare in the 1580s have been lost along with everyone else’s. The silence that surrounds Shakespeare’s transition into writing plays is a condition of that historical period, and not something particular to him.

When that silence is broken for Shakespeare is another matter. There are a series of unknown dates for when Shakespeare first moves to London, first becomes involved with the theatre profession, and first writes a play, and this sequence of firsts need not run in that order. Then there is the other, more tangible, moment of broken silence: the date when Shakespeare’s earliest surviving play or part of play was written. Gary Taylor and I (‘Canon and Chronology’) propose that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare’s earliest surviving play, offering a ‘best guess’ of early 1588 for its composition. Given the lack of external evidence for its date of composition, we offer an unusually large possible date range for the play of 1586 to 1598. Narrowing in, however, we present a range of internal evidence (echoes and allusions; vocabulary, metrical, and stylistic tests; cast size) to support an early date, and a date earlier than any other surviving play. Still, it is implausible to think that Shakespeare writes nothing in those five, six, or more years of silence before our working chronology begins. Or, perhaps more significantly, it seems implausible to think that everything Shakespeare writes in the 1580s survives. This is wishful thinking; the ‘Complete Works’ of Shakespeare is certainly incomplete, and the period in which works were most likely lost is the early part of his career. This is for two reasons: first, as we have seen, because the rate of attrition for surviving plays from the 1580s is so high, and, second, because Shakespeare’s own company bought and owned his plays from 1594 and those involved with the publication of the 1623 Folio collection, co-sharers in this company, possess exemplary credentials as witnesses of his dramatic output. I am not suggesting, à la E. A. J. Honigmann, that we push back extant plays into the mid-1580s.¹⁸ Rather, that when we think of ‘early Shakespeare’, we should allow for the possibility, if not probability, that he began writing plays professionally somewhat earlier than 1588 and that the early dramatic canon is incomplete.

In this vein, it is worth noting that what scholars have described as Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’ – that is the date range for which we have no external evidence for Shakespeare’s activities – actually extends a full seven and a half years from the baptism of the twins (in February 1585) to the Groats-worth allusion (in September 1592). Scholars have felt little hesitation in writing about Shakespeare’s activities, c. 1590–2. After all, the Groats-worth allusion cannot be based on nothing. Why not the late 1580s and before? How else can we account for the completion of all of the plays mentioned by Francis Meres? By 1598, when Meres notes his appreciation for twelve or thirteen¹⁹ of Shakespeare’s plays (including the lost Love’s Labour’s Won), he excludes a further six plays in which Shakespeare had contributed to by this time – Arden of Faversham, Edward III, The Taming of the Shrew, and the three parts of Henry VI – all of whose original composition precedes the narrative poems.²⁰ In ten or so years dating back to 1588, Shakespeare thus produces at a rate of about two plays per year (1.9 per annum), a rate that would only slightly decline over the succeeding fifteen years (some twenty-four plays at 1.6 per annum). If the starting date was 1590 rather than 1588, as Wiggins’s chronology implies, Shakespeare would have been producing plays at a rate that far exceeds his later practice (2.375 per annum).²¹ The latter period of the ‘lost years’, c. 1588 to 1592, is therefore not exactly silent.

The earlier period, before 1588, is where the evidence falls under a hush. On 27 November 1582, a special licence was granted by the consistory court of Worcester to allow the marriage of Will and Anne Hathaway, their first daughter Susanna is christened on 26 May 1583, and Hamnet and Judith are christened on 2 February 1585. Shakespeare’s whereabouts in the early years of his marriage are unknown; the birth of the twins only assures us that he and Anne were together, crude though that might seem, sometime in mid-1584. (The newly-weds had, as S. Schoenbaum notes, no place to call their own until 1597, and Anne probably lived with her in-laws on Henley Street.)²² The intervening period, the thirty or so months from early 1585 to c. late 1587, is most perfectly silent. This period, and the years before that follow his marriage, tracks Shakespeare from his teenage years to his early twenties. This is the corresponding period, age-wise, in which Munday (The Mirrour of Mutabilite (1579), aged nineteen), Middleton (The Wisdom of Solomon Paraphrased (1597, aged seventeen), and Beaumont (Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602), aged seventeen) emerge as authors of promise. The bar is not set with these authors (as we will see below), and personality and personal circumstance play their role in each case, but the key point is that Shakespeare’s first surviving works are plausibly not his earliest.

Although ‘early Shakespeare’ as a descriptor has had some critical currency, Shakespeare’s earliest extant writings have been rarely classified as juvenilia.²³ For other authors of the period, this has not been the case. The Oxford Collected Works of Middleton, for example, has a special section at the back of the edition for that author’s ‘juvenilia’, including four works written in his late teens and early twenties.²⁴ Marlowe, as ever, is the more interesting case in point. The early part of Shakespeare’s career, at least as suggested by Power and I in this volume’s Introduction, covers seven or more years. Marlowe’s entire career in writing plays (1587 to 1593) covers roughly the same time period and number of years. Born a couple of months before Shakespeare, the beginnings of their professional writing careers overlap almost exactly. As Tom Rutter suggests, Marlowe’s relative youth when he dies (aged twenty-nine) makes the idea of ‘late Marlowe’ incongruous.²⁵ But, at the earlier side of the Marlowe chronology, editors and critics such as Paul Menzer, distinguish between the ‘juvenilia’ of his translations of Ovid and Lucan, associated with the poet-dramatist’s time in Cambridge (though with no evidence to support this dating), and his later more accomplished works.²⁶ Indeed, the categorization of Dido, Queen of Carthage as juvenilia has been protested vigorously.²⁷ Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith, pushing this line of thinking about Marlowe’s relative youth a little further, suggest that ‘Marlowe’s literary canon is all essentially juvenilia’.²⁸ If all of Marlowe’s extant works can be thought of as juvenilia, and all of Marlowe’s writing career coincides with that of early Shakespeare, then why have critics been so reluctant to label anything Shakespeare writes early as juvenilia?

Perhaps one reason for the dismissal of the category of ‘juvenilia’ in Shakespearean criticism is that his personal circumstances make the idea of immaturity seem a little absurd. By the time Shakespeare first makes some noise, or by the time the surviving evidence allows him to be heard, c. 1588, he is already someone with responsibilities for a wife and three children, many years removed from the dalliance of youth; his eldest, Susanna, is by then five years old. (Marlowe, as a point of comparison, had recently been awarded his MA from Cambridge.) We should not, however, equate age with experience or vice versa; an individual can be experienced in different ways. The early period of the ‘lost years’, crucial as it must have been for Shakespeare both personally and professionally, is where the critical construct of ‘early Shakespeare’ begins. A paucity of evidence has created a surfeit of speculation about how Shakespeare achieved his ‘break’, anachronistic though that may seem, in the business of performance. We lack a narrative that makes sense for how someone last seen in a market-town in Warwickshire reappears in London as an emerging dramatist of note.

Yet another, perhaps, more significant reason for the lack of a Shakespearean juvenilia is that critics seldom seek to categorize anything Shakespeare wrote in a perceptibly negative way. In the history of Shakespeare criticism, only two plays have regularly drawn the label of ‘juvenilia’: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Titus Andronicus. For the former, Alexander Pope, noted that that play is ‘suppos’d to be one of [Shakespeare’s] first’, and sought to distance the dramatist from certain passages in the play. Observing that one of the scenes (1.2) is ‘compos’d of the lowest and most trifling conceits’, Pope assumed that such passages had been ‘interpolated by the Players’.²⁹ Samuel Johnson noted that ‘in this play there is a strange mixture of knowledge and ignorance, of care and negligence’.³⁰ The play’s earliness has been stressed by more recent commentators. Geoffrey Bullough thought the play a ‘dramatic laboratory in which Shakespeare experimented with many of the ideas and devices which were to be his stock-in-trade and delight for years to come’.³¹ Stanley Wells, writing in 1963 of the ‘failure’ of the play, notes that ‘the basic technical failure of the play … arises from the fact that Shakespeare is still a tyro in dramatic craftsmanship: he has not yet learned to manipulate more than a few characters at once’.³²

Similarly, bashing Titus Andronicus has been an easy game for centuries, with now-familiar critical tirades offered up by Edward Ravenscroft (‘rather a heap of rubbish than a structure’), Edmond Malone (a ‘spurious piece’), and Edward Capell (‘a very bundle of horrors, totally unfit for the stage’).³³ The play has undergone somewhat of a critical rehabilitation since the mid-1990s, indebted to the incisive editorial and critical work of Jonathan Bate and John Kerrigan and the directorial achievement of Julie Taymor. Interestingly, Bate’s edition made the somewhat radical move of dating the play to 1594, much later than previous editors, defying scholars who ‘suppose that is a very early work, a piece of crude and embarrassing juvenilia’. If written in 1594 (and entirely by Shakespeare, as Bate claimed then), when Shakespeare was thirty years old, the play could not be considered as juvenilia, and could barely be considered ‘early’. The re-dating of the play’s composition to later in Shakespeare’s life and career is therefore implicitly connected to the play’s merit. Indeed, a noted early enthusiast for Shakespeare’s works, John Dryden, considered it a ‘miracle to see a first good Play’ by any dramatist. Thus, for Dryden, Jonson did not begin with Volpone and Fletcher (and Beaumont) did not begin with ‘Arbaces’ (meaning A King and No King). Dryden incorrectly thought that ‘Shakespeare’s own muse [his] Pericles first bore| The Prince of Tyre was elder than the Moore [meaning Othello]’, an analysis that appears to be primarily based upon his estimation of those plays’ respective merits.³⁴ We see, then, in these examples how play merit is equated with, or explained by, its stage of composition in both the overall life and the career of the author.

Literary and Dramatic Careers

We can, I think, attempt to better situate Shakespeare’s early and overall career in the context of those of his peers. Shakespeare writes for the stage for about twenty-six years, or around half of his life. While this might seem like a long career, how can we know this? Once more returning to the comparison with Marlowe, who is the outlier of the two poet-dramatists? Marlowe, retired on a dagger’s point in Deptford aged twenty-nine, or Shakespeare, producing new works consistently over the space of a quarter century before returning to Warwickshire aged fifty? Quantifying and analysing the data that survives for dramatists working across the period may help to elucidate what constituted a ‘normal’ working life and career.

In the data presented in the tables that follow, several rules and caveats must be applied: as discussed earlier, plays have been lost from throughout the period (and especially from the 1580s, when many of these dramatists might have first begun); dramatists do not always write consistently, producing new plays year on year; many dramatists had other occupations beyond writing; the specific dating for many plays is uncertain, although, typically, the dating parameters can be firmly established; records for birth, baptism, death, and so on are not always available. Also, ‘peers’ is a necessarily capacious category; I have only included those dramatists who were writing professionally when Shakespeare was also, and for whom we have surviving plays.³⁵ One final rule is that they must each have authored or co-authored three plays that can be identified firmly.³⁶

Beginning on a rather macabre note, Table 1.2 details the average life expectancy for the twenty-three candidate authors, who are arranged alphabetically, with their maximal (in terms of calendar year when specific dates are unknown) approximate length of life.³⁷ Marlowe, Beaumont, Field, Kyd, and Nashe stand out as tragic early deaths; Chapman, Day, and Munday have noteworthy longevity. Shakespeare, who likely celebrates his fifty-second birthday just the day before his death, is closest to the mean. A standard deviation of almost fourteen years indicates the great variation in life expectancy in the period.

Next, in Table 1.3, I include some dating parameters for these men’s literary careers. Six authors merit special mention. I have opted to include lost works based on the evidence of Meres’s Palladis Tamia. Namely, this includes Jonson’s ‘unidentified tragedy’ and Heywood’s ‘unidentified comedy’, because these must certainly have existed at some point as Meres alludes to them.³⁸ For Peele and Marlowe, I have included works which were likely completed while they attended university. Whether these should count as professional writing is subject to debate, as is their respective date of composition in both cases, but I did not want to inadvertently shorten a writer’s literary career. For Kyd, I have included an unidentified play from the early 1580s; Thomas Dekker’s A Knight’s Conjuring seems to associates the ‘industrious Kyd’ with an earlier generation of writers, Thomas Watson and Thomas Achelley, distinguishing these from Marlowe, Peele, and Nashe.³⁹ (The distinction made is interesting, not least because of the close personal relationship of Watson and Marlowe.) Finally, for Shakespeare, I start with The Two Gentlemen of Verona; the fourteen lines of Sonnet 145 need not demand our attention unnecessarily (he could, after all, have written a pun about his wife’s maiden name at any point, notwithstanding the ceaseless speculation about the state of his marital affairs).

At over two decades, early modern literary careers were long, perhaps longer than most readers might expect. The longevity of the careers of Munday and, especially, Heywood are extraordinary. For those with shorter careers, there typically tend to be pressing reasons that writers stopped. Marlowe, Beaumont, Field, and Nashe are each cut off in their prime, the first killed, the others by disease. Kyd and Peele both come to a sorry end: seemingly unsuccessful in their attempts to extend their careers, both die penniless. Beaumont fares a little better. A prodigy by modern standards in completing and publishing Salmascis and Hermaphroditus (1602) in his late teens, he quits professional writing in his late twenties either due to illness or, more happily, because he no longer needs an independent income following his marriage to an heiress.⁴⁰ He simply dies young. Tourneur appears to opt for a career in military service. Marston also quits the stage and becomes a cleric, perhaps in the fallout to the Eastward Ho! controversy. So, too, Daborne joins holy orders, making a remarkable transition to a later life in steady employment having spent his youth chased by debt. Middleton, who has a longer-than-average career is likely compelled to quit writing for the stage after the Game at Chesse furore (for which he may also have suffered great physical punishment). But, ever productive, he remains writing almost up until his death. Shakespeare is again fairly average; his earliest works date almost exactly to the mean of first composition, he retires slightly later than the mean, and the length of his writing career is easily within the standard deviation.

Table 1.4, which gives data for the play-writing career of these authors, is more revealing. Shakespeare’s career in writing plays is ten years longer than average. Shakespeare’s overall dramatic career, at twenty-six years, is at the outer limits of the standard deviation; he starts earlier than average and ends significantly later. Writing plays in the period, it is shown, is the province of men in their late twenties and thirties. Beaumont and Field are unusual in starting out in their early twenties; if Shakespeare also began writing plays in the ‘lost’ period described above – the thirty or so months from early 1585 to c. late 1587 – he would have been young by contemporary standards, but the examples of Beaumont and Field show that this is possible. Shakespeare’s staying power is more unusual if not exactly exceptional. While no outlier in writing into his late forties/early fifties (so too did Chapman, Day, Fletcher, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, and Massinger), the extended nature of his career in writing plays is noteworthy. Although easily eclipsed by the startling longevity of Heywood and Jonson, the careers of those men are shown to be outliers in the same way that those of Tourneur and Daborne (and George Wilkins, for that matter) seem absurdly short: only four other dramatists, Day, Massinger, Middleton, and Webster, similarly write plays for a quarter century or so.

This data, broadly speaking, grants some insight into how Shakespeare’s overall career fits (or does not fit) into a pattern of professional play-writing in the period. While I noted that Shakespeare’s overall career is just about within the standard deviation for the period (26 (1588–1614) within range of 16 plus 10.2), so too is his entire early career (6–7 (1588–1594) within range of 16 minus 10.2). So too, incidentally, is Marlowe’s entire career. The early period of Shakespeare’s career alone is, then, not especially short in this context. It is over this period, taking Shakespeare into his thirties, the peak age as established for dramatists working in the period, that he will gain continuous experience in the composition of plays and that will lead to his institution as lead dramatist for a newly formed company in 1594. Working backwards, then, with such a model of age linked to experience in mind, when we arrive at the beginning of Shakespeare’s career we should find the play written by the least experienced dramatist. Here we return to the nexus of experience, age, and merit, and how this has informed the idea of early Shakespeare.

The Idea of Early Shakespeare

One of the earliest commentators on the overall Shakespeare canon was quick to join the dots between Shakespeare’s age at the date of composition and the relative merits of the work in question. In the preface to Abraham Cowley’s Poems (1656; WING C6683), the poet reflects upon the misfortune of authors whose Works are ‘stuffed out’ with ‘counterfeit pieces’ or works of less merit. Cowley laments that unscrupulous stationers, driven by greed and ‘content to diminish the value of the Author’, include additional works so as to increase the price of the books:

Cowley identifies two potential problem areas in authors’ canons: the ‘unnecessary yong Suckars’ created in youth, and the ‘old withered Branches’ produced in old age. This early commentator’s implied correlation in value between the works of young and old age, explicitly linked to the works included in Shakespeare’s First Folio, is now fascinating to consider in the context of the history of subsequent Shakespearean criticism. After all, his late plays have long been venerated by critics. Gordon McMullan has written about late Shakespeare and ‘the privileged place that the idea of late writing occupies in the critical imagination’.⁴¹ The early works, dismissed early as qualitatively worse, have not found a place in the critical imagination in the way the late works have. We might ask, within such a framework, what place could early writing occupy?

For Shakespeare, the question is especially fraught because, as we have seen in the case of Titus Andronicus, there is some dispute about which of his works were composed earliest. Edmond Malone first set out to establish a chronological order for Shakespeare’s works; his was also the first attempt, as McMullan observes, to ‘read the life and the work in direct relation to one another’ (130). This had the effect of establishing discrete chronological sub-periods within the longer writing career. For McMullan, Malone contributed to the ‘invention’ of the idea of a ‘late Shakespeare’, embraced by later critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edward Dowden. At the same time, although it has never been discussed as such, Malone contributed to the invention of ‘early Shakespeare’, in both the specific chronological sense, these works were composed ‘early’ in Shakespeare’s career, and in the broader discursive and interpretive sense, these works are read as products of Shakespeare’s early creativity and craft.⁴² Borrowing terminology used elsewhere (that ‘which [has] been named’, as he notes) Malone put in contrast Shakespeare’s ‘early compositions’, anything written before 1600, and his ‘late productions’, anything post-dating that year.⁴³

Malone’s decision to divide Shakespeare’s career periodically was to be influential. Coleridge divided Shakespeare’s career into five ‘eras’, the first of which includes Shakespeare’s poetry, his ‘first sketch … probably planned before he left Stratford … Love’s Labor Lost [sic.]’, several other plays now generally considered late (Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline), and several plays now dated to the mid-1590s at latest (Titus Andronicus, Taming of the Shrew, Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).⁴⁴ The first ‘era’ ends, Coleridge suggests, with Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet. Dowden (1877) divided Shakespeare’s career into four ‘periods’:

McMullan, who traces the influence of Dowden’s adoption of the periodic life-structure model for Shakespeare, has argued that the romantic idea of Shakespeare’s late writing can been seen as a critical construct at odds with the conditions and contexts of early modern dramatic authorship. But what of the idea of early writing? Is it too a critical construct? If so, from its beginnings with Malone, ‘early Shakespeare’, though its contents are contested, operates as a sort of shorthand for works considered qualitatively inferior to those which are written later, and the explanation offered for their relative inferiority is both Shakespeare’s youth and inexperience. But this ready alignment of merit and authorial biography is shown to be demonstrably unstable. Coleridge, an expert reader of the Shakespeare canon, thought that The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline were juvenilia (‘his laid-by Labor of Youth’), only first performed once Shakespeare had gained ‘celebrity as [a] Poet’ (i.e. after the publication of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece) and theatrical weight as a ‘manager’ in his company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men). Here, Coleridge attempts to explain away what he perceives as the relative merits of these late tragicomedies by recourse to the author’s age and biography. For Coleridge, as for Malone, ‘early Shakespeare’ equates to inferior Shakespeare.

Unlike with the chronologies of Malone and Coleridge, all of the works considered ‘early’ by Dowden are now generally accepted to date to the mid-1590s at the latest: Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2 and 3 Henry VI, and Romeo and Juliet. Dowden constructs a narrative for the early years:

This is the first attempt to outline and define an idea of early Shakespeare by reference to a chronology for the extant works. Dowden’s ‘starting at the age of twenty-four or twenty-six’ corresponds with his dating parameters for the earliest play in his chronology: Titus Andronicus, ‘touched by Shakspeare’ (i.e. only written in part by Shakespeare), 1588–90. Dowden is struck by the ‘rapid progress’ made by Shakespeare over this period, for though he is tentative in his praise for Titus Andronicus and 1 Henry VI, both products of co-authorship in Dowden’s view, he lauds both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Comedy of Errors, and, perhaps surprisingly, praises Two Gentlemen of Verona as the best of these early works. (This was not typical of early scholarship about the play.) Each of the plays in the early, early period is seen, however, to be still somewhat deficient in ways; even the broadly praised Two Gentlemen of Verona is thought to be ‘in parts slightly worked out’ (68). Dowden’s thoughtful readings of the early works – Love’s Labour’s Lost is ‘a dramatic plea on behalf of nature and of common sense against all that is unreal and affected’ (63) – attest to his ability to qualitatively evaluate these plays against the rest of the extant canon. However, Dowden’s readings are innately bound up with his own convictions about the chronology of Shakespeare’s works and how we might read the works biographically. Thus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, which Dowden places first in the chronology, is ‘precisely such an one as a clever young man might imagine, who had come lately from the country’ (63). This reading is instructive in two interconnected ways: first, his evaluation of the play and its merits are tied up with the chronology he offers, and, second, the chronology he offers and what it implies about Shakespeare’s age and experience is tied up with his evaluation of the play and its merits. Just as the Romantics ahistorically romanticized Shakespeare’s romantic late period, Dowden here constructs an idea of young Shakespeare, innocent yet sharply intelligent, protesting against things ‘unreal and affected’, who fits the mould of someone ‘in the workshop’ who ‘made rapid progress’. A narrative of early Shakespeare is thereby constructed from the chronology he proposes, one where, stylistically and dramaturgically, the poet-dramatist is to speedily develop and mature from his innocent, inexperienced state in first writing Love’s Labour’s Lost. The only problem for Dowden’s narrative is that Love’s Labour’s Lost was written c. late 1594 or early 1595, by which time Shakespeare had already composed or contributed to eight or more plays.

My goal here is not to assault this critical tradition with the benefit of hindsight, but rather to highlight how in the history of scholarship about the early canon there has been a persistent connection made between merit (or demerit) and chronology: the earlier the work, the lesser the value. While this connection seems to make sense at an intuitive level – that an author improves perceptibly over time – we have seen examples where works have been positioned early in Shakespeare’s chronology, such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, because of their perceived lesser value. The connection is therefore not intuitive, or at least it has not been for expert readers of Shakespeare in earlier generations. There is then a longstanding idea of early Shakespeare that, notwithstanding the works identified as early, is equated with lesser merit. Hermann Ulrici, who persisted with the idea that Pericles was a ‘youthful production’, characterized the works of Shakespeare’s early period as exhibiting ‘a certain youthful awkwardness, harshness, and immoderation’.⁴⁷ For Ulrici, ‘the young poet has not yet succeeded in gathering the multifarious threads into one centre’ (222–3). This is the critical construct of early Shakespeare, the space where the veneration of Shakespeare and his greatest works meets the quandary posed by how to describe his minor works; age and inexperience, real or perceived, helps to explain away the lesser lights of the canon.

But there is also a very real ‘early Shakespeare’ quite apart from the critical construct. Shakespeare did write plays and poetry in the late 1580s and early 1590s and at least some of these works survive. We are now in a position where, broadly speaking, the overall parameters for Shakespeare’s chronology are largely agreed upon (see Chapter 2); there is much greater disagreement about which works Shakespeare wrote or co-wrote, and the identity of his co-authors. For all readers of this generation, there is less need for such intuition about which works are ‘early’. Here is the list of plays, and their dates, that Taylor and I propose Shakespeare wrote by the end of 1594:

• The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1588)

• Arden of Faversham (1588)

• Titus Andronicus (1589)

• 2 Henry VI (1590)

• 3 Henry VI (1590)

• The Taming of the Shrew (1591)

• Edward III (1592)

• Richard III (1592)

• Comedy of Errors (1594)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594)

Studies by Martin Wiggins and Douglas Bruster and Geneviève Smith, while differing on some dates, each put the composition of these same ten plays in the same 1588–1594 period; the starkest difference between any one play date is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which Wiggins dates to 1594.⁴⁸ We can, then, begin to write with some authority about what Shakespeare actually wrote during the period designated as ‘early’.

What are the defining features of these early works? McMullan asks: ‘is late style primarily a phenomenon of ageing’ [and] ‘is late style involuntary, something that, as it were, descends upon a creative individual out of the blue at a certain stage of his life?’ (61). Might the same questions be asked of early writing and early style? Are these not also a phenomenon of ageing and cognitive development? In concluding, I want therefore to focus especially on the eight plays written by 1592 and the break for the plague poems. There will be no grand narrative offered, simply a summary of what he does and does not do and what we can reasonably infer from this.

The history genre is clearly dominant (50 per cent), but there are also two comedies and two tragedies. There is also remarkable range in terms of setting – Italy, France, London and rural England, ancient Rome – and source material – the writings of Ariosto (Two Gentlemen), Holinshed and other chronicle histories (Arden and the histories), Jorge de Montemayor (The Shrew), and, among others, Ovid, Livy, and Seneca (Titus Andronicus). Range is, I think, a key thing to consider here. Rather than deem the approach scattershot, the plays completed in Shakespeare’s early career reveal an author with an extraordinary command over an extraordinary range of material. The effect of this is lessened when drawn out over a twenty-six-year career; of course, it just makes good sense that Shakespeare wrote across genre, period, and form, in having a hand in forty-plus plays. But, if one accepts the modified chronology, in the four or five years covering 1588 to late 1592, Shakespeare demonstrates an ability to write in each of the major genres – English history, continental comedies, and tragedy (Roman and familial) – which would define his subsequent career. As a point of comparison, Marlowe, whose entire dramatic career (c. 1585–93) corresponds almost exactly with this period, focuses nearly exclusively on tragedy, with his generic experimentations in history (his contributions to the three parts of Henry VI and Edward II) tending towards the tragic rota fortunae narrative (think, Jack Cade in the garden or Edward in his cell). Similarly, John Lyly wrote what might be considered comedy almost exclusively (see Chapter 7 for Lyly’s generic experimentation).⁴⁹ George Peele, who demonstrates his range in tragedies such as the Battle of Alcazar, histories such as Edward I, and comedies like The Old Wife’s Tale, might be the best comparison to early Shakespeare. But in a period when generic range was not a given, Shakespeare, the ‘Johannes factotum’ identified in Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, was somewhat of an outlier among his distinguished peers. And, even allowing for the comparison in terms of generic diversity, Peele had a failed career, dying rejected and penniless in the mid-1590s. Whatever one thinks of Shakespeare’s early plays, and few would dispel the dramatic merits of 2 Henry VI, The Shrew, and Richard III, what stands out here is Shakespeare’s willingness to experiment.

This claim offers nothing new: Dowden had identified experimentation as a defining feature of the early canon. What has now changed is that the co-authored Arden of Faversham and Edward III are also included, and that further co-authors have been identified in at least five of the eight plays. In his practices as co-author, Shakespeare again demonstrates a willingness to experiment. This does not necessarily reflect well upon him. While it is clear that others were willing to work with Shakespeare, the nature of his early forays into co-authorship probably invited the invective of the ‘beautified with our feathers’ remark. While there is little doubt that Arden of Faversham and Edward III are the fruits of what we might consider ‘normal’ dramatic collaborations in the period – in that two or more dramatists worked together, dividing the play between them, to produce a composite work – the case is significantly murkier for Titus Andronicus and the Henry VI plays. For the former, Shakespeare most likely took over an incomplete script by George Peele, and the two men probably never worked together collaboratively.⁵⁰ Peele is one of the aggrieved noted in Groats-worth. It is plausible to imagine that Shakespeare never gave Peele due credit for his share, whether financially or otherwise. The other two mentioned in the tract, Marlowe and, almost certainly, Thomas Nashe, were involved in the composition of one or more of the Henry VI plays. It is now proposed that Shakespeare reworked all three of the Henry VI plays in the mid-1590s after the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Who can tell the nature of Shakespeare’s involvement in composing the first versions of these plays? But, however one chooses to interpret the opaque allusions in Groats-worth, there is little doubt (a) that it refers negatively to Shakespeare, (b) that this negativity relates to how Shakespeare has used the writings of others, and (c) that the others implicated are working dramatists in the late 1580s and early 1590s, all of whose writings are present within plays later ascribed in full to Shakespeare (in the 1623 Folio). After the plague outbreak of 1592–3, and following the death of Marlowe, Shakespeare appears not to have collaborated with others until either The Tragedy of Sejanus (c. 1603) or the revision of Sir Thomas More (c. 1603–4), a gap of more than a decade in either case. Either something went very right – that is, that Shakespeare had the opportunity, security, and/or confidence to continue to write plays alone – or very wrong – that is, that his experience in early collaboration and co-authorship was not something he wished to continue. Most likely, the truth falls somewhere in between.

Early in his career, Shakespeare experiments with genre. He is productive. He writes for various companies, and his plays are performed at various venues. He is willing to work with others, though he might not always play fair in doing so. He borrows liberally, seeking advantage through the writings of others. His early plays, even his comedies, are almost invariably dark in tone, tending towards moments of electrifying tension. His first two comedies include scenes of attempted rape (Two Gentlemen) and domestic abuse (The Shrew); his first two tragedies showcase one of the most infamous cases of murder in early modern England (Arden of Faversham) and scenes involving sexual assault, dismemberment, and cannibalism (Titus Andronicus). His first histories take on the reign of the king at the centre of the Wars of the Roses (Henry VI plays), leading up to the notorious usurpation of the crown and murder of the princes (Richard III), before turning to the reign of one of England’s most-beloved kings, vanquisher of the French, and father to a cult hero (Edward III). To spell this out, Shakespeare’s earliest surviving plays are typified by their tendency towards sensation and controversy. Like Marlowe, he is someone who writes plays that will be noticed, or, perhaps better still, he writes plays that cannot be ignored. Writing in 1875, Dowden thought that Shakespeare ‘began, if not timidly, at least cautiously and tentatively’; he imagined him as ‘obliging and free from self-assertion; he is waiting his time; he is not yet sure of himself’.⁵¹ This idea of early Shakespeare seems to me wrong, or at least at odds with what Shakespeare wrote at this time. Shakespeare’s early career, if it can be reduced to anything meaningful from the surviving materials, is a study in ambition.