ABSTRACT
In 2016, The New Oxford Shakespeare made international headlines, announcing that computer-aided scholarship suggested that 12 of Shakespeare’s plays were written in collaboration with other authors. Many hands went into Shakespeare’s stories, especially the histories at the start of his career—presenting parallels between early-modern playwrighting and corporate Hollywood authorship that films like Shakespeare in Love have explored. According to the New Oxford chronology, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and others wrote the play we now call 2 Henry VI first, probably around 1590. “From then onwards,” Stanley Wells writes, “perhaps with a sigh of relief, he became his own master”—Shakespeare collaborated with co-authors less frequently. Shakespeare then wrote 1 Henry IV in 1597, 2 Henry IV in 1598, and Henry V in 1599, completing his second tetralogy before going on to write his famous tragedies such as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.
