ABSTRACT
John Heminge and Henry Condell were fellow players in Shakespere’s King’s Men, and their First Folio opening address to the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery refers to the plays “out-liuing him” and lamenting that “he not hauing the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings”. It appears that Ben Jonson, being as forthright as he was, found a way of maintaining an uncorrupted conscience. When the target play searches have been completed, a contribution is assigned to a particular author only if rare phrases are shared with the unattributed play as mutual borrowing, that is, the author has rare matches both before and after the target date of the play. There are publications bearing William Shakespeare’s name on work he had not composed, and works published in the First Folio containing other hands, and yet the Stratford man receives all the credit in the prefatory tributes.
