ABSTRACT
After remarking that Sir Edmund Chambers, “the very pink of orthodoxy and paragon of caution,” declines to recognize any date earlier than 1590–91 for Shakespeare’s extant work, F.P. Wilson continues,
The fact is that the chronology of Shakespeare’s earliest plays is so uncertain that it has no right to harden into an orthodoxy, and perhaps we should do better to say that by 1592 he had certainly written Henry VI (all three parts), Richard III, The Comedy of Errors, probably Titus Andronicus and possibly The Taming of the Shrew, and that the earliest of these may have been written as early as 1588. 1
