On the Dating of Shakespeare's Early Plays

Abstract

OVER FIFTY YEARS AGO, E. K. CHAMBERS PRESENTED, in its more or less final form, a chronology of Shakespeare's plays as it had evolved over a period of almost two centuries.1 According to this consensus as formulated by Chambers, Shakespeare began his career as a playwright in 1590-91 with 2 and 3 Henry VI, following these with 1 Henry VI in 1591-92, and Richard III and Comedy of Errors in 1592-93. By the time of Greene's attack on him in Groats-worth of Wit (registered in September 1592), and Chettle's apology in Kind-Harts Dreame (registered in December 1592) he had therefore, by this account, written only the War of the Roses tetralogy and one comedy, with perhaps Titus Andronicus as well. During the post-World War II period, however, this consensus has come under attack. Though most editors of Shakespeare still hold in the main to the Chambers dating, they now set it forth in a much more tentative manner, allowing a wide latitude of dating for the plays in particular. Moreover, a number of scholars have, in recent years, tried to push back the beginning of Shakespeare's work as a dramatist by at least four or five years. The most active and assertive of the proponents of the so-called early start theory has been the distinguished English scholar, Professor E.A.J. Honigmann, who now confidently asserts that the Chambers chronology crumbling at last.2 If this statement is not to become self-fulfilling, the case for the traditional dating needs to be made once again, specifically in direct response to the position stated by Honigmann, whose arguments against the Chambers dating have been given their fullest expression in a recent study,3 which assigns eleven plays, from Titus Andronicus in 1586 to Love's Labour's Lost in 1592, to Shakespeare's first period. Honigmann's list also includes Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1587; 1 Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew, 1588; 2 Henry VI and Comedy of Errors, 1589; 3 Henry VI and Richard III, 1590; and King John and Romeo and Juliet, 1591 (p. 88). Any such attempts as Honigmann's to assign a considerable body of Shakespeare's plays to the years before 1592 must deal with the problem of Greene's attack on the upstart Crow who supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.4 That Greene could have used this con-