George Wilkins (died 1618) [1] was an English dramatist and pamphleteer best known for his probable collaboration with William Shakespeare on the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre . By profession he was an inn-keeper, but he was also apparently involved in criminal activities.
Wilkins was an inn-keeper in Cow-Cross, London, an area that was "notorious as a haunt of whores and thieves". [2] Most biographical information about him derives from his regular appearance in criminal court records for thievery and acts of violence. Many of the charges against him involved violence against women, including kicking a pregnant woman in the belly, and knocking down and stomping another woman. The latter appears in other records as a known "bawd", or keeper of prostitutes. These facts have led to the suggestion that his inn functioned as a brothel and that Wilkins was a procurer, or pimp. [2] [3]
Wilkins was associated with the King's Men, and their chief playwright William Shakespeare, during the latter's last working years as a dramatist. Shakespeare and Wilkins were both witnesses in the case of Bellott v Mountjoy in 1612; in his deposition he described himself as a "victualler."
He is first heard of as the author of a pamphlet on the Three Miseries of Barbary , which dates from 1606. [4] He then collaborated in 1607 with William Rowley and John Day in The Travels of the Three English Brothers , a dramatisation of the real-life adventures of the Sherley brothers. [5]
In the same year Wilkins wrote The Miseries of Enforced Marriage . This play is based on the real life story of Walter Calverley, a Yorkshireman whose identity is thinly disguised under the name of "Scarborough." This man had killed his two children and had attempted to murder his wife. The play avoided a tragic ending, at least in the printed version of 1607, which ends in comedy. The story stopped short before the catastrophe perhaps because of objections raised by Mrs. Calverley's family, the Cobhams. [5] Walter Calverley's crimes are dealt with in a short play, A Yorkshire Tragedy , of uncertain authorship.
A number of studies have attributed to Wilkins a share in Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre (which does not appear in Shakespeare's First Folio , but was published only in a textually corrupt quarto). This may have been collaboration, or perhaps Wilkins was the original author of Pericles and Shakespeare remodelled it, or vice versa. However it may be, Wilkins published in 1608 a novel entitled The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, described as "the true history of Pericles as it was lately presented by ... John Gower" (who serves as narrator in the play). This follows the play very closely. [5] The editors of the 1986 Oxford Edition of Shakespeare make the assumption that Wilkins was the co-author of Pericles and draw heavily upon The Painful Adventures in their controversial reconstructed text of the play. Wilkins is thought to have contributed most of the first two acts of the play, while Shakespeare wrote the last three.
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Eustathios Makrembolites, Latinized as Eustathius Macrembolites, was a Byzantine revivalist of the ancient Greek romance, flourished in the second half of the 12th century CE. He is sometimes conflated/equated with his contemporary, the Eparch of the City Eumathios Makrembolites.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1607.
William Rowley was an English Jacobean dramatist, best known for works written in collaboration with more successful writers. His date of birth is estimated to have been c. 1585; he was buried on 11 February 1626 in the graveyard of St James's, Clerkenwell in north London.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship, as it was not included in the First Folio. It was published in 1609 as a quarto, was not included in Shakespeare's collections of works until the third folio, and the main inspiration for the play was Gower's Confessio Amantis. Various arguments support the theory that Shakespeare was the sole author of the play, notably in DelVecchio and Hammond's Cambridge edition of the play, but modern editors generally agree that Shakespeare was responsible for almost exactly half the play — 827 lines — the main portion after scene 9 that follows the story of Pericles and Marina. Modern textual studies suggest that the first two acts, 835 lines detailing the many voyages of Pericles, were written by a collaborator, who may well have been the victualler, panderer, dramatist and pamphleteer George Wilkins. Wilkins published The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre which is the prose version of the story, and drew from Lawrence Twines' The Pattern of Painful Adventures. Pericles was one of the seventeen plays that were in print during Shakespeare's life, and was reprinted 5 times between 1609 and 1635.
This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare.
Edward Blount (1562–1632) was a London publisher of the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline eras, noted for his publication, in conjunction with William and Isaac Jaggard, of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays in 1623.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is the standard name given to any volume containing all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Some editions include several works that were not completely of Shakespeare's authorship, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was a collaboration with John Fletcher; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the first two acts of which were likely written by George Wilkins; or Edward III, whose authorship is disputed.
Apollonius of Tyre is the hero of a short ancient novel, popular in the Middle Ages. Existing in numerous forms in many languages, all are thought to derive from an ancient Greek version now lost.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, comedy, or otherwise is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
Like most playwrights of his period, William Shakespeare did not always write alone. A number of his surviving plays are collaborative, or were revised by others after their original composition, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as Titus Andronicus, are dependent on linguistic analysis by modern scholars; recent work on computer analysis of textual style has given reason to believe that parts of some of the plays ascribed to Shakespeare are actually by other writers.
Valentine Simmes was an Elizabethan era and Jacobean era printer; he did business in London, "on Adling Hill near Bainard's Castle at the sign of the White Swan." Simmes has a reputation as one of the better printers of his generation, and was responsible for several quartos of Shakespeare's plays. [See: Early texts of Shakespeare's works.]
Pandosto: The Triumph of Time is a prose romance written by the English author Robert Greene, first published in 1588. A later edition of 1607 was re-titled Dorastus and Fawnia. Popular during the time of William Shakespeare, the work's plot was an inspiration for that of Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale. Greene, in turn, may have based the work on The Clerk's Tale, one of The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Edward Chaney suggested that Robert Greene when writing Pandosto may have had in mind the Earl of Oxford's suspicions about the paternity of his daughter when he returned in 1576 from his continental tour that may have included Sicily.
The Travels of the Three English Brothers is an early Jacobean era stage play, an adventure drama written in 1607 by John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins. The drama was based on the true-life experiences of the three Shirley brothers, Sir Anthony Shirley, Sir Thomas Shirley, and Robert Shirley. The play illustrates the trend toward extreme topicality in some works of English Renaissance drama.
The Pattern of Painful Adventures (1576) is a prose novel. A later edition, printed in 1607 by Valentine Simmes and published by Nathaniel Butter, was a source for William Shakespeare's play Pericles, Prince of Tyre. There was at least one intermediate edition, around 1595.
The Pattern of Painful Adventures is a 90-minute 2008 radio play by Stephen Wakelam on the circumstances surrounding the writing of the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare and the sickness of his brother Edmund's child, introduced by a flashback by his daughter Susannah, playwright John Marston and William's secretary Robinson. It links the play to the marriage of Susannah and the birth of her daughter and to the similar themes of daughters, forests, storms, shipwrecks and lost infants from As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. It is named after The Pattern of Painful Adventures, a main source for Pericles. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 8pm on 23 November 2008, directed and produced by Jeremy Mortimer, and was followed in the same slot on 30 November by a repeat of a 2005 radio production of Pericles, with Tom Mannion as Pericles and Benjamin Zephaniah as Gower.
Shakespeare attribution studies is the scholarly attempt to determine the authorial boundaries of the William Shakespeare canon, the extent of his possible collaborative works, and the identity of his collaborators. The studies, which began in the late 17th century, are based on the axiom that every writer has a unique, measurable style that can be discriminated from that of other writers using techniques of textual criticism originally developed for biblical and classical studies. The studies include the assessment of different types of evidence, generally classified as internal, external, and stylistic, of which all are further categorised as traditional and non-traditional.
Walter Calverley was an English squire from Yorkshire.
The Miseries of Enforced Marriage is a play written by George Wilkins which was published in London in 1607.
The Town-Fopp: or, Sir Timothy Tawdrey is a Restoration comedy written by Aphra Behn and first staged in 1676. It deals with an unhappy marriage and its dissolution.
The Porpoise is a novel by English author Mark Haddon published in 2019, best known for his first novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.