Thomas Middleton was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. He, with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson, was among the most successful and prolific of playwrights at work in the Jacobean period, and among the few to gain equal success in comedy and tragedy. He was also a prolific writer of masques and pageants.
Cyril Tourneur was an English soldier, diplomat and dramatist who wrote The Atheist's Tragedy ; another play, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), formerly ascribed to him, is now more generally attributed to Thomas Middleton.
George Wilkins 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.
A Visit from St. Nicholas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas from its first line, is a poem first published anonymously under the title Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas in 1823 and later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837.
The Shakespeare apocrypha is a group of plays and poems that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons. The issue is separate from the debate on Shakespearean authorship, which addresses the authorship of the works traditionally attributed to Shakespeare.
A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton.
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style, usually to written language. It has also been applied successfully to music, paintings, and chess.
"A Lover's Complaint" is a narrative poem written by William Shakespeare, and published as part of the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It was published by Thomas Thorpe.
Thomas of Woodstock and Richard the Second Part One are two names for an untitled, anonymous and apparently incomplete manuscript of an Elizabethan play depicting events in the reign of King Richard II. Attributions of the play to William Shakespeare have been nearly universally rejected, and it does not appear in major editions of the Shakespeare apocrypha. The play has been often cited as a possible influence on Shakespeare's Richard II, as well as Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, but new dating of the text brings that relationship into question.
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.
John Kerrigan, is a British literary scholar, with interests including the works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Since 2000, he has been Professor of English in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
The Beaumont and Fletcher folios are two large folio collections of the stage plays of John Fletcher and his collaborators. The first was issued in 1647, and the second in 1679. The two collections were important in preserving many works of English Renaissance drama.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet and playwright. He wrote approximately 39 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems.
Henry Beekman Livingston Jr. has been proposed as being the uncredited author of the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas, more popularly known as The Night Before Christmas. Credit for the poem was taken in 1837 by Clement Clarke Moore, a Bible scholar in New York City, nine years after Livingston's death. It was not until a further twenty years had passed that the Livingston family knew of Moore's claim, and it was not until 1900 that they went public with their own claim. Since then, the question has been repeatedly raised and argued by experts on both sides.
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.
The authorship of Titus Andronicus has been debated since the late 17th century. Titus Andronicus, probably written between 1588 and 1593, appeared in three quarto editions from 1594 to 1601 with no named author. It was first published under William Shakespeare's name in the 1623 First Folio of his plays. However, as with some of his early and late plays, scholars have long surmised that Shakespeare might have collaborated with another playwright. Other plays have also been examined for evidence of co-authorship, but none has been as closely scrutinised or as consistently questioned than Titus. The principal contender for the co-authorship is George Peele.
Jeffrey A. Masten is an American academic specializing in Renaissance English literature and culture and the history of sexuality. He is the author and editor of numerous books and scholarly articles. Masten's book Queer Philologies was awarded the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Prize for the best book in the field of early modern drama by the journal SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in English Literature for 2022.
Patrick Gerard Cheney is an American scholar of English Renaissance Literature. He is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University.
Terence Laurie Sturm was a New Zealand professor of English literature and editor. His scholarship was mainly in the fields of Australian and New Zealand literature. He lectured at the University of Sydney from 1967 to 1980, after which he became professor of English at the University of Auckland. He edited the Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English.
