The authorship of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield

Abstract

Abstract Establishing the authorship of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield can be seen within the wider context of detecting a collaborative or single-authored canon of early Shakespeare plays which, perhaps, he did not want to see as part of his dramatic work if we are to trust Heminges’ and Condell’s references to ‘surrepetitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters, that expos’d them’ (First Folio preface). The fact that the remaining plays of the First Folio [are] ‘absolute in their numbers as he [Shakespeare] conceived them,’ has in some way a ring of self-amputation. The conclusion of the present study, based on the acknowledged methodological advances in non-traditional stylometric tools, contained in the R Stylo suite, is that George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield was originally written by William Shakespeare, even though the play may have been shortened for performances outside London with a reduced company of players during the plague years of 1592 and 1593.