Sources of Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare ed. by G. Harold Metz (review)

280Comparative Drama G. Harold Metz, ed. Sources of Four Plays Ascribed to Shakespeare. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Pp. xix + 502. $48.00. This book is made up of four bibliographical essays and the reprinted sources or possible sources of four plays ascribed to Shakespeare— Edward HI, Sir Thomas More, Cárdenlo, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Regrettably, no significant portion of any of the texts of these plays is included. The editor's announced intentions are to provide for these plays an apocryphal equivalent of Geoffrey Bullough's Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1957-75), the authoritative modern editing of the sources of Shakespeare's thirty-seven canonical plays. All four of the apocryphal plays treated in this volume have been the subject of extensive scholarship in this century. C. F. Tucker Brooke reprinted three of them in The Shakespeare Apocrypha: Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays which have been ascribed to Shakespeare (1908). Of the four plays included by Metz, Tucker Brooke excluded only Cárdenlo. However, Kenneth Muir devotes a chapter to it in his influential Shakespeare as Collaborator (1960), and he also includes chapters on Shakespeare's hand in both Edward III and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Has Metz succeeded in providing the apocryphal equivalent of Bullough 's eight-volume collection of Shakespeare's sources? Yes, for four plays, but their sources or possible sources are on the whole of much less interest than those collected by Bullough. The reader must be first concerned with the question of authorship in any play ascribed wholly or in part to Shakespeare. Only after the authorship matter is reasonably decided in Shakespeare's favor will the sources become of paramount interest. If it is convincingly demonstrated that Shakespeare did not write even a portion of a play credited to him in the volume edited by Metz, then surely the sources of the spurious play are basically irrelevant to Shakespeare studies. As a result, Metz is at pains to present a plausible case for Shakespeare's presence in each of the four plays in the book he has edited. Metz succeeds best with The Two Noble Kinsmen. It is agreed that this play was written in 1613, and, as Metz correctly states, "A large majority of scholars who have studied the authorship questions have determined that the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher" (p. 378). The Riverside Shakespeare includes the play; paperback editions of it are available. It remains the non-canonical play wherein Shakespeare's partial, if not complete, authorship is least questioned . It is also the non-canonical play that any serious student of Shakespeare is most likely to have read. Had Heminge and Condell included it in the first folio of 1623, surely it would have been accepted as Shakespeare's for the most part. Whatever has been written against Shakespeare's authorship, the long-standing presumption continues that he is the partial author of The Two Noble Kinsmen. For the above reasons, Metz's discussion of the many particulars of this drama's publication, date, authorship, sources, and stage history never seems irrelevant. It is worth knowing, as Metz indicates, that Speght's second edition of Chaucer's Works, published in 1602, and not bis first of 1598 is the version of The Canterbury Tales employed by Reviews281 Shakespeare and Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen (p. 418). Throughout the essay that focuses on this play, Metz makes us sense that all the important details about the drama are included in the best and deservedly the longest of the introductions to the four apocryphal plays. Though Edward HI is available in several twentieth-century editions, Metz would have improved his book if he had included those scenes from this play most frequently attributed to Shakespeare. The internal evidence for believing this play to be in part Shakespeare's involves "a number of links between Edward III and Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry, particularly the Sonnets" (p. 18). The external evidence consists of little more than its first quarto appearance without any designated author in 1596, a date consistent with Shakespeare's writing plays about the descendants of Edward III. In the essay...