Contested Will by James Shapiro

two-volume 1780 supplement to Samuel Johnson and George Steevens’s 1778 edition of The Plays of Shakespeare , and then again in his solo edition of Shakespeare’s works in 1790. This 1790 edition broke sharply with longstanding traditions going back to the First Folio of 1623 and continuing up through the great eighteenth-century editions of Rowe, Pope, Theobald, Johnson, Capell and Steevens. Malone parted company with his predecessors in two key ways. First, he tried to present the plays chronologically rather than as Heminges and Condell had originally arranged them in 1623, by genre, with no attention to the order in which they were written, under the headings of Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Secondly, he included Shakespeare’s poems alongside the plays; his edition was the first to be called The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare . Today these innovations seem unremarkable but at the time they were unprecedented and would have unforeseen consequences for how Shakespeare’s works were read and his life and authorship imagined.
    Before the plays could be arranged chronologically the order of their composition needed to be worked out. Nobody had ever done this and it’s unclear when anyone first thought it worthdoing. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe wondered which was Shakespeare’s first play – he couldn’t even hazard a guess – but thought it a mistake to assume that Shakespeare necessarily improved over time: ‘We are not to look for his beginnings in his least perfect works.’ A half-century later, Edward Capell, who was also curious about how Shakespeare had ‘commenced a writer for the stage, and in which play’, took things a step further, proposing that someone ought to investigate ‘the order of the rest of them’. Capell was well aware of how daunting a task this would be, requiring comprehensive knowledge of everything from versification to the printing history of the plays and the sources that Shakespeare drew upon. While Capell himself in his Notes and Various Readings broke fresh ground in this field, it would be left to Malone to attempt a full account of the plays’ chronology.
    Malone made a fair number of mistakes in his Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays of Shakespeare Were Written in 1778, dating several plays far too early (his claim that The Winter’s Tale was written in 1594 was off by nearly twenty years) while placing others too late. But after a decade of additional research he was able to fix some of his more glaring errors, and his efforts spurred others to improve upon his chronology. It’s next to impossible to arrange plays in their order of composition without seeing a pattern, and the one that Malone believed in superseded the open-minded one offered by Rowe. Citing the authority of Pope and Johnson, Malone offered his readers a more comforting Enlightenment portrait, one in which an industrious Shakespeare steadily ‘rose from mediocrity to the summit of excellence; from artless and sometimes uninteresting dialogues, to those unparalleled compositions, which have rendered him the delight and wonder of successive ages’. Malone hastened to add that he wasn’t really arguing for ‘a regular scale of gradual improvement’, only that Shakespeare’s ‘knowledge increased as he became more conversant with the stage and with life, his performances in general were written more happily and with greater art’.
    A few – surprisingly few – lines in Shakespeare’s plays referexplicitly to contemporary events, such as the allusion in Henry the Fifth to the Earl of Essex’s Irish campaign in the spring and summer of 1599, which allowed Malone to date that play with considerable precision. They were so few in number that their absence seems to have been a deliberate choice on Shakespeare’s part. But once Malone began sifting the plays for allusions to contemporary