Shakespeare’s Plays from 1601 to 1608

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Title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear. Courtesy of Shakespeare Documented and the British Library. Public Domain.

Shifts in Power

Para1Between 1601 and 1607, England grappled with the impending death of Queen Elizabeth I (1603) and with the accession of her cousin, King James VI of Scotland. Not long after his coronation as James I, the nation was shaken in 1605 by the near success of the Gunpowder Plot, a terrorist attack that attempted to blow up the House of Parliament with the King and all the members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons inside of it.
Para2Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare primarily wrote plays of dark power during this time.
A disturbing play drawn from Greek mythology and Chaucer: (Troilus and Cressida)
A tragedy of power and race, love and jealousy: (Othello)
Two dark comedies of gender and power, of virtue and its rewards: (All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure)
A tragedy of age and waning power, of parents and children: (King Lear)
A tragedy of magic and power, of husband and wife: (Macbeth)
A tragedy of power and love, of Rome and Egypt: (Antony and Cleopatra)
A tragedy of power and violence, of greed and generosity: (Timon of Athens)
A tragedy of power and Roman violence, of mother and child: (Coriolanus)

Publication and Documented History, 1601–1608

Composition Date Range Play Title Evidence
1600–1603 Troilus and Cressida Stationers’ Register entry, 1603. First Folio text (1623) differs in major ways from the 1609 quarto.
1601–1604 Othello Performed at Court, 1604. First Folio text differs substantially from the 1622 quarto
1604 Measure for Measure Performed at Court, 1604. Published in First Folio
1604–1605 All’s Well That Ends Well Published in First Folio
1604–1606 King Lear Performed at Court, 1606. First Folio text differs in major ways from the problematic 1608 quarto
1604–1607 Macbeth May have been performed at Court, 1607. Simon Forman saw a performance in 1611. Published in First Folio
1603–1608 Timon of Athens Published in First Folio
1605–1608 Antony and Cleopatra Stationers’ Register entry, 1608. Published in First Folio
1605–1609 Coriolanus Published in First Folio
Para3The New Oxford Shakespeare suggests the following chronology for the plays from this period:
1602? : Troilus and Cressida
1604? (Or 1601?): Hamlet
1604: Othello
1604: Measure for Measure, adapted by Thomas Middleton by 1622
1606: All’s Well That Ends Well, adapted by Thomas Middleton by 1621
1605: King Lear
1606: Timon of Athens by Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton
1606: Macbeth, adapted by Thomas Middleton in 1616
1606: Antony and Cleopatra
1608: Pericles, in collaboration with George Wilkins
1608: Coriolanus

Key Print Sources

Berger, Thomas L. and Jesse M. Lander. Shakespeare in Print, 1593–1640. A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 395–413.
The New Oxford Shakespeare. Edited by Gary Taylor et al., Oxford University Press, 2016.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Plays: 1602–1610. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/reference/chronology/plays1602-1610.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
King Lear, First Edition. Shakespeare Documented, 25 Jan. 2020, doi: doi.org/10.37078/599.
Timeline of Shakespeare’s Plays. The Royal Shakespeare Company, https://www.rsc.org.uk/shakespeares-plays/histories-timeline/timeline. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.

Image Sources

Shakespeare, William. King Lear, First Edition. MS. Shakespeare Documented, 1608, https://doi.org/10.37078/599.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Shakespeare’s Plays from 1601 to 1608
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.