Early Modern England Encyclopedia: Shakespeare’s Late Plays and Poems

Shakespeare’s Late Plays and Poems

No alternative text available. — The 1634 quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen, published for the first time 18 years after Shakespeare’s death. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Overview

Para1Shakespeare’s final years as an active playwright feature an array of plays, many of them concerned with loss and reunion, particularly of fathers and daughters. Driven to write a new style of play by the rise of the court masque and The King’s Men’s acquisition of an indoor playing space called the Blackfriars, Shakespeare’s late plays feature more music and spectacle. The smaller, indoor theater catered to a more refined clientele and allowed the King’s Men, who still used the Globe theater, to play year-round and increase their profits. Shakespeare’s plays from this period include:

A patchwork tale of adventure, shipwreck, loss and rediscovery (Pericles)

An odd and possibly unfinished tragedy: (Timon of Athens)

A fairytale romance of Britain and Rome: (Cymbeline)

A tale of tragic jealousy and pastoral rebirth: (The Winter’s Tale)

A tale of a brave new world: (The Tempest)

A tale of a king, his wives, and the Church: (Henry VIII)

A tale drawn from Don Quixote, heavily revised in the 18th century: (Cardenio, or Double Falsehood)

A tale drawn from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale: (Two Noble Kinsmen)

Publication and Documented History, 1608–1616

Composition Date Range	Play Title	Evidence
1607–1608	Pericles	Published in a bad quarto in 1609 with Shakespeare’s name on title page. Not published in the 1623 Folio but included in 1664 Third Folio.
1604–1609	Timon of Athens	May have been left unfinished. Published in 1623 Folio.
1609	Sonnets	Published in quarto in 1609 during a closure of the theaters due to plague. Shakespeare’s role in overseeing the publication is unknown.
1607–1610	Cymbeline	Simon Forman saw a performance in 1611. Published in 1623 Folio.
1609–1611	The Winter’s Tale	Simon Forman saw a performance in May, 1611; performed at Court in November, 1611.
1611	The Tempest	Performed at Court in November, 1611; uses sources not available until 1610. Published in 1623 Folio.
1612–1613	Henry VIII; Or All Is True	The Globe burned down at a performance in 1613. Probably written in collaboration with John Fletcher. Published in 1623 Folio.
1612–13	Cardenio; Or Double Falsehood	A lost play, perhaps by Fletcher and Shakespeare, acted at Court in 1612. Reconstructed and performed in 2012.
1613–15	The Two Noble Kinsmen	Written with John Fletcher; uses a source not available until 1613. Not published in the First Folio in 1623. Published in quarto in 1634.

Para2The records of Master of the Revels, George Buck (or Buc), who held the post that supervised court performances and the licensing of plays starting in 1603, survive. They list both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale as part of the Christmas festivities in the winter of 1611–1612.

Para3The New Oxford Shakespeare suggests the following chronology and authorship for the plays from this period:

1608: Pericles, with George Wilkins

1608: Coriolanus

1609: Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint

1610: The Winter’s Tale

1610: Cymbeline

1611: The Tempest

1612: Cardenio, with John Fletcher

1613: Henry VIII, with John Fletcher

1613: The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher

Key Print Sources

Berger, Thomas L., and Jesse M. Lander. Shakespeare in Print, 1593–1640. In A Companion to Shakespeare. ed. David Scott Kastan. Blackwell, 1999, pp. 395–413.

Taylor, Gary et al., eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. The Sixth Age: Plays from about 1608 to 1611. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/last%20plays/lateplaygroup.html. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Best, Michael. The Seventh Age: Plays of Shakespeare’s Retirement. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/retirement/finalplays.html. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Dailey, Kate. History of Cardenio. BBC News Magazine. 10 May 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18010384.

Nelson, Alan. Account of Sir George Buc. Shakespeare Documented. https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/account-sir-george-buc-master-revels-listing-plays-performed-year-1611-12. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Image Sources

Fletcher, John, and William Shakespeare. The Two Noble Kinsmen. The Cotes for John Waterson, 1634. Shakespeare Documented. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/file/stc-11075-copy-1-title-page.

Prosopography

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

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 Late Plays and Poems
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, peer-reviewed
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.