Dating Shakespeare's Plays

Dating Shakespeare's plays is a rather difficult matter. They have to be dated later than the last source he used, and earlier than their first recorded performance or publication.

That's less simple than you'd think. For example, we have a 1589 recorded performance of a play, Hamlet, which quotes a line from the Hamlet we know. Is it Shakespeare's play? Or is it a source?

The traditionalists/Stratfordians say that it must be a source for Shakespeare's play; they date Shakespeare's Hamlet to around 1599-1601.

But, as many writers on the dating controversy have noted, there's an unexamined hypothesis in this: that Shakespeare's plays were written all at once (more or less) and never rewritten.

For many plays by other writers, we know that's not true. Plays were often rewritten: to smooth out political problems, to freshen the text up, or to add topical material for a revival. Even Marlowe's Dr Faustus was rewritten; there's a note about it in Henslowe's Diary. (Incidentally, the man who got the job was our old friend Anthony Munday.)

The result is that the dates of many Elizabethan plays, not only Shakespeare's, are only best guesses.

There's considerable evidence that Hamlet could have existed in some form much earlier than the late 1590s. Among its topical references:

• "You are a fishmonger," Hamlet tells Polonius. This line is often taken to mean "you are a panderer." But William Cecil, the source for Polonius, was literally a fish-seller; he sponsored the highly unpopular Cecil's Fast bill of 1562, supporting the fish industry.
• The "star that's westward from the pole" in the first scene of Hamlet has been identified as the nova of 1572.

These, like the references to Euphuism in plays supposedly written in the 1590s, would have been very old jokes when Shakespeare supposedly told them. (But Oxford was in Cecil's house at the time of the Cecil's Fast difficulties, and he was studying astronomy and astrology at the time of the nova.)

Similarly, topical references in All's Well that Ends Well set it between 1578 and 1584. (It is casually mentioned that Don John of Austria is dead but William the Black Prince of Orange is still alive.) Oxfordians love AWTEW, since it refers in some detail to the circumstances of a marriage like Oxford's in the early 1580s--the monarch wants the groom to marry; the groom will be disparaged by marrying a commoner; the commoner is ennobled; the groom is married but then goes abroad and refuses to sleep with his wife. There were very few marriages like Oxford's.

Shakespeare may have written and rewritten some of his plays over the course of years. The "Shakespearean" texts that we have now may represent rewrites or collaborations, rather than a single shining draft poured out by genius at a single time.

(thanks to Mark Anderson and Dr. Daniel Wright)

• A good place to start reading about Oxfordian play-dating
• Another Oxfordian article on chronology
• A good Stratfordian chronology

Biographical Stratford • Jonson's eulogy • Oxford's death • Biographical Oxford
Shakespeare's library • Shakespeare's travels • Shakespeare's experience
Dating the plays • Authorship timeline • "Theory of casual references"