Introducing Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide - Nick Groom, Piero 2013

Rejects from the Canon

Yet there was also an iconoclastic streak running through the New Shakspere Society. The first volume of its Transactions argued that Shakespeare did not write all of Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Rowe had rejected Pericles, which, despite being very popular in its own time, had not appeared in the First Folio and was added only in 1663.

Pope had doubted Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale and Titus.

Theobald was suspicious of the three parts of Henry VI.

Today it is admitted that not only Timon and Pericles but also even Macbeth have scenes not written by Shakespeare (Timon and Macbeth show the hand of Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), Pericles perhaps that of George Wilkins). Timon also looks unfinished, and possibly (perhaps like Troilus and Cressida) it was never performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime — still, it remains in his collected works, and replaced Troilus in the First Folio, presumably for copyright reasons.