Shakespeare’s Plays in Order of Composition

        The composition dates of poems which were printed can usually be estimated with some confidence because the English government licensed registration of the official permission to publish to the Stationers Company, the guild of scribes, limners, printers, book binders, and book sellers.  Their "entry book of copies" or registry provides authoritative dates before which any given printed book must have been composed.  An aristocratic poet, like Surrey or Sidney, might not publish during his lifetime, but non-aristo poets tended to publish soon after composition in hopes of earning money for their work, so publication dates largely correspond to dates of composition unless publication was delayed for some reason.  Because Shakespeare wrote for the stage, not for the press, and appears to have had only an indirect interest in the quarto editions published during his lifetime, scholars rely on internal references to contemporary events, or on other people's diary or letter references to the plays’ performances, to give us some idea when they might have been written.  Probably the most famous of these external sourcs of performance dates is the manuscript diary of Philip Henslowe (?-1616), which was edited for print in 1904-8 by Walter W. Greg and made available in digital facsimile by the Internet Archive.  Other sources of information include theoretical patterns of change in his use rhymed verse (which seems to diminish in frequency over his career), the quality of his blank verse (which grows less formal and more "speech-like" with more enjambed and fewer end-stopped lines), and the increasing frequency with which known-dated plays use "feminine endings" or words which add unaccented syllables after those necessary to form the last iambic foot (i.e., ^/^ rather than ^/--the designation "feminine" vs. "masculine" or "strong" endings is, of course, a nineteenth-century term of art). The following are estimates of the plays’ order and date of composition based on the work of Hardin Craig, T.W. Baldwin, E.K. Chambers, F.J. Furnivall, G. König, and George Saintsbury. More recent scholarship has challenged some of these dates, but the order is relatively certain. Genres are specified in color to emphasize some rather obvious but important trends in his career, and to encourage speculation about relationships among the plays’ plots, characters, themes, etc..

1612-13  Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen