John Gilbert, The Plays of William Shakespeare, ca. 1849; oil on canvas, 41.5 × 50.25 in (105.4 × 127.6 cm)

In 2007, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, published William Shakespeare: Complete Works. The choice of plays was based on the First Folio of 1623 and its assumption that Shakespeare had a major hand in thirty-six plays. Only two plays not in the First Folio gained admission to the Bate/Rasmussen canon: Pericles, in which George Wilkins was the co-author, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, in which Shakespeare collaborated with John Fletcher. The third edition of the First Folio, published in 1663, was issued again the following year, and this time added seven further plays, only one of which, Pericles, has been accepted as canonical. In 1908, C. F. Tucker Brooke published The Shakespeare Apocrypha, in which he listed about thirty plays, in addition to the canonical ones, which had at one time or another been regarded by someone as Shakespeare’s work. In their new book Bate and Rasmussen give the complete texts of ten uncanonical plays in which Shakespeare may or may not have had a collaborative hand.1 These are divided into three groups in declining order of probability. The first “covers roughly the territory from almost certain to very likely,” and consists of Sir Thomas More, Edward III, Arden of Faversham, The Spanish Tragedy (with its additions), and Double Falsehood. The