Chapter 2 turns to the important idea in Kyd’s design of rhetorical hyperbole and dramatic excess by comparing the emerging ethical effects engendered by the moral void of Kyd’s play to similar but crucially different devices involving abused emblems of writing in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. These early, near-contemporary responses to Kyd weigh through performance the consequences of violent action when neither the circumstances of plot nor the demands of justice can help explain or assign meaning to such action within any conceivable moral calculus. In the process, the moral-tragic weight of such plays sinks under the irruption of farce and burlesque, thereby forcing the audience to re-evaluate their voyeuristic complicity in the unfolding onstage representation of ritualised, and highly aestheticised retaliatory acts of violence.

The version of 2 Henry VI most people know, read, and study is the play printed in 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. There is, however, an early alternative version of the play, about one third shorter in length, that was printed in quarto format in 1594, entitled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, and reprinted in 1600 and 1619. The provenance of this shorter text, and its relationship to the Folio text, has provoked much debate. First focusing on the variant versions of a speech about lineage in early quartos and Folio, while drawing in consideration of practices of coauthorship and revision, the chapter then turns to how the death of Gloucester is represented in the various versions. The chapter considers how the different textual versions of this English history play convey also a different emotional register that affects both character and situation.

Critics have long recognized that the Elizabethan minor epic or 'erotic epyllion', dealing largely with mythological love affairs and including Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, form a coherent generic cluster and testify to an intense albeit apparently rather short-lived literary vogue. This chapter argues that the general critical determination to understand these poems as Ovidian has ignored that their distinctive style is quite unlike that of Ovid. It locates these poems instead within a wider category of medium-length mythological narrative verse in both Latin and English, unified by asensuous and ecphrastic style as well as shared features, including stock characters (such as Venus, Proserpina and Glaucus) and set pieces (such as the ‘Garden of Venus’ motif). Latin examples precede the first English instances, and, where studied at all, have been variously described as epyllia and epithalamia, but have almost never been discussed in relation to the English genre. The chapter argues that the Elizabethan English epyllion of the 1590s functioned as a proxy for formal epithalamia, which, due to the Queen's age and lack of an heir, largely disappeared in England in this decade.

Standard theatre history accounts tend to assume that plays were received in the order in which they were first performed, but playgoers were not bound to watch plays chronologically. Considering Marlowe’s influential Tamburlaine plays, the chapter asks what happens when playgoers watch plays out of the expected order. While there is clear evidence that Tamburlaine had cultural cachet at this time, it does not follow, as is generally assumed, that all audience members would have encountered Tamburlaine before other, related plays.

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare fashions the dramatic role of his early tragic heroine in relationship to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and especially in relationship to his erotic elegies as they are mediated by the charismatic figure of Christopher Marlowe. This chapter explores the difference to the 1597 and 1599 quartos of the play that Ovid makes. There is no particular relationship between the part of Juliet to Ovid in the first quarto, whereas there is an intense and transformative relationship between Shakespeare’s Juliet and the version of Ovid that Marlowe brought to the Elizabethan stage. The final argument of this chapter is that Shakespeare remembers, honors, and radically adapts Marlowe by transferring the bold speech of the Ovidian erotic elegist from the tragic hero to the part of girl, performed by a boy.

The relationship of plays to their sources has always been important evidence of chronology, authorship, and the derivation of textual variants. Such evidence has been particularly important to studies of Shakespeare’s early plays. But for centuries source scholarship has been based on random anecdotes: a scholar reading one text notices something about it that reminds them of another text. We can now re-evaluate those anecdotal findings by testing them systematically against digital databases. Such tests establish that Margaret's long speech at the beginning of Scene 2 of The First Part of the Contention is based on a passage in Hall's chronicle, whereas the variants in the Folio text of 2 Henry VI instead draw upon Holinshed's chronicle. This evidence supports revision rather than memorial reconstruction. Likewise, the links between the Contention speech and Edward II are best explained by Marlowe's authorship of both.

Along with 1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus – plays that have been at the centre of debates surrounding Shakespeare’s canon and chronology since Malone – scholars have acknowledged, or suspected, the presence of someone other than Shakespeare in The Taming of The Shrew since the 18th century. There is thus a historical consensus regarding these other collaborations, but what about The Shrew? Unlike the Henry VI plays and Titus Andronicus (and more recently Arden and Edward III) there has been no recent attempt to validate or discredit claims for collaboration in this play. This designates The Shrew as the only early play recognized by early commentators as potentially collaborative that has not yet been systematically investigated for the presence of someone other than Shakespeare.

The Introduction first outlines the grounds for the collection’s dating parameters for ‘early Shakespeare’. It then discusses what a category such as ‘early’ or ‘late’ might mean for someone with Shakespeare’s long career, and how such temporally bound categories can condition critical responses. Next, it considers the many variables in play in Shakespeare’s early canon, discussing these with relation to the value ascribed to these works. The chapter then reflects upon how most readers of Shakespeare begin somewhere in the middle of the collected works, with super-canonical works like Twelfth Night and Hamlet, before, if ever, working to the margins of the canon where the early works reside. It concludes with brief summaries of each of the chapters in the collection, noting how contributors shed significant new light upon the formative part of Shakespeare’s career.

This is an essay about early Shakespeare and loss. It attempts to put some kind of order on a span of several years when Shakespeare is first writing plays, or parts of plays, in a commercial environment with fellow professionals. It discusses a period of time, the mid-to-late 1580s and early 1590s, for which much information about Shakespeare and other working dramatists is lost. It asks, how do you write about that kind of loss? And, what sort of data-sets do you hold up to the blank spaces of those years, knowing only the likelihood of Shakespeare’s activity, to enable plausible deductions about his early working life? It considers how the early canon has been categorized and written about, situates the documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s first forays in writing in the context of surviving evidence about theatrical activity in the 1580s, contextualizes Shakespeare’s overall career in the light of those of his peers, and, finally, considers some of the defining features of Shakespeare’s earliest writings.

Marlowe’s play survives in the so-called A-Text of 1,517 lines, first printed in 1604, and in the B-Text of 2,121 lines, printed in 1616. The B-Text is not only the longer, but also the more overtly political play, providing more in-set spectacle that is reminiscent of court performance. The difference in length has often been explained with reference to cuts made to allow provincial acting during the plague of 1592–4 or to additions made to the play in 1602 (Greg 1950). However, Eriksen offers another solution, positing that, in fact, the longer and more politically informed B-text is the earlier and was intended for court performance by a dramatist who had already tried his hand at court drama in Dido. Doctor Faustus, Eriksen argues, would be his second attempt, written in support of the self-sovereignty of Elizabeth I before the attack of the Spanish Armada in August 1588. Its consistent staging of imperial iconography in the papal and imperial scenes, especially the use of the 'pillars' and Alexander the Great, portrays Charles V as a wise ruler in contrast to his aggressive son and the Pope as a usurper of imperial power, both posing threats to the queen.