The Shakespeare canon

The problem of the text: 

Shakespeare and his colleagues were men of theatre, only concerned with the staging of the plays they wrote: they may also have acted in them or directed them, but they paid no attention to the written text. Plays were not considered literature in sense of lyrical or epic poetry. The texts of the most successful plays were often published without the author's permissions.

The "quartos" and the "folios": 

The unreliable editions are usually called "bad", and since they were published in quarto size (so called because the whole sheet of paper is folded twice, to form four levels) they are referred to as "bad quartos".                                         

In 1597 a bad quarto of Romeo and Juliet came out. It was very different from the text we use nowadays. Some of the quartos, however were good, either because the author may have finally agreed to supervise the work or because the editor has used the author's original manuscript.

      1623 is when the first fairly accurate edition of Shakespeare's works was published à called first folio

The texts we read today are therefore not Shakespeare's originals, but the result of a  reconstruction work.

The problem of the date: 

We don't know all the dates the texts were written and/or performed. We have to guess the date of a play taking into account external and internal evidence.

External evidence:                                                                                                       

Some of Shakespeare's plays are cited Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia and since this work came out in 1598 the plays mentioned there must have been composed before that date, but we do not know exactly when.

Internal evidence: 

A play may contain references to contemporary historical events which helpdating it.

      -  For example in Hamlet,  Shakespeare paraphrases parts of Florio's English version of Montaigne's essays à so Hamlet may have been written before 1603. The style of the play can also help dating it.

     The dating of the plays: One of the most authoritative attempts at dating Shakespeare's plays was made by Chambers.