Determining the Shakespeare Canon Arden of Faversham and a Lover's Complaint

Determining the Shakspeare Canon aims to solve two key problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works, as a play to which Shakespeare contributed the central scenes. Consequently, it adds to the mounting evidence that early in his career Shakespeare, like other playwrights of the time, collaborated with other playwrightsin the writing of scripts, as was common at the time. MacDonald P. Jackson also considers A Lover's Complaint, published within the quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Its authenticity has been vigorously challenged. Hereit is shown that the poem should be accepted as Shakespeare's and that it belongs to a sequence that he himself organized. Our reading of the sonnets is affected by this conclusion.