Editing Shakespeare apocrypha (section)

==Lost plays==
* ''[[Love's Labour's Won]]''. A late sixteenth-century writer, [[Francis Meres]], and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare's then-recently published works, but no copy of a play with this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternative title of an existing play, such as ''[[Much Ado About Nothing]]'', ''[[All's Well That Ends Well]]'', or ''[[The Taming of the Shrew]]''.
* ''[[The History of Cardenio]]''. This late play by Shakespeare and [[John Fletcher (playwright)|Fletcher]], referred to in several documents, has not survived. It was probably an adaptation of a tale in [[Miguel de Cervantes]]' ''[[Don Quixote]]''. In 1727, [[Lewis Theobald]] produced a play he called ''[[Double Falsehood|Double Falshood]]'' {{sic}}, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Counter to that, a professional handwriting expert, Charles Hamilton, claimed that ''[[The Second Maiden's Tragedy]]'' (generally considered the work of [[Thomas Middleton]]) play is actually [[Shakespeare's]] manuscript of the lost play ''Cardenio''. On the rare occasions when ''The Second Maiden's Tragedy'' has been revived on the stage, it is sometimes performed under the title ''Cardenio'', as in the 2002 production directed by [[James Kerwin]] at the 2100 Square Foot<!-- Do NOT make this into a convert template. "2100 Square Foot" is the theater's proper name. --> Theater in Los Angeles, as well as a production at the [[Burton Taylor Theatre]] in 2004. In March 2010, the [[Arden Shakespeare]] imprint published an edition of ''Double Falsehood'' calling it a play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, adapted by Theobold, thus including it officially in Shakespeare's canon for the first time. In 2013 the Royal Shakespeare Company published an edition also attributing ''Double Falsehood'', in part, to William Shakespeare.{{sfn|Rasmussen|Bate|2013}}
* The lost play called the ''[[Ur-Hamlet]]'' is believed by a few scholars to be an early work by Shakespeare himself. The theory was first postulated by the academic Peter Alexander and is supported by [[Harold Bloom]] and [[Peter Ackroyd]], although mainstream Shakespearean scholarship believes it to have been by [[Thomas Kyd]]. Bloom's hypothesis is that this early version of ''[[Hamlet]]'' was one of Shakespeare's first plays, that the theme of the Prince of Denmark was one to which he returned constantly throughout his career and that he continued to revise it even after the canonical ''Hamlet'' of 1601.