[D.-L.L.] (XVII) Bc [Greene] SR
Assessing what precisely Shakespeare did or did not write is one of the tasks facing the editor. In addition to the canonical plays, works attributed to him include six spurious plays published during his lifetime with his name or initials on the title page (included in the Third Folio); plays published after his death, similarly with his name or initials on the title page; and plays attributed to him since the early eighteenth century on the basis of internal evidence. Faire Em is one of three plays of a fourth class of plays ascribed to Shakespeare because they were in a volume of plays in Charles II’s library with the binder’s spine title “Shakespeare. Vol. I”. A satiric reference to, and quotation from, the play by Robert Greene in 1587 shows Faire Em to have been Elizabethan, but Shakespearean authorship is widely repudiated, supported only by the German writer and Shakespearean translator Ludwig Tieck in his Shakespeare’s Vorschule (1829) and by Richard Simpson (who also argued that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic) in The School of Shakspere (1878).