1611. The First and Second Part ... As they were (sundry times) lately acted by the Queenes Maiesties Players. Written by W. Sh. Valentine Simmes for John Helme. [The signatures are continuous through both parts.]
1622.... as they were (sundry times) lately acted. Written by W. Shakespeare. Augustine Mathewes for Thomas Dewes.
Editions by G. Steevens (1760, T. P. ii), J. Nichols (1779, Six Old Plays, ii), W. C. Hazlitt (1875, Sh. Libr. v), F. G. Fleay, King John (1878), F. J. Furnivall (1888, Sh. Q), J. S. Farmer (1911, T. F. T.), F. J. Furnivall and J. Munro (1913, Sh. Classics).—Dissertations: E. Rose, Shakespeare as an Adapter (Macmillan’s Magazine, Nov. 1878); G. C. Moore Smith, Sh.’s K. J. and the T. R. (1901, Furnivall Miscellany, 335); H. D. Sykes, Sidelights on Shakespeare, 99 (1919).
The authorship was assigned by Malone to Marlowe, by Pope to Shakespeare and W. Rowley, by Fleay, ii. 53, and King John, 34, to Greene, Peele, and Lodge, working on a Marlowian plot. Furnivall and Munro accept none of these theories, and the latter suggests a common authorship with the early Leir. Sykes argues strongly for Peele. The lines prefixed to Part I begin
You that with friendly grace of smoothed brow
Have entertained the Scythian Tamburlaine.
They do not claim to be a prologue, and may have been added on publication. The play is not therefore necessarily later than Tamburlaine (c. 1587). But the tone is that of the Armada period. Shakespeare used the play, with which, from the booksellers’ point of view, his King John seems to have been treated as identical.
Judith c. 1595 (?)
[MS.] National Library of Wales, Peniarth (formerly Hengwrt), MS. 508.
G. A. Jones, A Play of Judith (1917, M. L. N. xxxii. 1) describes the MS. which contains the Latin text of the Judithae Constantia of Cornelius Schonaeus, of which a reprint was issued in London in 1595, together with an incomplete English translation in unrhymed verse written as prose, perhaps as a school exercise, in a late sixteenth-century or early seventeenth-century hand.