The Puritan, first edition

George Eld printed The Puritan; or, the Widow of Watling Street in 1607 with an attribution to “W.S.” The title page’s further information that the play was performed by the Children of Paul’s is the strongest evidence against the Shakespeare attribution as Shakespeare was known not to have written for this company. Several other candidates with the same initials have been advanced, but there is no evidence to support any of these.

The play was one of eight plays bound in a volume in the library of Charles I in the 1630s bearing the ascription “Shakespeare, Vol. 1” (Kirwan 2011), and Philip Chetwinde added it to the second impression of the Third Folio in 1664, where it was retitled The Puritan Widow. The play was then republished as Shakespeare’s in the 1685 Fourth Folio, in further editions of Shakespeare’s collected works including Nicholas Rowe’s in 1709 and Alexander Pope’s in 1728, and in competing individual editions of the play by Jacob Tonson and Robert Walker in 1735. Thereafter it was included along with the other major disputed plays in Edmond Malone’s Supplement (1780) and several other collections of disputed plays during the nineteenth century, culminating in C.F. Tucker Brooke’s The Shakespeare Apocrypha.

There is little dispute among contemporary scholars that the play belongs in the canon of Thomas Middleton (Sharpe 2013, 727-8). The work of David Lake and MacDonald Jackson has solidified the attribution to the point where it was included in the 2007 Oxford edition of Middleton’s Collected Works and excluded from Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen’s William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) on the basis of the Middleton attribution.