STC 21533, title page
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Title: The true chronicle historie of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell. As it hath beene sundry times publikely acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. Written by VV.S.
Date: London : Printed by Thomas Snodham, 1613.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 21533, title page
View online bibliographic record
Terms of use
Images that are under Folger copyright are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This allows you to use our images without additional permission provided that you cite the Folger Shakespeare Library as the source and you license anything you create using the images under the same or equivalent license. For more information, including permissions beyond the scope of this license, see Permissions. The Folger waives permission fees for non-commercial publication by registered non-profits, including university presses, regardless of the license they use. For images copyrighted by an entity other than the Folger, please contact the copyright holder for permission information.
Copy-specific information
Title: The true chronicle historie of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell. As it hath beene sundry times publikely acted by the Kings Maiesties Seruants. Written by VV.S.
Date: London : Printed by Thomas Snodham, 1613.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 21533, title page
View online bibliographic record
Peter Kirwan, "Thomas, Lord Cromwell, second edition," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/227.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 21533. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/227.
The second edition of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, retains the attribution to W.S. but updates the name of Shakespeare’s playing company to “the Kings Maiesties Seruants.” A Stationers’ Register entry of December 16, 1611, passing the rights from William Jones to John Brown, also preserved the attribution to W.S. Although Thomas Snodham printed the second edition, the text contains few significant emendations and preserves the 1602 edition’s basic layout.
The date of 1613 may suggest that the play’s republication was designed to capitalize on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s recently staged Henry VIII, which features Cromwell as a character.
Written by Peter Kirwan
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Peter Kirwan, "The First Collected “Shakespeare Apocrypha',” Shakespeare Quarterly 62.4 (2011): 594-601.
Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Baldwin Maxwell, Studies in the Shakespeare Apocrypha (New York: Greenwood Press, 1956).
Will Sharpe, Authorship and Attribution" in William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays, eds Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, with Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 643-747.
Last updated January 25, 2020
