''Thomas Lord Cromwell'' is an

Elizabethan The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personifi ...

history play, depicting the life of

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex Thomas Cromwell (; 1485 – 28 July 1540), briefly Earl of Essex, was an English lawyer and statesman who served as chief minister to King Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540, when he was beheaded on orders of the king, who later blamed false charge ...

, the minister of King

Henry VIII of England Henry VIII (28 June 149128 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disa ...

. The play was entered into the

Stationers' Register The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including print ...

on 11 August 1602 by William Cotton and was published in

quarto Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...

later the same year by bookseller William Jones, for whom it was printed by Richard Read. The title page of Q1 specifies that the play was acted by The

Lord Chamberlain's Men The Lord Chamberlain's Men was a company of actors, or a "playing company" (as it then would likely have been described), for which Shakespeare wrote during most of his career. Richard Burbage played most of the lead roles, including Hamlet, Othe ...

, and attributes the play to a "W. S." A second quarto (Q2) was printed in 1613 by

Thomas Snodham Thomas Snodham was an English printer. He was a specialist music printer, but music accounted for as little as 10 per cent of the books he printed. His other output included plays. Early life Snodham was the son of a draper. In 1595 he was appre ...

. The Q2 title page repeats the data of Q1, though the Lord Chamberlain's Men are now the King's Men (the name change having occurred in 1603). The "W. S." of the quartos was first identified as

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

when publisher

Philip Chetwinde Philip Chetwinde ( fl. 1653–1674) was a seventeenth-century London bookseller and publisher, noted for his publication of the Third Folio of Shakespeare's plays. A rough start Chetwinde was originally a clothworker. Through his 1637 marriag ...

added the play to the second impression of his Shakespeare Third Folio in 1664. Modern scholars reject the Shakespearean attribution; speculation, relying on common initials, has shone on

Wentworth Smith Wentworth Smith (1571 – in or after 1614), was a minor England, English dramatist of the Elizabethan period who may have been responsible for some of the plays in the Shakespeare Apocrypha, though no work known to be his is extant. Life ...

and

William Sly William Sly (died August 1608) was an actor in English Renaissance theatre, a colleague of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men. Nothing is known of Sly's early life. He enters the historica ...

as possible alternatives. Individual critics have also suggested

Thomas Heywood Thomas Heywood (early 1570s – 16 August 1641) was an English playwright, actor, and author. His main contributions were to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre. He is best known for his masterpiece ''A Woman Killed with Kindness'', a ...

and

Michael Drayton Michael Drayton (1563 – 23 December 1631) was an English poet who came to prominence in the Elizabethan era. He died on 23 December 1631 in London. Early life Drayton was born at Hartshill, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. Almost nothin ...

as possible authors—suggestions unsupported by firm evidence. Indeed, scholars have disagreed about almost every aspect of the play; it has been dated as early as 1582–83 and as late as 1599–1600. The play is primarily political commentary—or religious propaganda. Baldwin Maxwell argued that the play has a discontinuous nature: the first half, through Act III scene ii, is dramaturgically well-crafted, while the second half is disorganized and loosely put together. Maxwell interpreted this as indicating that the extant text was the telescoped condensation of a two-part original; alternatively, others have suggested that the play is a collaboration between two unequal partners, or a work that was left incomplete by its original creator and finished by another hand.

In Performance

In 2020, the Beyond Shakespeare Company released online a play-reading and discussion of ''The Life and Death of Thomas Cromwell''.Archived a
Ghostarchive
and th
Wayback Machine

Notes

References

* Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. ''The Popular School: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama.'' Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1975. * Maxwell, Baldwin. ''Studies in the Shakespeare Apocrypha.'' New York, King's Crown Press, 1956. * Tucker Brooke, C. F., ed. ''The Shakespeare Apocrypha.'' Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908.

External links

''Thomas Lord Cromwell''
from Internet Shakespeare Editions {{Authority control Shakespeare apocrypha English Renaissance plays Plays about English royalty Plays based on real people Plays set in England Plays set in the 16th century 1602 plays