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From 1599 onwards, Shakespeare's works began to appear in printed anthologies. Over the following years, a number of volumes included passages from his poems and plays, presenting them alongside similar excerpts by his rivals and contemporaries. The practices of reading and commonplacing that lie behind these anthologies have been reconstructed by recent scholars. Less work has been done, though, on how authors responded to those practices-how they wrote for, or against, readers looking for material to extract. This thesis is an examination of how Shakespeare engaged with the culture of commonplacing in which his works were written, published, and received. It traces the first decade of his life in print, from 'Venus and Adonis' to 'Hamlet', to show how that culture shaped the formative works of his career. Shakespeare, I argue, was keenly attuned to this way of reading, and to the distinctive poetic and dramatic possibilities it opened up. By rereading his works through the passages these anthologies extract, we can get a better sense for those moments that solicit a reader's desire to commonplace-or resist it-or move between the two. The thesis falls into four chapters and an afterword. To introduce the series of printed anthologies on which I focus, the first chapter surveys the theory and practice of commonplacing, as they were articulated by humanist scholars, and applied in the early modern schoolroom. Those theories can be followed into Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis', which-no less than the anthologies in which it later featured-was a product of the Elizabethan education system. I show how habits of commonplacing left their mark on the poem, colouring everything from its pedagogical interludes to the verse-form it takes. The second chapter turns from the poems to the plays, in order to explore the relationship between lyric and commonplace in 'Love's Labour's Lost'. Although these seem like entirely contrary ideas, this play demonstrates their paradoxical affinity. Its lovers struggle to prove that the feelings they express in verse are really their own; their poems fail to persuade their recipients, because-as commonplaces of Elizabethan sonneteering-they could have been spoken by anyone. So it is that they appeared in the 1599 'Passionate Pilgrim', extracted from the play, and presented as Shakespeare's first sonnet-sequence. I use this anthology to consider the often tenuous connection between love and verse, along with related questions of authorship, criticism, and lyric theory. My third chapter is an experiment in using the evidence of these anthologies to reread Shakespeare's works. At its centre is the question of why two 1600 volumes, 'Englands Parnassus' and 'Belvedere', gather so much material from a single scene in 'Richard II', the deathbed of John of Gaunt. Poised between this life and the next, dying words were (and are) often seen as proverbially true. That reputation for truthfulness, and their sense of otherworldly detachment, made them especially attractive to the anthologies that detached them. Shakespeare relishes the irony by which dying words are most likely to win an afterlife, and the consequent importance they win in what one critic calls Richard II's 'fight for the future perfect'. The opening chapters set these anthologies in their social, historical, and literary context. I argue that they participated in the wider critical moment of 1590s drama, whose effects ranged from the common-placing of printed plays to the literary arguments staged in the Poets' War. Though often overlooked in accounts of his life, this moment marked an important stage in Shakespeare's career, as what James Bednarz has termed his 'miscellany period'. In the fourth chapter, I consider the effects of this critical moment on 'Hamlet'. Amid the hostilities of the Poets' War, Shakespeare took an extraordinary risk in revisiting a play written over a decade earlier. Back in 1589, Nashe had derided those playwrights who plundered Seneca's tragedies for 'manie good sentences', and 'whole Hamlets, I should say handfulls of tragical speaches'. Unsurprisingly, then, Shakespeare's play is preoccupied with sentences, and sententiousness, as a legacy of its theatrical past. But sententiousness had a more respectable lineage too. In the 'Poetics', Aristotle had defined dianoia-translated into Latin as sententia-as an essential part of tragedy, denoting the thought performed in plays. My chapter tracks this idea as it made its way into English drama, following it through Seneca, and his imitators, to the experiments of the children's companies. Shakespeare used sententiousness to explore his relations with a longer tragic tradition, and to examine his own play's relative agedness. But he used it, too, to address the problem of how to show thinking onstage, working through and against tragic sententiousness to fashion his most thoughtful protagonist. Finally, this thesis's findings are recapitulated in an afterword, which concludes with some thoughts on Shakespeare's Sonnets, and the afterlife they imagine for their poet and his love.

The aim of this work is to investigate the possibility that Francis Bacon was a contributor in the writing of three Shakespeare plays: The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Tempest. In order to proceed, I develop a new Rare Collocation Profiling (RCP) method using Chadwick–Healey’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) database to identify those collocations in a target text that are rare. I then list the probable sources of a target and the writers who possibly borrowed from it. In this way, I obtain a DNA-type profile in relation to the target text for all frequently occurring writers that are returned by the searches. However, while collocation analysis is traditionally confined to a database of known dramatists, I widen the search to include all fully searchable texts in EEBO. My test case is the long poem A Funeral Elegye (1612), and my method supports Brian Vickers’ conclusion that John Ford is a better authorial candidate than William Shakespeare. I also analyse two previously unattributed pamphlets: the Gesta Grayorum (1688), an account of the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn revels; and the True Declaration (1610), a Virginia Company propaganda pamphlet, and I conclude from my method that Francis Bacon is the only candidate for having compiled the former and that he was a major contributor to the latter. Two of the Shakespeare plays, The Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost have previously been associated with the 1594–5 Gray’s Inn revels. I analyse the three volumes of Nelson and Elliott’s Records of Early English Drama: Inns of Court (NE) to find that the number of professional companies that played at the Inns of Court (one of which is Gray’s Inn) before 1606 has been overestimated. A document shows that Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were playing at Greenwich on 28 December 1594 when, as the Gesta Grayorum reports, The Comedy of Errors was performed at Gray’s Inn, and the circumstances do not allow Shakespeare to have been present. The evidence suggests that the play was first enacted by Inns of Court players rather than the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Inns of Court plays were often based on translations of classical works and usually commented on the succession question. I argue that The Comedy of Errors displays both of these characteristics and so was likely written with the revels in mind. Also, due to certain rare parallels between Francis Bacon’s speeches at the revels and Love’s Labour’s Lost, I claim that the play was intended for performance there but cancelled. Referring to the results of RCP, I suggest that Francis Bacon not only compiled the Gesta Grayorum but also contributed to the writing of these two plays. I also show that my new method identifies two non-members of the Inns of Court, Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker, as later revisers of these plays. In the final chapters, I improve on the dating evidence for The Tempest by showing that Caliban’s speech on edible items relies on knowledge of the Bermudan cahow, a bird whose behaviour was unknown in England before September 1610. The application of RCP to The Tempest confirms that William Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’, a 20,000-word secret report sent back from the Virginia colony to the London Virginia Company, was beyond reasonable doubt a source for the play. RCP also reveals Francis Bacon as a contributor to the writing of the play. I also apply the new method to the Virginia Company’s True Declaration, a pamphlet that almost certainly relied on ‘True Reportory’, and reveal Bacon as a contributor. This means that he must have inspected Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’, a source for The Tempest. I give strong reasons why Shakespeare would have been prohibited from gaining access to Strachey’s restricted company report. Finally, I suggest that The Tempest was used as a political tool to promote England’s influence in the New World, and although Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ could not have been released for inspection, the Virginia Company must have cooperated in supplying information for the writing of the play.