What was Shakespeare's first play and when did he write it?

However, it is unlikely that we'll ever know definitively which of the plays was Shakespeare's earliest: We do know that he first began writing a handful of plays in the late 1580s or early 1590s. Sources: Bruster D. 2015. Shakespeare’s Pauses, Authorship, and Early Chronology. Studia Metrica et Poetica 2(2). Jackson MP. 1994. read more

John Jowett, editor of the play for both the Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Works and the individual Oxford Shakespeare edition, believes Middleton worked with Shakespeare in an understudy capacity and wrote scenes 2 (1.2 in editions which divide the play into acts), 5 (3.1), 6 (3.2), 7 (3.3), 8 (3.4), 9 (3.5), 10 (3.6) and the last eighty lines of 14 (4.3). read more