Portal:Yorkshire/Selected article/10

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A Yorkshire Tragedy is an early Jacobean era stage play, a domestic tragedy printed in 1608. The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this Shakespearean attribution. A Yorkshire Tragedy was entered into the Stationers' Register on May 2, 1608; the entry assigns the play to "Wylliam Shakespere." The play was published soon after, in a quarto issued by bookseller Thomas Pavier, who had published Sir John Oldcastle, another play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, in 1600. The title page of the quarto repeats the attribution to "W. Shakspeare," and states that the play was acted by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre.

The play is unusual in consisting of only ten scenes. The original printed text of the play identifies it as "ALL'S ONE. OR, One of the foure Plaies in one, called a York-Shire Tragedy...." This plainly implies that the existing play was one of a quartet of related works that were performed on stage together. In that respect it must have resembled Four Plays, or Moral Representations, in One, from c. 1608–13, a play in the John Fletcher canon in which Fletcher wrote the last two parts of the quartet, while another playwright, most likely Nathan Field, wrote the others. (read more . . . )