SOURCE: Robb, Dewar M. “The Canon of William Rowley's Plays.” Modern Language Review 45, no. 2 (April 1950): 129-41.

In the following essay, Robb attempts to determine what part, if any, Rowley had in writing some twenty plays whose authorship is uncertain.

I

In 1910 Dr Stork, in the introduction to his edition of A Shoemaker a Gentleman and All's Lost by Lust, listed thirty-one plays as ascribed, by one critic or another, though without agreement among themselves, to the pen of William Rowley. Even then the list was incomplete; to-day almost fifty plays would have to be included. The following pages contain in summary form the results of a careful study of these various ascriptions primarily in an endeavour to determine which, and which only, we are justified in regarding as, in part or as wholes, Rowley's work.

That many of the ascriptions are due to mere ill-considered guesses is obvious...