Thomas Lord Cromwell is anElizabethan history play, depicting the life ofThomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, the minister of KingHenry VIII of England.
The play was entered into theStationers' Register on 11 August 1602 by William Cotton and was published inquarto 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 TheLord Chamberlain's Men, and attributes the play to a "W. S." A second quarto (Q2) was printed in 1613 byThomas Snodham. The Q2 title page repeats the data of Q1, though the Lord Chamberlain's Men are now theKing's Men (the name change having occurred in 1603).
The "W. S." of the quartos was first identified asWilliam Shakespeare when publisherPhilip Chetwinde added the play to the second impression of hisShakespeare Third Folio in 1664. Modern scholars reject the Shakespearean attribution; speculation, relying on common initials, has shone onWentworth Smith andWilliam Sly as possible alternatives. Individual critics have also suggestedThomas Heywood andMichael Drayton 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.[1]
In 2020, the Beyond Shakespeare Company released online a play-reading and discussion ofThe Life and Death of Thomas Cromwell.[2]
