Who Wrote the First English Play Romeo & Juliet, circa 1560?

It is commonly assumed that William Shakespeare wrote his iconic play Romeo & Juliet around 1594–95, using Arthur Brooke’s English poem Romeus & Juliet (1562) as the play’s main source.^[1]

Yet Brooke himself attested to an English stage performance of Romeo & Juliet that preceded his poem, a play that presented the same narrative as his poem. This early play has no extant script and its author is anonymous, and is rarely considered in modern Shakespearean criticism. Even so, salient factors about this lost play—its plot outline, source, date, and location—can be determined about this first English stage version of Romeo & Juliet. This essay argues that, in fact, the lost play is an example of a plot construction technique—the translation and embellishment of a popular French novella as the basis for a play script—used by Shakespeare in other plays, most notably Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night.^[2] So, might they all be written by the same man?