A Yorkshire Tragedy
The play was originally assigned to William Shakespeare, though the modern critical consensus rejects this attribution, favouring Thomas Middleton.
It was next reprinted in 1664, when Philip Chetwinde included it among the seven plays he added to the second impression of the Shakespeare Third Folio.
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.
Other examples of such anthologies of short plays from the English Renaissance can also be given; see, for instance, The Seven Deadly Sins.
The rest of the play has the same content as the first half of the pamphlet Two most unnaturall and bloodie Murthers,[2] which was entered in the Stationers' Register on 12 June 1605.
[3] The play's genre is that of the domestic tragedy, a subgenre of the English Renaissance theatre focusing on the downfalls of ordinary middle-class people.
[4] The crimes were a well-known scandal of the day; a pamphlet on the case was issued in June 1605, with a ballad following in July.
[5][6] The case was also dramatised in a play titled The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), by George Wilkins.
[7] In the Stationers' Register of 2 May 1608, the entry for A Yorkshire Tragedy ascribes authorship to "William Shakespere."
The title page of the published quarto repeats the attribution to "W. Shakspeare," and states that the play was acted by the King's Men (Shakespeare's company) at the Globe Theatre.
While some early critics allowed the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship, most, over the past two centuries, have doubted the attribution.
[8] Cases for the authorship of Thomas Heywood or George Wilkins have been made, but have convinced few commentators.
[9] The title page of the quarto claims that the play was first acted by the King's Men at the Globe Theatre (though these sources are not always reliable).
[10][11][12] Note: This synopsis follows the scene divisions from Stanley Wells' edition of the play in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (eds John Lavagnino and Gary Taylor, Oxford, 2007).
The play opens with a conversation among three servants of an anonymous Yorkshire gentleman, who is returning to his country house after a long sojourn in London.
The Wife has an opening soliloquy, "What will become of us?," which fills out the picture of the Husband's devotion to drink and gambling and riotous behaviour.
He provides quick justification for the Wife's worry with his cruel words and general bad behaviour.
He kicks her and demands that she go to London to see her uncle so that the lands from her dowry can be sold for cash.
She tells a servant that, rather than selling the lands from her dowry, she has convinced her uncle to get her husband a place at court.
Further violence is interrupted when a servant enters and tells the Husband that he has a visitor: the Master of his college from university.
(Commentators who allow a possibility of a Shakespearean contribution to the play tend to centre their attention on this fourth scene and this soliloquy).
In a fit of passion, the Husband decides to kill his children to save them from the poverty that he sees in his future.
The Husband flees, planning to murder the third and youngest of his children, who is living with its wet nurse nearby.
The action now returns to the bedroom above, where the servant, the Wife, and the children are lying on the floor, all seriously injured.
