A book on attribution can hardly avoid discussing the authorship of what are conventionally known as ‘Shakespeare's works’. These comprise a body of plays and poems from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries which are widely, but not universally, accepted as composed by Warwickshire-born William Shakespeare (1564–1616). For this chapter this individual will be referred to as Will the player, but with the warning that a small splinter-group of dissidents maintain that Warwickshire Will was not the same person as the actor of the same name. The plays are distinguished as a corpus by having been published in 1623 in the folio format also used for Jonson's works (1616), the authorship of which has never been doubted, and Beaumont and Fletcher's works (1647), which are believed to incorporate contributions by several other dramatists, including Will the player. The poems comprise two mythological narratives, a collection of 154 sonnets, ‘The Lover's complaint’, published with the sonnets, and a few shorter pieces.

External attributions are strongest for the two mythological poems, The Rape of Lucrece (1593) and Venus and Adonis (1594), both of which were published under Will the player's name during his lifetime in editions dedicated to his patron, the Earl of Southampton. The first edition of the Sonnets (1609) may not have been authorised (though Katharine Duncan-Jones has argued persuasively to the contrary) and comes attended by mysteries which have aroused much speculation. Its title, Shake-speares Sonnets.