Shakespeare’s works have survived because they were printed. No manuscript exists of any of Shakespeare’s works in his own handwriting or in any contemporary copy (although some scholars think he was responsible for writing a part of an unpublished manuscript play The Book of Sir Thomas More; see ‘Shakespearean Apocrypha’ below). So it is impossible for us finally to determine exactly what Shakespeare wrote or how he revised it, or to know fully why and how some plays found their way into print, or to determine how far the texts we have register his own final thoughts, and how far they record intentional and accidental changes introduced by actors, scribes and printshop workers.

During his lifetime Shakespeare was probably best known for the two poems, based on Ovid, that he published in 1593 and 1594: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Venus and Adonis went through fifteen editions by 1675; Lucrece eight editions: they are Shakespeare’s best-sellers. Both poems were published by fellow Stratford migrant to London, the printer Richard Field – who has often been proposed as the source for some of Shakespeare’s significant reading, since he also published Ovid, North’s translation of Plutarch which was Shakespeare’s source for his Roman plays, and Greene’s Pandosto, the source for The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare probably wrote the poems while the theatres were closed because of the plague in 1592–3, and he dedicated them to Henry Wriothesley, the young Earl of Southampton. The date of Shakespeare’s sonnets is more difficult to discern: there is a report of the circulation of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’ in 1598, and two of the poems are printed in 1599 in the miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim. The collection is published in 1609, with a dedication apparently signed by the publisher Thomas Thorpe to ‘Mr. W. H.’, as ‘the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’: there are many theories and speculations about the identity of this personage.