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William Shakespeare wrote around 40 plays (depending on how the Shakespeare canon is defined). Except for some of his history plays (Henry IV, Henry VI) and possibly The Merry Wives of Windsor (not a real sequel of Henry IV Part 2 but another play involving Falstaff) Shakespeare did not write any continuations or sequels to any of his own plays. Marlowe, by contrast, wrote Tamburlaine the Great as a two-part play. But what about plays by other dramatists that continue the plot of a Shakespeare play? Do any such plays exist?

(I am excluding history plays from this question; there are history plays by several contemporaries of Shakespeare that tackle the same material—often based on Holinshed's Chronicles—in a different way.)

Note that the Jacobean period ended in 1625 with the death of King James, i.e. nine years after Shakespeare's death. Although the works I am looking for may have been written during Shakespeare's lifetime, I expect that the number of such works is very low.

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  • This is kind of a request for "lists of things" as written. Can you edit?
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Dec 2, 2017 at 4:37
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    I think this is more of a "Do any exist?", not a "List all things" question, so it's still on-topic
    – user72
    Dec 2, 2017 at 16:07
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    I retracted my CV and upvoted BTW.
    – EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine
    Dec 7, 2017 at 16:58
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    @MattThrower Off the top of my head, the info about Love's Labours Won is very sketchy indeed. I'll look it up again, though.
    – Tsundoku
    Dec 11, 2017 at 10:58
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    @JoshuaEngel Ah, I missed the fact that you were commenting on a statement in my question. I have fixed that now.
    – Tsundoku
    Dec 12, 2017 at 16:56

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To my knowledge, the only Elizabethan or Jacobean play that is a sequel to a Shakespeare play is The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher, a play that was first performed in 1609 – 1610. The play is a mock sequel to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petrucio "tames" Katharina. In Fletcher's "sequel", Petruchio is a widower again and remarries, but this time he is the one who gets "tamed" by his wife Maria. The play is also interesting for other reasons: its performance was prohibited for some time by the Master of the Revels until some adaptations were made, and it has survived in manuscript form (unlike any of Shakespeare's plays, unless you count Shakespeare's presumed contribution to Thomas More).

I also looked at the description of Ben Jonson's masque Oberon, the Faery Prince (performed in January 1611), but apart from the character Oberon, it has too little in common with Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to count as a sequel.

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