Unlike The Widow, the printed text of which claimed that the play was written by Jonson, The London Prodigal was published in 1605 with a title-page attributing it to William Shakespeare. The London Prodigal was then included in Philip Chetwinde’s 1664 third folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and in the 1685 fourth folio, alongside six other plays ‘never before printed in folio’, namely Pericles, Prince of Tyre, The History of Thomas, Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of Locrine. Nicholas Rowe and Alexander Pope both included The London Prodigal in their eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, and it was accepted as genuinely Shakespearean by Schlegel in the nineteenth century). Nevertheless, the attribution to Shakespeare has never been widely embraced. C. F. Tucker Brooke, for example, calls the suggestion ‘utterly untenable’ and puts forward John Marston and Thomas Dekker as possible authors (Brooke, 1918, xxix-xxx).

Most critics date the play to around 1603-5, largely because of the assertion on the quarto title-page that the play was performed by the ‘Kings Majesties Servants’ and therefore after James I’s accession in 1603. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, for example, supports this date, discussing the play alongside the second part of Dekker’s The Honest Whore (c. 1604-5) and Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (c. 1604) (Rutter, 2009, 83). A date prior to 1603 has been supported by only a handful of critics, most notably F. G. Fleay, who dated the play to around 1590-1 and saw it as a satirical commentary by the Lord Strange’s Men upon the dramatist Robert Greene’s ‘connections with the theatres then open’ (Fleay, 1877, 42). Fleay suggests that the play was written either by Thomas Lodge or Michael Drayton, and that Shakespeare revised it (Fleay, 1877, 42; Fleay, 1891, 1.152). He also explains the quarto’s ascription of the play to the King’s Men by suggesting that it was taken with some of the Lord Strange’s Men to the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, and thence to the King’s Men (Fleay, 1876, 300-2).

The case for Jonson’s authorship is made by De Winter, editor of the 1905 Yale edition of The Staple of News, who also subscribes to an earlier date for the play. He suggests that The London Prodigal ‘was such a play as Jonson could have produced in the days when he was still an apprentice in play-writing’, asserting that it falls short of his writing abilities in 1605 and must therefore have been composed earlier. Observing that the ‘frequency of rimes in the verse portions also points to an early date of composition’, Winter concludes that ‘the evidence that Jonson wrote The London Prodigal is very strong’ (Winter, xxix). He builds up a case for The London Prodigal as a product of Jonson’s pen by drawing attention to the similarities between the anonymous play’s plot and Staple’s ‘motif of the three Peniboys, with the father’s disguise, the sham will, and a considerable number of minor details’ (xxxiv), and also sees some possible significance in the fact that Nathaniel Butter, the publisher of The London Prodigal was, from 1605 onwards, the distributor of pamphlets of news and was satirized by Jonson in Staple (xxxvii ff).

C. H. Herford rejected Winter’s attribution, though concurring that The London Prodigal was a source for Staple (H&S, 10.258-9). This has remained the standard line, with Anne Barton, for example, describing The London Prodigal as ‘very much the kind of popular work at which Chapman, Jonson and Marston were laughing in their own collaboration for the Children of the Queen’s Revels’ (Barton, 1984, 247). Although, she says, ‘Jonson can never have regarded The London Prodigal as anything but crude and improbable’, nevertheless he later returned to it ‘and borrowed the device of the father who disguises himself, announces his own death, and takes service with his prodigal son’. ‘The London Prodigal looks unsophisticated and simplistic beside The Staple of News’, Barton notes, but adds that ‘it was an important source for Jonson’s play’ (248).

In her edition of the play for a 1989 doctoral dissertation at the University of Auckland, Santha Devi Arulanandam leans towards a date of composition ‘during the final months of Queen Elizabeth’s reign’, proposing 1603-4 as the date of performance. After considering the frequency of word choices in the play, such as the use of the oaths ‘Jesu’ and ‘godamercy’, she disregards Jonson’s candidacy for authorship and follows Marie Jones-Davies’s suggestion from 1958 that Thomas Dekker was the most likely writer (Arulanandam, ed., The London Prodigal , 29 ff; Jones-Davis, 1958, 137).

In the 1990s, the play was analysed stylistically first by Thomas Merriam, who suggests John Fletcher as the author, and then by Jonathan Hope, who proposes that The London Prodigal was a collaborative work between at least two writers (Merriam, 1992, chapters 10 and 11; Hope, 1994, 114-15). After considering Shakespeare as a contributor, Hope rejects his candidacy, preferring Fletcher, Middleton and Dekker as more likely possibilities.

In 1998, Richard Proudfoot revived the discussion of Shakespeare’s authorship, suggesting that, although ‘we are unlikely ever to know the extent of Shakespeare’s participation in the communal act of producing this play, whether as dramatist, dramaturge, plotter, actor, or sponsor of the play with his colleagues’, nevertheless, ‘we are inescapably faced with a claim that he did in some way contribute to that production’ (Proudfoot, 1998, 156). Taking up Hope’s idea that the play was a collaborative effort between two writers, he agrees that one man might have composed ‘the 895 lines of scenes 8, 9, and 13 while the other one wrote the 1,062 lines of the remaining ten scenes’ (155). While he does not make a claim for Shakespeare’s authorship, he does note verbal similarities between Shakespeare’s known writing and the habits of Hope’s author B.

Hope’s subsequent work with Michael Witmore and the Docuscope program provides an alternative perspective. Docuscope’s dendrogram of early modern drama places The London Prodigal in a stylistic cluster that includes George Peele’s Old Wives (1590), Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) – stylistically, its closest match – and Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (1592). Arulanandam’s suspicion that the play bears strong stylistic resemblances to Dekker is borne out by this computer analysis. We should also recall the suggestion that the play was composed before 1603. In sum, Jonson’s involvement in the writing of The London Prodigal seems unlikely. Nonetheless, the play clearly deserves further sustained critical and linguistic attention.