We'll go over this again, simply, for the uninstructed. Shakespeare was a professional playwright, part owner of a theater company. He wrote for money, and his function was to supply plays as needed. Somewhere around the time of his retirement, a royal wedding was celebrated, and the troupe (which had royal sponsorship) needed an important new play to contribute to the festivities. Either they appealed to Shakespeare and he obligingly squeezed out the first and fifth acts of something new, or they took up these scraps of something he'd left unfinished, and Fletcher (whose previous collaborator, Beaumont, had just made a rich marriage and given up the theater) filled the gaps in the outline with... More >>>