Shakespenser

As is well known, Shakespeare not infrequently collaborated with other playwrights -- much as today, a screenplay is seldom the work of but one hand.  Such scribes as Middleton, Kid, and Fletcher shared that honor.
[Update:  And now, according to one far-fetched theory,  Marlowe.]

Less well known except by experts (and that, a litotes) is the fact that, in the eventide of Edmund Spenser’s career, his masterpiece behind him, and in the dawn of a brash young man named Will Shakespeare, whose mighty works were yet to come, the two poets joined forces in a series of fabliaux, curtain-raisers, and entr’actes.  This light fare was thought, until recently, to have perished quite.  Tis only now that the Incunabula Office of the World of Dr Justice ™, which has aforetimes brought forward, to critical acclaim, a series of pieces unpublished hitherto (by such as Omar Khayyam, Dickens, and Saint Augustine), has once again, in a triumph of antiquarian spelunking, scored a surprising find.  Alas, ‘tis but a fragment;  but we print it here, for the delectation of connoisseurs.

   Ye fretfull Porpentine

   went pricking o’er the plain …

Scholars are even now attempting to disentangle, which lines to attribute to Spenser, and which to father on the Bard.

Shakespeare and Spenser at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Cheapside,

wenching together

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A porpentine (as it might be) fretfully pricking along.

Further Elizabethan delicacies (some previously unpublished) available here.

[Update]  This just in!  An even more surprising authorial duo:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/03/shakespeares-collaborators.html