Tudor or Jacobean plays that are sequels to a Shakespeare play?

Question

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*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature#Jacobean_period:_1603.E2.80.9325) 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.

Answer 1

Funny, I was going to mention Marlowe's Edward II, which takes place three kings after Shakespeare's King John, but a) you said "not counting histories," b) Marlowe's play may have been written first (1593 is the first known registration of Edward; John is likely from the mid 90s), and c) Marlowe isn't a Jacobean playwright since he died in 1593 while Elizabeth was still on the throne.

None of the Jacobean plays I've read or seen are direct sequels to Shakespeare. The only instance I definitely know of when a 17th century playwright wrote a sequel to a different playwright's work is John Vanbrugh's The Relapse, which is a direct continuation of Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift. However, those are both from the 1690s and belong to the Restoration period of English drama (and actually late for that period, since Charles II died in 1685).

In the Jacobean period, I might mention Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which is a sort of parody of two plays by his contemporaries Heywood and Dekker, but not exactly a sequel.

It's an interesting question: may I ask if there's a particular reason you're asking?

Answer 2

Faust by Christopher Marlowe. They were actually playwrights who were in competition with each other.