Mac Jackson is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His publications include Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity (Auckland UP 1965), Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg UP 1979). He is editor of A. R. D. Fairburn: Selected Poems (Victoria UP 1995) and Selected Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (Edwin Mellen Press 2002), and is co-editor of The Selected Plays of John Marston (CUP 1986) and The Oxford Book of New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (OUP NZ 1986). He has contributed chapters to a further 16 books and has written over 150 articles for academic journals. He wrote the annual critical survey of Shakespeare editions and textual studies for Shakespeare Survey from 1984 to 1990.

Many plays of Shakespeare's time were, like modern movie and television scripts, products of collaboration between two or more writers. This book shows that in the first of his Late Romances, Pericles, Shakespeare collaborated with the minor playwright George Wilkins. It explores a wide range of new techniques for identifying the co-authors in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.