The play has been recognised as a probable collaboration since 1709, if not earlier. In that year Nicholas Rowe wrote, "there is good Reason to believe that the greatest part of that Play was not written by him; tho' it is own'd, some part of it certainly was, particularly the last Act." Rowe here seems to be summarising what he believes to be a consensus view in his day, although some critics thought it was either an early Shakespeare work or not written by him at all. Wilkins has been proposed as the co-author since 1868. In 1919, H. Dugdale Sykes published a detailed comparison of numerous parallels between the first half of Pericles and four of Wilkins's works, but he thought that Wilkins's novelisation of the play preceded its composition. Many other scholars followed Sykes in his identification of Wilkins, most notably Jonathan Hope in 1994 and MacDonald P. Jackson in 1993 and 2003. In 2002, Prof. Brian Vickers summarised the historical evidence and took the Cambridge editors to task for ignoring more than a century of scholarship.