Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The One King Lear
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Vickers, Brian William
BIRTHDATE: 1937
WEBSITE: http://www.brianvickers.uk/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Vickers_(literary_scholar) * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/02/shakespeare-scholar-claims-the-bard-didnt-shorten-king-lear
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 82084324
Personal name heading:
Vickers, Brian
Variant(s): Vickers, B. W. (Brian W.)
Birth date: 1937
Found in: Mackenzie, H. The man of feeling, 1967.
Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, 1984
(a.e.) CIP t.p. (Brian Vickers, Centre for Renaissance
Studies, ETH Zürich) author info. (Brian William
Vickers; b. 12/13/37)
Info. converted from 678, 2012-10-02 (b. 1937)
Invalid LCCN: n 86083110 n 85281405
================================================================================
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PERSONAL
Born 1937, in Cardiff, Wales.
EDUCATION:Cambridge University, B.A., 1962, Ph.D., 1967.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, instructor, 1967-72; ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, professor, c. 1972-2004, became emeritus professor, 2004; University of London, London, England, senior research fellow, 2004—; University College London, London, England, visiting professor, 2012—.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Brian Vickers is a respected Shakespeare scholar who has written or edited more than thirty-five books, most of which are dedicated to William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, or the English literary renaissance. Vickers has largely made a name for himself debunking Shakespeare claims, including works falsely attributed to the bard. Discussing his career in a Shakespeare Newsletter interview with Michael P. Jensen, Vickers remarked: “Looking back, I think two books that specially influenced me placed Shakespeare’s language and style in its historical context, the humanist curriculum (that is, the studia humanitatis, involving rhetoric, moral philosophy, history, and poetry). They were both by American scholars: T.W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (1944), and Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (1947). These were the first two detailed historical studies of the grammar-school curriculum as Shakespeare absorbed it, and of his knowledge of the expressive devices of rhetoric. I have worked on these topics from time to time in my career, but am convinced that an enormous amount may still be learned about Shakespeare’s creative forging of an individual style and his debt to these traditional disciplines.”
Counterfeiting Shakespeare
With Counterfeiting Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye, published in 2002, Vickers sets his sights on several works misattributed to Shakespeare. These works include “Shall I Die?” and A Funerall Elegye. Regarding the latter title, Vickers asserts that John Ford is the real author, and he prevents a wealth of evidence in support of his claim. In addition, Vickers provides a methodology of authorship studies, allowing readers to assess his approach. This provision also allows Vickers to dismantle the approach of Shakespeare scholar Donald K. Foster, the man responsible for misattributing A Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare in the first place.
Katherine Duncan-Jones noted in her Modern Language Review assessment: “In the aftermath of Foster’s retraction, together with Professor Monsarrat’s attribution of the Elegye to John Ford, Vickers’s book comes across as gratuitous dead-horse-flogging.” However, David Bevington in the Renaissance Quarterly was mostly positive, and he stated that while Vickers’s “book is dauntingly long and laden with tables; it is not for the weak of heart … [and] the book as a whole presents considerably more argumentation and evidence. It is a very valuable study, and one that justifies its length and attention to technical detail.” Bevington went on to conclude: “The structure of Vickers’s argument is indeed brilliant as it moves from refutation to confirmation. The innovative historian of rhetoric displays how masterfully he can put the methodology of rhetorical persuasion to his own use. The book is thus a tour de force of considerable beauty. It is also a very useful guide for those wishing to do studies in attribution.”
Shakespeare, Co-Author
Vickers continues his study of Shakespeare authorship in Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays, in which he identifies five Shakespeare plays that were coauthored. Vickers sets his claims in context by noting that collaborative authorship n the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was more common than not. The plays that Vickers identifies to this effects are Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Vickers identifies the missing coauthors, explaining that Titus Andronicus was written with George Peele, while Timon of Athens was written with Thomas Middleton, Pericles was composed with George Wilkins, and both Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were written with John Fletcher.
Linda Anderson in Renaissance Quarterly mostly praised the book, observing: “Although Vickers is an extremely engaging writer, some of the book’s arguments can be daunting for those unsophisticated about statistics. … Vickers, however, can hardly be held accountable for his readers’ ignorance, and the remainder of the book is as entertaining as it is informative.” Further, stated Anderson, “it is exemplary in its logic, historical grounding, and inclusiveness, and is certain to be the definitive book on its subject for the foreseeable future.” Warren Chernaik, writing in the Modern Language Review, was equally equivocal, remarking: “The book has its faults: it is too long by about 100 pages, and its tone is too often ill-tempered, treating previous critics as unacknowledged heroes or consigning them to outer darkness. Vickers is impatient with uncertainty, the view that a phenomenon may have more than one possible explanation. But Shakespeare, Co-Author is a major achievement, which marshals its evidence very effectively and is likely to have a great influence on later studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.”
The One King Lear
With The One King Lear, a 2016 work, Vickers explores the validity of various versions of one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, King Lear. Vickers begins by exploring the significant differences between the version of King Lear that appeared in the Quarto of 1608 and the version that appears in the Folio of 1623. Specifically, there are 300 lines in the Quarto that do not appear in the Folio, and there are almost 1,000 variations overall. Scholars have generally treated the Quarto as the version used and annotated by actors, while they have treated the Folio as the official version. While Vickers concedes that this conclusion is true for the dual versions of Hamlet, he does not find it to be true in the case of King Lear.
“Vickers’ theory is bound to attract its fair share of controversy,” Clarisse Loughrey pointed out in a review for the Independent Online. Indeed, in a contribution to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Holger S. Syme panned The One King Lear, remarking: “Every once in a while, a book comes along that fundamentally challenges the way we think. Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear is such a book. It constitutes a real challenge to the belief that our system of academic peer reviewing works as it should. Published by one of North America’s most august university presses, it is nonetheless a volume riddled with basic methodological errors, factual blunders, conceptual non-sequiturs, and vituperative ad hominem attacks. It is a book that should never have been printed in its present form. But one of its two prominent, if non-committal, blurbists is right: now that it exists, this is not a book one can ignore.” Spectator columnist Jonathan Bate was more positive but still reserved, remarking: “Vickers may well be right that the Folio revision of King Lear was not a single, carefully crafted intervention by Shakespeare himself. The evolutionary nature of all theatre scripts would suggest that the changes are far more likely to have been gradual accretions over the years, some purposeful and others haphazard. But he is unnecessarily dismissive of what he calls the ‘ill-judged’ Folio text.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Early Modern Literary Studies, May, 2001, Joseph Tate, review of English Renaissance Literary Criticism.”
Modern Language Review, October, 2004, Warren Chernaik, review of Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays, p. 1030; January, 2005, Katherine Duncan-Jones, review of Counterfeiting Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye, p. 197.
Queen’s Quarterly, winter, 1996, review of Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, pp. 807-815.
Renaissance Quarterly, spring, 2004, David Bevington, review of Counterfeiting Shakespeare, p. 382; summer, 2004, Linda Anderson, review of Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays, p. 741; winter, 2007, David Bevington, review of Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford, p. 1463.
Review of English Studies, November, 1995, Cedric Watts, review of Appropriating Shakespeare, p. 563.
Science, December 7, 1984, B.J.T. Dobbs, review of Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, p. 1185.
Shakespeare Newsletter, summer, 2002, Michael P. Jensen, “Talking Books with: Brian Vickers,” p. 35; fall, 2008, Grace Tiffany, “A Lover’s Complaint: Shakespeare’s or Not?,” p. 71.
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, fall, 2004, James Brookes, “Fixing an Academic Fiasco,” p. 3.
Spectator, May 28, 2016, Jonathan Bate, “Shakespeare’s Crowning Glory,” p. 41.
ONLINE
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (September 6, 2016), Holger S. Syme, review of One King Lear.
New York Times Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (September 2, 2003), William S. Niederkorn, review of Shakespeare, Co-Author.
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (May 2, 2016), Clarisse Loughrey, review of One King Lear.*
Shakespearean scholars clash over 'gay' bard
Sir Brian Vickers, a visiting professor at University College London, provoked his fellow academics by raising the question of Shakespeare’s sexuality
William Shakespeare Photo: ALAMY
By Keith Perry
12:25AM GMT 27 Nov 2014
An argument has broken out between some of the world’s most distinguished Shakespearean scholars about whether the playwright was gay.
Sir Brian Vickers, a visiting professor at University College London, provoked his fellow academics by raising the question of Shakespeare’s sexuality, claiming that his sonnets gave no clues to his love life.
His first letter asserted that a Times Literary Supplement book review was wrong to state that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 appears in a “primarily homosexual context”.
He wrote that it was an “anachronistic assumption” because Shakespeare was using a form of rhetoric that allowed men to express love without implying sexual attraction.
He also declared that any attempt to find biographical information in the sonnets was doomed to failure because Shakespeare was a professional writing under the identity of a “poet-persona”.
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Fellow scholars including Stanley Wells, chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, have accused Sir Brian of promoting “one of the great fallacies of modern Shakespeare criticism”.
The first to reply was Arthur Freeman, a scholar who described himself as a “friendly acquaintance” of Sir Brian before accusing him of introducing “presuppositions that many of us would question, if not reject out of hand”.
“I cannot think of any responsible editor ... who would dismiss the premise of homosexual, as well as heterosexual passion pervading [the sonnets],” Mr Freeman wrote.
He said that no one questioned Keats’s devotion to Fanny Brawne or Byron's “inconstant passion” for the subjects of his poetry.
“Why should Shakespeare alone be thought so committed to the ‘negative capability’ of his dramatic craft that all his most personal writings are treated as potentially artificial?
“And even if we insist on regarding the sonnets, wholly or in part, as a kind of long-term dramatic narrative ... why on earth would Shakespeare choose so often to impersonate a pathetically ageing, balding, lame and vulnerable bisexual suitor, abjectly whingeing about rejection and betrayal — unless the self-humiliation that surfaces again and again through these particulars were both genuine and cathartic?”
Professor Wells also took Sir Brian to task, noting that Shakespeare used at least one sonnet to woo Anne Hathaway. “When a poet whose name is William writes poems of anguished and unabashed sexual frankness which pun on the word ‘will’ — 13 times in [Sonnet] No 135 ... it is not unreasonable to conclude that he may be writing from the depths of his own experience.”
Sir Brian conceded that he could not stop people speculating. “Thought is free. But if you fix these codes and then say that his 126 poems are like this, then people stop reading them as poems. They read them as biographical documents, looking for imputed sexuality.”
He said there was “no bad blood” but has written a second letter that mocks Professor Wells for claiming too much insight into Shakespeare’s motives. “Such figments of the critic’s imagination not only produce quantities of waste paper but ... are inimical to the proper reading of poetry,” he wrote.
Sir Brian Vickers is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
The One King Lear
Brian Vickers
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$45.00 • £30.00 • €35.00
ISBN 9780674504844
Publication: April 2016
King Lear exists in two different texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Because each supplies passages missing in the other, for over 200 years editors combined the two to form a single text, the basis for all modern productions. Then in the 1980s a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represent different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare revised his play in light of theatrical performance. The two-text theory has since hardened into orthodoxy. Now for the first time in a book-length argument, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars challenges the two-text theory. At stake is the way Shakespeare’s greatest play is read and performed.
Sir Brian Vickers demonstrates that the cuts in the Quarto were in fact carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period, and printers counted the number of lines or words in a manuscript before ordering their supply. As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists claim that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. These cuts were likely made by the theater company to speed up the action. Vickers includes responses to the revisionist theory made by leading literary scholars, who show that the Folio cuts damage the play’s moral and emotional structure and are impracticable on the stage.
Shakespeare, Co-Author
A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays
Brian Vickers
Provides a detailed evaluation of the claims made for Shakespeare's co-authorship of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
Examines the processes of collaboration and the methods used in authorship studies since the early nineteenth century.
Identifies and summarizes a coherent tradition in attribution work on Shakespeare.
Sir Brian William Vickers, FBA (born 1937) is a British academic, now Emeritus Professor at ETH Zurich. He is known for his work on the history of rhetoric, Shakespeare, John Ford, and Francis Bacon. He joined the English Department at University College, London as a visiting professor in 2012.
Contents
1 Life
2 Works
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
Life
He was born in Cardiff, educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, London and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1962 with a Double First in English, winning both the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship and the Harness Shakespeare Essay Prize. He was awarded a Cambridge doctorate in 1967, and taught there until 1972. In that year he became Professor Ordinarius at ETH Zurich.
He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1998 (Corresponding, Ordinary Fellow from 2003)[1] and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London since 2004. He was knighted for services to literary scholarship in the New Year Honours of 2008.[2] He is the General Editor of an old-spelling edition of the Complete Works of John Ford, published by Oxford University Press.
Works
(ed.) The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie (1967)
Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (1968)
The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (1968)
The World of Jonathan Swift: essays for the tercentenary (1968)
(ed.) Essential articles for the study of Francis Bacon (1968)
(ed.) Seventeenth-century Prose: an anthology (1969)
Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (1970)
Towards Greek Tragedy: drama, myth, society (1973)
(ed.) Shakespeare; the critical heritage (six volumes, 1974–81)
Francis Bacon (1978)
Frances Yates and the Writing of History (1979)
Shakespeare's Hypocrites (1979)
Rhetorical and Anti-rhetorical Tropes : on writing the history of elocution (1981)
(ed.) Shakespeare: Coriolanus (1981)
(ed.) Rhetoric Revalued: papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (1982)
Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance (1983)
Epideictic rhetoric in Galileo's "Dialogo" (1983)
(ed.) Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (1984)
Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: language change in the 17th and 18th centuries (1985)
Public and Private Life in the Seventeenth Century: the Mackenzie-Evelyn debate (1986)
English Science, Bacon to Newton (1987)
In Defence of Rhetoric (1988)
Returning to Shakespeare (1989)
"Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: the ambivalence of otium". Renaissance Studies. Society for Renaissance Studies. 4 (1): 1–37. 1990. doi:10.1111/j.1477-4658.1990.tb00408.x. eISSN 1477-4658.
Arbeit, Musse, Meditation : Studies in the Vita activa and Vita contemplativa (1991)
Appropriating Shakespeare: contemporary critical quarrels (1993)
(ed.) The history of the reign of King Henry VII and selected works by Francis Bacon (1998)
(ed.) The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral by Francis Bacon (1999)
(ed.) English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999)
Shakespeare, Co-author: a historical study of the five collaborative plays (2002)
(ed.) Francis Bacon, The Major Works: [including New Atlantis and the Essays] (2002)
Counterfeiting Shakespeare: evidence, authorship, and John Ford's Funerall elegye (2002)
(ed. with William Baker) The Merchant of Venice (2005)
Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (2007)
The One King Lear (2016)
English professor's 500-plus tweetstorm about 'King Lear' is the literary community’s hottest beef
by Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Jun 8, 2016, 7:19pm EDT
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Photo by Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images
Scene: The internet
Enter Holger Schott Syme, associate professor of English, chair of the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto-Mississauga, and Twitter user with 1,135 followers.
Will be live tweeting my reading of SIR’s _The One King Lear_. My brain’s likely to melt if I don’t let off a steady flow of steam. #vickers
— Holger Syme (@literasyme) May 10, 2016
And like the three witches in Macbeth, his next tweet offers a glimpse into the future.
Oh boy. This is going to take a while. #1Lear
— Holger Syme (@literasyme) May 11, 2016
Thus began Professor Syme's truly epic takedown of Sir Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear, a recently published work of Shakespearean criticism that argues that the two existing texts of Lear, the 1608 Quarto and the 1623 Folio, should be combined in one version.
Now, I know what you're going to say. Balderdash! The 1623 Folio is a distinct work and the very idea of combining it with the 1608 Folio is enough to make my monocle shatter! Well, apparently Syme agrees, because he has spent the next three weeks live-tweeting his criticisms of the book. And by his own admission, "It turned into a bit of an all-consuming exercise."
As it stands now, Syme's tweetstorm has stretched well beyond 500 tweets, and has recently grown to include his scathing responses to Vickers's rebuttal. This is how Vickers describes Syme to the Times Higher Education: "[H]e comes across as an internet troll, speciality: character assassination by 500 tweets." Syme's response? More tweets, naturally.
Sir’s claim that my tweets "trivialis[e] literary criticism" may well be be true, but is entirely beside the point. #1Lear
— Holger Syme (@literasyme) June 6, 2016
Before you close this tab, thinking to yourself, Did I even read King Lear? Is that the one where the dude's head turns into a donkey? Keep in mind, this is another example of how the internet, and social media specifically, has democratized speech. Back in the day, Syme likely would have penned a letter to the Times Literary Supplement taking Vickers to task for all his alleged "misrepresentations and inconsistencies," and the whole thing would have amounted to a faint fart in an empty theater.
But why bother letting someone else edit and publish your tirade, when Twitter allows you to do it in bitesize chunks for an audience that could ballon from a thousand to a million? And then the whole world gets a chance to learn a little bit about Shakespeare's Folios while chuckling to themselves about the idea of two stuffy white guys flaming each other online.
To be or not to be-that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
Who was that, Drake? No wait, his was: "trigger fingers turn to Twitter fingers."
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Syme's tweetstorm is probably the world's longest act of tweeted criticism. I'm sure my colleagues in the literary press would agree. Move over, Kanye and Wiz. Twitter's got some new bad boys.
Prof Sir Brian Vickers
Profile
Publications
Prof Sir Brian Vickers
Contacts
b.vickers@ucl.ac.uk
Appointments
Visiting Professor
Dept of English Lang & Literature
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
Joined UCL
2012-01-01
Shakespeare's crowning glory
Jonathan Bate
331.9796 (May 28, 2016): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
The One King Lear
by Sir Brian Vickers
Harvard University Press, 30 [pounds sterling], pp. 387, ISBN 9780674504844
In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts of the plays preserved by his fellow actors in the posthumously published First Folio of his Comedies, Histories & Tragedies and those that had been published in the playwright's lifetime in the cheap pocket editions, analogous to modern paperbacks, known in the trade as Quartos.
In the case of King Lear, the subject of Sir Brian Vickers's new book, the Quarto of 1608 is strikingly different from the Folio of 1623. The Quarto has nearly 300 lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has over 100 lines that are not in the Quarto; there are more than 800 verbal variants in the parts of the play that the two texts share. For a long time, the standard editorial response to this difficulty was to treat the Quarto as a 'memorial reconstruction' by actors--a phenomenon that accounts for the First Quarto of Hamlet, which includes the immortal and presumably half-remembered line 'To be or not to be, ay, there's the point.' This was, however, a difficult position to maintain because Quarto Lear, although corrupt in many places, does not have the usual characteristics of memorial reconstruction.
In the 1970s the scholar Peter Blayney proved decisively by means of meticulous and highly technical bibliographic investigation that Quarto Lear was not a bad text based on actors' memories but an authoritative one, almost certainly deriving from Shakespeare's own holograph. The poor quality of the text was the result of the personnel in the printing shop being unused to drama. Thus the fact that much of Shakespeare's verse was set as prose was due to the printer running out of the blocks that were needed to fill in the margins when setting verse. Blayney and a group of other scholars concluded that both Quarto and Folio texts were authentically Shakespearean. The substantial differences between them were to be explained by revision.
That plays change in the course of their stage life is not exactly news. Anyone who works in the theatre will tell you that. The editors of the 1986 OUP Shakespeare accordingly decided it would be worth illustrating the evolution of the text of King Lear by printing both the Quarto and the Folio versions. It was a shame that they chose sequential as opposed to parallel texts, which would have made comparison much easier, but the exercise was a valuable one, stimulating a wealth of interesting scholarly debate and challenging students to question their assumptions about the singularity of great literary works.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Now, though, Sir Brian Vickers rides into the lists with the intention of knocking the Oxford team off their chargers. There is, he announces, just one King Lear. He argues that the omissions in the Quarto were abridgements carried out by the printer because he was short of paper (which was expensive) and that those in the Folio were cack-handed actors' cuts. The fons et origo, he concludes, was a single Shakespearean manuscript, so the right approach is the traditional one of conflating Quarto and Folio to reconstruct the lost original. The two-text Oxford school can, like Lear's Fool, go hang.
Vickers may well be right that the Folio revision of King Lear was not a single, carefully crafted intervention by Shakespeare himself. The evolutionary nature of all theatre scripts would suggest that the changes are far more likely to have been gradual accretions over the years, some purposeful and others haphazard. But he is unnecessarily dismissive of what he calls the 'ill-judged' Folio text: it comes with the imprimatur of the actors who knew and loved Shakespeare, and it crystallises a moment in the evolving stage life of what Vickers calls Shakespeare's 'greatest pay' (I assume that is a misprint for 'play', unless he has discovered some hitherto unknown box-office returns).
Folio Shakespeare offers a constant reminder of the collaborative nature of theatre, just as the Oxford school of editors worked as a team. But Vickers is not a team player. Over the past decade he has published a stream of books and articles arguing that all sorts of new ideas about the attribution of Shakespearean or possibly partially Shakespearean texts are wrong, and only he is right.
Vickers gained his reputation with some splendid books on the power of Renaissance rhetoric. But where Shakespearean rhetoric is all plenitude and wit, Vickers has, in the manner of certain other Elizabethans such as 'snarling John Marston', locked himself into the trope of vituperatio. He relishes the sneer and the jeer, is a master of the lofty dismissal and the throwing up of rhetorical hands in mock incredulity at the sheer stupidity of the younger generation of textual scholars and the gullibility of those older peers, such as Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Institute, who have been taken in by their newfangled theories.
The polemical monograph, like the unremittingly barbed review, ought to be a young man's game. It's a sign of male insecurity, like revving a car at the lights. Few women feel the need to write such things. And when men approaching the age of King Lear do so, there is usually some sadness or bitterness or, to use the proper Shakespearean phrase, 'ancient grudge' lurking in the background. I have no idea what that may be in Vickers's case, but there can be no doubting his insecurity.
Many historians and a handful of literary scholars have been knighted for their work but, as far as I am aware, Sir Brian is the only one to parade his knighthood on his title page instead of confining it to its due place in the blurb. Mind you, Shakespeare did something similar: King Lear is the one Quarto to announce the status of gentleman that its author purchased in order to restore the honour of his family name: it is attributed to Master William Shakespeare.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bate, Jonathan. "Shakespeare's crowning glory." Spectator, 28 May 2016, p. 41. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453494667&it=r&asid=c80932903785a64985acd109b1551e89. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453494667
English Renaissance Literary Criticism
53.2 (Summer 2000): p616.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Vickers Brian, ed. English Renaissance Literary Criticism.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1999. xv + 655 pp. index. $95. ISBN: 0-19-818679-7.
This collection of Renaissance literary criticism from 1531 to 1675 includes the famous, the little-known, and the never-before-printed, and provides in its introduction a clear and comprehensive overview of differences in Renaissance and modern approaches to literary discussion. Included in that introduction are sections on prescriptive and descriptive criticism, rhetoric and poetics, originality and imitation, criteria of correctness, and the defence of literature. Primary text titles are presented in old spelling, but the texts themselves are modernized in spelling and punctuation in deference to general readers. All selections are annotated: classical and other sources are identified and translations for Greek, Latin, and Italian texts are provided.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"English Renaissance Literary Criticism." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2, 2000, p. 616. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA65286022&it=r&asid=80d0ded506d9b099a403badcc8131aa9. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A65286022
"Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye
David Bevington
57.1 (Spring 2004): p382.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Brian Vickers. "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxviii + 568 pp. index. tbls. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-521-77243-5.
By now, the scholarly world and a sizable reading public are well aware that Donald Foster has recanted his claim, originally put forth in 1989, that Shakespeare was the likely author of the Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter. He did so (SHAKSPER, the online discussion group, 13 June 2002), in response to an article appearing in The Review of English Studies in its May 2002 issue by Gilles D. Monsarrat, Professor of Languages at the University of Burgundy, in Dijon, France, arguing successfully that the Elegy bore marked resemblances to John Ford Christ's Bloody Sweat and The Golden Mean, both published in 1613. Yet Monsarrat was not the first to stake out a claim for Ford; Richard J. Kennedy, a well-known writer of children's books and something of an amateur scholar, had proposed the Ford connection (on SHAKSPER, between 1 March and 13 May 1996; see also Patrick Gillespie's contributions on 10 July and 9 August, w.w.w.shaksper.net), and so had Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, applying their computerized stylometry to material supplied them by Brian Vickers ("Smoking Guns and Silver Bullets. Could John Ford Have Written the Funeral Elegye?," LLC, 16:205-32). Vickers announced the imminent publication of their essay, and that of Monsarrat, in a letter to the TLS.
After a series of impressive successes with his Shaxicon, and his much-publicized identification of Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors when that author was still denying his having written it, Foster thus admitted defeat on this occasion. He had dared the scholarly world to answer him in his own method, using the technical means available through computer-driven analysis rather than simply assert that the poem didn't "sound" like Shakespeare. He pointed his finger at some British scholars particularly when he said this, and perhaps justifiably so; some objections to Foster's claim were based on subjective criteria. There matters stood for a while, pitting British literary sensibilities against American technological know-how. No one thought much of the poem, but Foster's point remained to be answered: is there a flaw in his analytical method? The implications for further research in determination of authorship by electronic means were plain for all to see, and applied also to the poem "Shall I die?" for which Gary Taylor advanced the claim of Shakespeare's authorship in preparing, with Stanley Wells, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, The Complete Works for the Oxford Shakespeare in 1986.
Into the fray stepped the Elliott/Valenza team and then Brian Vickers, a scholar brilliantly suited in intellectual acumen and feisty temperament for such a controversy. His book is dauntingly long and laden with tables; it is not for the weak of heart. His chapter 9 on verbal parallels between the Funeral Elegy and Ford's works turns out to have been anticipated by Gilles Monsarrat; and there were other anticipations, as noted above. Nevertheless, the book as a whole presents considerably more argumentation and evidence. It is a very valuable study, and one that justifies its length and attention to technical detail by its threefold statement of purpose: "to disprove Shakespeare's authorship of 'Shall I die?' and A Funerall Elegye; to prove Ford's authorship of the latter; and to give a full demonstration of the methodology used in modern authorship studies" (xviii).
All three tasks require acute attention to textual matters and to critical interpretation. Vickers's argument goes into considerably more detail than does Monsarrat's, and is also considerably more intemperate. Both Monsarrat and Vickers had worked independently on Ford for some time (Monsarrat having suspected Ford's authorship as early as 1989), and Vickers's achievement should not be discounted because it had the unlucky timing to appear shortly after Monsarrat's Review of English Studies article. Instead, their joint achievement confirms a seeming truth with strength in numbers. To an impressive extent, the conclusions of these two scholars concur and are based on similar kinds of argument and evidence. Perhaps it is this concurrence of critical opinion that persuaded Foster that the jig was up; he did not have Vickers's book in hand when he conceded defeat, but he evidently sensed what was coming.
Vickers's taste for the acerbic and his manifest dismay at the work of Taylor and Foster (not to mention the editors like myself who included one or both of these poems in recent editions of the Complete Works) is evident, for example, in the title of Vickers's substantial prologue, "Gary Taylor finds a poem." The tone is dryly ironic, but Vickers is right, of course. Most of us who saw the London Sunday Times trumpeting the "discovery" of a new Shakespeare poem by Gary Taylor in 1985 were aware that the poem "Shall I die?" had long been known to Shakespeare scholars, who had nonetheless discounted the attribution of the poem to "William Shakespeare" in Rawlinson poet. MS. 160 by the unknown scribe who had compiled this miscellany. Taylor, we thought, hadn't much going for him other than a nose for publicity and the chutzpah to assert Shakespeare's authorship with a certainty bordering on contempt for those who thought otherwise: "this poem belongs to Shakespeare's canon and, unless somebody can dislodge it, it will stay there" (New York Times, 25 December 1985, A 40, quoted by Vickers, 3). Still, who had the tenacity and the know-how to do the dislodging?
Now Brian Vickers has bravely volunteered to do so, in a bravura philippic that chiefly consists in an attack on Taylor. Vickers reviews and supports the contentions of Muriel Bradbrook, Peter Beal, and others who complained of the poem's notable lack of thematic unity. He makes good use of George Wright's metrical analysis of the poem's asymptomatic choice of an English stress-equivalent of the Latin cretic measure, and of Tom Pendleton's demonstration of the poem's profoundly un-Shakespearean language. He takes Taylor to task for deploring aesthetic standards and then using them for his own purposes. He argues that Taylor's attempts to resuscitate the poem by emendation betray a failure to understand the poem's poetic idiom. Vickers's language is frankly polemical. "Taylor's ability to ignore all the opposite evidence is breathtaking." "This is an extraordinarily specious sequence of argument." "Taylor's response to his critics was deeply unsatisfactory" (48-49). Vickers deplores the uses of the Oxford publishing name to legitimate "Shall I die?" under the category of "Various Poems" without even conceding that they might be assigned as "Doubtful Ascriptions." He is, if anything, even more unhappy with the decision of the Norton editors and publishing company to perpetuate Taylor's attribution "without any apparent attempt at an independent, critical evaluation" (52). "The whole misguided identification of this mediocre Petrarchan poem as a work of Shakespeare reaches its lowest point here" (53).
Having shown that he is not a man to pull his punches, if any of us doubted that fact, Vickers wades into the Elegye controversy with manifest relish, and, be it said, with remarkable success. In this major portion of the book, Vickers capitalizes on the advantage of a stronger argument than with "Shall I die?" There he refutes Taylor, with verve and polemical skill, but it is mostly a negative argument (though positively he does show how the poem belongs to a kind of Petrarchan genre that dates it 1610-20, thus refuting Taylor's mid-1590s date). In the larger portion of the book, Vickers has the stronger positive argument that he has found another, more persuasive candidate for author. This stratagem gives added conviction to his polemic, for he is able to argue how Foster's deficiency in the use of statistics arises from the inadequate scope of his comparison. The daunting statistics in Foster's 1989 monograph, claiming to be advanced with a consideration of "all possible contrary evidence," and thus arriving at factors in the Elegy that "are found nowhere but in Shakespeare" (Foster, Elegy by W.S. A Study in Attribution, 1989, 80, quoted by Vickers, 189) are vulnerable to a demonstration that the factors in question are indeed to be found in the writings of John Ford.
Vickers also takes Foster to task on literary and stylistic grounds. He shows, for example, how Foster bases part of his argument on the presence in the Elegy of the rhetorical figure of hendiadys. Foster identifies ten certain instances and seven others that "at least verge on hendiadys" (Foster, 129), and argues for this as characteristically Shakespearean. Apart from the fact that hendiadys is a figure widely dispersed in early modern texts, Vickers asserts that in the Elegy we find at most two or three, "depending on the reader's charity" (191). One suspects that he is right to regard hendiadys as hardly a useful distinguishing marker. This is, at any rate, only one of a considerable number of telling objections to Foster's method. A more glaring instance is in Foster's analysis of compound words (194). The point here is that Vickers attacks Foster on his own ground, rather than deploring the Elegy's uninspired language or its focus on the consolations of the Christian afterlife. Vickers is not afraid to advance critical appraisals also: like others, he finds the repetitions in the poem un-Shakespearean, and dismisses as sheer fantasy Foster's attempt to see in the poem any biographical connection to Shakespeare. Vickers finds the religiosity of the poem decidedly un-Shakespearean in its pious moralizing about violent death as no proof of a wasted life (218-19). Like MacDonald Jackson, Vickers points to the highly abstract diction of the Elegy. He bolsters his point with tables of Latinate words, showing how the frequency of such diction in the poem is substantially greater than in Shakespeare's late plays. So, too, with four-syllable words like "apprehension" or "executioner." He compares pleonastic "do" forms in the Elegy with Shakespeare's texts, finding a marked preference for such locutions in the poem. Vickers has taken the fight to the enemy, then, by tabulating matters like those on which Foster's case had rested.
The structure of Vickers's argument is indeed brilliant as it moves from refutation to confirmation. The innovative historian of rhetoric displays how masterfully he can put the methodology of rhetorical persuasion to his own use. The book is thus a tour de force of considerable beauty. It is also a very useful guide for those wishing to do studies in attribution. Vickers's epilogue makes for disturbing reading to anyone who cares about the ethics of scholarship and authorial attribution. Warning: one has to work very hard at this. One has to be very learned and smart. Vickers is both, and thereby earns his right to be dismissive of the work of some other researchers. P.S.: I have taken the Elegy out of the fifth edition of the Complete Works. I was skeptical all along, and tried to say so, but I included it as a subject of what seemed a fruitful controversy of authorship. That controversy now appears to be settled.
DAVID BEVINGTON
University of Chicago
Bevington, David
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bevington, David. "'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2004, p. 382+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA115270612&it=r&asid=2fafaaa1528b4cb6839e1ab44a0a8e73. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A115270612
Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays
Linda Anderson
57.2 (Summer 2004): p741.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Brian Vickers. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xviii + 558 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $95. ISBN: 0-19-925653-5.
Brian Vickers's stated aim is to explore and expand our knowledge of Shakespeare's collaboration with other dramatists; he analyzes five plays that he and other critics--but by no means all editors--identify as coauthored: Titus Andronicus (with George Peele), Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (with George Wilkins), and Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both with John Fletcher). Although, inevitably, some of his arguments and pieces of evidence are more convincing than others, overall he makes his case, and it will be an obdurate reader indeed who is not persuaded.
Such readers, according to Vickers, have not been lacking among the ranks of Shakespearean critics. In his first chapter, he takes to task those editors who fail to consider arguments for Shakespeare as a coauthor, given how common a procedure collaboration was among early modern dramatists. Vickers then proceeds to discuss various methods of identifying authors, including verse tests, parallel passages, vocabulary, linguistic preferences, function words, statistics and stylometry, and studies of the connections among linguistic change, education, and social class. He is admirably skeptical of each method, and offers examples of badly done studies, as well as good ones. He argues, convincingly, for the use of multiple methods; when different approaches lead to the same conclusion, the case is far stronger than when an investigator relies on a single method.
Vickers maintains that such strong cases have been established for the five plays he discusses in detail. (He also discusses, more briefly, Sir Thomas More.) For each play, he discusses the study of its authorship chronologically, giving credit to critics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who were often the first to recognize a second hand in plays originally attributed solely to Shakespeare. He both presents the arguments and data developed by earlier critics and offers his own analyses and evidence. Throughout, Vickers is critical of "conservators," those who refuse to acknowledge the existence of coauthors, whom he accuses of ignoring the frequently reiterated evidence of collaboration in these plays. In his final chapter, Vickers discusses how Shakespeare and his coauthors coordinated (and failed to coordinate) the plots and characters of their plays; his discussion produces yet more evidence of collaboration.
Although Vickers is an extremely engaging writer, some of the book's arguments can be daunting for those unsophisticated about statistics. Particularly abstruse are the accounts of Ants Oras's analyses of "pause patterns" in Elizabethan drama (to which methodology Vickers devotes an appendix), and Marina Tarlinskaja's studies of stresses in blank verse lines. Even Vickers admits that Tarlinskaja's discussion can be "highly technical," and he notes that "Oras and Tarlinskaja raised the study of Shakespeare's metrics to an altogether higher level of complexity" (374). While Shakespeareans, by and large, are attracted to complexity, they generally don't have to deal with it in numerical forms. Although these discussions are accompanied by numerous tables (there are 36 in chapter 6 alone), they are likely to prove heavy going for anyone whose mathematical endeavors in recent years have been limited to calculating students' grades.
Vickers, however, can hardly be held accountable for his readers' ignorance, and the remainder of the book is as entertaining as it is informative. In the book's second appendix, "Abolishing the Author? Theory versus History," one feels that Vickers enjoys demolishing Michel Foucault's suggestion that "the author" and authorial ownership of literary works are comparatively modern "constructs." In an impressive display of scholarship, Vickers demonstrates through numerous examples that the concept of the author existed throughout both antiquity and the Renaissance; simultaneously, he castigates Foucault for incoherence and failure to consider the historical evidence. He concludes that "Foucault's claim ... can now be seen as constituting myth, not history" (527). No such criticism can be leveled at Vickers's work, controversial as it may be in some circles; it is exemplary in its logic, historical grounding, and inclusiveness, and is certain to be the definitive book on its subject for the foreseeable future.
LINDA ANDERSON
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Anderson, Linda
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anderson, Linda. "Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 2, 2004, p. 741+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA117426286&it=r&asid=b3691aea5161e2c57415fbfd51374d84. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A117426286
Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays
Warren Chernaik
99.4 (Oct. 2004): p1030.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Journals/mlr.html
Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays. By BRIAN VICKERS. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. xviii+ 558 pp. 65 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-19-925653-5.
Shakespeare, Co-Author is an important book, challenging some widely held assumptions about Shakespeare, and it is wholly convincing in its main argument. In its advocacy of multiple authorship of several plays in the Shakespeare canon, Brian Vickers's book is sufficiently persuasive to have made a convert of Jonathan Bate, who in his 1995 Arden edition was dismissive of the view that Titus Andronicus was 'a patched-together collaborative effort' (p. 3), but, in his very favourable TLS review (18 April 2003), now agrees that this early play is the joint effort of Shakespeare and George Peele. The book has its faults: it is too long by about loo pages, and its tone is too often ill-tempered, treating previous critics as unacknowledged heroes or consigning them to outer darkness. Vickers is impatient with uncertainty, the view that a phenomenon may have more than one possible explanation. But Shakespeare, Co-Author is a major achievement, which marshals its evidence very effectively and is likely to have a great influence on later studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Vickers's book is basically a study of five plays: Titus Andronicus, from the beginning of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, Timon of Athens, a problematical work roughly contemporaneous with the great tragedies, and three late plays, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Its argument, proved with massive supporting evidence for each play, is that each of them is the product of collaboration, with George Peele (for Titus), Thomas Middleton (for Timon), George Wilkins (for Pericles), and John Fletcher (for the last two) the co-authors. One might have wished for a similar treatment of z Henry VI, to give a fuller account of collaborative authorship of plays at the outset of Shakespeare's career, to balance the treatment of the Shakespeare-Fletcher partnership near the end of his career. But there are riches here, and one should not cavil.
In some ways, the most valuable part of the book is the introductory section, with its admirable account of collaborative authorship as standard practice in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, as attested in Henslowe's diary and other contemporary sources. Commissions for plays were parcelled out to several contributors, based on 'plots' or brief proposals, with different acts and scenes assigned to different writers, who would work independently. Robert Daborne, who apparently was writing parts of three plays in 1613, along with Massinger, Tourneur, and Field, wrote to Henslowe desperately (a short time later, he and two of his fellow playwrights were languishing in debtors' prison):
Mr Henslowe, you accuse me with the breach of promise: true it is, I promised to bring you the last scene, which, that you may see finished, I sent you the foule sheet, and the fair I was writing, as your man can testify-which, if great business had not prevented, I had this night finished. (p. 29)
Plays written under such constraints, with authors under pressure and rarely consulting as they race to finish their separate scenes, are not likely to be models of unity and coherence. Shakespeare, as Vickers shows, is unusual among the dramatists of his day in the relatively large proportion of single-authored plays in his oeuvre: in contrast, nearly half of Middleton's thirty-odd plays are written with co-authors.
In the critical history of each of the 'Shakespeare' plays, Vickers finds a consistent pattern. In the first phase, a critical hypothesis is advanced, usually in the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that parts of the play are by a second author and that the two authors can be distinguished-significant figures here include James Spedding (1850), Nikolaus Delius (1854-61), E G. Fleay (1869-74), and the somewhat later T. M. Parrott (1919) and H. Dugdale Sykes (1919-24). In the second phase, lasting throughout most of the twentieth century, 'disintegration' is rejected out of hand as somehow unworthy of the sacred name of Shakespeare: this is the position argued in virtually all the standard editions of Shakespeare until the Oxford Shakespeare of 1988. And in the final phase, dating largely from the 1970s, such scholars as MacDonald Jackson, David Lake, Cyrus Hoy, and Jonathan Hope, using sophisticated statistical analysis, have confirmed or refined the hypotheses of the first group, citing linguistic evidence which can be shown to be quantifiable and objective.
Here again one can quarrel with some of the details. There is, for example, a tendency to underestimate the extent to which the criteria of such early critics as Fleay were subjective and evaluative-'good' passages are by Shakespeare, those the critic considers weaker are by Hand B (H. J. Oliver, in the Arden edition of Timon of Athens, calls this 'treating a play like a plum pudding and giving Shakespeare only the plums'). In the discussion of Pericles, more attention might have been paid to the instability of the text, the problems inherent in drawing firm conclusions from a notoriously corrupt Quarto text, with linguistic detail which is as likely to derive from the printer as from the author or authors. But this is a very impressive study, even if some of its conclusions might have been stated in terms of probability rather than certainty.
WARREN CHERNAIK
KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
Chernaik, Warren
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chernaik, Warren. "Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays." The Modern Language Review, vol. 99, no. 4, 2004, p. 1030+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138663024&it=r&asid=248e7fc6482fecbd99669390e655f0b3. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138663024
Review of English Renaissance Literary Criticism
Joseph Tate
7.1 (May 2001):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Matthew Steggle
https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls
Brian Vickers. English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 672pp. ISBN 0 19 818679 7
Joseph Tate
University of Washington
jtate@u.washington.edu
Tate, Joseph. "Review of Brian Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism." Early Modern Literary Studies 7.1/Special Issue 8 (May, 2001): 11.1-11
English Renaissance Literary Criticism seeks to provide, as Vickers writes, "general readers as well as scholars" (xv), with a comprehensive collection of English Renaissance literary criticism. It contains an impressive collection of carefully selected texts and excerpts, both familiar and unfamiliar, that represent what Vickers calls the period's "perfectly coherent theory of literature" (vii). The ultimate goal of the volume, which it achieves with mixed results, is to situate the chosen documents, "in a newly defined historical context" (vii). The anthologizing of Renaissance literary criticism, however, has its own history that can tell us much about how the present volume re-imagines the genealogy of English Renaissance literary criticism. Therefore, before continuing, I turn attention to two anthologies from around 1900 to which Vickers' collection pays tribute.
Vickers' anthology is the first of its kind in nearly a century, as the jacket notes announce, but that is only true if you disregard O. B. Hardison's 1963 anthology English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. Vickers is more intent on remembering two much older anthologies, the first of which is G. Gregory Smith's two- volume Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904). Organized chronologically, as such anthologies are, it begins in 1570 with selected remarks from Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster and ends in the second volume with Samuel Daniel's 1603 pamphlet, A Defense of Rhyme. In between, one finds the likely inclusions of George Puttenham, George Gascoigne and Sir Philip Sidney, along with some relatively obscure and engrossing documents that include excerpts from correspondence between Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, as well as King James VI of Scotland's 1584 treatise on the Reulis and Cautelis to be obseruit and eschewit in Scottis Poesie. The methodology governing Smith's selection criteria seems indiscriminately inclusive at times (his task, as he puts it, is to corral the "inchoate, and to some extent irregular character of Elizabethan criticism" (xiii)), but the near riotous eclecticism produces a volume replete with inexhaustibly interesting texts and excerpts, complete with appendices of additional resources.
Just four years later, Joel Spingarn edited the magisterial three-volume set entitled Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, which surveys the undulating and vast terrain of criticism from 1605 to 1700. Spingarn's method yields a collection more sternly systematic than Smith's. His opening introductory paragraph proclaims that English criticism "has its origins in the Italy of the later Renaissance" (ix). The Italians, with their, "ancient literary heritage," essentially introduced "the England of Sidney's age to the formal study of literature, and English criticism began." With a few commanding rhetorical gestures, he links the formative moment of English criticism with Italian Renaissance humanism and the classical ideals it vigorously pursued, thus simultaneously acknowledging the seventeenth-century context of the criticism and the distant but pervasive pressures exerted by the classical period.
Differences aside, Smith and Spingarn share an astute critical acumen steeped in the period's history, and both in their introductions unfold how contemporary pressures (evident in Puritan invectives and other anti-theatrical tracts) and classical influences of the time shaped the variety of critical opinions. And variety, here, is the operative word, for as Smith states and Spingarn would have agreed, any editor of the period's criticism should be cautioned against making "a too absolute 'composite' out of the variety" (xiii).
However, this is precisely Vickers' mistake: the single most glaring fault of his collection is its attempt to make too absolute a composite out of the expansive heterogeneity of English Renaissance criticism. This approach surfaces in the first lines of the preface where he reveals that his editorial task is the explication of the period's "perfectly coherent theory of literature" (vii). Ascribing to the period (or to any period for that matter) a perfectly coherent theory of literature is questionable. Theory, as so many of us have come to understand, is a monolithic entity. This is just as true then as it is now. Further, promoting a period's theoretical coherence is an unlikely tactic when scholars and general readers alike would be attracted more to a collection that emphasized, or at least acknowledged, the period's "inchoate" nature, as Smith did a century earlier.
Nevertheless, this sort of anachronistic conviction makes the volume stand out among the predictably theorized releases from larger university presses, and it is this conviction that makes Vicker's anthology one of Renaissance literary criticism, and decidedly not one of early modern criticism. For example, returning to the preface, we find that the period not only possessed a perfectly coherent literary theory, but the culture that produced it was a "homogenous" one (vii). As soon as it seemed that E. M. W. Tillyard's work had been forgotten, we hear its perturbed spirit throughout Vickers preface, introduction and other notes.
This posited cultural homogeneity, then, manifests itself in the overbearing presence of men: no women writers find a home in the anthology. Whether or not Vickers consulted the excellent 1995 collection entitled Women Critics 1660- 1820, edited by the Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, one can only guess, but doing so might have prompted a less monotonous table of contents. Willfully unaware of the recent shifts in scholarly interest, Vickers lays claim to an unusual originality when he maintains that the cumulative research of the last fifty years has yielded "a newly defined historical context", that will redefine how we think of the period's criticism. What we now have, Vickers claims, is an increased awareness of the period's reliance on classical rhetorical models in the writing of poetry. This assertion determines the informative, although occasionally unwieldy, fifty-five page introduction and forms the selection criteria for the anthology.
Many scholars, I feel sure, will welcome his careful attention to how the classical rhetoricians Quintillian, Cicero and Horace motivated poetics in the period, but even more scholars, I feel sure, will be puzzled and a bit frustrated by his obvious inattention to the critical debates that have surfaced in the last thirty years, most notably British cultural materialism and American new historicism (not to mention feminism). This attention to classical rhetoric, however, is not at all new, despite his statement to the contrary. Vickers' claims to originality, when compared to Smith and Spingarn, fall flat, and more simply, disappoint given the current climate of scholarly inquiry that is saturated with a theoretical sensibility that Vickers lacks. Vickers' collection also lacks the attention to historical and other issues that defined Smith's and Spingarn's editions: Why are most of the tracts defenses or apologies? How did the Puritan attacks shape these treatises? What made prosody a central concern for these thinkers (evidenced by the failed race to perfect quantitative prosody in English participated in by Spenser, Sidney and others)? In his didactic insistence that the whole of Elizabethan and Jacobean criticism is essentially prescriptive, he forsakes its uniquely descriptive qualities.
The selections that make their way into the anthology are valuable excerpts from invaluable texts (tangentially, I should note, spelling is modernized by Vickers, a practice even Smith and Spingarn eschewed in favor of retaining the eccentric character of Elizabethan spelling). Beginning in 1531 with Sir Thomas Elyot's remarks on the value of poetry in education, the collection ends with Hobbes' comments on epic poetry in 1675. One finds the predictable inclusions: Sidney's Defence, Gascoigne's Notes, Puttenham's The Art of English Poesie, the pamphlet debate between Campion and Daniel, prefaces from Spenser, Chapman and Fletcher, and Jonson's famous tribute to Shakespeare. But, there are some notable absences and some remarkable additions. Excerpts that scholars will not find readily available in other collections come from pre-1600 works and include an extract from Thomas Wilson's rhetorical manual, words from William Baldwin on the poet Collingbourne, and an intriguing passage thought to have been written by Shakespeare from the 1596 play Edward III, a disputable attribution but fascinating nonetheless.
The lamentable absences are more than I can mention here, but they include Thomas Nashe and, most unfortunately, Stephen Gosson. Nashe's The Anatomie of Absurditie (1592) and Strange Newes (1589) are important glimpses of literary practice from which any collection of the period's literary criticism should at least provide excerpts. Despite the fact that Stephen Gosson's Schoole of Abuse (1579) or Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582) did not find their way into Smith's collection, they have much merit as vivid, if caustic, accounts of audience behavior, literary tastes, and the theatre more generally in the period. The value of Gosson's work, too, as one of the impetuses behind Sidney's composition of his defence cannot be underestimated. Likewise, as I noted earlier, the absence of female critics is surprising, especially since Aphra Behn's work contains insightful commentary that has been too long overlooked. Also, given Vickers' proclaimed interest in rhetoric, it might have been a wise choice to include excerpts from the classical treatises themselves, those by Cicero, Quintillian and Horace, the critics most prized by the early modern period. Or perhaps even a translation of Gabriel Harvey's Cambridge lecture, "Ciceronianus", might have been added to exemplify the period's developing adherence to classical rhetoric.
But, presenting a tableau of a period in process and witnessing the birth and death of varying perspectives is not Vickers' aim. Perhaps a future editor of the period's criticism will address that task. Nevertheless, the present collection is valuable as it is. Though it will never replace the still unparalleled compilations of Smith and Spingarn, it will serve their established work well as an idiosyncratic but useful addendum.
Works Cited
Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, ed. Women Critics: 1660-1820. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995.
Hardison, O. B. English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963.
Smith, G. Gregory, ed. Elizabethan Critical Essays. 2 vols. London: Oxford UP, 1904.
Spingarn, Joel E., ed. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908-09.
Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at L.M.Hopkins@shu.ac.uk.
[c] 2001-, Lisa Hopkins (Editor, EMLS)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tate, Joseph. "Review of English Renaissance Literary Criticism." Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2001. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA120917774&it=r&asid=0f6a73820aae005a7add0453f03adb41. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A120917774
Fixing an academic Fiasco
James Brookes
40.4 (Fall 2004): p3.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 Shakespeare Oxford Society
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/
Two academically respected journals have within the past year published highly favorable reviews of Brian Vickers's recent book 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye. The reviews appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly (Hugh Craig) (1) and in Sixteenth Century Journal (John Lee). (2)
Both Craig and Lee offer high praise for the thoroughness and high quality of Vickers's scholarship in disproving the attribution of A Funerall Elegye in Memory of ... William Peeter to Shakespeare and in showing that it is, in fact, the work of John Ford. Combining linguistic and statistical analysis, Vickers successfully demonstrates the methodology of modern authorship studies.
The reviews are of interest to Oxfordians on several counts. First, Oxfordians have dodged a bullet. The refutation of Don Foster's attribution of A Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare refutes what some orthodox scholars (those who deign to consider the Shakespeare authorship issue at all) were happy to seize upon as a "smoking gun" against the Oxfordian hypothesis. In light of Oxford's death in 1604, a valid attribution to Shakespeare would eliminate Oxford as Shakespeare because the elegy was composed for William Peter, who was killed in January 1612 following a quarrel over the sale of a horse. (3) The elegy was entered in the Stationers' Register on 13 February 1612. (4)
Foster's attribution had gained sufficient acceptance within the community of Shakespearian scholars that it appeared (generally prefaced with disclaimers) in the latest Shakespeare editions published by Norton, Addison-Wesley, and Riverside. Foster has since withdrawn his attribution and Lee indicates Colin Burrow's The Poems, published subsequently by Oxford University Press, has omitted A Funerall Elegye. Vickers suggests in his preface (5) that two documents that appeared as his book went into production were instrumental in influencing Foster's capitulation: Hugh Craig's essay in the online journal, Early Modern Literary Studies (6), and Giles Monsarrat's essay in Review of English Studies. (7)
Second, Oxfordians have a hero in this tale. 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare contains a great deal of material describing the course of the debates in the scholarly community. Concerning one aspect of this debate, Vickers notes that Oxfordian Richard Kennedy was the first to raise the possibility that Ford authored the poem. (8) Vickers tells us that Kennedy communicated his views in a posting to the Shakespeare Electronic Conference in March 1996 (9), and that, while Kennedy is an Oxfordian, he "never mentioned the Oxford authorship theory, concentrating all his attention on arguing that the Elegye was not Shakespeare's but Ford's." Foster, however, attempted to discredit Kennedy by pejoratively labeling him as an Oxfordian and arguing that Kennedy had a large stake in rejecting the attribution to Shakespeare. (10)
Perhaps the outcome of the elegy attribution incident offers Oxfordians hope that issues they raise in the future on the Shakespeare authorship question can be debated and resolved on the merits of the evidence without the Stratfordian side bringing in ad hominem arguments.
Third, the favorable acceptance of Vickers's research furnishes Oxfordians with a possible opportunity to employ in their own studies those methods the academic community considers appropriate for a sound analytical approach to research on authorship attribution. Provided the methods were applicable to the specific problem under investigation, doing so would at least eliminate methodology as a basis for criticism. This is not to suggest, however, that Vickers's methods are the only ones capable of producing valid results; other scholars have also produced fine work. In addition, a number of recent papers provide evidence that authorship attribution problems are attracting increasing interest in the academic community. (11) Some of the techniques described in this work may eventually prove to be useful in illuminating the Shakespeare authorship question.
Finally, independent of whether one would enjoy absorbing the details of Vickers's methodology and his relentless assault on Foster's position, most readers will find the extensive epilogue, "The Politics of Attribution," (12) a fascinating description of the failure of the academic community to make an independent scholarly evaluation of Foster's claims. Also, Lee's review cites an additional bonus of general interest: "Lying within 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare is a very helpful introduction to Shakespeare's language and Elizabethan English." (13)
Endnotes
(1) Hugh Craig, review of Vickers 2002, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54:312-314, 2003.
(2) John Lee, review of Vickers 2002, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXXIV/4: 1158-1160.
(3) Brian Vickers, 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye, (Cambridge, 2002), p. 60.
(4) Vickers, p. 59.
(5) Vickers, xxi.
(6) Hugh Craig, 'Common-word frequencies, Shakespeare's style, and the Elegy by W. S.',
(7) Giles D.Monsarrat, A Funeral Elegy: Ford, W. S., and Shakespeare, Review of English Studies, vol. 53, no. 210
(8.) Vickers, p. xix.
(9) Vickers, p. 436.
(10) Vickers, p. 437.
(11) Chance, a journal of the American Statistical Association, devotes its Spring 2003 issue to the subject of authorship attribution (five articles); other examples include Labbe and Labbe, 2001; Yang et al., 2003; Benedetto, Caglioti, and Loreto, 2002; Khmelev and Tweedie, 2001.
(12) Vickers, pp. 422-65.
(13) Lee, p. 1160.
Bibliography
Benedetto, Dario, Emanuele Caglioti, and Vittorio Loreto, Language Trees and Zipping, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 88, No. 4, 28 January, 2002 Chance, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2003
Craig, Hugh, 'Common-word frequencies, Shakespeare's style, and the Elegy by W. S.',
Craig, Hugh, review of Vickers 2002, Shakespeare Quarterly, 54:312-314, 2003
Foster, Donald W., Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution, Newark and London, 1989
Khmelev, Dmitri V. and Fiona J. Tweedie, Using Markov Chains for Identification of Writers, Literary and Linguistics Computing, 16: 299307, 2001
Labbe, C. and D. Labbe, Inter-Textual Distance and Authorship Attribution Corneille and Moliere, Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 8: 213-231, 2001
Lee, John, review of Vickers 2002, Sixteenth Century Journal, XXXIV/4: 1158-1160
Monsarrat, Giles D., A Funeral Elegy: Ford, W. S., and Shakespeare, Review of English Studies, vol. 53, no. 210
Vickers, Brian, 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye, Cambridge, 2002
Yang, Albert C. C. et al., Information Categorization Approach to Literary Authorship Disputes, Physica A, 329: 473483, 2003
Dr. James Brooks recently retired from a 30 year career dealing with national security, including nearly 20 years as a senior executive in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Office of the Director, Program Analysis and Evaluation. His research interests include the use of statistical methods for assessing the correspondence between the markings in Oxford's Bible and references to the Bible in the plays of Shakespeare. Dr. Brooks received a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Irvine.
Brooks, James
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brookes, James. "Fixing an academic Fiasco." Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol. 40, no. 4, 2004, p. 3. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA129810195&it=r&asid=9d8a78b12eaade8553bff460044ed638. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A129810195
Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford
David Bevington
60.4 (Winter 2007): p1463.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 The Renaissance Society of America
http://www.rsa.org/RQ.HTM
Brian Vickers. Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 330 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. bibl. $90. ISBN: 978-0-521-85912-7.
Can Brian Vickers repeat his refutation of a generally accepted assignment of authorship to Shakespeare, as he successfully did with A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter in his "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare (2002)? The case for Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint has aroused little controversy until now, with important exceptions, notably in the analysis of J. W. Mackail (1912; see Vickers, 124-27). The poem was, after all, published in 1609 in the Quarto volume containing Shakespeare's Sonnets. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, ascribed the poem to "William Shake-speare" in its title heading (sig. Kv). To be sure, Thorpe's authority for making such a claim should not be given too much weight: he evidently published the 1609 Quarto without the author's authorization. Still, the poem was never assigned to any other author during Shakespeare's lifetime, and no convincing alternative candidate has been put forth--until, perhaps, now.
To me, Vickers's case against Shakespeare (against Thorpe, really) is stronger than his case in favor of John Davies of Hereford. That, I suppose, is reason enough to consider removing the poem from a Complete Works, but still leaves the poem in limbo. Vickers probably overstates his argument against Thorpe as unscrupulous: Thorpe was, after all, Ben Jonson's publisher from 1605 to 1608. Still, Thorpe seems not to have obtained Shakespeare's authorization to publish the Sonnets (and A Lover's Complaint) in 1609, and the ascription on the title heading of that poem to "William Shake-speare" certainly could have been Thorpe's doing. The puzzling dedication of the Sonnets "To the Only Begetter of These Ensuing Sonnets, Mr W. H.," and the ensuing hope, "All Happiness and That Eternity Promised by Our Ever-living Poet / Wisheth the Well-wishing Adventurer in Setting Forth," signed "T. T.," leave us with no clear sense as to whether Thorpe can be believed in his inclusion of A Lover's Complaint in the 1609 volume, published as it was well after the vogue of the sonnet sequence had had its day. Vickers does rehearse Thorpe's occasional shady dealings, much of this information having been assembled earlier by Colin Burrow.
Vickers's book is wonderfully informative about John Davies of Hereford, and makes a case that we should be more aware of Davies as a writer. He was, as Vickers points out, personally known to many poets of the age. He was a handwriting teacher and tutor to the nobility. He had links to Oxford colleges, to the Donne circle, to the King's Men, and specifically to Shakespeare. He published twelve volumes of poems between 1602 and 1617. He achieved significant status as a religious poet. He was well-known among the witty young men of the Inns of Court. Vickers plentifully allows that Davies was a derivative poet. His argument is essentially that A Lover's Complaint is derivative also, and worthy of the author of The Scourge of Folly and Wits Bedlam. Vickers also sees Davies as influenced by Shakespeare, and this is an inherently more plausible proposition, though the parallels cited again seem to me so commonplace as to make one wonder if Davies could not have absorbed the ideas more generally.
I find myself continually coming to the defense of A Lover's Complaint as I read this book, and no more so than in the matter of womanly virtue. Vickers astutely points out how the young woman in the poem falls in love with her seducer's manly beauty, his smoothness of conversation, and so on, rather than with the bravery, generosity, honesty, and integrity that are set forth in other poems of female complaint by Samuel Daniel and others. But to see the author of the poem as "intent on exposing her superficial value system" is to make a judgment I do not share. Vickers sees the poem as an indictment of "women's frailty" (102). My own response, like that of Edmund Malone, has been to empathize with the young woman of this poem, much as I do with Cressida in Shakespeare's magnificent play. The young woman of the poem is weak, ashamed of herself, distraught about her own moral collapse. The ending of the poem is one long cadence of bitter regret, even if the woman acknowledges that she would gladly do it again. She expresses her shame in a way that I can find no model for in John Davies of Hereford, but that seems to me well-suited to Shakespeare's generosity of spirit and willingness to forgive a person who is truly sorry for what she or he has done. I do not read A Lover's Complaint in an antifeminist spirit. The function of the listener, the old man, is to serve as our agent in listening with compassion. I cannot see that the woman in the poem, "far from remorsefully admitting her guilt, rejects the moral law and celebrates the pursuit of pleasure in libertine terms, making her presentation profoundly unsympathetic" (118). To the contrary, the poem strikes me as an indictment not of womanly frailty but of male thrusting aggression, and that is a stance one finds written all over Shakespeare.
My point here is not to urge my own reading as of superior value but to suggest that a reader's judgment of A Lover's Complaint comes down to one of varied individual responses. The history of criticism of the poem supports that view. I don't know if the poem is really by Shakespeare. I listen carefully to Vickers's detailed observations about the poem's difficult diction; the tendency of Davies to use compound adjectives and verbs; the evidence of rhetoric, metaphor, and verse forms: this is all carefully detailed, so much so as to amount to an impressive technical case in favor of Vickers's argument. The last two chapters especially are forcefully argued with a great plenitude of examples. "Any open-minded reader," writes Vickers, "who takes stock of the large number of instances where John Davies of Hereford uses an identical commonplace phrase to that used by the author of A Lover's Complaint, with the same wording, often in the same grammatical-syntactical construction or position within the verse line, will conclude that the similarities are too great, and too frequent, to be a coincidence" (231). The data are carefully assembled and need to be taken with due seriousness, all the more so in that Vickers's method of assembling complex links is that of his final chapter in "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare, which I find convincing. Vickers is both informative and convincing on the need, in attribution studies, to avoid simplistic word-links and to be wary of the potential phenomenon of intended or unintended plagiarism. I welcome and cherish the opportunity to approach the Shakespeare ascription skeptically. Still, on grounds of metaphor I find it hard to imagine John Davies writing something as splendidly vivid as this: "Oh, father, what a hell of witchcraft lies / In the small orb of one particular tear!" (A Lover's Complaint, 288-89). One can come up with other examples in the poem, whoever the poet may be; but I find nothing of comparable genius in the writings of John Davies. He comes across to me an uncertain candidate.
DAVID BEVINGTON
The University of Chicago
Bevington, David
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bevington, David. "Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 4, 2007, p. 1463+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA172398311&it=r&asid=7c37378dbd07729f8e679519304309f3. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A172398311
Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance
B.J.T. Dobbs
226 (Dec. 7, 1984): p1185.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/
The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries seemed to be a fairly clear-cut phenomenon to 19th- and early 20th-century historians of science. It involved a rational rejection of "superstitutions" such as witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, and magic, as well as a rejection of an outworn Aristotelian philosophy that dealt with words more than things. Those unsatisfactory systems were replaced by modern science: a revived mechanical philosophy and a methodology based on mathematics, reason, and experimentation. Cracks began to appear in the structure of that historical interpretation, however, in the form of disconcerting facts about early scientific heroes: some of Francis Bacon's ideas on induction and empiricism perhaps came from the tradition of natural magic; Johannes Kepler attempted to reform astrology as part of his Copernican reform of astronomy; Isaac Newton left in manuscript some 1,200,000 words from his private study of alchemy. When it also became apparent that general interest in the so-called occult sciences peaked in the Renaissance and early modern period just as the supposedly rational revolution should have been effecting a diminution in the appeal of such subjects, problems with the old interpretation became intense, and a number of historians in recent years have argued that the occult must actually have contributed to the scientific revolution. That thesis in its turn has been criticized as overstated if not totally misconceived. The volume under reviw, in 13 essays of varying length, presents new evidence and new arguments that bear upon these issues, especially upon the question whether "occult" and "scientific" mentalities can be adequately distinguished in Renaissance and early modern Europe.
The reader who expects the answer to that question to be an obvious affirmative may be surprised. Brian Vickers, who not only edited the book but has contributed an introduction and a long essay to his own, argues that they can. Vickers is a relative newcomer to this area of scholarship and brings to the question his skills in linguistic and rhetorical analysis. Two principal points divide the occultists from other thinkers of the period, Vickers says: their sense of words as "real" (opposed to the recognition that words are "signs" that points to something else) and their tendency to treat analogy with identity constitute patterns of thought that make possible the occulist worldview of correspondences (between metals and planets, for example), magical manipulations with words (as in incantation), and so forth. This is a convincing argument, and one that almost divides the personalities involved along expected lines. Ficino, Reuchlin, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the alchemists appear among the occultists, and Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Boyle have the different perceptions of language that characterize the emergent new sciences. Yet the analysis is not percent, for it seems to put J. B. van Helmont has been more often described as a Paracelsian, an alchemist, or a hermeticist; Lotte Mulligan's essay in this volume even cites him as an "extreme example" of "irrationalism" (p. 376).
Other problems arise, as with John Dee. Dee operated a sort of academy for English explorers in the 16th century, teaching them the mathematics useful for navigation. He also wrote a preface to the first English edition of Euclid in which he urged the application of mathematics in all sorts of practical activities. Yet one activity for which he recommended mathematics was "Archemastrie." Nicholas Clulee, in an essay marked by some exciting detective work in tracking down Dee's references, has discovered that "Archmastrie" included a form of divination in which knowledge of past, present, and future might be had by gathering celestial rays in mirrors or other reflecting surfaces, and wisely concludes (p. 65), "The effort to find a dividing line between magic and genuine science--a crossroads where magic either transforms itself into science or is left behind and true science taken up--is, in regard to Dee, mistaken because it pushes a later conceptual distinction between magic and science, involving a narrowed definition of legitimate science, back onto Dee, for whom it is inappropriate."
conversely, persons wholly committed to a study of influences we might see as occult have had rather a scientific approach. In his provocative essay "The scientific status of demonology," Stuart Clark points out that in the period of concern the action of the devil was not considered supernatural in our sense at all, since (for theological reasons having to do with the power of God) he had to work within the natural order of things. He might of course understand and be able to manipulate the natural order better than human beings can, or as the Great Deceiver he might be able to create illusions of things that were really impossible, such as metamorphoses of humans into animal forms. Serious epistemological problems exist in distinguishing what might be the work of the devil from natural magic (not dependent upon demonic agency but having hidden causes unknown to man), or from natural monsters and prodigies such as Bacon recommended for study (and the early Royal Society studied extensively) as being more illuminating than the ordinary course of nature. In attempting to settle the epistemological questions bound up in these distinctions and others Clark sees most demonologists as contributing to scientific discourse--"a debate about the grounds for ordered knowledge of nature and natural causation" (p. 368).
Three essays offer welcome new insights into the perennially fascinating Kepler, two concentrating on the Kepler-Fludd controversy, examined in the 1950's by Wolfgang Pauli. Fludd was the arch-occultist of the early 17th century, and Kepler's modernity seems strained as one realizes that he and Fludd shared many presuppositions in this famous quarrel. But their differences were important, too, and further illuminate the general differences between occult and scientific mentalities. Robert Westman observes in his chapter that Fludd had a "visual epistemology" in which "the world of images mediates between the world of the senses and the world of the intellect" (p. 203). Kepler said Fludd produced "pictures forged from air," but Kepler made pictures too--witness his nestling polyhedra that represent God's archetypal Ideas for the creation of the world. The crucial difference comes from the fact that, while Fludd and Kepler both assigned mataphysical meaning to their visions, Kepler also assigned physical and mathematical meaning to his. In an interesting addendum to the early modern material. Westman suggests that Pauli's work on these pictorial archetypes may have been stimulated in part by the visualization crisis in modern physics.
Fludd thought Kepler was a numerologist, albeit a mistaken one, and since Fludd was one himself he attempted to straighten Kepler out on the matter. Judith Field finds in her essay, however that Kepler knew he was not in that tradition. Kepler had opted for numeri numerati (counted numbers) over numeri numerantes (counting numbers), thus for geometry over arithmetic in music, astrology, and astronomy. He saw himself as heir to Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Proclus rather than Pythagoras, Boethius, Iamblicus, and Porphyry. Since many historians have also seen Kepler as something of a numerologist in his search for "the music of the spheres," Field's work is a significant clarification.
A number of the essays mention epistemology, and, although no author quite makes the point explicit, as a whole the collection presents considerable evidence for an epistemological crisis during the 16th and 17th centuries. What can one know, and how can one know it? Through what human faculties is knowledge to be obtained? Or, since both the senses and the intellect are subject to error, should one rely solely on divine illumination? Mulligan in "'Reason,' 'right reason,' and 'revelation' in mid-seventeenth-century England" has found that these questions cut across all fields--religion and politics as well as the study of nature. Almost everyone called for the use of "right reason," by which each one meant his own idiosyncratic mix of "reason" and "revelation," with none to decide which "right reasons" was really "right." No one knew, and one must be very sensitive to that point in any search for "occult and scientific mentalities" in the Renaissance and early modern period. As Richard Westfall notes in his essay on Newton's alchemy, "A different standard of rationality in the seventeenth century may have encouraged Newton to open himself to the influence of a tradition that appears to us almost as the antithessis of reason" (p. 332). No single factor seems to divide the principal actors in the drama as we would wish, and it may be that we have not yet asked quite the right questions on any of these issues regarding the origins of modern science.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dobbs, B.J.T. "Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance." Science, vol. 226, 1984, p. 1185+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA3552774&it=r&asid=9421255d4d1ac93a5a2dfa376f7661f0. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A3552774
Appropriating Shakespeare: contemporary critical quarrels
103.4 (Winter 1996): p807-15.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Queen's Quarterly
http://info.queensu.ca/quarterly
MARTA STRAZNICKY teaches in the Department of English at Queen's Univeristy.
APPROPRIATING SHAKESPEARE: Contemporary Critical Quarrels. Brian Vickers. Yale University Press, 1993.
EVER since the first publication of Shakespeare's collected plays in 1623, readers and audiences around the globe have, by their seemingly indefatigable book-buying and theatre-going, paid homage to his exceptional literary talent and his keen insight into the human psyche. This much is self-evident. What is not so well known, and consequently less well documented, is the extent to which critics, those highly trained and specialized professional readers, have in fact steered the popular reception of Shakespeare. In our own time, Shakespeare criticism is for the most part situated in the academy, and becomes more and more detached from nonliterary scholars and the non-academic public. And yet the results of contemporary Shakespeare research would be able to help general readers deepen their understanding and appreciation of the plays, if only some mechanism existed for the dissemination of criticism beyond disciplinary and institutional barriers. The following review essay of three critical books on Shakespeare aims to be a small step in this direction.
Brian Vickers' Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels is a broad and detailed critique of contemporary literary theory and the results of its application to Shakespeare's plays. Vickers provides a handy, if biased, summation of the most influential theoretical tenets in contemporary Shakespeare criticism and some pressing objections which almost certainly make this a book destined for the "backlash" category. And while this label in many respects accurately flags the book's contents, it would be premature to dismiss Vickers' work on these grounds. If nothing else, the book offers a timely opportunity to assess the past and future directions of "theory" in Shakespeare studies.
Vickers' central argument is that those schools of Shakespeare criticism that emerged in the wake of 1960s intellectual ferment - namely Deconstructionist, New Historicist, Psychoanalytic, Feminist, and Marxist - do nothing more than "appropriate" Shakespeare's plays to further their own agendas. Unable to read a play "in itself," these critics are compelled "to impose between themselves and it a template, an interpretive model. ... But what that yields, once the reading has been performed, is not the play but the template, illustrated or validated by the play."
Vickers arrives at this fundamental charge by means of two complementary critiques: Part I of the book aims to expose the logical inadequacies of the linguistic theories that inform contemporary Shakespeare criticism, and Part II examines the theory and practice of each school in light of those inadequacies. It must be admitted at once that this is a Herculean effort: in admirably clear and precise language, the book tackles almost every conceivable issue currently at the forefront of literary study, marshalling an impressive array of European linguists and philosophers in defence of its central argument. In essence, Vickers rejects the fundamental tenet of postmodernist literary theory that the referential and communicative function of language is the product of arbitrary relations between words and their referents. Instead, he argues vigorously, though not always convincingly, for a return to the seemingly "common sense" view of language as capable of embodying thought and consciousness, as the product not of systemic relations between signs but of personal intention, and as a medium of determinate and accessible meaning.
While Vickers' wholesale dismissal of "current" literary theory is in many cases ill considered, refusing as it does to grant even a speck of value to the many groundbreaking inquiries that theory has inspired, his critique does raise some key questions regarding methodology in contemporary Shakespeare studies, questions that are prompted by the new critical practices but that have yet to be fully addressed. Is there some minimal proportion of a play that ought to be included in literary interpretation? Is the critic obliged to read with Renaissance linguistic habits in mind, or can a play's language be wrested into the present? How much historical knowledge should inform literary analysis? How exactly do plays and their social contexts relate to one another? What can reasonably be said about a play's relationship to "reality"? What, in short, are the rules of evidence in literary argumentation? While some critics would simply answer "there aren't any," most at least recognize that some arguments are more convincing than others and that this differential suggests the operation of a standard of evidence. Vickers' rejection of theory-inspired Shakespeare criticism rests on his claim that such criticism "distorts" the text, that in its desire to confirm its own preconceptions, it fails to consider matters of historical fact, rhetorical practice, and aesthetic design, oversights which result in readings that misrepresent Shakespeare's plays. Flawed as it is - and I will return to Vickers' own errors - the concept of "distortion" is useful in mapping the unique insights and blindnesses of particular critical studies.
VICTOR KIERNAN'S Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen unwittingly commits nearly every interpretive error identified by Vickers. Best known for his work on modern imperialism and the formation of nation-states, Kiernan has for many years considered culture an important aspect of Marxist historical analysis. The first draft of this book on Shakespeare was written over forty years ago, and Kiernan seems ill acquainted with developments in literary criticism since that time. In fact, he frames his study as a rebuttal of the long-expired New Criticism, particularly its tendency to remove Shakespeare from his times: "It is the possible connecting threads between what Shakespeare wrote and the environment whose air he breathed that are the subject of this study." In traditional Marxist fashion, Kiernan positions Shakespeare within his social and political milieu, finding a veritable web of "connecting threads" between the writings and the seismic historical changes of the late Tudor period. More specifically, Kiernan argues that in the comedies and history plays of the 1590s Shakespeare was writing about contemporary transformations in the social hierarchy and the transition from a monarchic to a republican state, respectively.
Part I of the book is, regrettably, an all-too-brief survey of social, political, theatrical, and biographical material. Kiernan manages to touch on practically every significant historical development of late Tudor England, but the speed with which he sails over many complex and contested issues impairs the "scene-setting" function of these chapters. One would have hoped that as a historian he could have dwelled substantially longer on this material. In Part II, Kiernan moves on to consider Shakespeare's history plays, first by running very briefly over the major thematic interests of individual plays and then by discussing a wide range of "Historical Themes," for instance Monarchy, Feudal Nobility and Politics, Nationalism, Religion, and Women and the Family. Overall, Kiernan finds that in the histories "Shakespeare is surveying a transition from anarchic feudalism to despotic but popular monarchy; it eliminates much evil, but also, as the necessary price, something grand, heroic, which he clearly admires and regrets." This critique of a former political transformation is a paradigm within which Shakespeare explores the political transformation that his own society was experiencing.
A similar argument is made regarding the comedies, to which Kiernan turns after a short excursion into Shakespeare's "Experiments" (Part III), the early tragedies and the non-dramatic poetry. As with the histories, Kiernan mines the individual comedies up to Twelfth Night for thematic content and then discusses "Comedy Themes" such as Wit and Humour, Men and Women, Social Currents, and Affairs of State. Although the comedies differ from the histories in being situated more securely in the present and focused on social as opposed to political order, they reveal the same "dual process" of assessing what parts of the declining order were worth preserving and what was expendable. To his credit, Kiernan assiduously avoids oversimplifying Shakespeare's position, finding in most cases that his characters are compelling literary creations precisely because they embody more than one element of cultural conflict. Shylock, for instance, is perceptively described as a character who has "features both of a protester against social oppression and of a member of the grasping bourgeoisie." Thus, while The Merchant of Venice is in many ways an indictment of a capitalist economy, it also represents the bourgeois subject as victim. A major strength of Kiernan's book is this ability to detect multiple significances in characters, situations, and whole plays.
As is evident from the thematic focus of the study, Kiernan is not primarily interested in performing a literary analysis of the plays, and while this choice of emphasis need not lead to "distorted" readings, Kiernan does in fact impose a questionable template on Shakespeare's work. The many opposing affinities to be found in Shakespeare's plays are read as the first glimmers of the civil war into which England would be thrust some 25 years after Shakespeare's death. Noting that Shakespeare, unlike Milton, did not make his appearance at a moment of "revolutionary upheaval," and so is something of an exception to the rule that great literature normally coincides with watersheds in political history. Kiernan insists nevertheless that "Fractured consciousness in him went with deepening schism in his England." Throughout the book, Kiernan embellishes this point, reading the plays' conflicts again and again as embryonic versions of the historical tumult of the 1640s, and ascribing to Shakespeare the not unfamiliar talent of prophecy. This method of reading literature through future historical events has, ironically, the effect of muting the plays' full range of relations to their own times, the very thing Kiernan set out to study. And while Kiernan is a gifted reader of Shakespeare - his template continually produces fresh insights about a much-studied corpus - the book fails to convince because it never examines its own methodological procedure. Specifically, it does not confront the problem of using literature as historical evidence, and it relies too heavily on the unexamined assumption that Shakespeare speaks directly through his plays. Pace Vickers, what Kiernan's book needs is a theory of relations between authors, literary texts and historical events.
In Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama, Valerie Traub is also guilty of "appropriating" Shakespeare, although she openly acknowledges it. Searching the plays for evidence of how the representation of sexuality is determined by non-erotic aspects of early modern ideology, Traub discovers a bewildering nexus of social and political pressures converging on the seemingly "natural" matter of sex. Her main argument is that sexuality in Shakespeare's plays is always marked by conflicting cultural imperatives: on the one hand, sexual desire is represented as generative and fulfilling; on the other hand, that representation is riddled with anxiety about desire's potential to disturb the social order. The exact balance of positive and negative elements in any single representation of sexuality depends upon the class, gender, family position, and sexual orientation of the character in question, thus revealing that erotic behaviour is invariably represented through the filter of ideology. For example, the inordinate emphasis on female chastity and the horrors associated with independent female reproductive powers in Shakespeare's plays evidence a patriarchal culture in which women's eroticism is perceived as potentially subversive of their prescribed subordination in society.
In the overall shape of her argument, Traub is persuasive. Combining the resources of feminist, psychoanalytic, and historicist approaches, she works through nine of Shakespeare's plays to reconstruct the terms in which eroticism was figured in language by one early modern writer. She is less convincing, however, in the historical sweep she claims for her findings, and this is where the problem of "distortion" surfaces. First, nine plays by a single writer are hardly sufficient evidence for a broad cultural pattern; second, the value of using Shakespeare rather than any other writer or combination of writers to reconstruct this pattern is nowhere defended; and finally, the relationship between literary representation and historical practice is both acknowledged as a theoretical problem and conveniently shelved in the persistent emphasis on discourse. Furthermore, selected details from Shakespeare's plays are marshalled to support the psychoanalytic theory that "sex is never just sex," with the effect that a play's range of significance is impoverished. For example, Traub offers a provocative and insightful reading of Falstaff in the Henry IV plays as a maternal figure whom Hal must reject and overcome if he is to achieve mature heterosexual subjectivity. The evidence for seeing Falstaff as a maternal figure is slim but striking - he does, after all, refer to his belly as a "womb," and in physique and comportment he resembles several of Shakespeare's nurse figures. Still, Hal's rejection of Falstaff is, at the very least, more than part of his progress towards psychological maturity. By foregrounding the psychic aspects of the relationship - an interpretive choice Vickers would characterize as "distortion" - Traub occludes the political issues, such as the critique and rejection of populism, that are also animated in this relationship.
One hastens to add, however, that every interpretive choice inevitably produces a distortion of some kind, and here I would like to begin critiquing Vickers through the considerable achievements of Kiernan's and Traub's "distortions." In contrast to criticism that distorts the text, Vickers advocates criticism that reflects it; that is, criticism that respects the author's conscious intention, that describes the text's linguistic and rhetorical qualities in its own terms, that explains the text's meaning, and that derives its theoretical principles from the text and not from an extraneous source. The task of the critic as Vickers sees it is to recreate the past in its own image, and this is in his view the only way to avoid creating "a partial Shakespeare - seen in part; used for a partisan goal." But what Vickers fails to recognize is that his method produces no less a distortion than any other: his sample reading of Othello, for instance, chooses to focus on the dynamics of Iago's machinations and as a result offers a predictable description of one of the play's actions: "Iago's understanding of how honest people rely on the conventions of truth-telling in communication is so sharp that he can insert himself into them with perfect decorum yet violate them in every respect, in order to fulfil his intentions of deceiving and destroying." I emphasize that this reading is the result of an interpretive choice and that it accounts for but one thread of the play. Simply because Vickers chooses to represent the play in its own terms does not mean that his reading is more valid than any other. In fact, it would seem that he has (deliberately?) overlooked the whole problematic of race relations underlying Iago's rhetorical ploys and the fact that Desdemona figures as the medium through which Iago and Othello deal with one another, elements one might well expect not to have been part of Shakespeare's "conscious" intention. Conversely, while the interpretive frameworks used by Kiernan and Traub in their respective studies have the effect of foregrounding some issues and muting others, their readings do produce genuinely innovative insights, insights to which the plays themselves do not explicitly direct us. It would seem that staying within the terms prescribed by the play for its own analysis amounts to a kind of critical entrapment.
THIS example of Vickers' critical practice illustrates that his own solution to the disintegration he thinks he sees in Shakespeare studies is anything but promising. In fact, its primary impetus is not forward-looking at all but rather regressive, and this is where his attack on the entire project of contemporary literary theory is disappointing. If nothing else, "theory" has taught us to question our own assumptions, to interrogate our methods and consider carefully the extent to which we are implicated in the results of our research. This preoccupation with the need for self-criticism in literary studies can also be found beyond disciplinary and institutional boundaries, most strikingly in the pressure for "accountability" in a wide array of public and private spheres. The possible merging here of critical and societal issues can, I think, be used to shape the evermalleable Shakespeare into forms that are relevant to specialist and non-specialist audiences alike.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Appropriating Shakespeare: contemporary critical quarrels." Queen's Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 4, 1996, pp. 807-15. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA30376117&it=r&asid=8678e334a56913523dc5512821605027. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A30376117
'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's 'Funerall Elegye'
Katherine Duncan-Jones
100.1 (Jan. 2005): p197.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Journals/mlr.html
'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's 'Funerall Elegye'. By BRIAN VICKERS. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press 2002. xxviii+568 pp. 55 [pounds sterling]; $75. ISBN 0-521-77243-5.
In an uncharacteristically brief note, Brian Vickers acknowledges (p. xxi) that this book was overtaken by events. On 12 June 2002 both Donald K Foster and his loyal supporter Richard Abrams used the SHAKSPER website to concede the force of the philological case for John Ford [as author of A Funerall Elegye] presented by Gilles Monsarrat in the latest issue of the Review of English Studies'; Foster also made the handsome admission that Personal opinions cannot stand for evidence, nor can personal rhetoric'. Soon after Foster's capitulation other scholars, led by Stanley Welis, generously welcomed him back to the fold'. Sadly, however, lasting harm has been done, and much time wasted It will take many years for American editions of Shakespeare's collected works containing the Elegye to vanish from library shelves, and unwary students will continue to be misled Harm has also been done to the reputation of American Shakespeare scholarship Should new, and sounder, additions to the Shakespeare canon be proposed, there is a risk that they will not be taken seriously if they emanate from the United States.
Cambridge University Press went ahead with the publication of 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare in September 2002, and Vickers hoped that the book 'may help' Foster to under stand where he went wrong in his own analysis of the language of this dreary poem (p. xxi). This gives the book a target audience of one. Much of it appears to be addressed severely and exclusively to Donald Foster, resembling an over long tutorial note on an essay by a misguided student. The media, who are warned not to get over-excited by Shakespeare 'discoveries' of dubious credentials, are unlikely to mend their ways.
In the aftermath of Foster's retraction, together with Professor Monsarrat's attribution of the Elegye to John Ford, Vickers's book comes across as gratuitous dead-horse-flogging. Part I, a devastatingly thorough demolition both of Foster's scholarly methods and of his use of manipulative rhetoric, at least incorporates, as a preliminary salvo, a 'Prologue' entitled Gary Taylor finds a Poem', in which Vickers (p. 53) dismisses. The whole misguided identification of this mediocre Petrarchan poem'--Shall I die?'--as a lyric by Shakespeare. But Part 1's 259 pages, though locally entertaining, are surely too numerous Vickers makes it exhaustively clear, for instance, that when Foster in 1997 claimed that the Elegye manifested what the distinguished metrical scholar George Wright called the Shakespearian hendiadys', he revealed his own crass misunderstanding of this figure But the case could have been made equally well with fewer examples In Part II, which runs to a mere 158 pages, Vickers sets out evidence, both contextual and stylistic, that suggests that John Ford wrote the poem. And in a relatively concise 43-page epilogue he discusses The Politics of Attribution', focusing his unsparing gaze on the probability that com inertial factors' outweighed the requirement that Taylor's and Foster's respective attributions should be properly assessed Three appendices provide an old spelling text of the all-too-widely available Elegye, a list of verbal parallels between lines in it and in poems by Ford, and an essay on Establishing Ford's Canon'.
In an investigation of such scope we might imagine that no pebble would be unexstained. Nevertheless, there are some remarkable omissions Most notably, Vickers's own 'argument' that the poem was written by Simon Wastell', set out in a long TLS essay on 8 March 1996 and corroborated on 12 April, is not mentioned Again on the SHAKSPER website, Vickers has recently declared that some people erroneously concluded that I was seriously proposing Wastell as author'--more fools us! Given that he often congratulates himself for addressing the Elegye debate rationally, fully, and even-handedly, it would have been honourable to record his own flirtation with Wastell I also feel bound to point out that though my own name appears halls dozen times, Vickers does not mention that in the 1997 Shakespeare Studies article to which he refers I too had a candidate to propose, the Puritan clergyman William Sclater. While the Elegye's verbal and stylistic parallels with Ford are compelling, puzzles remain. Why should a writer so devoted to candour and moral probity as 'W.S.' pass off as his own a poem composed by I. F.? And why should Ford, by 1612 the author of several published poems, claim that he is not a poet and does not expect to write any more poetry? Sclater still merits consideration because of his initials, his West Country residence, his lack of poetic credentials (the poem really is very, very bad), and his cultivation of a patronage network that included a Devon neighbour who was a first cousin of the Elegye's subject, William Peter.
KATHERINE DUNCAN-JONES
SOMERVILLE GOLLEGE, OXFORD
Duncan-Jones, Katherine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. "'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's 'Funerall Elegye'." The Modern Language Review, vol. 100, no. 1, 2005, p. 197+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA138705509&it=r&asid=4d98668fafdb00007c949ad02ffaadf5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A138705509
Recent studies in tudor and stuart drama
Kevin Curran
57.2 (Spring 2017): p427.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Rice University
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/studies_in_english_literature/
Reading one hundred and fifteen books on English Renaissance drama is uniquely exhausting, but it's also a great privilege since it offers a rare opportunity to see the field whole. Although "whole" isn't quite the right word since one is hardly left with the impression of unity or coherence. This makes introducing and framing an essay of this sort difficult. There are a couple of general observations I can make from the outset, though. First, it's been driven home for me that a brilliant, paradigm-shifting book can be produced at any career stage. A number of the studies I found most impressive were first books. Second, there's no one approach or subdiscipline leading our field. Among the books I expect to be particularly influential are studies dealing with book history, queer theory, and the history of ideas, and a number that don't fit into any of our usual critical categories.
Of course, if our field is not dominated by one approach, it is dominated by one author. Some prefatory groans about the predominance of Shakespeare have become standard in this annual review, and I'm happy to join the chorus. But I also think Shakespeare has been an enabler of the diversity of critical perspectives that make our field exceptionally vital. The undeniable marketing benefits of the "Shakespeare" moniker can be especially important when it comes to securing the support of major presses for unorthodox or experimental work. There are plenty of reasons to be cynical about this sort of thing, but there are reasons to be thankful, too. Both as a delivery mechanism for new critical ideas and as a site for public outreach, early modernists are fortunate to have Shakespeare in their corner. I think it's important to acknowledge this even as we remain vigilant of the ways in which an overemphasis on Shakespeare distorts our sense of the history of theater and the culture of performance in the early modern period.
The following discussion considers this year's books under themed subheadings. This is an inevitably reductive approach (it goes without saying that many books could be included in more than one category), but I hope it will make the essay easier for readers to navigate.
TEXTS AND TRANSMISSION
I received a number of books dealing with the texts, and textual cultures, of English Renaissance drama. Collectively, they demonstrate the range of critical uses to which book historical scholarship can be put.
Emma Smith has produced two studies of Shakespeare's First Folio. The first. The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio, explores the planning, printing, and publishing of Shakespeare's 1623 collection with a final chapter on "Early Readers." Pitched for a general readership, the book nevertheless provides a storehouse of information that will be of interest to scholars. Central to the study is the assertion that the First Folio is a document of collaboration and sociality, of the interdependent relationships among playwrights, scribes, compositors, engravers, printers, and financial backers. This is a useful corrective to the more conventional view of the First Folio as a monument to Shakespeare himself and to a distinctly modern notion of authorial subjectivity.
Smith's second book, Shakespeare's First Folio: Four Centuries of an Iconic Book, picks up where The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio leaves off, tracing different ways of interacting with the Folio--owning, reading, forging, acting, collecting, and studying --from the seventeenth century to our own time, and from Europe and America to Africa and Asia. Readers interested in Smith's monographs will also want to consult her edited collection. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's First Folio, which features a solid lineup of essays covering the printing, publishing, reading, buying, and transmission of the 1623 collection.
Like Smith's The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio, Adam G. Hooks's Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography, and the Book Trade views Shakespeare's authorial persona as a product of the collaborative practices of early modern print culture. However, Hooks's project is more targeted than Smith's. He considers how bibliographical work on the book trade can lay the foundation for a new kind of Shakespearean biography, a form of distributed and textually anchored life writing that he calls "bio-bibliography." This shrewd argument gains momentum through a series of careful examinations of bookshops and printing houses. Here, we encounter long-forgotten individuals who contributed (financially and otherwise) to the creation of Shakespeare the Author. Bio-bibliography, Hooks shows us, isn't about recovering through books a life that exists beyond them; it's about understanding that t he books themselves--material objects that move though complex social and economic environments--are constitutive of that life.
Many scholars will welcome the arrival of Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume's monumental study, The Publication of Plays in London, 1660-1800: Playwrights, Publishers, and the Market, even if much of the material covered falls outside the date range in which most of us work. The opening chapter on "Play Publication before 1660" is too quick to dismiss deservedly influential work by Lukas Erne and Zachary Lesser, but the scholarship presented in subsequent chapters is nothing short of groundbreaking. Addressing basic questions about who published plays, how much they cost, and who bought them, this book provides the first exhaustive, fully analytic account of play publication in London between 1660 and 1800.
Two books that usefully shift the conversation from print to manuscript are James Purkis's Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text and Laura Estill's Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays. Like Hooks, Purkis wants to trade in simple models of authorial agency for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple figures involved in the production of dramatic documents. His third chapter on Thomas Middleton's The Second Maiden's Tragedy is particularly illuminating in this regard. He describes a manuscript that has undergone a complex series of revisions and features at least three distinct hands in addition to the original scribe's. In this document, we find an embodiment of the way plays could evolve out of extended collaborative processes. Conventionally, a manuscript like this might be viewed as an opportunity to get closer to the author-at-work. But, as Purkis points out, it also calls into question the appropriateness of "the author" as an interpretive category. What Purkis finally offers through his painstaking analyses is a persuasive argument about the relevance of manuscript studies to a variety of scholarly debates, from textual editing and theater history to collaboration and attribution studies.
Estill's Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts turns to manuscript evidence not to assess where plays came from, but instead to understand where they went. In her detailed study, Estill traces how early modern playgoers and readers copied extracts of plays and masques into their notebooks. Together, these textual artifacts constitute an often-neglected archive of information about how the verbal component of performance was put to use, intellectually and politically, in seventeenth-century England. Estill shows how plays possessed a degree of assemblage-like volatility only partially accounted for in their lives as theatrical events and printed books. Dramatic Extracts, though certainly highly specialized, is not narrow in either conception or aim. Rather, the book zeroes in on a very specific cultural practice in order to offer an entirely new perspective on how plays make meaning.
This is in some ways opposite in spirit to Brian Vickers's The One "King Lear," which rather than confronting us with a new way of seeing things, asks instead that we accept an old way of seeing things. Arguing vigorously against the widely (though not universally) accepted position that the Quarto and Folio texts of Shakespeare's King Lear constitute distinct and equally authoritative versions of the play, each from a different stage in the process of composition, Vickers insists on the validity of an older premise, that both texts are imperfect versions of a now-lost original: the "one King Leaf' of the title, a complete masterpiece that no sensible playwright would consider revising. Vickers's argument is stern, sometimes righteous, and he invokes both bibliographical and literary evidence to support his position. Not everyone will agree with the way he marshals this evidence. Indeed, reading The One "King Lear," one often gets the impression that the idea of an original masterpiece has an imaginative, and emotional, purchase on Vickers that is much stronger than the textual record itself can bear out. Scholars working on the texts of King Lear will have to reckon with Vickers's study, and they should, but I don't foresee the book leading to a "new consensus" of the sort described in the conclusion.
ECOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENT
Two books on the role of nature and ecology in Shakespeare's writing illustrate some of the different ways in which an ecocritical perspective can be brought to bear on Renaissance drama.
For Tom MacFaul in Shakespeare and the Natural World, Shakespeare's engagement with nature derives primarily from religious habits of thought. MacFaul shows how representations of the natural world in Shakespeare's plays contribute to religious and philosophical debates about the status of material life in the divine scheme. He demonstrates that in early modern England, nature could function as a site for unorthodox speculation about grace and free will. Shakespeare seems always to have connected nature to human creativity (as William Wordsworth would later), and yet he also found in nature a form of relationality that highlighted the limits of human agency. Tracing this paradox, both in Shakespeare's drama and in Renaissance thought, is central to MacFaul's project.
Randall Martin's book, Shakespeare and Ecology, part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series edited by Peter Holland and Stanley Wells, takes a different approach to Shakespeare's engagement with the natural world. For Martin, "ecology" is a term that denotes not only a way of understanding nature as a series of interlinked parts, but also a particular political orientation, one which is roughly similar to our present-day ecological consciousness. Indeed, Martin sees Shakespeare's ecological sensibility as at once firmly embedded in its own historical moment and anticipatory of present-day environmental ethics. The transition from the former (historical context) to the latter (environmental ethics) sometimes feels a bit strained. I'm not fully convinced, for example, that "Mistress Quickly's fuel choice ... would have resonated with Londoners weighing short-term costs and benefits against environmental damage" (p. 3) or that the end of Cymbeline is "suggestive of today's need to merge regional and national interests with multilateral political action to avert global dangers such as rising sea levels and eroding biodiversity" (p. 115). Nevertheless, the work Martin has done reconstructing aspects of Renaissance deforestation, husbandly, and the relationship between militarization and the environment, among many other things, is truly impressive. His book should be consulted by anyone working on environment and ecology in the early modern period.
RELIGIOUS CONTEXTS
Three books on drama and religion stood out for me. David Scott Kastan's A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, based on his Oxford Wells Shakespeare Lectures, does not offer any paradigm-shifting arguments, but it's perhaps the best introduction to the general topic of Shakespeare and religion I've encountered so far. Aimed especially at an undergraduate audience, Kastan combines deep historical learning, careful close reading, and a fast-paced prose style. The book also contains a steady stream of critical wisdom that I think scholars at any level could benefit from. To give just one example, Kastan perceptively reminds us that "[e]ven as religion has been returned to our discussion of early modern drama, we often claim either too little or too much for it, especially when we shift from what characters say to what performance does" (p. 8). Comments like these are easy to pass through only half-noticed because Kastan drops them into the discussion without the stern gravitas typical of academic point making. But as with many of the book's intuitions, it gets at something fundamental to the relationship between drama and religion, and to the critical practices we employ when discussing that relationship.
Brian Walsh's Unsettled Toleration: Religious Difference on the Shakespearean Stage takes a fresh look at the well-established notion that Renaissance plays tend to be religiously polyvocal rather than expressing a single theological or confessional stance. Walsh does this by correlating the infra-Christian conflict represented on stage in plays by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, William Rowley, and others to a specifically Renaissance, and specifically English, practice of toleration. Under this rubric, he shows how plays participate in what he terms, variously, "everyday ecumenicity" and "pragmatic pluralism." I found Walsh to be at his strongest when he was analyzing complex cultural-historical contexts, more so than when he was reading the plays themselves. What makes his book important is the way it expands the critical vocabulary we use to talk about theater and religion.
Finally, Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama by Katherine Steele Brokaw is a meticulously researched, originally conceived study of theater and religion that bridges the disciplinary gap between music and drama and the historical gap between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Brokaw shows that religious music on stage from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century shaped cultural memory and linked the political and liturgical processes of Reformation to the embodied experiences of hearing and seeing. Staging Harmony expertly weaves together knowledge about theatrical practice, religious controversy, music history, and the history of sensation to make an argument that will be of interest to scholars working in all of these fields.
THEATER AND KNOWLEDGE
How did the Renaissance theater make, manage, and use different forms of knowledge? Several books I received address this question.
Andras Kisery's Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England is a painstakingly researched study of something that it's incredibly hard to say something new about: Renaissance drama and politics. But Kisery does it. And he does it, moreover, in a way that manages to be closely engaged with current scholarly debates without feeling either derivative or combative. Kisery is not interested in attributing a certain kind of political orientation to the theater, nor is he interested in the representation of particular political positions or theories in individual plays. Rather, Hamlet's Moment shows through a series of detailed case studies--all of which display a sophisticated knowledge of book history, intellectual history, and literary form--how Renaissance drama around 1600 familiarized English audiences with the emergent notion of politics as a profession. The commercial theater distributed a special form of cultural capital that Kisery terms "political competence."
Readers interested in theater and politics will also learn from Urszula Kizelbach's The Pragmatics of Early Modern Politics: Power and Kingship in Shakespeare's History Plays. The writing in this book is not always up to standard, but the author's use of concepts from linguistic pragmatics can reveal unexpected things about the cultural effects of putting politics on stage. The book reminds us how useful the analytical tools of linguistics can be to the study of Renaissance drama. Such tools tend to be exploited far more in Continental European scholarship than in Anglo-American scholarship.
Over the last twenty years, a number of studies have shown how Renaissance plays drew on the language of economics. Brian Sheerin contributes to this body of work in Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama: Commerce, Poesy, and the Profitable Imagination. His core argument, elegant in its simplicity, is that economic theory, especially the concept of credit, shares with drama a desire to create something out of nothing--to tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie but decides to believe in anyways. From this suggestive starting point, Sheerin delivers five smart readings of plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Jonson.
Katherine Eggert's Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England explores the curious way in which early modern literature sometimes rejects established forms of knowledge in favor of more suspect epistemologies. Eggert's term for this is "disknowledge." She explains, "One sure sign that disknowledge is operating in a text is when bad ideas--or nutty ideas, or simply irrelevant ideas--start to look good" (p. 4). Alchemy serves as the prime example of this throughout the book. When writers like Spenser, John Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish use alchemical tropes, they are practicing a kind of disknowledge, an active pushing-aside of one kind of knowing in favor of another. Locating her study at a cultural moment that falls after humanism's heyday but before the emergence of the new science, Eggert shows how literary disknowledge establishes paradigms for epistemic choice that would eventually become central to the disciplinarity of the late seventeenth century and Enlightenment. Both deeply learned and impressively wide-ranging, Disknowledge will be required reading for anyone interested in the relationship between literature and the history of ideas in the early modern period.
SHAKESPEAREAN AFTERLIVES
If the books discussed in the previous section investigate the kind of thinking Renaissance drama makes possible in its own time, the books discussed in this section focus on the kind of thinking Renaissance drama makes possible in subsequent eras.
Michael Anderegg's beautifully written book, Lincoln and Shakespeare, studies Abraham Lincoln's intellectual devotion to the Bard with particular attention to how he incorporated lessons from the plays into his personal and professional life. Lisa Hopkins's Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare may sound too specialized to appeal to a broad audience of scholars, but in fact the book uncovers a large and diverse world of unexamined Shakespearean influence. Moving with ease between a variety of novels and films, Hopkins investigates the distinct ways in which crime fiction both invokes and ironizes Shakespearean cultural value. The book is written in agile, jargon-free prose and will make a helpful addition to the library of any scholar interested in Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation.
Two superb studies of Shakespeare's modern influence are Andreas Hofele's No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt and Theodore Leinwand's The Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare. Hofele explores the role of Shakespeare in the work of right-wing German intellectuals from the late nineteenth centuiy to the Cold War era. With chapters on Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan George, Ernst Kantorowicz, Joseph Goebbels, Schmitt, and others, Hofele tells a remarkable story about the way Shakespeare provides imaginative resources for some of the most challenging and troubling thought of the modern era. The majority of Shakespeareans will be unfamiliar with the primary sources discussed in this book; Hofele spent long hours working in German archives. But No Hamlets is also very much engaged with current conversations in early modern studies, especially work on political theology and other strands of German theory that have become increasingly influential over the last fifteen to twenty years.
In The Great William, Leinwand is not interested in politics or philosophy, but rather in creative practice. The book includes lively and detailed discussions of seven writers' career-long engagement with Shakespeare: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes. Leinwand captures the intellectual and spiritual urgency with which these writers read Shakespeare, but he also shows that their reading was a profoundly embodied experience. Keats and Woolf, each in their own way, described being physically overwhelmed by Shakespeare's verse, and Ginsberg was fascinated by what he thought of as a particularly Shakespearean mouthfeel. As this suggests, The Great William is not a study of how Shakespeare influences subsequent writers, but more accurately of "what Shakespeare 'does' to them" (p. 11). Leinwand's interests are, at base, phenomenological. The Great William is also distinguished by something I can only describe as genuine respect for the material at hand. The way these modern writers combined the study of Shakespeare with creative work will seem odd, even wacky, by contemporary scholarly standards, but you won't find any arch or snide remarks from Leinwand. He takes his subjects seriously as readers, writers, and thinkers. As he puts it simply. "When an Olson or Berryman or Hughes reads and comments on Shakespeare, the rules of scholarship obtain, but differently" (p. 7).
SHAKESPEARE: POLITICAL THEORIST AND PHILOSOPHER
In Hamlet's Moment, which I commented on above, Kisery insists that he does not view Shakespeare as a political thinker per se, but rather as a purveyor of a certain kind of political expertise. Other books I received insist on just the opposite, that Shakespeare can indeed be viewed as a unique kind of political thinker or philosopher.
In Shakespeare and Democracy: The Self-Renewing Politics of a Global Playwright, Gabriel Chanan writes intelligently on what Shakespeare has to teach a modern audience about participatory politics. For an academic reader, the book seems to veer sharply between scholarly commonplaces and methodologically rickety linkages (Chanan is a former teacher and social policy researcher, not an academic). However, for nonspecialists less concerned with the technicalities of scholarly argument, Chanan offers a satisfying way to pose big-ticket political questions through Shakespeare's plays.
In a more historically grounded vein, Andrew Moore's Shakespeare between Machiauelli and Hobbes: Dead Body Politics attempts to show how Shakespeare is part of a distinctly modern lineage of political thought. Moore places Shakespeare between Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes not only in a historical sense, but also in a theoretical or political-doctrinal sense. For Moore, Shakespeare is a political thinker as much as a playwright, one who holds, and advances through his drama, specific political beliefs. While this kind of approach can be thought-provoking, it also feels critically unsophisticated at times, as do Moore's prefatory comments on John Shakespeare's political career, in which he remarks that thinking of "Shakespeare ... as the son of a career politician who grew up to be a brilliant political theorist" is "less jarring" than thinking of him as "the son of a Stratford glove-maker" who grew "up to be a famous London playwright," which he finds "quite baffling" (p. xi).
Leon Harold Craig's book, The Philosopher's English King: Shakespeare's "Henriad" as Political Philosophy, has similar issues, though it's clear that Craig, a professor of political science, knows the plays intimately and has spent a great deal of time reflecting on them. Arguing that the second tetralogy articulates a sustained philosophy of political legitimacy, the book is full of smart, original readings and suggestive linkages. But the fact that Craig tries to subsume the plays' various insights under the umbrella of one coherent philosophical master plan will feel forced and unpersuasive to many scholars of Shakespeare. This is exacerbated by the fact that Craig makes his argument without reference to any of the influential work on Shakespeare and political philosophy by scholars such as Paul Kottman, Julia Lupton, and James Kuzner, to name just a few.
Thomas P. Anderson's Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics, by contrast, is closely engaged with recent work in this area. The book appears in my series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy, so I can't claim neutrality. That said, I do think Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics makes a significant intervention by assembling a new critical vocabulary for talking about Shakespeare's political imagination. Anderson rejects dialectically configured categories like "sovereign absolutism" and "republicanism," which, he explains, probably have more to do with our knowledge of the way English history would play out than with Shakespeare's own intellectual and artistic investments. Instead, Anderson argues that Shakespeare's political imagination is characterized by dissensus, a term he borrows from Jacques Ranciere. Dissensus, an active breaking down of centralized sovereign authority, is glimpsed frequently in the histories and Roman plays that form the core of Anderson's study. Importantly, while Shakespearean dissensus is oriented toward democratic community, it is nevertheless very much prior to easily celebrated ideas like contract and consensus. Dissensus, in other words, marks an in-between space of political action, after sovereign absolutism but before republicanism or democracy.
Worldly Shakespeare: The Theatre of Our Good Will by Richard Wilson is a fascinating book about the way Shakespeare's plays and poems model an agonistic cosmopolitanism that prepares us for the urgent problem of toleration in our own multicultural societies. Wilson distinguishes this vexed version of coexistence, which he calls "worldliness," from the consensus-oriented "universalism" that comes down to us from Saint Paul. This is an excellent and potentially very influential argument. I do worry, though, about the programmatic way in which Wilson frames his project. Large and complex areas of critical debate are quickly swept aside: the turn to political theology is "inspired by a cult of the Catholic and Fascist jurist Carl Schmitt" and aims to "revive an old myth of Shakespeare as mystic monarchist" (p. 5); scholarship that views Shakespeare as a pluralist whose interest in religion is theatrical and imaginative rather than pointedly political is "bland Kantian critique" that idealizes "aesthetic closure and creative disinterest" (p. 7). The work that Wilson engages with most carefully (and most often) is his own. Still, Worldly Shakespeare is a bold and original work of literary criticism and anyone interested in Shakespeare, philosophy, and politics will do well to read it.
Kuzner's Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness is another intellectually ambitious book committed to delivering a far-reaching philosophical argument. The study is marked by a willingness to think alongside other critics and theorists while still staking out territory in which to make new claims. Kuzner shows us, in crystal-clear prose, how Shakespeare articulates a particular kind of skepticism--not one that questions knowledge or belief per se, but rather one that questions the capacity of the individual to engage successfully in the labor of knowledge acquisition all by themselves. Shakespeare, in other words, advances a kind of epistemological weakness, but he makes that weakness livable by representing knowledge as a form of social interaction. Shakespeare as a Way of Life is an intellectually invigorating study that takes the philosophical effects of the plays and poems seriously without losing sight of the fundamentally literary and dramatic mechanisms through which those effects are achieved.
RETHINKING BIOGRAPHY
I noted above that Hooks's Selling Shakespeare proposes a compelling way to rethink the practice of Shakespearean biography. Other versions of this undertaking include The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells; Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life: Treasures from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, edited by Delia Garratt and Tara Hamling; and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro.
Edmondson and Wells's volume is premised on a rejection of the singularity and individualism that underpin conventional biography. A life is never a life apart. It's always in and of the world. Accordingly, you won't find a linear, birth-to-death narrative in The Shakespeare Circle. Instead, a group of twenty-six contributors discuss the many family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and patrons who cohabited Shakespeare's personal and professional world, from his mother, father, and children, to his publisher, collaborators, patrons, and fellow actors. The volume features essays on John Shakespeare, Thomas Greene, Lady Elizabeth Barnard, the Mountjoys, the Burbages, John Fletcher, Middleton, and many others. Shakespeare exists in the spaces in between. A similarly relational Shakespearean life emerges from Garratt and Hamling's Shakespeare and the Stuff of Life. In seven vividly illustrated chapters, which run from "Birth" and "Childhood" to "Professional Life" and "Older Age," Shakespeare's biography unfolds through a series of objects: books, chairs, beds, gloves, cloths, cauldrons, posset cups, and many other artifacts.
Shapiro's The Year of Lear is an example of the microbiography that has become particularly popular over the last fifteen years. The book centers on 1606, a year in which Shakespeare worked on three major plays: King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It was a moment of creative transition for Shakespeare and cultural transition for Britain. Shapiro weaves those two stories together brilliantly. His careful political-historical research is sometimes supplemented with conjectural embellishments about Shakespeare's life and temperament. But The Year of Lear never feels like scholarly fan fiction. Shapiro's method seems to rest on a double-edged conviction that bringing a figure from the past to life requires imagination, but also that imagination should be firmly anchored to the archive. This is a tough balance to strike, but Shapiro accomplishes it.
Readers interested in Shakespearean biography will also enjoy Katherine Duncan-Jones's beautifully illustrated Portraits of Shakespeare. Pitched for a broad readership, the book gives a thoroughly researched overview of what we know about the extant portraits of Shakespeare, including those that are currently disputed.
THEATER HISTORIES: PEOPLE, PRACTICES, INSTITUTIONS
The books addressed in this section consider material, institutional, and social aspects of playmaking and playgoing. Drawing on textual studies, book history, and the digital humanities, each of these studies practices an intellectually versatile theater history.
Richard Dutton's much anticipated Shakespeare, Court Dramatist takes up one of the most basic and enduring questions in Shakespeare studies: why are there different versions of Shakespeare's plays? There are a number of possible answers. Perhaps it's because some texts were reconstructed from memory or patchy note taking. Perhaps it's because some were pirated by unscrupulous publishers. Perhaps it's because some represent shortened scripts used on tour outside of London. Or perhaps it's because Shakespeare wrote longer, more literary versions of his plays in addition to those he wrote for performance. All of these explanations have been offered over the years, but Dutton proposes something different: in a number of cases, he argues, Shakespeare's plays were revised specifically for performance at Court. This argument runs counter not only to other textual schools of thought, but also, in a more general way, to a deeply entrenched desire, dating back at least to Alfred Harbage, to view Shakespeare primarily as a popular dramatist. Central to Dutton's narrative is the figure of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels from 1579 to 1610, who was involved in establishing and coordinating "an elite group of court identified companies" (p. 21) for much of his working life. Dutton argues forcefully, and with careful attention to archival evidence, that Tilney was not just an administrator, but also a kind of theatrical impresario who had a hand in stage-managing and, in a sense, adapting Shakespeare's plays for Court performance. No one knows more about the Master of the Revels than Dutton, but I predict that some scholars will query his boldest claims about the extent of Tilney's influence on Shakespeare's text. Of course, this is precisely the kind of debate a major book of this sort should trigger. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist is the work of a master scholar and merits careful attention from anyone interested in the history of English Renaissance drama.
In The Master of the Revels arid Elizabeth I's Court Theatre, W. R. Streitberger is interested in roughly the same concatenation of administration and creative forces that fascinate Dutton, but Streitberger's book is less thesis driven than Dutton's. Instead, he offers something closer to a narrative history of the Revels Office from Thomas Cawarden to Tilney, along with two very useful appendices that document Court entertainments and Revels officers. Throughout the book, Streitberger is locked into close conversation with E. K. Chambers, whose still-influential account of the Revels Office and the offices of the Works and Wardrobe Streitberger sets out to revise point by point. This can make the book a bit laborious at times, but Streitberger's work nevertheless represents a long-overdue historical intervention and one of the few up-to-date examinations of the pre-Tilney Revels Office we have.
In "Public" and "Private" Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of Publication, Eoin Price considers why the term "private" suddenly starts being applied to a certain kind of commercial theater in the first decade of the seventeenth century, despite the fact that similar establishments existed in London since 1575. This is a simple but brilliant question (one that merits more than the 95 pages of discussion afforded by the short-form Palgrave Pivot series in which the book appears). Price leads readers through a fascinating examination of printed plays and theater records to understand what changed in the economic and social landscape of early Jacobean drama to make "private" a potent term. Price's slightly hectoring critique of "theoretical approaches," which he oddly attributes primarily to Paul Yachnin, will grate on some readers. (The tone may be left over from a Ph.D. dissertation.) But it's nevertheless clear from this short study that Price is an accomplished theater and book historian who asks probing questions and curates evidence elegantly. I very much look forward to reading more of his work.
Matthew Steggle has produced a remarkably original and informative book on ten Renaissance plays whose scripts have not survived: Digital Humanities and the Lost Drama of Early Modern England: Ten Case Studies. Steggle opens the book with two important reminders: first, all Renaissance plays are largely "lost" to the extent that we're missing so much information pertaining to performance; and second, "lost plays" are not entirely lost, for we sometimes have their titles. With this established, Steggle turns to the titles of ten lost plays, and with the help of a variety of sophisticated digital resources, including chiefly EEBO-TCP, generates data that helps us surmise what those plays might have looked like, including how their plots unfolded and the kinds of characters they featured. The study is speculative, of course, but well informed and consistently methodologically self-aware. It's an excellent example of how the digital humanities can dovetail in productive ways with traditional scholarly formats like the academic monograph, which in most institutions remains the primary currency for tenure and promotion bids.
Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh by Stanley Wells does exactly what it says on the tin. Aimed at a broad readership, the book offers short biographies of "great Shakespeare actors" from Shakespeare's time to our own. Included among the chapters are figures we would expect to meet, such as Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench, and others who might be less familiar to some readers, such as Dora Jordan and Donald Wolfit. Great Shakespeare Actors reads more like a series of encyclopedia entries than a monograph with a conceptual through-line. I don't know if this is intentional, but in any case the book will veiy likely prove a helpful and entertaining resource for many.
It was a pleasure to see some work on private and occasional performance among this year's books. Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich's The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender will establish itself as the authoritative study of this wonderfully peculiar performance practice. The three-legged thematic stool of print, performance, and gender situates Elizabethan country-house entertainments in an up-to-date critical frame and nicely counterpoints older studies that have tended to focus on mythography, sources, and Court micropolitics. Kolkovich's analyses of the entertainments in print form, in my view, are the strongest sections of the book. With very little previous work done in this area, the new information Kolkovich presents about the functions and effects of printed entertainments--as collectables, as sources of rumor and gossip, as news--will be of interest to many early modernists.
Finally, theater historians--and other scholars of Renaissance drama, I'm sure--will get much use out of Richard Schoch's impressive Writing the History of the British Stage, 1660-1900. Schoch's book is the first study of English theater historiography from its origins in the 1660s to the twentieth century. Through careful discussions of a range of interesting texts and figures, he shows that before theater history was a modern academic discipline, with specialist training and empiricist methods, it was a largely amateur pursuit that included among its practitioners booksellers, bibliographers, antiquarians, journalists, and theater professionals. Early modernists will find especially helpful chapters on "Restoration Booksellers as Theatre Historians," Edward Malone, and John Payne Collier.
SPACE AND PLACE
I received several books concerned in various ways with the importance of space and place to Renaissance drama.
Nina Levine's Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage focuses on plays that represent boundary-crossing forms of urban sociality, instances of association and exchange that connect distinct neighborhoods, professions, and social milieus in London. These plays, Levine argues convincingly, model "new modes of urban belonging" (p. 2) for their diverse city audiences. In this respect, Levine's book builds on excellent studies by scholars such as Jean Howard and Adam Zucker. She departs from this work by shifting attention away from specific institutions and locales to the social practices that work between them and which contribute to the formation of an increasingly hybrid and complicated city.
In This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World, Jerry Brotton situates Elizabethan drama within a global cultural imaginary. Queen Elizabeth's 1570 excommunication by the Pope marked the beginning of a remarkable period of economic and political collaboration between England and the Islamic world. Brotton introduces readers to English merchants and adventurers who spent time in Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Moroccan Sultanate, and recounts a number of fascinating ambassadorial visits. The book is scholarly but accessibly written. It will appeal to both academic and nonacademic audiences.
Gavin Hollis's The Absence of America: The London Stage, 1576-1642 is a deft analysis of how London playing companies resisted the promotional zeal of the Virginia Company, either by marginalizing the New World or critiquing English colonial activities. Working with a range of plays and masques by Jonson, George Chapman, Philip Massinger, Shakespeare, Middleton, Dekker, and others, Hollis shows how playwrights interrogated the colonial project through ingenious spatial substitutions, frequently projecting elements of the New World into London itself. With close attention to the cultural and institutional geography of early modern London and an impressive command of the archive, The Absence of America stands out as one of the past year's most critically sophisticated studies. This is the first title in the new Oxford University Press series Early Modern Literary Geographies, edited by Julie Sanders and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. If Hollis's book is any indication of what's to come, the series will quickly establish itself as the home of our field's most innovative scholarship on issues of space, place, and environment.
Finally, academics and nonacademics alike will be interested in Peter Whitfield's lavishly illustrated Mapping Shakespeare's World, which connects Shakespeare's plays to various aspects of the early modern geographical imagination. The achievement of the book does not lie in its readings of the plays themselves (Whitfield doesn't really attempt readings in the academic sense), but rather in the way the plays are juxtaposed with extraordinary archival documents, especially maps, that relate to the locales in which they are set (Greece, Rome, Venice, medieval Britain, and so on).
TIME, MEMORY. MEMORIALIZATION
Isabel Karremann's new monograph, The Drama of Memory in Shakespeare's History Plays, makes an original contribution to the study of memory and forgetting, a subject of scholarly interest since Frances Yates published The Art of Memory in 1966, but especially since the late '90s and early 2000s when influential work on the topic appeared from Jonathan Baldo, Jonas Barish, Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, and Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. Karremann shows how Shakespeare's history plays took part in a process of selective memorialization and strategic forgetting in the wake of the Reformation. One of the things that distinguishes Karremann's book is her close engagement with performance studies, which allows her to link specific forms of memory to specific dramaturgical practices.
In Monuments and Literary Posterity in Early Modern Drama, Brian Chalk makes the simple but provocative assertion that playwrights wanted to be remembered. While much attention has been given to tropes of memorialization in lyric poetry, Chalk shows that playwrights like Marlowe, Jonson, John Webster, Shakespeare, and Fletcher also engaged with the objects and practices of cultural memory, revealing an abiding interest in the future of their plays.
J. K. Barret considers drama, poetry, and prose in her marvelous book. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. She argues that early modern literature "offers an important and largely unexamined archive for understanding the history of the future" (p. 4). The future meant many different things and operated at many different scales for early modern writers, but as Barret explains, it always ends up telling us something significant about how the present was viewed. Barret also explores the formal dimension of literary futurity, the way writing about what-eomes-later requires, but also creates, certain grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical structures. One of the many things that makes this book impressive is the fact that Barret is not just a skilled intellectual and literary historian, but also an expert close-reader. She manages to weave big ideas through the complex particularities of literary language without losing any of the latter's nuance or energy.
LANGUAGE AND GESTURE ON STAGE
The first conclusion one will draw from John Kerrigan's new book on "binding language" in Shakespeare is that there must have been a lot of it. Clocking in at 622 pages, Shakespeare's Binding Language addresses just about every oath, vow, promise, bond, gage, and contract in the canon. The book's length won't be easy on readers, but the significance of Kerrigan's work--not just in terms of scale, but also in terms of depth of knowledge--can't be denied. The study shows clearly that various forms of binding language not only connect Shakespeare's plays to some of the most significant institutions, controversies, and events of the Renaissance, but also that such language is essential to understanding key structural elements of his dramaturgy.
Gary Watt's Shakespeare's Acts of Will: Law, Testament, and Properties of Performance shows how will--both the legal document and the volitional force--allows us to think about the conceptual and experiential links among theater, law, and public life. It's a fiercely intelligent but nimbly written book that maintains a spirit of intellectual generosity throughout. Watt is interested both in the way words express will in Shakespeare's late-Elizabethan plays (the period during which a last will and testament is often used as a plotting device) and in the way the performance of will on stage connects to cultural practices of witnessing outside the theater. Both onstage and off, testamentary language--the language that expresses volitional will and formalizes legal wills--is a primary concern for Watt. As he writes in his introduction, "In theater, the language of the play performs a sort of magic as it passes from the world of the stage to the world of the playgoers. In law, so-called 'operative words' (such as 'I agree,' 'I declare,' and 'I swear') have a comparable capacity to move people from one state of social being to another" (p. 5).
Farah Karim-Cooper's The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture. Touch, and the Spectacle of Dismemberment combines its author's expert knowledge of early modern performance with new research on the cultural history of gesture to deliver a groundbreaking account of the emotional, psychological, and social work carried out by the hand on stage. I was especially struck by the thorough cultural-historical taxonomy of the hand in chapter 1, which will be of interest to anyone working on emotion, sensation, the history of the body, or historical phenomenology. I also found uniquely instructive the way Karim-Cooper cites the living, embodied evidence provided by performances at the reconstructed Globe Theatre and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. This will be a useful reminder to many readers of the special status these venues have as "research theaters," and of the important work carried out by Globe Education where Karim-Cooper serves as Head of Higher Education and Research.
INWARDNESS AND PRIVACY
Ronald Huebert's impressive book, Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare, offers a welcome counterweight to the many studies (recent and forthcoming) on various aspects of publicity, sociality, and material embeddedness in the Renaissance. Huebert builds on Katharine Eisaman Maus's seminal study of inwardness in English Renaissance drama, but he distinguishes his project in two important ways. First, Huebert's range of reference, both historical and generic, is notably broad and this will make his study of consequence for just about anyone working in early modern studies. What Huebert calls "the age of Shakespeare" actually stretches at least 150 years, from Thomas More to Milton, and he discusses drama, poetry, prose fiction, devotional work, commonplaces, and many other kinds of writing. Second, Huebert is careful to distinguish privacy from inferiority, though he discusses the connections between the two when relevant. For Huebert, privacy refers to both a physical and a social state, one in which an individual has some degree of control over who does and who does not have access to their person. This concept, Huebert shows, was fully available to early modern men and women and designated an increasingly important category of experience.
Donald Beecher's book, Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance, joins a well-respected body of work on cognition in our field. One of the things that makes Beecher's study different is its investment in evolutionary psychology. Beecher argues that selfhood is an expression of a genetically hardwired neural system and that we should think of "the selves of literature in relation to the selves of reality," as iterations of a "purpose-designed" brain as old as homo sapiens (p. 5). This will be a hard pill to swallow for many early modernists, both because it conflates literary characters and real human beings and because it largely disregards the cultural and material contexts that also shape both character and selfhood.
REASSESSING TRAGEDY
One of this year's greatest scholarly achievements, in my view, is Blair Hoxby's What Was Tragedy?: Theory and the Early Modern Canon. Combining literary and intellectual history, philosophy, and formal analysis, Hoxby recovers a largely lost early modern poetics of tragedy. As he explains, most of what we know of tragedy finds its origin in the work of German idealist philosophy produced in the wake of the French Revolution and under the influence of Immanuel Kant. These writers--including Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel--have left an indelible mark on our notion of the tragic, even though their ideas developed comparatively late in the history of tragedy and under particular historical conditions. With an extraordinary range of reference--from antiquity to modernity and across Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, and English literary and philosophical traditions--Hoxby invites us to reencounter early modern tragedy unencumbered by the distorting assumptions that we often don't realize come down to us from German idealism. One reason A. C. Bradley and so many other scholars after him struggle with King Lear, for example, is because they read "through the lens of Hegel" who didn't appreciate the important philosophical role afforded to scenes of passive suffering in sixteenth-century theories of tragedy. For post-Kantian philosophers, as for Bradley, "mere suffering ... can never be tragic, no matter how painful it may be to watch. Early modern critics had no such compunction" (p. 10). What Was Tragedy? has many implications not just for how we understand tragedy in our period, but also for how we conceive of early modern selfhood, how we understand the history of emotions, and how we go about the business of literary periodization. It's a major piece of scholarship.
Richard van Oort's Shakespeare's Big Men: Tragedy and the Problem of Resentment is a study that, like Beecher's (discussed in the previous section), turns to unconventional material in order to find new ways to make sense of Renaissance literature. I think van Oort does so more successfully than Beecher and in a way that will engage a larger cross section of early modernists. Specifically, van Oort turns to generative anthropology's theory of the origins of human society to find a more socially attuned language for discussing Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Generative anthropology teaches that societies defer the resentment they feel for the "big men" who run things in order to (a) build a sense of community, and (b) use that community as a source of resistance once the "big men" are finally repudiated. What makes van Oort's argument work is that he is not simply trying to fit Renaissance tragedy into a generative-anthropology shaped box. Instead, and much more instructively, he's trying to use the concepts of generative anthropology to understand the social function of tragic form in the Renaissance.
Allyna E. Ward's Women and Tudor Tragedy: Feminizing Counsel and Representing Gender traces the relationship between the rhetoric of monarchy and the place of women in English society with a particular focus on the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Lots of groundbreaking work was produced on gender and politics in the 1980s, '90s, and early 2000s, frequently with Queen Elizabeth as the centerpiece. It would have been helpful if Ward had differentiated her project more clearly from this seminal body of scholarship. All the same, readers will find useful some of Ward's sustained readings of neglected Tudor plays, including a cogently argued chapter on early English translations of Senecan tragedies.
DRAMATIC SOURCES AND TRADITIONS
Charlotte Artese's Shakespeare's Folktale Sources is set to become the go-to study for anyone interested in how Shakespeare put folktales to use in his plays. Artese has done extensive research in English, French, and German archives many of us would not be very adept at navigating. The landscape of folk influence was complicated and uneven, with tales circulating in multiple versions and multiple languages, and being transmitted both textually and orally. Although Artese's study focuses on Shakespeare, she displays a solid knowledge of Renaissance drama more broadly. Each chapter concludes with a bibliography of different versions of the folktales under consideration, an especially valuable feature of the book that will establish a framework for future scholarship.
Charlotte Steenbrugge's Staging Vice: A Study of Dramatic Traditions in Medieval and Sixteenth-Century England and the Low Countries is part of a groundswell of work on Tudor drama this year. This includes Ward's Women and Tudor Tragedy, already discussed, and Greg Walker's The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama, about which I'll comment later. Steenbrugge's study takes a comparative approach, placing English Vice figures alongside the Dutch sinnekens. We certainly need more comparative work in our field, but I wish a more compelling case had been made for the critical payoffs of looking at the English and Dutch traditions together. Steenbrugge does comment on the political and economic links between England and the Low Countries and suggests some literary influence at work in both directions, but more often than not the analyses of the two traditions are simply juxtaposed without any specifically comparativist claims being made. Nonetheless, Steenbrugge does a good job linking the respective vice traditions to aspects of cultural history and evolving theatrical practices.
Peter Mack's Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, another comparative study, does our field a great service by providing a concise and accessible description of how the two most famous authors of the European Renaissance brought their training in rhetoric to bear on the composition of plays and essays. Rhetoric is arguably the single most important intellectual context for understanding the practices associated with literary invention in the period. But it's also the easiest to ignore since it can be discouragingly obscure and technical. Mack's book will introduce Renaissance rhetoric to a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students in both English and French departments.
NEW METHODS, NEW FORMS
In this section, I consider several books that take up deliberately experimental or methodologically creative projects. This will also give me an opportunity to comment briefly on particular publishers and book series that are energizing our field.
Craig Dionne's Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene is published by Punctum Books, the brainchild of the indefatigable Eileen Joy. Punctum has been at the forefront of experimental criticism in medieval and Renaissance studies for the last several years and Posthuman Lear makes a worthy addition to its lists. "Part scholarship, part journalism, part ecological screed," Dionne's method is basically that he doesn't have one. Instead he considers anything and everything whenever it seems suitable. He uses "examples from Japan, New Mexico, Finland, India, all the while jumping back to Shakespeare's early modern England" (p. 15). In lesser hands, this would be a disaster. But Dionne pulls it off, mostly because he's a good writer and has a uniquely capacious and disciplined intellect. He has also managed to find in King Lear a philosophy of what it means to be human that is both coherent and strange enough to anchor what would otherwise be scattered musings. The book is a testament to the critical payoffs of intellectual drift.
Something similar can be said of R. M. Christofides' Othello's Secret: The Cyprus Problem, which appears in the Shakespeare Now! series, edited by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey. The book combines literary scholarship, political criticism, and personal memoir to re-present Othello as a play about Cyprus, not Venice. In particular, Christofides shows how Othello stages a form of political agonism that's still at the heart of the island's present-day struggles. The book is animated chiefly not by its literary-critical intuitions, but rather by the way in which the author manages to tell a personal story through the imaginative raw materials of Shakespeare's play.
Drawing new stories out of Shakespeare's old ones is central to Fernie and Palfrey's coauthored book Macbeth, Macbeth, a novel that is both a sequel to and reflection on Shakespeare's play. The novel occupies the imaginative world of Macbeth, but it also gives voice to its silences and form to its shadows. That is to say, Macbeth, Macbeth draws a new world out of the world Shakespeare presents to us and in doing so offers a distinctive way to reflect on the moral and emotional demands of the original play. I'm not sure who the audience for this book will be, but it's certainly thrilling to read and it's clearly the creation of two powerful intellects. Macbeth, Macbeth is the first volume in a new series titled Beyond Criticism, published by Bloomsbury, which promises to rethink critical practice at both a conceptual and formal level.
Gabriel Josipovici's "Hamlet": Fold on Fold represents the best version of a kind of writing scholars rarely spend a lot of time with: learned but nonacademic, critical but nonmethodological. The book is neither historical nor theoretical, but rather than speaking to no one, it ends up speaking to everyone--or at least to anyone who has ever studied, taught, or performed Hamlet. Josipovici's book takes the play one scene at a time (each scene gets a chapter) in order to gradually demonstrate the mismatch between Hamlet and our most basic critical instinct: the compulsion to interpret. Josipovici makes the case that Hamlet, by design, does not invite the reader or viewer in to pluck out the heart of its mystery. On the contrary, the play is committed to sustained uncertainty. It's built to impart incremental knowledge and to encourage thinking rather than understanding. Josipovici writes from a decidedly modern perspective and with the sensibility of a practicing playwright and novelist. What he achieves--always in fluid, jargon-free prose--is a piece of criticism that transforms Hamlet from a problem to be solved into a process to be experienced.
Anyone in our field who values both creativity and academic rigor has probably drawn inspiration from Bruce R. Smith, a scholar whose critical practice has for decades been defined by the combination of inventiveness and exactitude. His new book, Shakespeare Cut: Rethinking Cutwork in an Age of Distraction, is very much in this vein. As always, Smith doesn't contribute to subfields, he invents his own. In Shakespeare Cut he notes that in any of its several meanings, "cutting" always involves some configuration of persons and objects moving through space and time. With this established, Smith wonders how the concept of "cutting" might, therefore, provide a new way to talk about the physics, psychology, and phenomenology of Shakespearean text and performance. Addressing cuts to Shakespeare's texts (material that gets excised for performance), cuts in Shakespeare's texts (the disposition of lines and scene breaks), cuts from Shakespeare's texts (quotations and characters that enjoy a cultural life independent of the plays from which they're drawn), and cuts with Shakespeare's texts (the kind of creative collaboration that takes place between the Renaissance playwright and modern artists), Smith shows how cutting constitutes a new hermeneutic for describing the complex crossings of Shakespeare's textual, performative, and cultural lives.
I conclude this section with one of the most anticipated books of the year: Jeffrey Masten's Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time. A large-format, wonderfully illustrated book that runs to almost 400 pages, this major study is the result of persistent intellectual risk-taking and careful thinking about the relations among queer theory, philology, historical linguistics, book history, and early modern literary studies. Masten calls for a renewed historical philology as a way to map out both the familiarity and alterity of early modern understandings of the bodies, acts, affects, and pleasures that comprise what we would now call sexual identity. This "philology of the queer" involves attending to the etymologies, transformations, and even orthographies of certain keywords--queue, tail, conversation, intercourse, fundament, foundation, mongrel, tup, bumbast, and many others--that structure the experience of sex, gender, and desire. Ranging from Foucauldian theory to textual editing and from Indo-European language families to Charles Hinman's collator machine, Queer Philologies embodies two of the characteristics I have come to admire most in literary scholarship: a commitment to methodological pluralism and a capacity to be both creative and scholarly.
ESSAY COLLECTIONS
This section overviews the majority of edited collections 1 received, though a small number have been included in other sections. I begin with three large volumes from Oxford University Press, two from the Oxford Handbooks series and one from the Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature series.
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk, is an enormous volume containing a whopping fifty-four essays and there's hardly a weak link. What I particularly appreciate about this collection is the editors' commitment to accommodating a range of approaches to tragedy. Within the volume's pages, readers will find philosophical essays by Paul Kottman and Tzachi Zamir; essays on textual issues, including digital approaches, by Paul Werstine, Michael Witmore, Jonathan Hope, and Michael Gleicher; essays on performance by Tiffany Stern and Peter Holland; essays on screen adaptation by Sujata Iyengar and Katherine Rowe; and a variety of reflections on Shakespearean tragedy in a global context by Avraham Oz, Alexa Huang, and others.
Valerie Traub's much-anticipated The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, and Race is out as well. On first encounter, the volume may feel disorienting: the reader moves from a title which promises a focus on "embodiment," to a table of contents that features a section on "The Lives of William Shakespeare," to an introduction that opens by locating the collection's origins in a request to edit "a feminist volume on gender" (p. 1). But as Traub's erudite opening chapter makes clear, "embodiment" is a conceptual rubric under which the volume's forty-three contributors can trace a feminism whose theoretical and historical concerns intersect with other identity-based critical approaches such as queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, animal studies, and postcolonial studies, as well as historical phenomenology and the new materialism. As this suggests, the volume makes a particularly urgent and timely contribution to our field.
Early Modern Theatricality, edited by Henry S. Turner, serves not only as a nuanced state-of-the-field publication, but also--and more importantly--as a map of where we might go next if we're willing to put the tools of theater history, performance studies, and critical theory into conversation. Turner chooses the term "theatricality" (rather than theater, drama, or performance) to capture more accurately the assemblage of material conditions, cognitive and sensory experiences, and spatial practices that together make the event of a play. Comprised of twenty-nine carefully curated keyword essays on topics such as "Scene," "Skill," "Off-Stage," "Hospitality," "Optics," "Mobility," and "Occasion," Early Modern Theatricality advances a form of critical inquiry that is both historically meticulous and theoretically sophisticated.
Several edited collections I received challenge the Anglocentric focus of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama studies. 1616: Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu's China, edited by Tian Yuan Tan, Paul Edmondson, and Shih-pe Wang, considers the death of Shakespeare and the death of the famous Chinese playwright TangXianzu, both in 1616, as parallel literary-historical events. Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Ton Hoenselaars, explores Renaissance drama's obsession with foreign tongues, English dialects, and issues of translation. Employing a range of historical, linguistic, and semantic approaches, the volume's international team of scholars has produced an admirably coherent set of essays that challenge conventional assumptions about the Englishness of English Renaissance theater. Shakespeare in Cold War Europe: Conflict, Commemoration, Celebration, edited by Erica Sheen and Karremann, is part of Alexa Huang's Global Shakespeares series with Palgrave Pivot. It features eight short (10-15 page) essays that reflect on the challenge of talking about the cultural affordances of Shakespeare's plays in political contexts where the very term "culture" is problematic. Renaissance Shakespeare: Shakespeare Renaissances, edited by Martin Prochazka, Michael Dobson, Hofele, and Hanna Scolnicov, is a conference-proceedings volume that contains about forty contributions to the ninth World Shakespeare Congress that took place in Prague in 2011. It's not thematically anchored--with sections on "Interpretations," "Performance," "Contexts," "Appropriations," and "Adaptations" it covers just about everything--but it does give a useful snapshot of the state of Shakespeare studies across six continents.
Another volume that developed out of conference proceedings is Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, edited by Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kathiyn R. McPherson, and Sarah Enloe, which draws on papers originally presented at the sixth Blackfriars Conference at the American Shakespeare Center in 2011. The volume is tightly focused and distinctive for the way it brings together teachers and theater practitioners to think about language and performance. It's one of those rare volumes that will be of interest to actors and directors as well as academics. Another collection poised at the intersection of theatrical practice and historical scholarship is the Stanley Wells anthology, Shakespeare on Page and Stage: Selected Essays, edited by Edmondson. As Margreta de Grazia puts it in her afterword, "Has there ever been a textual scholar more enamored of the theatre than Stanley Wells?" (p. 449). The essays in this collection exhibit Wells's extraordinary critical range, as well as his characteristic clarity, wisdom, and wit.
Joseph Candido has edited a collection of essays in honor of Charles R. Forker titled The Text, the Play, and the Globe: Essays on Literary Influence in Shakespeare's World and His Work, which includes thirteen contributions by eminent scholars such as Rebecca Bushnell, S. P. Cerasano, Leeds Barroll, and Lois Potter. Many topics are covered, but the aim of the volume as a whole is to create a space of methodological overlap among theater-historical, textual, and cultural-historical approaches. Stephen Booth's Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others falls somewhere between an edited collection and a monograph. Overseen by the Director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Harry Keyishian, the volume contains thirteen essays on Renaissance drama and poetry, seven of which appear for the first time, the other six of which were published between 1969 and 2010. All the essays display Booth's trademark (and almost always revelatory) approach to literary texts, which involves showing how poetry works rather than establishing what it means. I also received volume 29 of the annual journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, which maintains its high standard of scholarship with eight essays on matters ranging from dumb shows (Leslie Thomson), to friendship (Maurice A. Hunt), to slavery (Matthieu Chapman), and including readings of rare plays such as The Laws of Candy (Marina Tarlinskaja) and the lost play Pythagoras (Todd A. Borlik).
SHAKESPEARE 400: COMMEMORATIONS, CELEBRATIONS, EXHIBITIONS
A number of books I received were published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. These range from Margaret Willes's A Shakespearean Botanical, which pairs sixteenth-century illustrations of plants with relevant lines from the plays; to a special issue of Shakespeare Studies, the journal of the Shakespeare Society of Japan; to a reissue of Oxford University Press's 1916 A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, edited by Israel Gollancz, which was published to mark the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death and which includes an intriguing collection of eulogies and commentaries by Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Henri Bergson, Maurice Maeterlinck, and many others.
Two edited collections respond to the quatercentenary by considering the history of Shakespearean commemoration. Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory, edited by Clara Calvo and Coppelia Kahn, includes fifteen essays that discuss a broad spectrum of events. We see how Shakespeare was celebrated in the context of the American Civil War, World War I, and the 1916 Easter Rising, in locales ranging from Australia to India and from Northwestern University to the Vatican. Shakespeare Jubilees: 1769-2014, edited by Christa Jansohn and Dieter Mehl, undertakes a similar, though more narrowly defined, project, focusing specifically on Shakespeare jubilees. There are a number of standout essays in this collection, including Katherine Scheil's on Shakespeare clubs in America and John Cunningham's on the music composed for the 1864 Stratford Tercentenary.
Other books I received celebrate Shakespeare's legacy through critical reflections on his plays and poems. John O'Meara's Remembering Shakespeare: The Scope of His Achievement from "Hamlet" through "The Tempest" is a somber and slightly mistyeyed meditation on Shakespearean genius. Shakespeare's Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers, edited by Edmondson and Peter Holbrook, combines a series of short introductory essays on Shakespeare's afterlives in film, poetiy, fiction, music, and dance by scholars such as Tom Bishop, Penny Gay, and Sukanta Chaudhuri, with reflections on Shakespeare by practicing artists such as John Ashbeiy, Wendy Cope, Yuki Ninagawa, and Janet Suzman. The volume is an excellent example of the kind of insight, and pleasure, that can be generated when scholars and artists think together.
Shakespeare's Dead, by Palfrey and Emma Smith, accompanies an exhibition of the same name that ran at the Bodleian Library in 2016. The book marks the death of Shakespeare by exploring what Palfrey and Smith describe as the extraordinary life in Shakespearean death. The book, aimed at a broad readership, is illustrated with high-quality images of texts, paintings, and artifacts connected to the early modern culture of death. Short chapters on topics such as plague, places of death, and death and sex are written in lively prose and balance carefully between cultural history and literary criticism.
EDITIONS OF PLAYS
I received eleven new editions, the majority of which are of plays by Shakespeare.
The Arden Shakespeare, third series, continues to produce carefully prepared and generously annotated and introduced critical editions. James C. Bulman's edition of Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part Two includes an extremely informative introduction which breathes new life into this often-neglected play. Bulman expertly navigates the difficult textual terrain--neither the Quarto (which appeared in two issues) nor the Folio provides a fully authoritative copy text--explaining the rationale for his decisions in a detailed but accessible appendix. A revised edition of the Arden 3 Othello, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann, has been published with a new introduction by Ayanna Thompson. Scholars and students alike will appreciate Thompson's reframing of the play in terms of the most current scholarly debates about genre, race, and sexuality, as well as her thorough and up-to-date account of the play's stage history. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor's revised edition of Hamlet presents the text of the 1604-05 Second Quarto. (Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623 was published as a separate volume in 2007.) The editors' 168 pages of introduction and 103 pages worth of appendices provide an unprecedented level of contextualization on matters cultural, textual, and theatrical. Claire McEachern's revised edition of Much Ado about Nothing updates the original introductory material with incisive discussions of gender dynamics, formal and structural characteristics, and stage history.
I also received four volumes from the New Kittredge Shakespeare series: Cymbeline, edited by Hannah C. Wojciehowski: King John and Henry VIII, edited by James H. Lake, Courtney Lehmann, and Jane Wells; King Henry the Sixth: Parts I. II, and III, edited by Annalisa Castaldo; and The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by Jane Wells. Aimed at middle-school and high-school readers, these volumes include class discussion topics and an annotated bibliography.
One of the great achievements in editing this year is Greg Walker's The Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama, a collection of sixteen freshly edited plays and entertainments, from the York Pageant of The Fall of the Angels and Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucrece to Nicholas Udall's Respublica and Thomas Preston's Cambises. It also includes examples of more familiar commercial drama by Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and Shakespeare. Conceived as a companion to The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, which appeared in paperback in 2015, the Anthology emphasizes the extraordinary variety of Tudor performance culture and challenges received evolutionary narratives that move from old-fashioned to modern or religious to secular. The collection makes a number of previously difficult-to-access plays readily available for scholars and will likely change the way we teach English Renaissance drama, too.
Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith have published an edition of Thomas Drue's The Duchess of Suffolk, an intriguing play performed in 1623/24 at the rebuilt Fortune Theater by the Palsgrave's Men. Retelling the story of Katherine Willoughby (1519-80), who would become a Protestant martyr figure in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the play is particularly interesting for its oblique commentary on religious-political events on the Continent in the early 1620s. This edition is the first title in a new Early Modern Drama Texts series published by Ohio State University Press and overseen by Dutton and Galbraith. The series will put scholarly editions of a range of lesser-known plays into circulation.
Finally, Matthew R. Martin has prepared a solid undergraduate-level edition of Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great: Part One and Part Two for Broadview Press. In addition to a comprehensive introduction, Martin provides appendices that include a selection of documents concerning early modern perceptions of Islam and the East.
REFERENCE WORKS
I received four new reference works (one older one now in paperback will be mentioned in a separate section). Three of these four books focus on Shakespeare.
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin's Shakespeare's Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary, part of the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries series edited by Sandra Clark, is organized alphabetically and includes indexes of both works and characters. It's thorough and easy to use. It's also entertaining.
The Globe Guide to Shakespeare by Andrew Dickson is an especially useful resource for theatergoers and for scholars and students interested in performance. While some of the contextual and biographical information it presents can easily be found in other places, the volume distinguishes itself by providing a detailed and globally aware stage and screen history for all thirty-nine plays. The second edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, and revised by Will Sharpe and Erin Sullivan, is arranged a bit like a one-volume encyclopedia. The book begins with a 220-page section of alphabetically organized thematic entries on topics ranging from the "Bible" and "Cockpit theatre" to "foreign words" and "Jan Kott." This is followed by longer entries on individual plays and poems that include, among other things, a synopsis, textual information, information on sources, a critical history, and a stage history. The Companion is a neatly prepared onestop shop for a wealth of basic information about Shakespeare's works, then and now.
Frederick Kiefer has published an almost 1,000-page reference volume on English Dramafrom "Everyman" to 1660: Performance and Print. The book offers scholars of Renaissance drama ease of access to information that is usually spread across several different print and web-based resources, such as basic historical context, early texts, and first performances. The volume would stand to make a greater impact if it offered a clearer statement of what new information it was providing or what new research it was enabling. I also worry that in the absence of a searchable web-based component, or even an index, it won't accommodate the kind of sophisticated cross-referencing that many book and theater historians have grown accustomed to.
GUIDES AND INTRODUCTIONS
The academic book market in our field is saturated with guides and introductions of various sorts, many published by Bloomsbury. Here I comment briefly on some key texts and series.
I received five volumes from Bloomsbury's Arden Early Modern Drama Guides series, edited by Andrew Hiscock and Lisa Hopkins. These include "Hamlet": A Critical Reader, edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor; "Romeo and Juliet": A Critical Reader, edited by Julia Reinhard Lupton; "Julius Caesar": A Critical Reader, edited by Andrew James Hartley; "The Spanish Tragedy": A Critical Reader, edited by Thomas Rist; and "The Revenger's Tragedy": A Critical Reader, edited by Brian Walsh. I'm very impressed with this series. I think its success lies in part in the general editors' wise selection of volume editors who are both intellectually open-minded and capable of assembling strong, diverse teams of contributors. (Lupton's volume on Romeo and Juliet is exemplary in this regard.) Each volume includes essays on the critical and performance history of the play under consideration, a "keynote essay" on current critical approaches, and a selection of new essays that put some of these approaches into practice. Volumes conclude with a survey of resources for teaching and research that are more useful than one might assume. The "Resources" chapter in Thompson and Taylor's volume on Hamlet, for example, includes a list of all modern editions of the play with a brief description of the copy text used and editorial approach taken.
Virginia Mason Vaughan's "Antony and Cleopatra": Language and Writing is a new volume in Bloomsbuiy's Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing series, edited by Dympna Callaghan. Like the other books in the series, Vaughan's is devoted to empowering undergraduate students to appreciate the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's language. The volume closes with a very helpful chapter on how to research, plan, and write an essay on Antony and Cleopatra.
Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach, by Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi, is the product of a unique collaboration between a major Shakespeare scholar (Thompson) and an education specialist (Turchi). Written especially for teachers of high-school students and college underclassmen, Thompson and Turchi describe techniques for moving us away from teacher-centered historical expertise toward a collaborative and participatory model of learning that puts Shakespearean language and performance at the center of the classroom experience. There's a big difference between books on teaching by people who actually teach and those by pedagogues who haven't been in a high school or college freshman classroom for twenty years. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose is a particularly strong example of the first kind of book. It's innovative, practical, and generous; I hope it will be read widely and put to use.
Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Text and Performance, by Pamela Bickley and Jenny Stevens, is another introductory volume aimed at undergraduates. It sets itself apart by pairing some of Shakespeare's most frequently taught plays with plays by other Renaissance dramatists under themed chapter headings. For example, a chapter called "Defining the Self' has sections on Romeo and Juliet and The Duchess of Malji; a chapter called "Money and the Modern City" has sections on The Merchant of Venice and Volpone. I'm not sure how a student would actually go about using this book, unless they were taking a course built very much on the themed model it offers. Nevertheless, I commend the authors for trying to return Shakespeare to the theatrical milieu in which he worked.
Finally. Bart van Es's Shakespeare's Comedies: A Very Short Introduction can be read in two or three sittings and still manages to be remarkably comprehensive. Aimed at a general readership. the slim volume is nonetheless carefully researched and full of original ideas and connections.
NEW IN PAPERBACK
I received several books that are newly available in paperback editions. As most of these will have been addressed in previous "Recent Studies" essays, I offer only very brief comments here.
The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama, edited by Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker and first published in 2012, provides an exhaustive overview of a period of Renaissance drama that many of us probably know less about than we'd care to admit. Covering the period from 1485 to 1603, the volume includes thirty-eight essays on religious drama; interludes and comedies; entertainments, masques, and royal entries; and histories and political dramas. Lynn Enterline's Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, first published in 2012, is an erudite study of how the linguistic, performative, and affective dimensions of Renaissance pedagogy shaped Shakespeare's imagination. Nick Davis's Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience, first published in 2013, traces a shift from communal to individual experience in early modern literature and drama.
It's great to have Stuart Gillespie's Shakespeare's Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources, first published in 2001, out in paperback. Shakespeare's Books is a terrific resource not just for source study, but also for the broader study of Shakespeare's intellectual contexts. The Cambridge History of British Theatre, Volume 1: Origins to 1660, edited by Jane Milling and Peter Thomson and first published in 2004, is, despite its title, heavily weighted toward the Renaissance. Essays by Martin Butler and Janet Clare, which address the less frequently examined period from 1642 to 1660, are especially valuable. The release of the paperback edition of Julia Thomas's Shakespeare's Shrine: The Bard's Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-upon-Avon, first published in 2012, is nicely timed to coincide with the publication of other books on Shakespearean commemoration linked with the quatercentenary (discussed earlier). Shakespeare's Shrine tells the story of the nineteenth-century creation of Shakespeare's Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Finally, Zed Books has released in paperback two studies of Shakespeare by the British historian Victor Kiernan: Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, first published in 1993, and Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare, first published in 1996. Like Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan is a member of that highly influential generation of British historians who came to prominence in the 1960s and '70s. A committed Marxist, Kiernan writes with passion and precision on the social and economic contexts of Shakespeare's plays.
CONCLUSION
My only concern when I agreed to do this essay was that I might come away from the experience feeling cynical about our field: too much derivative work, too much tedious positioning, too many exploitative presses producing $ 100 books they'll never bother to get reviewed, too much Shakespeare.
I encountered all of this, but in the end it was overshadowed by all that is genuinely impressive about contemporary early modern studies: the rigor and detail with which the most serious historical criticism is practiced; the commitment to collaborative inquiry that informs the best essay collections; and the creativity and intellectual risk-taking that characterizes more and more of the books and book series devoted to English Renaissance drama. I was also heartened to see, at least among some of the strongest studies I received, a drift toward what I'd describe as critical nonpartisanship. or intellectual pluralism; a willingness, that is, to combine disparate methodologies, both historical and nonhistorical, in order to pose more complex questions and arrive at more nuanced insights. If nothing else, this means we belong to a community of scholars who are getting better and better at listening to one another. And in academia, as in the world beyond, that's cause for optimism indeed.
BOOKS RECEIVED
Anderegg, Michael. Lincoln and Shakespeare. Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas. Pp. xviii + 222. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-7006-2129-3.
Anderson. Thomas P. Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy. Series ed. Kevin Curran. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. 2016. Pp. xiv + 290. S120.00. ISBN 978-0-7486-9734-2.
Artese, Charlotte. Shakespeare's Folktale Sources. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press; Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. x + 244. $80.00. ISBN 978-1-61149-555-3.
Barret. J. K. Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press. 2016. Pp. xiv + 250. $55.00. ISBN 978-1-5017-0236-5.
Beecher, Donald. Adapted Brains and Imaginary Worlds: Cognitive Science and the Literature of the Renaissance. Montreal. Kingston ON, London, and Chicago IL: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. ix + 486. $110.00 cloth. ISBN 978-0-7735-4680-6. $39.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-7735-4681-3.
Berry. Ralph. Shakespeare's Settings and a Sense of Place. Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press (distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press), 2016 (paper only). Pp. xvl + 112. $30.00 paper. ISBN 978-1-78316-808-8.
Betteridge, Thomas, and Greg Walker, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2015 (paper only). Pp. xx + 692. $50.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-19-871556-6.
Bickley. Pamela, and Jenny Stevens. Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama: Text and Performance. London and New York: Bloomsbuiy Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xiv + 338. $86.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-4725-7714-6. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-47257713-9.
Booth. Stephen. Close Reading without Readings: Essays on Shakespeare and Others. Madison and Teaneck NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press: Lanham MD and Plymouth UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. xii + 190. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-61147-890-7.
Brokaw, Katherine Steele. Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 276. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-5017-0314-0.
Brotton. Jerry. This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World. London: Allen Lane, 2016. Pp. xvi + 368. 20.00 [pound sterling]. ISBN 9780-241-00402-9.
Calvo, Clara, and Coppelia Kahn, eds. Celebrating Shakespeare: Commemoration and Cultural Memory. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2015. Pp. xiv + 394. S120.00. ISBN 978-1107-04277-3.
Candido, Joseph, ed. The Text, the Play, and the Globe: Essays on Literary Influence in Shakespeare's World and His Work in Honor of Charles R. Forker. Shakespeare and the Stage. Series eds. Peter Kanelos and Matthew Kozusko. Madison and Teaneck NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press; Lanham MD and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. x + 358. S95.00. ISBN 978-1-6114-7821-1.
Chalk, Brian. Monuments and Literary Posterity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 228. $99.99 ISBN 978-1-107-12347-2.
Chanan. Gabriel. Shakespeare and Democracy: The Self-Renewing Politics of a Global Playwright. Leicestershire UK: Troubadour. 2015 (paper only). Pp. x + 222. 12.99 [pound sterling] paper. ISBN 978-1-78462-424-8.
Christofides, R. M. Othello's Secret: The Cyprus Problem. Shakespeare Now! Series eds. Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury. 2016 (paper only). Pp. viii + 128. $22.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4742-1297-7.
Craig, Leon Harold. The Philosopher's English King: Shakespeare's "Henriad" as Political Philosophy. Rochester NY: Univ. of Rochester Press; Woodbridge UK and Rochester NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2015. Pp. xvi + 274. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-58046-531-1.
Crawforth, Hannah, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, eds. On Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Poets' Celebration. Foreword by Colin Thubron. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury. 2016. Pp. xviii + 94. $19.95. ISBN 978-1-4742-2158-0.
Davis, Nick. Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience. London and New York: Bloomsbury T and T Clark/ Bloomsbury. 2015 (paper only). Pp. viii + 238. $39.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4742-3282-1.
Delabastita, Dirk, and Ton Hoenselaars. eds. Multilingualism in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Benjamins Current Topics 73. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. viii + 216. $135.00. ISBN 978-90-272-4261-7.'
Dickson, Andrew. The Globe Guide to Shakespeare. New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2016 (paper only). Pp. xvi + 704. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-68177-260-8.
Dionne, Craig. Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene. New York: Punctum, 2016 (paper only). Pp. 228. $19.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-6926-4157-6.
Dobson. Michael, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. 2d edn. Rev. eds. Will Sharpe and Erin Sullivan. Oxford Companions. Foreword by Simon Russell Beale. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xxx + 578. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-870873-5.
Drue, Thomas. The Duchess of Suffolk. Ed. and introduction by Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith. Early Modern Drama Texts. Series eds. Richard Dutton and Steven K. Galbraith. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2015. Pp. viii + 184. $77.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1288-2.
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Portraits of Shakespeare. Oxford: Bodleian Library (distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press), 2015 (paper only). Pp. x + 126. $25.00 paper. ISBN 978-1-85124-405-8.
Dutton, Richard. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2016. Pp. xii + 324. $55.00. ISBN 978-019-877774-8.
Edmondson, Paul, and Peter Holbrook, eds. Shakespeare's Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, Readers. London and New York: Bloomsbuiy Arden Shakespeare/Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xviii + 182. $104.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-4742-3449-8. $29.95 paper. ISBN 978-1 -4742-3448-1.
Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells, eds. The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 364. $84.99 cloth. ISBN 978-1-1070-5432-5. $29.99 paper. ISBN 978-1-1076-9909-0.
Eggert. Katherine. Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press (in cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library). 2015. Pp. xii + 356. 855.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4751-0.
Enterline, Lynn. Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016 (paper only). Pp. vi + 202. S24.95 paper. ISBN 978-0-8122-2371-2.
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Hofele, Andreas. No Hamlets: German Shalcespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 336. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-871854-3.
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Huebert. Ronald. Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare. Toronto, Buffalo NY, and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 336. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-4426-4791-6.
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Kiernan, Victor. Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen. Introduction by Michael Wood. London: Zed Books (distributed by Univ. of Chicago Press), 2016. Pp. be + 274. $95.00 cloth. ISBN 978-1-78360-734-1. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-78360-671-9.
Kisery, Andras. Hamlet's Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 338. $95.00. ISBN 978-0-19-874620-1.
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Kolkovich, Elizabeth Zeman. The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 248. $99.99. ISBN 978-1107-13425-6.
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Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine the Great: Part One and Part Two. Ed. Matthew R. Martin. Broadview Editions. Gen ed. L. W. Conolly. Peterborough ON: Broadview Press, 2014 (paper only). Pp. 368. $17.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-5548-1174-8.
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Masten. Jeffrey. Queer Philologies: Sex. Language, and Affect in Shakespeare's Time. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xiv + 354. $59.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-4786-2.
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Kevin Curran is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. He is the author of Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood (2017) and Marriage, Performance, and Politics at the Jacobean Court (2009), and the editor of Shakespeare and Judgment (2016). Curran edits the books series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy and is founding director of the Lausanne Shakespeare Festival.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Curran, Kevin. "Recent studies in tudor and stuart drama." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 57, no. 2, 2017, p. 427+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA496345482&it=r&asid=dba95ab118572999f2658d5b7d4e6555. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A496345482
Shakespeare as co-author: the case of 1 henry VI
Warren Chernaik
27 (Annual 2014): p192.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Associated University Presses
http://www.aupresses.com
I.
THOUGH included in the First Folio as part of a trilogy, I Henry VI (gener-ally considered to be "hare), the vi," in Henslowe's list of plays acted at the Rose in 1592-93) is an independent play. The Contention and True Tragedy, acted by Pembroke's Men, are advertised on their title pages as a play and its sequel, like Tamburlaine, Parts I and II or 1 and 2 Henry IV: the titles are The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke and the death of good King Henrie the siXt, with the whole contention between the two houses Lancaster and Yorke. In 1619, a Quarto edition of the two plays was published with the title The Whole Contention betweene the two Famous Houses, Lancaster and Yorke ... Divided into two Parts.
In some respects, the action of these two plays, in both Quarto and Folio versions, can be seen as continuous. Where True Tragedy and 3 Henry VI begin, in medias res, with Warwick's "I wonder how the king escaped our hands?" and York describing the flight of Henry VI from the battle, the earlier play ends with an exchange between Warwick and York proclaiming "a glorious day' of victory, saying 'the King is fled to London" (2 Henry VI, 5.3.24, 29; 3 Henry VI, 1.1). (1) Though I Henry VI ends with a scene between Queen Margaret and Suffolk, including the ominous closing lines by Suffolk, "Margaret shall now be Queen, and rule the King, / But I will rule both her, the King, and realm" (1 Henry VI, 5.5.107-8), which can be said to anticipate the action of 2 Henry VI, the links between / Henry VI and the other two plays are less pronounced than in 2 and 3 Henry VI. In the RSC productions of 2000 and 2006, directed by Michael Boyd, treating the plays as a cycle, it was apparent that 1 Henry VI was in some ways a different kind of play from the other two. As the subtitle of the 1619 Quarto suggests, The Contention and True Tragedy could be seen as comprising a single tragic action, with the separate but connected "Tragicall ends of the good Duke Humfrey, Richard Duke of Yorke, and King Henry the sixt," occurring in The Contention, 3.2, True Tragedy, 1.4, and True. Tragedy, 5.6 One structural oddity is that Talbot, the principal figure in 1 Henry VI, is never mentioned in the other two plays. (2) A partial explanation for this anomaly may lie in the order of composition of the three plays: in all probability, I Henry VI was written after the other two.
Two pieces of external evidence make I Henry VI, according to Gary Taylor, "the most securely dated of all Shakespeare's early work"--though there is no reason to assume that the text of 1 Henry VI, as printed in the First Folio in 1623, many years after its first performance, is identical with the play as acted in 1592 by Strange's Men. Henslowe's Diary lists a first performance of this play, particularly well attended, on March 3, 1592: "ne," in Henslowe's entry for "harey the vi," can only refer to a new play, given the unusually high gate receipts. (3) Praise of this play, with its portrait of "brave Talbot," in Thomas Nashe's Pierce Penniless, entered in the Stationers' Register on August 2, 1592, confirms a date before June 1592, when the theatres were closed for several months because of plague. The extremely short time between March and June 1592 renders it virtually impossible for the plays to have been written and performed in the order in which they appear in the First Folio, as a sequence of three plays. The fact that versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI were performed by a different company, Pembroke's Men, is further evidence that the order of composition and performance was 2, 3, and 1, with 1 Henry VI the last to be performed. As Edward Burns says, "there is in fact nothing in I Henry VI that we need to know to follow the story of Parts Two and Three," though in this"free-standing piece," it might be possible for members of the audience (or the dramatist) to "draw on ... knowledge of the two earlier plays." (4 )
1 Henry VI is definitely a "Talbot play.- The largest part in the play. Talbot was the kind of role in which Alleyn excelled. Nashe, praising the history play as a genre by the means of which "our forefathers" can be "raised from the Grave of Oblivion", singles out as example Alleyn's performance as the heroic, doomed warrior Talbot, bringing him alive again before an audience: Talbot, who dies nobly in the company of the son he has trained in the principles of chivalry, is both an exemplary heroic figure and a tragic victim. In the play. Talbot is contrasted with two sets of adversaries: the French, led by Joan la Pucelle, an ambiguous figure with supernatural powers associated with witchcraft, and the selfish, squabbling English courtiers, who undermine
How would it have joyd brave To/bot (the terror of the French) to
thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeare in his Tomb, he
should triumph againe on the Stage. and have his bones newe embalmed
with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall
times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person. imagine they
behold him fresh bleeding ... There is no immortalitie can be given a
man on earth like unto Playes. (5)
his prowess in battle and eventually are responsible for his death. Both Talbot and Joan, the two leading characters, are dead before the end of act 4, and Queen Margaret, a principal figure in 2 and 3 Henry VI, appears for the first time in act 5--significantly, shortly after Joan, another powerful, dangerous woman, departs from the stage. Though the English scenes in 1 Henry VI can be said to prefigure the principal concerns of 2 and 3 Henry VI--the rivalry of Duke Humphrey and Winchester, and of York and Somerset, the ambition of Suffolk, the ineffectuality of the well-meaning King--in the two later plays war in France is replaced by civil war, presented as civil butchery, murderously destructive. Surprisingly, the association of the two warring factions with the red and white rose of York and Lancaster, prominent in 1 Henry VI, 2.4, is, except for one line, never mentioned in The Contention, and mentioned only in three lines and a stage direction in True Tragedy. (6)
Even with considerable doubling, I Henry VI, in the version preserved in the First Folio, requires a larger cast than The Contention, Edward II, and Titus Andronicus, plays known to have been performed by Pembroke's Men. At least fourteen adult male actors and three or four boys are required, along with at least eight extras, some mute and some with a few lines to speak. With doubling, Edward II can be performed by a company of eleven men and two boys, Titus Andronicus by twelve men (five of them in roles permitting doubling) and three boys, and The Contention, as Scott McMillin has shown, by eleven men and four boys. (7) 1 Henry VI, 1.3 includes two rival sets of servingmen and a third set of Mayor's officers (six or more extras), with lines to speak for five minor characters. 3.1 and 3.2 present considerable problems for the company, even with doubling. 3.1 has nine principal characters and at least four servingmen, and 3.2, a battle scene, has a whole new set of characters, eight or nine, along with six to eight extras, three of whom have lines to speak. Only thirty-two lines, a soliloquy and a brief scene with Joan and five extras, one of them offstage, allow actors to change costumes, permitting some doubling. There is a considerable amount of spectacle and pageantry in I Henry VI, far more than in Edward II or Edward III, with specific references to "the walls" and "the turrets" calling for the use of an upper stage. Battle scenes (1.2, 1.4, 1.5, 2.1, 3.2, 3.3) with stage directions like "they are beaten back by the English with great loss," "enter . with scaling ladders," and "the French leap over the walls in their shirts" illustrate this element of spectacle, and require a large number of extras. It is likely that the play was designed to take advantage of the facilities available at the Rose, where it was performed, with great success, in 1592 and 1593. (8)
A possible doubling chart follows. Actors 1-6, with the longest roles, would not need to double, though actors 3 and 6, not in act 1, could be Messengers in 1.1. King Henry VI, who comments on his"tender years" and is spoken of as "a child" in 3.1, may have been played by a boy actor in this scene, and possibly in later scenes of the play. Actors 7-10 could double in French and English roles, and actors 11--.14 could play a number of roles. Several characters appear in one scene only.
II.
Though, as with Edward III and Titus Andronicus, critics generally agree that I Henry VI is a collaborative play, there is no consensus as to the authors involved or the portions of the play attributed to each of them. Dover Wilson (1952) and Gary Taylor (1995) present arguments for Thomas Nashe as the author of act 1. That would accord with the pattern of Titus Andronicus, in which the opening scenes of the play are assigned to one author, the rest of the play to another, with the second author responsible for the "plot," the overall structural pattern. Dover Wilson points out several striking parallels with works by Nashe. In 1.2, the opening dialogue between the Dauphin and Alencon includes three echoes of Nashe: An inconsistency noted by Dover Wilson sets act 1 apart from the rest of the play: Winchester, Humphrey of Gloucester's bitter enemy, is a cardinal in 1.3, a bishop in acts 3 and 4, and newly "call'd unto a cardinal's degree" (5.1.29) and dressed in scarlet robes in act 5. Athough he does not attribute act I to Nashe, Marco Mincoff points out stylistic characteristics in this part of the play he considers un-Shakespearean: "an excess of inversions," a "staccato abruptness": "Me they concern; Regent I am of France," "His ransom there is none but I shall pay" (1.84, 148). Paul Vincent, in his unpublished PhD thesis, has shown that in the frequency of grammatical inversions (seventy-three in act 1, one every 8.2 lines, as against only thirty-six in the rest of the play) and classical and biblical allusions (nearly as many in act 1 as in the other four acts combined), act 1 can be seen as anomalous. (10) Taylor cites several other anomalies in act I, in stage directions and linguistic detail (stage directions beginning "Here," verbs ending "eth," both common in act 1 and rare even in early Shakespeare). but these cannot be considered reliable evidence of authorship. Even if some of Taylor's arguments are discounted, there is solid evidence to support the conclusion that the author of act 1 is "not Shakespeare," with Nashe as a likely author of these opening scenes. (11)
Though claims have been made for Shakespeare as author of acts 2-5 and thus the principal author of a collaborative play, the scenes most often attributed to Shakespeare are 2.4 (the Temple Garden scene), 4.3-4.7 (the death of Talbot). and the scenes involving Suffolk and Margaret (the later part of 5.3 and 5.5). Beginning with Chambers, scholars who have seen the play as the product of more than one author have singled out the Temple Garden scene, with its rivalry between two factions, the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York, as definitely by Shakespeare. Though the scenes in act 4, partly in stately blank verse and partly in couplets, are stylistically different from 2.4. these scenes as well are often assigned to Shakespeare. Chambers distinguishes six kinds of scenes in I Henry 1/1--scenes in the English court, scenes of war in France, the Temple Garden scene, the scenes leading up to Talbot's death, the scene in couplets when Talbot mourns the death of his son and dies. and the Suffolk-Margaret scenes in act 5--and argues that only the Temple Garden scene and some of the Talbot scenes in act 4 can be attributed to Shakespeare. Mincoff and Craig cite linguistic evidence (the relative frequency of feminine endings, tests involving vocabulary and function words) that make it likely that the Temple Garden scene and a large part of act 4 are Shakespearean. Several critics. including MincoIT, add the Suffolk-Margaret scenes near the end of the play, with their foreshadowing of the action of The Contention and 2 Henry VI, to the list of scenes that can be attributed to Shakespeare. (12)
Taylor, like Dover Wilson, argues that three or more authors are involved in the collaboration. Dover Wilson's version is that Shakespeare. at a relatively late stage, was called in to supply new or revised scenes, in a play "knocked together" in "haste" by Robert Greene "in collaboration with Nashe and perhaps Peele, but afterwards revised, in places drastically, by Shakespeare for stage production." (13) Taylor, less impressionistic and less convinced that the play is "poor drama" written to appeal to debased public taste, purports to find four authors, citing supposedly objective evidence to support the following distribution: Yet the grounds on which Taylor distinguishes Author W from Author Y and the two of them from Shakespeare, as author of 2.4 and the Talbot scenes in act 4, are exiguous. Taylor claims that the scene divisions in acts 3 and 5, absent from acts 1 and 2, indicate a separate author (17) for these parts of the play. But in fact the indications of scene divisions, extremely chaotic in the folio text of I Henry VI (where act 4 contains four scenes, the equivalent of 4.1-4.7 and 5.1-5.4 in the Cairncross edition, and act 5 contains one short scene only, 5.5). in no way support separate authorship. (14) As Marcus Dahl has pointed out, the use of "ye" instead of "you," relatively rare in Shakespeare and more common in acts 3 and 5 than in the rest of the play (twenty out of twenty-three instances), cannot be considered a reliable test of authorship, nor can the variant spellings Pucelle/Puzel, Burgonie/Burgundy. Oh/O, or the frequency of brackets in the scenes Taylor assigns to Author Y or W. All of these discrepancies can more easily be explained in other ways than by a multiplicity of authors. Taylor's arguments provide some support for a separate author for act I. but very little solid evidence for dividing up the play further. (15)
Brian Vickers, in "Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer," agrees that Nashe is the author of act I. but assigns only 2. 4 and one scene in act 4 to Shakespeare, arguing that in these scenes, "both of which stand out from those around them in several prosodic aspects," Shakespeare was revising a play written by two other authors. According to Vickers, the author responsible for the bulk of the play (all of acts 3 and 5 and all but one scene in acts 2 and 4) was Thomas Kyd. (16) In his TLS essay, the evidence Vickers gives for Kyd as coauthor of the play consists entirely of parallel passages, "exact matches" between I Henry VI and plays by Kyd, twenty-seven passages altogether--nine from The Spanish Tragedy, seven from Soliman and Perseda, and eleven from Cornelia. Since that time, Vickers has revised his figures for these three plays to fourteen from The Spanish Tragedy, sixteen from Soliman and Per-seda, and fourteen from Cornelia, and in plays not previously accepted as by Kyd that Vickers attributes to that author, ten from Arden of Faversham, ten from Fair Em, and, in an extraordinarily high number of parallels, thirty-one from King Leir and forty-one from Edward III. The latter two plays require separate discussion, but for the three plays in Kyd's acknowledged canon as well as for Arden of Faversham and Fair Em, alternative explanations are possible, and the parallel passages do not prove common authorship. (17)
The method Vickers employs to establish "unique matches" is to use soft-ware designed for detecting plagiarism (http://www.plagiarism.tk) to detect identical three-word sequences in any two texts being collated, and then to check each match against a database of plays of the period. The unusually large number of such parallels between King Leir and the three canonical Kyd plays (over one hundred, according to Vickers) or between Arden of Faversham and these three plays (seventy-six, according to Vickers) provides a strong case for Kyd's authorship of the two anonymous plays. But in the case of 1 Henry VI, the parallels with The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda, and Cornelia can be explained in a number of different ways.
All the passages cited from The Spanish Tragedy are common formulae, and do not indicate distinctive practice by a particular author: "blood of innocents," "break your necks," "mov'd with remorse," "thou didst force." All these are what Vickers calls rare matches, in that the exact wording does not occur elsewhere in the seventy-five texts on his database, but the parallels need not indicate a common author. The words "blood" and "remorse," after all, are central to the vocabulary of nearly all Elizabethan and Jacobean dra-matists. (18) The additional parallels in 147 Unique Matches (2012) can similarly be explained as common formulae, suitable for insertion in a line of iambic pentameter: "that will not," "make this marriage," "death from his," "and my countries." More unusual parallels of three to five words include "I gave in charge," "art thou prisoner," and "play'd/mist her part in this," and so are "created Duke of York," "will not trust thee," and "with the pitifull," from Vickers's later list of "unique matches."
But again they do not necessarily indicate Kyd as co-author. "Art thou prisoner" (ST, 1.2.153, / H6, 2.3.33) is appropriate to a different context in each play. "Poor Bel-inzperia mist her part in this" (ST, 4.4.140) refers literally to playing a role in a play- within-a-play, where "Pucelle hath bravely play'd her part in this" (1H6, 3.3.88) refers to her prowess in battle. The word "prisoner" occurs ten times in The Spanish Tragedy, eleven times in the plays of Marlowe. In the Shakespeare canon, "prisoner" occurs eighty-one times, including "thou art my prisoner" and "I am thy prisoner," while "trust" occurs 180 times in Shakespeare, including "I will not trust," "and will not trust," "we will not trust," "will I trust thee," and "I'll not trust thee." (19)
Some matches from Soliman and Perseda, initially striking because they include an unusual word or rhythmical and syntactic as well as verbal parallels, do not survive closer scrutiny. At least eight passages in Shakespeare and other writers of the period contain the words "you to forbear," and for "collop." Cairncross notes a closer parallel in Golding's translation of Ovid., Metamorphoses, v. 650-51: "my daughter ... a collop of mine owne flesh cut as well out of thine." (20) Other parallels, as in The Spanish Tragedy, are commonplaces. If, in the limited database of plays of this period used by Vickers in his TLS essay and 147 Unique Matches, the exact three words "with desire to," "my selfe will." "I owe him," "-that others have," and "deny me not" do not appear, that does not mean that these locutions are "preferred phrases" indicating a writer's "individual voice." A wider database, including plays written between 1596 and 1642 and poems of the period, might well contain all of these conventional three-word combinations:2' Some of the phrases of more than three words cited by Vickers are somewhat more unusual: "I weare this Rose," "the gates of heaven," and, a particularly striking instance: The contexts of the two "Alcides" passages differ considerably: the passage from I Henry VI is the opening line of a tribute to the dead Talbot, where the other passage comes from a comic speech by the braggart Basilisco, listing a series of heroes (Hercules, Achilles, Alexander, Pompey ...) who are all dead, as an argument for self-preservation: "the shrub is safe when the Cedar shaketh" (SP, 5.3.87). "I wear this rose" and its variants, "will i upon this party wear this rose," "pluck this/a red/white rose," "he wears this rose," and the white rose that I wear," occurs again and again in Shakespeare, thirteen times in I Henry VI, 2.4 (assigned by Vickers to Shakespeare). "Gates of heaven" occurs in 3 Henry VI as well as 1 Henry VI, and "gates of hell" three times in Marlowe.
Though there are many parallels with Cornelia, a translation from a French original, all may reflect the common vocabulary of the period or a generic resemblance: "inferior to none," "lay them gently/level," "[the] bodies of the dead," "When he perceiv'd," "If Death be, "be wedded to, "shall turn to," "with hope to," "tune not thy," "day or night," "to venge this outrage or revenge my wrongs/ to venge this wrong." (22) A problem with citing parallel passages from Kyd is that the canon of his works is uncertain, and that the database Vickers is using is small. Even if phrases like "blood of innocents" or "bodies of the dead" do not appear in the limited corpus of works on the database, these are highly conventional phrases., characteristic of the period. If the words "day or night" or "with hope to" do not appear on Vickers's database, they can hardly be called characteristic of a particular author. According to Charles Forker, writing about echoes from Peele's The Troublesome Reign of King John to be found in such plays as Richard II and Mar-lowe's Edward II, "verbal imitation was a stock-in-trade of the commercial theatre, and ... popular dramatists such as Peele, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare all practised it to varying degrees." As MacDonald Jackson says in his critique of Vickers' TLS essay, "it is clear that dramatists of the late .1580s and early 1590s drew on a common stock of phrases and that they borrowed from, and were influenced by, one another." In this essay, Jackson uses a method similar to that of Vickers to show that at least as many parallels can be found between Arden of Faversham, attributed to Kyd by Vickers, and two early Shakespearean texts, The Taming of the Shrew and 2 Henry VI, as the matches Vickers cites with works by Kyd. (23)
Marina Tarlinskaja, in "Revising the Kyd canon," provides evidence from stylistic detail and versification that would suggest a collaboration of three authors: Shakespeare, Nashe, and a third author (Taylor's "Y"), who may well be Kyd. On the basis of a series of stylistic criteria, Tarlinskaja argues for the extension of the Kyd canon from three to seven plays, including the "Y" scenes of I Henry VI. In this paper, she finds a clear distinction in the handling of the blank verse line (in such things as deviations from the iambic pattern, inversions, and disyllabic scansion of suffixes in words like "distinction" or "ambiti-ous" ) in passages in / Henry VI that can be assigned to Kyd, Nashe, and Shakespeare. According to Tarlinskaja's prosodic tests, where seven "Kyd" texts show an overall stylistic homogeneity (scores ranging from 10.0 to 12.0, with the "Y" scenes in 1 Henry VI at 10.5), the "Shakespeare" scenes of 1 Henry VI have a much lower score of 5.5, and the "Nashe" passages in Act I are even more sharply differentiated from passages that can be assigned to Shakespeare and to "Y." (24) There is a very strong case for assigning the authorship of Arden of Faversham to Kyd. Vickers has identified thirty-six exact matches between Arden of Faversham and Soliman and Perseda and thirty-two between Arden of Faversham and The Spanish Tragedy. Several of these cannot be considered commonplaces, and must represent either common authorship or conscious imitation. The first of these passages, as Vickers concedes, is "the most famous line in The Spanish Tragedy, frequently parodied," and thus could be an example of imitation rather than indicating common authorship. As Jackson argues, "it is just as likely that the author of Arden of Faversham echoed Kyd's unforgettable line." Nevertheless, the sheer number of parallels, as well as the close agreement in detail, is striking. (26)
There are fewer parallels between Arden of Faversham and I henry Though some, like "to pay him," can please him," and "Why, what is he?" can be considered commonplaces, three matches, echoing one another in their metrical pattern as well as in verbal detail, may well be either deliberate imitation or evidence of the same author.
An additional complication is the large number of parallels between Marlowe's Edward II and Arden of Faversham, two plays plainly by different authors, as well as parallels between Edward II and Soliman and Perseda. If, as is likely, the parallels are deliberate borrowing, it is not clear whether Marlowe or Kyd is the borrower. Kyd and Marlowe were close associates in 1591, at one point "writing in one chamber" in the service of Lord Strange. (27) Edward II, published in 1594 after Marlowe's death, was written for Pembroke's Men sometime between 1591 and 1593. Arden of Faversham, with no indication on the title page of an acting company, was registered with the Stationers' Company in April 1592 and Soliman and Perseda registered in November 1592, with Quartos of both plays published that year. In these three plays the likely line of descent is Edward II, Arden of Faversham, and Soliman and Perseda. The Spanish Tragedy is earlier than any of these plays. One commentator says that Kyd in these passages "makes little or no attempt to disguise the theft from Marlowe." (28) Though the case for Kyd's authorship of Arden of Faversham remains strong, it is evident from this complex network of borrowings and echoes that the "rare matches" Vickers cites do not in themselves prove common authorship of works in which such passages occur.
A particularly interesting set of parallels cited by Vickers and by Thomas McNeal in an essay in Shakespeare Quarterly (1958) consists of passages from The True .Chronicle History of King Leir, a play performed by the Queen's Men at the Rose in April 1594. According to Vickers, both this play and the parallel passages in I Henry VI were written by Kyd. (29) The similarities are striking, both in their"sheer number (over one hundred altogether, according to Vickers) and in the close agreement of details. Many of the parallel passages come from an episode in King Leir that Shakespeare did not draw on a decade later in writing King Lear, a scene out of romance, the Gallian King's courtship of the exiled Cordella. The equivalent scene in 1 Henry VI is Suffolk's courtship of Margaret in act 5, and differs in tone because Suffolk, rather than a virtuous young monarch, is a morally suspect figure, ambitious and corrupt. In one passage full of such verbal parallels, "the golden sceptre" of "a queen" and "a rich imperial crown" are the temptations of earthly power and riches, to which both Margaret and Suffolk succumb, where in the other Gardena rejects the trappings of wealth. (30) The Gallian King says "Your birth's too high for any but a king" (King Leir, 7.110), where Suffolk, in a later scene, says "Her peerless feature, joined with her birth, Approves her fit for none but for a king" (5.5.68-69). The scenes in King Leir in the tradition of romance are full of such echoes, with phrases like "wondrous praise," "chief/rare perfections," and wandering in "a labyrinth of love" abounding. (31)
There are two possible explanations for these close parallels, which are unlikely to be the result of chance. Though such phrases as "fairest creature" or "I dare not speak," cited by Vickers, are part of a common vocabulary, available to any author of the period, others would appear to be conscious echoes. If Kyd is the author of King Leir and of act 5 of I Henry VI, then the passages can be seen as illustrative of what Vickers calls "self-plagiarism," an author's recycling of "preferred phrases" in different works. (32) But if Shakespeare, rather than Kyd, is the author of the Margaret/Suffolk scenes in I Henry VI, then he could be drawing on the work of another author, in a play known to him in 1594. when these scenes are likely to have been written, as well as in 1605, when he wrote King Lear. Some support for the second possibility is provided by McNeal, who lists as many parallels between King Leir and other plays written by Shakespeare in the 1590s as the parallels with act 5 of I Henry VI. At least two passages in 2 Henry VI show Queen Margaret as more like King Leir's Ragan and Gonorill than like Cordella: "Would make thee quickly hop without thy head" (2H6, 1.3.138) echoes Ragan's "Or I will make him hop without a head" (King Leir, 15. 28); and Ragan's "These foolish men are nothing but mere pity, /And melt as butter doth against the sun" (King Leir, 25.17-18) finds an echo in Margaret's equally coldhearted "Free lords, cold snow melts with the sun's hot beams. 1 Henry my lord is cold in great affairs, 1 Too full of foolish pity" (2 Henry VI, 3.1.223-35) (33) McNeal goes on to cite four parallels with A Midsummer Night's Dream, three with Two Gentlemen of Verona, three with Romeo and Juliet, and four with The Merchant of Venice. Such passages, involving the power parents exercise over their children, can be seen as Shakespeare's recycling or reworking the rejection scene in King Lein with its contrast of flattery and plain speaking or disobedience, long before he wrote his own version of that scene in King Lear. These similarities (or the similarity, often cited, of a conscience-stricken murderer in King Leir to the two Murderers assigned to kill Clarence, in Richard do not indicate common authorship of King Leir and these other plays, but do suggest that Shakespeare was familiar enough with this play performed by the Queen's Men to be able to draw on it in detail on several occasions, reworking its materials. (34)
Other parallels cited by Vickers in 147 Unique Matches, from scenes other than the courtship scene, include a number that could be considered commonplaces: "in good will," "I am unworthy," "content with any," "and left us," "ne're so much," and, in four-word matches, "I trust ere long" and "set a glosse on/upon." But several parallels are too close to be anything but conscious imitation or an indication of common authorship. Most of these passages are from Talbot scenes in acts 2 and 3, assigned by Vickers to Kyd:. "And think me but the shadow of my selfe" (King Leii; 14.17) is virtually identical in phrasing with "No, no, I am but shadow of my self" (1H6, 2.3.49), in an exchange between Talbot and the Countess of Auvergne. Two lines spoken by the dying Duke of Bedford, "Lord Talbot, do not so dishonour me" and "And will be partner of your weal and woe" (1H6, 3.2.88, 90), are recycled as "Then do not so dishonour me. my lords" (King Leir, 6.41) and "As make me partner of your pilgrimage" (King Leir, 4.15), two lines in entirely different contexts. Another passage from the same scene in 1 Henry VI, spoken by a cowardly knight fleeing from battle, "Ay, all the Talbots of the world, to save my life" (3.2.106), reappears in King Leir as an indication of honor and loyalty: ''Oh, had I now to give thee 1 The monarchy of all the spacious world, 1 To save his life" (King Leir, 19.268-70). Leir's reunion with Cordelia contains the line "Oh, if you love me as you do profess" (King Leir, 24.32), a close parallel to "And if you love me, as you say you do" (1116, 3.1.106), from a speech apparently also echoed in Kyd's Soliman and Perseda.
These parallels, like those cited by McNeal, can be explained in a number of ways. If Kyd is the author of King Leir and the author of the scenes in 1 Henry VI containing these extracts, then the passages could, as Vickers argues, be examples of an author's recycling of "preferred phrases." But if these scenes from 1 Henry VI are by Shakespeare rather than Kyd, then there are at least two possibilities. If 1 Henry VI (a version of which was performed at the Rose in March 1592) was the earlier play, then the author of King Leir may have been drawing on 1 Henry Vi, imitating and adapting a number of details. Since we do not know when King Leir was written, and since the entry in Henslowe's diary for April 1594 evidently refers to this play as one in the repertory of the Queen's Men rather than as a new play, it is also possible that King Leir was available for Shakespeare to use in adapting passages in I Henry VI, as, from the evidence cited by McNeal, he did in several other plays written during the 1590s. (35)
As Charles Forker has shown, both Marlowe and Shakespeare drew on another Queen's Men play, George Peele's The Troublesome Reign of King John. recycling and reworking lines where there is no possibility of common authorship:
An earlier study by Rupert Taylor lists 32 parallels between Troublesome Reign and Edward II, which he considers conclusive proof "that one author was imitating the other." (36) Rupert Taylor also lists twenty-two parallels between Troublesome Reign and Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris, and at least six close matches between Peele's Edward I and Edward II. Here again the parallels suggest deliberate imitation, with Marlowe probably the borrower in each case. (37)
Edward III provides the largest number of substantive parallels with 1 Henty V/--forty-one overall, of which at least twelve cannot be explained as commonplaces, but must be either deliberate imitations or evidence of common authorship. Matters are complicated here because both works have two or more authors, with Shakespeare generally accepted as the author of at least four scenes in Edward III ( I .2, 2.1, 2.2, and 4.4) and of a number of scenes in 1 Henry V/ (2.4 and parts of act 4. as a minimum). But though such three-word matches as "let us resolve," "my tender youth," "with his armie." and "thee with thine" can be considered commonplaces, likely to turn up in a wider database than the one Vickers uses, other parallels are striking in their close agreement in detail. All the passages from Edward III quoted below are from scenes Vickers assigns to Kyd and not to Shakespeare. I list them in the order in which they appear in Edward M. Even if, as appears likely. Kyd is co-author of Edward ///, that in itself does not prove that he is recycling his own material and not imitating another dramatist. (38)
These resemblances, nearly all of which come from scenes of war in a history play, may be in part generic, even when they are conscious echoes. All but one of the passages quoted from / Henry V/ come from the scenes featuring the antagonists Talbot and Joan, set in France, and all the extracts from Edward /// are from similar scenes. The death of the Talbots, father and son (in the penultimate extract), was a famous scene, and the equivalent episode in Edward III, where the young prince addresses the old, wounded Audley, may be imitating the earlier play. We know that "harey the vi" was performed in March 1592, and Richard Proudfoot dates Edward III 1593. The Contention and True Tragedy, versions of 2 and 3 Henry VI performed by Pembroke's Men, are almost certainly earlier than either play. The LFAS database, which lists only exact matches of three words or more (and thus would not include some of the matches above, like "My arms shall be thy grave") shows a roughly similar number of exact matches for 1H6, 2116, and 3H6 with E3: 22, 20, and 26. (39)
Thomas Merriam and Hugh Craig, like Vickers and Taylor, find three authors collaborating in 1 Henry VI, but argue that the third author is Marlowe. Merriam, who also considered Marlowe rather than Kyd the co-author of Edward III, finds close verbal parallels between Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and one scene involving Joan in I Henry VI (5.3.1-44). Though he argues, like Vickers, that the "exact sequence of words" he quotes "occurs nowhere else in English verse drama of the period," the parallels, like those Vickers cites, do not necessarily constitute evidence of common authorship. Merriam cites "aid me in this enterprise," "plumed crest," and "regions under earth," and Craig, supplementing Merriam's account, adds further parallels from different scenes in 1 Henry VI: "famous through the world," "monstrous treachery," "his envious heart/envious malice of thy swelling heart." All of these, with the possible exception of "aid me in this enterprise," can be considered commonplaces rather than revealing the hidden signature of a particular author. (40) "Enterprise," used in this sense, is a Marlovian word, occurring twice in Faustus 1604. three times in Faustus 1616, and three times in The Massacre at Paris. In a similar context, Faustus in 1604 calls on students of necromancy to "aid me in this attempt" (1.1.1 13). "Regions under earth," like "aid me in this enterprise" (1146.5.3.7), occurs in the scene where Joan summons demonic spirits, who "forsake" her (5.3.29). The scene is clearly influenced by Doctor Faustus, and the earlier scene in which her French allies tell Joan "we will make thee famous through the world" (3.3.13) may well echo Tamburlaine, "famous through the world" (3.3.83), with a further parallel in Faustus 1616 "famous through all Italy" (4.1.59). But these parallels are more likely to be conscious imitation than evidence of common authorship. "Plumed crest'', "monstrous treachery/treason/traitor/villainy", and "envious" in association with "heart" are all commonplaces. Though the LFAS database lists 37 "unique" exact matches between /H6 and Marlowe, nearly all of them, like "sons and husbands," "leave this town," "no other king," "draw on thee" can be considered commonplaces. The rare exceptions, like the parallel between "Whose bloody deeds shall make all Europe quake" (1H6, 1.1.156) and "Which lately made all Europe quake for feare" (1Tam, 3.3.135) are formulaic passages, and probably conscious echoes of a famous play.
Here and in an earlier essay, Merriam cites the evidence of function words (like "to" and "but") to illustrate differences in common practice in texts by Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as a close affinity to the Marlowe passages in the forty-four lines of this scene (an extremely small sample from which to draw a conclusion). In the earlier essay. Merriam, counting both function words and the relative frequency of words "preferred" by Marlowe over Shakespeare (words like "mighty," "fiery," "town"), makes a case for Marlowe as part-author of Shakespeare's early history plays. His conclusion is that such plays as 1 Henry VI are "Shakespeare's incorporation and revision of original writing by Marlowe." (41) Craig. again using for comparison both "marker words", used more by Marlowe than his contemporaries, and function words, tests three scenes in I Henry VI involving Joan against Marlowe and several other dramatists of the period, including Kyd. His conclusion is that "it seems very likely that Marlowe wrote the middle part of the play involving Joan of Arc." Later in this essay, Craig goes on to argue that Marlowe also wrote the Jack Cade sequences in 2 Henry VI, and here again the conclusion seems unwarranted from the relatively skimpy evidence he provides. It would be difficult for any author of the 1590s to write a scene in which devils are summoned and appear on stage without being influenced by Doctor Faustus, and possible echoes of Tamburlaine in 2 Henry VI are evidence only of the popularity of Marlowe's plays, widely imitated by other dramatists. (42)
III.
What most of these critics ignore, claiming scenes in acts 2-5 of 1 Henry VI for different authors, is that the text of the play that appears in the First Folio of 1623 is very unlikely to be the same text that was acted by Strange's Men in 1592. As G. E. Bentley says in The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time: We know that in 1594 or shortly afterwards, 1Henry VI passed into the ownership of the Chamberlain's Men and entered into their repertory, along with
The refurbishing of old plays in the repertory seems to have been the
universal practice in the London theatres from 1590 to 1642. As a
rough rule of thumb one might say that almost any play first printed
more than ten years after composition and known to have been kept in
active repertory by the company which owned it is most likely to
contain revisions by the author or. in many cases, by another
playwright working for the same company. (43)
2 and 3 Heniy VI, which, under different titles, had been in the repertory of Pembroke's Men. (44) The epilogue to Henry V calls the attention of the 1599 audience to the three parts of Henry VI as plays "which oft our stage has shown" (Epilogue, 13). With 2 and 3 Henry VI, two distinct versions of each play exist, one of the texts in all probability a revised version, but no equivalent of The Contention and True Tragedy exists for 1 Henry VI.
If Shakespeare revised the text of "Harey the vi" in 1594 or afterwards to make it conform more closely to the two later plays in the sequence, then the scenes most likely to be revised, or added to the play, are 5.3.45-195 and 5.5. which introduce the adulterous love of Suffolk and Queen Margaret, a major theme in the later plays. Cairncross sees "the insertion of the Margaret-Suffolk material" by Shakespeare as a way of adapting 1 Henry Vito two plays written and performed earlier. Vincent explicitly presents these scenes as added to a pre-existing text, performed without these scenes in 1592, and ending with 5.4 and its proclamation of "a solemn peace" (5.4.174) between the victorious English and the defeated French. One anomaly is that in 5.5 the King is an adult, old enough to marry, where in earlier scenes he is referred to as a "child" (3.1.132), and probably played by a boy actor. (45)
Act 4 of I Henry VI is disputed territory. The action of 4.2-4.7 is continuous, presenting a coherent narrative in a series of short scenes (not indicated as separate scenes in the Folio, other than by stage directions "Enter" and "Exit/Exeunt"), with Talbot as the central figure. These scenes follow directly from 4.1, which ends with Exeter's speech on the damaging effects of the "jarring discord" (4.1.188) of the factious courtiers. In 4.2 the heroic Talbot leads his troops into battle. "unconquer'd" in the face of "pale Destruction" (4.2.27, 32); in 4.3 and 4.4 first York and then Somerset refuse to send aid to Talbot, "betray'd" by the "strife" of his supposed allies (4.4.39). In 4.5 and 4.6 Talbot and his son John demonstrate their courage and adherence to a chivalric code, choosing certain death before shame: in 4.7 the body of young Talbot is brought on stage and his father dies. This scene, and the entire sequence. ends with the choric figure Sir William Lucy eulogizing Talbot as an exemplary figure. On the face of it, act 4 would appear to present a clear, coherent action entirely in keeping with the earlier scenes in the play, and to be the work of a single author.
However, with rare exceptions, critics divide up the sequence among several authors, parcelling out bits and pieces in various ways. Taylor allots 4.24.7.32 to Shakespeare, but assigns 4.1 and 4.7.33-96 to another author, on the grounds that the passages he considers Shakespearean have a greater percentage of feminine endings and in the Folio text use the spelling "0" rather than "Oh". Craig argues that Shakespeare wrote "the scene depicting Talbot's last battle" (by which he could mean either 4.5-4.7 or 4.2-4.7), but also claims that the scenes in which Joan appears are by a different author from the rest of the play. Presumably, this would mean that the lines by Joan on the dead Talbot (4.7.37-43, 72-76, 87-90) are an interpolation. (46) Vickers advances three different hypotheses for dividing up act 4. In "Incomplete Shakespeare" (2007) he argues that three scenes in act 4 (4.3 through 4.5) are by Shakespeare; in "Thomas Kyd, Secret Sharer" (2008) he claims that unspecified "new evidence" would rule out 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5, but that a "scene for York" in act 4 is by Shakespeare; and in his most recent essay, "Shakespeare and Authorship Studies" (2011) he assigns two scenes in act 4 to Shakespeare, accepting 4.5 but rejecting 4.4, and attributing 4.2 to Shake-speare. (47)
Mincoff assigns all of 4.2-4.7 to Shakespeare, but argues that"if Shakespeare revised the play somewhere about 1594," 4.2 and possibly other parts of the Talbot sequence may have undergone revision. Dover Wilson and Pearlman argue that 4.5 is a revised version of 4.6, and that Shakespeare probably intended 4.6 to be deleted. Pearlman attributed both of these scenes to Shakespeare, where Dover Wilson argued that in 4.5 Shakespeare was revising a scene by Greene or Nashe. (48) This part of the sequence, from 4.5.16 to 4.7.32, is entirely in couplets. Despite Dover Wilson's claim that the diction of 4.6 is "poverty-stricken" and Pearlman's assertion that 4.5 is "of an entirely different character," with "a highly figured rhetoric" absent from 4.6, the distinction they purport to find is highly subjective and open to challenge. The language is formal and sententious throughout, the couplets similar in their syntax and rhetorical structure. Except for the stychomythia in the exchange, there is no essential difference in rhetorical patterning, the use of balance and antithesis within the couplet, in passages like these: As Vickers points out, one distinction between the couplets in 4.5 and those in 4.6-4.7 is the proportion of end-stopped and enjambed couplets. In 4.5, there are fifty lines of couplets, all end-stopped, where in 4.6, fifty of fifty-six lines are end-stopped (nearly 15 percent enjambed) and in 4.7, twenty-nine of thirty-two lines are end-stopped (slightly under 10 percent enjambed).
Tai. Part of thy father may be sav'd in thee. John. No part of him
but will be sham'd in me.
(4.5.38-39)
and
By me I nothing gain and if I stay
'Tis but the shortening of my life a day ...
All these and more we hazard by thy stay;
All these are sav'd if thou will fly away.
(4.6.36-37, 40 41) (49)
The use of run-on lines does lead to a difference in style in passages like this one. from 4.6, discussed by Vickers: But where Vickers sees such a passage as having "a counterproductive effect in rhymed couplets, destroying their rationale," the product of "a bookish dramatist of an older generation" rather than Shakespeare, it would be equally possible to explain the passage as appropriate for describing the action of a battle scene. There is no reason to identify the closed couplets as Shakespearean and the eniambed couplets as Shakespearean. (50)
One anomaly pointed out by Pearlman does suggest that 'Shakespeare may have revised 4.3-4.4, with traces of the unrevised text remaining in the Folio. Sir William Lucy is a choric figure who comments on how the "vulture of sedition" (4.3.47) in the quarrelling courtiers York and Somerset is responsible for the death of Talbot, and at the end of 4.7 pays tribute to the dead hero. Though in modern editions Lucy enters near the beginning of 4.3 and remains onstage until the end of 4.4, in the Folio his speeches in 4.3 (including the "vulture of sedition" speech) are assigned to a Messenger, and Lucy enters for the first time to the cue "Here is Sir William Lucy" in 4.4.10. (51)
There is thus no firm evidence for attributing 1 Henry VI to three or more authors or for dividing up act 4 between two authors. I would offer the following conjectural account of the genesis of the play--recognizing, of course, that it is no more than conjecture, and that another reconstruction of the composition and early performances of "harey the vi" would be possible. After Pembroke's Men had performed The Contention and True Tragedy, versions of the plays given the titles 2 and 3 Henry VI in the 1623 Folio, Strange's Men commissioned a history play on a related subject with a leading role designed for Edward Alleyn and parts for several actors later associated with Shakespeare in the Chamberlain's Men.. Shakespeare, I would argue, was responsible for drawing up the "plot," a scene-by-scene plan for the play as a whole, and assigned the actual writing of act 1 to Thomas Nashe--in much the way that, a few years earlier. Shakespeare had delegated responsibility for act 1 of Titus Andronicus to George Peele. (52) Vincent, Min-coff, and Pearlman, on the grounds that "the play is not stylistically of one piece," argue that the Folio text of 1 Henry VI shows evidence of revision by Shakespeare. In its initial performances at the Rose in 1592, according to Vincent, the play ended with 5.4.173-74 ("Hang up your ensigns, let your
The ireful Bastard Orleans, that drew blood From thee. my boy. and
had the maidenhood Of thy first lichi. I soon encountered. And
Interchanging blows. I quickly shed Some of his bastard blood.
(4.6.16-20)
drums be still, 1 For here we entertain a solemn peace") and did not include the love scene between the ambitious Suffolk and Margaret in 5.3. 45-195 or 5.5, in which Suffolk arranges a marriage between Henry VI and Margaret. (53) When I Henry VI was first acted by the Chamberlain's Men, together with the newly renamed Parts Two and Three, in 1594 or shortly afterwards, Shakespeare. I would argue, undertook a revision of this play as well as the other two. Since no Quarto edition of the play, or any edition earlier than 1623, exists, it is impossible to reconstruct the play in the version performed in 1592 by Strange's Men, though it is likely that some scenes in acts 2 though 5, the parts of the play for which Shakespeare was originally responsible, were revised, with particular attention to providing links with the action of the two other plays and with Richard III, a play performed for the first time by the Chamberlain's Men in 1594.
In the "plot" drawn up by Shakespeare and in the play as performed, both in its earlier and its revised version, the play featured a large number of battle scenes, pitting an English army led by the heroic, doomed Talbot against a French army led by the charismatic, demonic Joan. These scenes, set in France, were juxtaposed with scenes of domestic discord, giving prominence to the rivalry of the Yorkist and Lancastrian factions, and of the corrupt prelate Winchester and Humphrey of Gloucester. The damaging effects of "private discord" are a recurrent theme--expressed, for example, in Lucy's lines on the dangers facing Talbot (4.4.22) and in the pleas of the young King in 3.1 to avoid "civil dissension ... 1 That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth" (3.1.72-73). The epilogue to Henry V, which provides firm evidence for performances of all three plays, in one version or another, by the Chamberlain's Men after 1594 (and possibly even a revival not long before 1599), (54) suggests that the overall effect of the three Henry VI plays is tragic, emphasizing the decline of heroism and chivalric conduct:
Henry the Sixth. in infant bands crowned King Of France and England.
did this king succeed. Whose state so many had the managing That
they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage has
shown; and for their sake In your fair minds let this acceptance
take.
(Henry V, Epilogue, 9-14) (55)
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Notes
(1.) The Whole Contention (London, 1619). title page. Where texts of The Contention and True Tragedy agree with the Folio texts, I quote from 2 Henry VI, ed. Knowles and 3 Henry. VI, ed. Cox and Rasmussen. Quotations from I Henry VI. except noted. are from 1 Henry V1, ed. Cairncross.
(2.) On the absence of references to Talbot in The Contention and True Tragedy. see 1 Homy VI, ed. Dover Wilson, xiii.
(3.) Wells and Taylor, William Shakespeare, 112-13; Henslowe's Diary,16.
(4.) 1 Henry VI, ed. Burns, 5-6. 69-73. According to Dover Wilson, "whereas 1 Henry VI was written by a person or persons who knew all about 2 Henry VI." the other two plays "display complete ignorance of the drama which ostensibly precedes them" (1 Henry VI, ed. Wilson. xi-xii).
(5.) Nashe, 26. See the discussion of this passage and of Talbot's role in 1 Henry VI in Chernaik, Shakespeare's History Plays. 10-11, 28-30. If Nashe is co-author of 1 Henry VI, he is praising his own work-not an uncommon phenomenon. Alleyn is not explicitly mentioned in this passage. but shortly afterward Nashe says, "Not Ras-citts nor Aesope those Tragedians admired before Christ was borne, could ever per-forme more in action, than famous Ned Allen" (27).
(6.) See Gary Taylor, "Shakespeare and Others." 150.
(7.) .See McMillin. "Casting for Pembroke's Men." 141-59. McMillin argues that the order of scenes in the Folio text of 2 Henry VI makes some of the doubling in The Contention impossible. and that this version of the play requires a somewhat larger cast. On doubling in Edward II, see Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe, 136-39.
(8.) I Henry VI, s.d., 1.2. 2.1. On spectacle and pageantry in 1 Henry VI as a play particularly suited to the Rose. see 1 Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, p. liv; and 1 Henry VI, ed. Burns, 9-18. According to Burns. there are more scenes using the upper stage in 1 Henry VI than in any other play in the Shakespeare canon (12).
(9.) ! Henry VI, ed. Dover Wilson. xxii-xxvi. The parallel passages in Nashe are from his satirical pamphlet Have with you to Saffron Walden. Four Letters Confuted. Summer's Last Will and Testament. and The Terrors of the Night. The text quoted is altered from Cairncross's text in 1.2.7.
(10.) I Henry VI, ed, Dover Wilson, xii; Mincoff, "Composition of Henry VI, Pan I," 234-42; Vincent, "Structuring and Revision.- 2005. 203, 216.
(11.) Gary Taylor. "Shakespeare and Others.- 154-62. 174. In his unpublished PhD thesis, Marcus Dahl casts doubt on several of Taylor's arguments supporting Nashe's authorship of act 1. including the use of "Here- as a stage direction: see Dahl, "Authorship of The First Part of Henry Sixth." 2004.
(12.) Chambers, William Shakespeare, 1.290-1; Mincoff. "Composition of Henry VI Part 1," 234-39; Hugh Craig. "The three parts of Henry VI," in Craig and Kinney. Shakespeare, Computers, 51-53.
(13.)I Henry VI, ed. Wilson. xxx. xxxix-xl.
(14.) Taylor. "Shakespeare and Others," 155-57, 164-69. The scene divisions in 'Henry VI, ed. Wilson, are the same as in the Cairncross edition. Other modern editions subdivide acts 4 and 5 differently: Burns has four scenes in act 4 and four in act 5.
(15.) Taylor, "Shakespeare and Others," 161-4, 168-70. According to Marcus Dahl in his unpublished thesis, linguistic analysis (largely based on function words) also provides no support for Taylor's ascription of sections of the play to four different authors.
(16.) Vickers, "Thomas Kyd," 2008,13-15. In a later essay, "Shakespeare and Authorship Studies," (2011), Vickers argues that two scenes in act 4. 4.2 and 4.5. are by Shakespeare.
(17.) I am grateful to Brian Vickers for sending me his 147 Unique Matches in 1 Henry VI between Kyd's scenes (1,832 lines) and the extended Kyd canon (dated .5 March 2012). Vickers describes the method he uses in establishing "unique matches" in Vickers, "Thomas Kyd," (2008) and in Vickers, "Manage of Philaloro," (November 2009).
(18.) Lam grateful to Marcus Dahl for providing me with a marked-up copy of 1 Henry VI, indicating three-word parallels. Though the number of rare matches (27) with the seven plays attributed to Kyd in this database is relatively large. the LFAS database shows a greater number of rare matches with plays attributed to Greene (sixty-nine) and Marlowe (thirty-seven) and the number of rare matches with other Shakespeare texts (two hundred) is much higher. Part of the explanation might lie in the number of texts included: seven Kyd texts, sixteen by Greene, thirty-six by Shakespeare.
(19.) Quotations from Kyd are from Thomas Kyd, Works, ed. Boas. I have consulted A Concordance to the Plays. Poems, and Translations of Christopher Marlowe and The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare.
(20.) 1 Henry Vi, ed. Cairncross, 122. A third parallel cited by Vickers, "I may have liberty" (SP, 3.1.96), 1H6, 3.4.42) uses the phrase very differently in the two passages.
(21.) Vickers, "Thomas Kyd," (2008), 13-15. In this essay. Vickers's database includes seventy-five plays and in 147 Unique Matches (2012) "68 plays thought to have been performed before 1596.
(22.) The parallels with Fair Em can also be dismissed as commonplaces: "the one of us," "we will presently," "to support this," and even the somewhat more extensive "and daughter to a / the King" and "in duty, I am bound / I am bound by duty." The text of Fair Em. in its only edition, is chaotic and unreliable. In the LFAS database, there are fewer matches between Fair Em and 1 Henry V1 than in any other two of the ninety-five plays included.
(23.) Jackson, "New Research," (2008), 107-27 (118); Forker, Troublesome Reign, 127-148 (137).
(24.) Marina Tarlinskaja, "Revising the Kyd canon" (2008), a paper delivered at the LFAS seminar, accessible on the LFAS Web site. The "Kyd" texts are The Spanish Tragedy, Soliman and Perseda. Cornelia, Fair Em, Arden of Faversham, 1 Henri VI (T), and King Leir.
(25.) Arden of Faversham. ed. White; Vickers, "Thomas Kyd," (2008), 14. Crawford, "Authorship," 81-85, lists fifty-three parallels from Soliman and Perseda alone.
(26.) Jackson. "New Research," (2008), 118. For arguments that Shakespeare is author of at least scenes 6 and 8 of Arden of Faversham, see Jackson. "Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene," (2006), 249-93.
(27.) See Nicholl. "The Reckoning," 42-3, 225-26. 288-89.
(28.) The parallels are listed in Marlowe. Edward 11, ed. Charlton and Waller, 18-19. See also Crawford. "Authorship." 81.
(29.) McNeal, "Margaret of Anjau," 1-10; Vickers, "Thomas Kyd," (2008), 14-15.
(30.) King Leir, ed. Michie, 7.116-19; 1H6, 5.3.117-19; McNeal, "Margaret of Anjau," 4. The words "golden scepter in my/thy hand" also appear in Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage and Lyly's Woman in the Moon, according to the LFAS database.
(31.) King Leir, 4.4.16-17, 7.47; 1H6, 5.3.188, 190.5.5.11-12.
(32.) Vickers, "Thomas Kyd." (2008). 13-14.
(33.) See McNeal. "Margaret of Anjau," 8.
(34.) Ibid., 6-7. For the parallel with the murder of Clarence, see ibid.. 9-10; :and Law, "Richard the Third," 117-41.
(35.) See Hens/owe's Diary. 21. King Leir was one of live plays put on in a season of eight days in April 1594. with the repertory divided between the Queen's Men and Sussex's Men. The other plays included The Jew of Malta and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.
(36.) Forker. Troublesome Reign, 128-32; Marlowe, Edward II, ed. Forker. 15-16: Rupert Taylor, "Tentative Chronology," 648.
(37.) Two lines in Edward I are reproduced almost verbatim in Edward II: "It is but temporall you can inflict" (E/.5.880) / 'Tis but temporal that thou canst inflict" (E2, 3.4.22); and "Hence feigned weeds, unfeigned is my grief / are my woes" (El. 25.2519; E2, 4.7.96).
(38.) Once again. I am grateful to Brian Vickers for providing me with a copy of 147 .Unique Matches. In "The Authors of King Edward III," British Academy lecture, 19 October 2009. Vickers argues for Kyd and Shakespeare as co-authors of this play (http://www.britac.ac.uklcnsflles/assets/8756.mp3).
(39.) I am grateful to Marcus Dahl for providing me with a list of exact matches between Edward Hi and /, 2, and 3 Henry VI and with a similar list of parallels between/ Henry VI and Marlowe, from the LFMS database.
(40.) Merriam. 2002. 218-20; Craig and Kinney, 59-61. Merriam's case for Marlowe as part-author is weakened by the uncertain state of Marlowe's text and canon: Faustus 1616. which Merriam cites, is known to include passages not by Marlowe..
(41.) Merriam. "Faustian Joan," (2002), 218-20; Merriam. "Tamburlaine." (1996), 267-91.
(42.) Craig and Kinney. Shakespeare. Computers, 57-68; for Cade and Marlowe, see ibid., 70-77. Vickers. "Shakespeare and Authorship Studies," (2011), 121-26. is critical of Craig's methodology, especially in his improbable assignment of the Jack Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI to Marlowe.
(43.) Bentley. Profession of Dramatist, 263. See also Rasmussen. "Revision of Scripts," 441-60. The Bentley passage is quoted in Vincent. "Structuring and Revision" (2005), which argues that Shakespeare revised the play in 1594, when it was first performed by the Chamberlain's Men.
(44.) See Knutson. Repertory. 59. 165. 188-89. Knutson dates the revival of the three Henry VI plays by the Chamberlain's Men 1594-96. though she does not comment on possible revision at this time.
(45.) I Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xxxvi; Vincent. "Structuring and Revision," 378-80.
(46.) Taylor. "Shakespeare and Others." 156. 163-69; Craig and Kinney. Shakespeare, Computers. 61-64, 68.
(47.) Vickers, "Incomplete Shakespeare," (2007). 326-28. 332. 337-43; "Thomas Kyd," (2008), IS; "Shakespeare and Authorship Studies." (2011). 123-4. Vickers consistently attributes 4.6 and 4.7 to Kyd.
(48.) Mincoff. "Composition," 236-39; / Henry VI, ed. Dover Wilson. pp. xliii- xlvii; Pearlman, "Shakespeare at Work," 1-22. According to Pearlman. the Folio text inadvertently includes "both an initial draft (4.6) and a much improved version of the scene of the Talbots' death" (2).
(49.) 1 Henry VI, ed. Wilson, xlv; Pearlman, "Shakespeare at Work," 6,. 17.
(50.) Vickers, "Incomplete Shakespeare," (2007). 340-43. Dover Wilson similarly characterizes the couplets of 4.5 as "end-stopped as couplets should be" (xlv). Mincoff, in contrast, sees the run-on lines in 4.3 and 4.4, as well as the "frequent run-on lines and medial pauses" in passages in couplets in 4.5-4.7, as indicative of a "comparatively late period" (Mincoff, "Composition," 237-8).
(51.) See Pearlman."Shakespeare at Work," 21-2.; and 1 Henry VI, ed. Cairncross, xvi--xviii. To add to the confusion. York addresses the Messenger, "Lucy, farewell" (4.3.43). Cairncross suggests that these changes may not be authorial, but due to a "stage adapter" or prompter, not fully aware of "authorial inconsistencies" (I Henry VI, ed. Caimcross, xvii--xviii).
(52.) The best account of the "plot scenario" in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater is Stern, Documents of Performance, 9-35.
(53.) Mincoff. "Composition," 242; Vincent, "Structuring and Revision," 379-80.
(54.) Editors of Henry V regularly annotate "which oft our stage has shown" as specifically alluding to performances of "the three parts of H6." See, for example. the notes on Epilogue, 12-13, in Henry V. ed. Craik (Arden 3, 1995) and Henry V, ed. Taylor.
(55.0 In writing this essay, I am grateful for the advice and assistance of Brian Vickers and Marcus Dahl, and for comments on earlier drafts by Marcus Dahl, Richard Proucifoot, and Tom Rutter.
Actor 1 Talbot
Actor 2 Humphrey of Gloucester
Actor 3 York
Actor 4 Winchester
Actor 5 Dauphin
Actor 6 and/or Boy 4 King Henry VI
Actor 7 Bastard, Suffolk
Actor 8 Regnier, Mortimer, Fastolf
Actor 9 Burgundy, Somerset. Master Gunner
Actor 10 Aleijon. Warwick
Actor 11 Exeter, Mayor. General
Actor 12 Bedford. Basset, Lucy
Actor 13 Salisbury, Shepherd, Messenger
Actor 14 Messenger. Woodville, Vernon
Boy 1 Joan
Boy 2 Countess, Margaret
Boy 3 Gunner's Boy, John Talbot
[Boy 4 King Henry VI]
At least 8 extras (needed in 1.3, 3.1-3.2, and other scenes)
Charles. Mars his true moving, even as the heavens So in the earth,
to this day is not known ... Otherwhiles the l'amish'd
English, like pale ghosts. Faintly besiege us one hour in a
month.
Alen. They want their porridge and their fat bull-beeves: Either
they must be dieted like mules And have their provender
tied to their mouths, Or piteous they will look, like
drowned mice.
Later in the same scene, the Dauphin says of Joan:
Was Mahomet inspired with a dove? ... Nor yet Saint
Philip's daughters were like thee.
(1.2.1-2, 7-12, 140, 143) (9)
Author Z (Nashe) All of Act 1
Author X (Shakespeare) 2.4. 4.2-4.7
Author W Act 2 aside from 2.4
Author Y Act 3 and most of Act 5"
God knows. thou art a collop of my flesh (1H6. 5.4.18)
They lopsi a collop of my tendrest member (SPI 4.2.23)
Let me persuade you to forbear awhile (1H6, 3.1.105)
And I commaund you to forbeare this place (SP. 1 . 1 .4)
But where's the great Aickles of the field (I H6, 4.7.60)
Where is that Ak'ides. surnamed Hercules? (SP. 5.3.67)
What dismal outcry calls me from my rest? (AF, 4.87)
What outcries pluck me from my naked bed? (ST, 2.5.1)
Had I been wake you had not risen [rise in Q] so (AF, 1.59)
soon
How now, my Lord, what makes you rise so soone? (ST. 3.4.1)
Because her husband is abroad so late (AF, 14. 270)
Why? because he walkt abroad so late (ST, 3.3.40)
1 loved him more than all the world beside (AF, 14.406)
Dearer to me than all the world besides (SP, 2.1.284)
Because she loved me more than ail the world (.ST. 2.6.6)
What ails you woman, to cry so suddenly? (AF. 14.298)
What ails you, madam, that your colour changes? (SP. 2.1.49)
And hurt thy friend whose thoughts were free
from harm (AF, 13.93)
To wrong my friend whose thoughts were ever true (SP. 2.31)
And. in even closer parallels extending over six or more words
Mosby, leave protestations now, /And let us. (AF 10.100-101)
Leave protestations now, and let us (SP, 1.4.30)
Did ever man escape as thou hast done? (AF, 9.184)
Did you ever see wise man escape as I have done? (SP. 2.2.1-2)
(25)
For every drop of his detested blood (.AF; 14.7)
For every drop of blood was drawn from him (JH6, 2.2.8)
To warn him on the sudden from my house (AF, 1.301)
Roused on the sudden from their drowsy beds (7 H6, 2.2.23)
Why speaks thou not? What silence has thy tongue? (AF, 8.125)
Why speak'st thou not? What ransom must I pay? (7 H6, 5.4.33)
I have my wish in that I joy thy sight (E2, 1.1.150)
1 have my wish in that 1 joy thy sight (AF. 14.332)
Is this the love you bear your sovereign?
Is this the fruit your reconcilement bears? (E2. 2.2.30-31)
Is this the end of all thy solemn oaths?
Is this the fruit thy reconcilement buds? (AF, 1.185-86)
Look up, my lord. Baldock, this drowsiness /
Betides no good (?2, 4.7.44-45)
This drowsiness in me bodes little good (AF, 5.17)
Or, like the snaky wreath of Tisiphon,
Engirt the temples of his hateful head (E2. 5.1.45-46)
That like the snakes of black Tisiphone
Sting me with their embracings (AF. 14.141-42)
Nay, to my death, for too long have 1 lived (?2. 5.6.82)
But bear me hence, for I have lived too Long (AF, 18.35)
The parallels between Edward 11 and Solirnan and Perseda are
equally close, and here again Kyd seems to be echoing Marlowe:
Thy worth, sweet friend, is far above my gifts:
Therefore to equal it, receive my heart. (E2. 1.1.160-61)
And, sweet Perseda, accept this ring
To equall it: receive my hart to boote. (SP, 1.2.39-40)
And when this favour Isabel forgets.
Then let her live abandoned and forlorn. (E2, 1.4.296-97
Mv gratious Lord, when Erastus doth forget this favor.
Then let him live abandoned and forlorn. (SP, 4.1.198-99)
Father, thy face should harbour no deceit (E2, 4.7.8)
This face of thine should harbour no deceit (SP, 3.1.72)
0. my stars!
Why do you lower unkindly on a king? (E2. 4.7.62-63)
Ah heavens, that hitherto have smilde on me.
Why doe you so unkindly lowre on Solyman? (SP, 5.4.82-83)
I tell thee, "tis not meet that one so false
Should come about the person of a prince (E2, 5.2.103-4)
It is not meete that one so base as thou
Should come about the person of a King (SP, 1.5.71-72)
Lysander. You have her father's love. Demetrius.
Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him.
(MND. 1.1.93-94)
Cornwall. The lady's love I long ago possessed:
But until now I never had the father's.
(King Leir. 5.39-40)
Capulet. Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.
Lady Capulet. Do as thou wilt, for 1 have done with thee.
Leir. Look for no help henceforth from me nor mine:
Shift as thou wilt and trust unto thyself.
(King Leir, 3.1 17-18)
And see the tears distilling from mine (TR. part 1. 1.140)
eyes
And let these tears, distilling from mine (E2. 5.6.100)
eyes
Proud, and disturber of thy country's (TR, part 1, 7.3)
peace
Thou proud disturber of thy country's (E2, 2.5.9)
peace
A day / That tended not to some notorious (TR, part 2. 8.82)
ill
Even now 1 curse the day
Wherein I did not some notorious ill
(Titus Andronicus,
5.1.125-27)
I'll seize ... lands
Into my hands to pay my men of war (TR (TR part 1, 1.313-14)
We seize unto our hands
His lands to fund our war in France (R2, 2.1. 209-10)
Why lookst thou pale? The colour/ Flyes
thy face (772. Part i. 4.229)
Why looks your grace so pale? ...
But now the blood of twenty thousand men
Did flourish in my face, and they are (R2. 3.2.75-77)
tied
I'll take away those borrowed plumes of his (E3, 1.1.85)
We'll pull his plumes and take away his train (1H6, 3.3.7)
You are the lineal watchman of our peace (E3, 1.1.36)
The special watchmen of our English weal (1H6, 3.1.66)
His faithful subjects, and subverts his towns (E3, 3.3.49)
Razeth your cities and subverts your towns (IH6, 2.3.64)
Be numb, my joints, wax feeble, both mine arms.
Wither, my heart, that like a sapless tree (E3, 3.3.216-17)
And pithless arms, like to a withered vine
That droops his sapless branches to the ground (JH6, 2.5.1 1-12)
He means to bid us battle presently (E3, 3.3.44)
And means to give you battle presently (JH6. 5.2.13)
Ay. that approves thee, tyrant, what thou art:
/ No father (E3, 3.3. 118-19)
Thou art no father, nor no friend of mine (IH6, 5.4.9)
The prince, my lord, the prince! Oh, succour him!
'He's close encompassed in a world of odds (E3, 3.4.32-33)
Let not your private discords keep away
The levied succours that should lend him aid.
While he, renowned noble gentleman.
Yield up his life into a world of odds. (1H6, 4.4.22-25)
To swear allegiance to his majesty ...
Never to be but Edward's faithful friend (E3, 4.1.6, 9)
Then swear allegiance to his majesty
As thou art knight, never to disobey [1H6, 5.4.168-69)
And then I will attend your highness' pleasure (E3, 4.3.54)
I will attend upon your lordship's leisure (JH6, 5.1.55)
Your grace shall see a glorious day of this (E3, 4.6.7)
We should have found a bloody day of this (JH6, 4.7.34)
Dear Audley, if my tongue ring out thy end.
My arms shall be thy grave (E3. 4.7.28-29)
Now my old arms are young John Talbot's grave (IH6, 4.7.32)
So that hereafter ages, when they read (E3, 5.1.229)
And that hereafter ages may behold (1H6, 2.2.10)
Chernaik, Warren
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chernaik, Warren. "Shakespeare as co-author: the case of 1 henry VI." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, vol. 27, 2014, p. 192+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA384642841&it=r&asid=8c183a097cbc400218acc6f30a9b262d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A384642841
How reliable is stylometrics? Two orthodox scholars investigate
Ramon Jimenez
47.1 (Jan. 2011): p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Shakespeare Oxford Society
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/
Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship by Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge University Press 2009)
Arthur F. Kinney, the venerable editor of English Literary Renaissance, and Hugh Craig, an English professor at the University of Newcastle in Australia, have teamed up with two of their graduate students to produce a group of essays that focus on the authorship questions surrounding more than a dozen plays and parts of plays both in and out of the Shakespeare canon. More than half of the play-texts examined appeared in Shakespeare's First Folio. Two Others--Edward III and The Two Noble Kinsmen--were added to the canon in the last thirty years. Four other anonymous plays and fragments make up the balance.
Citing Georges Braque's remark that "One's style is one's inability to do otherwise," the authors claim that "... writers leave subtle and persistent traces of a distinctive style through all levels of their syntax and lexis," the former being the writer' s arrangement of words, and the latter his vocabulary or word stock. Their objective is to "... resolve a number of questions in the Shakespeare canon, so that the business of interpretation, which is so often stymied by uncertainty of authorship, can proceed." Their studies supply considerable additional evidence of Shakespeare's participation or lack of it in the selected texts, but in most cases that evidence falls short of resolving the question.
Kinney and Craig lay out their case for the absolute individuality of verbal expression with considerable biological detail. This leads them to conclude that "a scene or an act will become uniquely identifiable." To accomplish such identification, they use "computational stylistics" to calculate the probability that a particular author wrote or did not write a particular body of text.
Roughly speaking, their method is to compare an author's use of two types of common words--function words and lexical words--in his known works with the use of the same words in an anonymous work or disputed section of text. It may be summarized in this series of steps:
1. Select an appropriate "control group" of an author's acknowledged plays and divide it into 2000-word segments, regardless of speech, act or scene divisions.
2. For each segment, obtain a numerical score for the author's use and non-use of a group of the 200 most common functional words occurring in Early Modern English, such as and, you and through that have syntactical rather than semantic uses.
3. For each segment, obtain a numerical score for the author's use and non-use of a group of 500 selected lexical words. These are the words in a writer's vocabulary that have semantic meaning.
4. On two scatter plots, graphically display the individual scores for each test for each segment of 2000 words.
5. The result is two scatter plots, on one of which a cluster of points indicates the author's typical use and non-use of the 200 function words. On the other scatter plot, the cluster indicates the author' s typical use and non-use of the 500 selected lexical words. The statistical center of each cluster is the centroid.
6. Conduct the same two tests for similar 2000-word blocks from an anonymous play or questionable fragment, and superimpose the scores on the scatter plots for the proposed author of the text.
7. The physical distance of the scores for the subject segment of text from the centroid of the selected author's cluster, and the size of the sample, indicate the degree of probability that he wrote it.
Results
The result is a mixed bag of conclusions, many of which confirm today's scholarly consensus about what Shakespeare wrote and what he didn't, but many others that conflict with recent studies by other scholars who also use methods of stylometric analysis. These include Sir Brian Vickers, Thomas Merriam, Eric Sams, and Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza. In spite of their use of an array of statistical tools, such as Principal Component Analysis, the t test, the "Zeta" test, and discriminant analysis, Craig and Kinney's conclusions raise the same doubts and questions as other methods of determining authorship that rely on detailed textual analysis.
One problem is the selection of the "control group" from a dramatist's accepted work to develop the criteria to apply to questionable texts. In the case of Shakespeare, the authors chose 27 "core" plays--excluding in their entirety the three Henry VI plays, the Folio King Lear, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsman, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Pericles. Also excluded are Edward III, Edmond Ironside, and Richard II, Part One (Thomas of Woodstock), each of which has been attributed to Shakespeare in fulllength studies by a reputable modern scholars. Admittedly, many of these plays, or parts of them, remain in dispute, and are the actual subjects of Craig and Kinney's analyses. But to exclude the entirety of half-a-dozen of Shakespeare' s earliest plays when attempting to establish his linguistic peculiarities is to limit and distort the definition of his style. This is particularly important in the case of Shakespeare because much of the apocrypha, the disputed texts, would obviously be his earliest work.
Shakespeare and Marlowe
The authors apply their function- and lexical-word tests to each of the three Henry VI plays, using as their baseline the results from a control group of six undisputed Shakespeare plays--three histories and three comedies, that "he wrote about the same time." Test results for Part 3 were sufficiently vague to cause them to discontinue any further analysis, but the results for Parts 1 and 2 suggested that portions of each play were not by Shakespeare. In the case of Part 1, their tests confirm the opinions of numerous commentators, including Malone, Wilson, Cairncross and Taylor, that the Temple Garden scene and the scenes involving John Talbot and his son were Shakespeare's work. But Acts 1, 3 and 5, and three scenes in Acts 2 and 4 were the work of another writer or writers.
Although they acknowledge that a third dramatist was probably involved, most likely Thomas Nashe, the authors assert that Marlowe was Shakespeare's earliest collaborator, and that he and Shakespeare worked together on Parts 1 and 2 of Henry VI. Marlowe was responsible for, at least, "the middle part" of Part 1, involving Joan of Arc, as well as the Cade rebellion scenes in Part 2.
This analysis of I Henry VI conflicts with the recent conclusion of Sir Brian Vickers that Thomas Kyd was the author of the play. In light of Vickers' attribution, Craig and Kinney compared 1 Henry VI to a Kyd corpus of The Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia, and found "no affinities between Kyd and I Henry VI." After expanding the Kyd corpus to include Soliman and Perseda, they found that "the I Henry VI segments remained firmly in the non-Kyd cluster."
Three Anonymous Plays
The anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592) is the play in the Shakespearean Apocrypha that has most often been ascribed to him, although it has been assigned to least six other authors. The most recent attribution was by Sir Brian Vickers, who agreed with T. S. Eliot that the author was Thomas Kyd. Arden was extravagantly praised and ascribed to Shakespeare by A. C. Swinburne, and more recently MacDonald P. Jackson has published several papers suggesting that Shakespeare had a major hand in it, most assuredly in scene 6 and scene 8, the admirable "quarrel scene." Craig and Kinney tested the author' s use of lexical words against the Shakespeare pattern obtained from the 27-play control group. The results suggest that Shakespeare was responsible for scenes 4, 5, 6, 7 and 16, but the scores for the two longest scenes (1 and 15), and most of the rest of them, fall clearly out of the Shakespeare cluster. Further tests "gave no support for the idea that Marlowe or Kyd were collaborators in writing Arden of Faversham." Craig and Kinney's scores for scene 8 place it in the "non-Shakespearean" category, in direct disagreement with Jackson.
Ascriptions to Oxford
In 1931 Arden was confidently attributed to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, by Eva Turner Clark, who cited dozens of identical words, phrases and dramatic devices in it that were echoed in subsequent Shakespeare plays, especially Richard III and the Henry VI trilogy. She argued persuasively that it was acted at court in early 1579 under the title Murderous Michael by the Earls of Oxford and Surrey and Lords Thomas Howard and Frederick Windsor, the latter being the son of Oxford's half-sister Katherine. The first edition of the supposed source of the play, Holinshed's Chronicles, had been published less than two years earlier.
The chapter on the anonymous Edmond Ironside reviews all the literature on the play, focusing especially on that since 1982, when Eric Sams published his extensive study claiming that it was Shakespeare's apprentice work, and his alone, in about 1588. Most other commentators have derided Sams' attribution and instead asserted that the author was heavily indebted to Shakespeare. The function-word and lexical-word tests that Craig and Kinney applied to Edmond Ironside suggest that none of it was by Shakespeare.
Furthermore, the application of similar tests comparing the Ironside sections against plays by Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe and seven other playwrights produced no positive results. Thus, the authorship of Ironside, dated by most scholars in the 1590s, remains a mystery to everyone except those who agree with Sams' convincing attribution to Shakespeare.
The authors subject the two major episodes of Edward III--the so-called Countess scenes (1.2 through 2.2) and the French campaign scenes (3.1 through 4.3)--to the same function-word and lexical-word tests. Each segment makes up a third of the play. The results indicate that Shakespeare wrote the Countess segment, echoing a conclusion arrived at by most critics. But the authors' results for the French campaign segment fail to support Shakespeare' s authorship. Further tests of word usage in both segments against that in undisputed plays by Marlowe, Peele and Kyd did not "support the idea" that any of them wrote either segment. Craig and Kinney thus consign two-thirds of Edward III to an unknown collaborator with Shake speare. They describe as "flawed" the studies of Wentersdorf (1960), Lapides (1980), Slater (1988) and Sams (1996), all of whom concluded that Shakespeare wrote the entire play.
Further complicating the issue are the findings of Sir Brian Vickers, who in late 2008 asserted that his analysis of three-word collocations in the "non-Shakespearean" portions of Edward III (1.1, 3, and 5) revealed that they were by Thomas Kyd. A few months later, Thomas Merriam, another advocate of Shakespearean co-authorship, published the results of his "multi-dimensional analysis of relative frequencies of function words" in the same "non-Shakespearean" passages of Edward III. He found that Shakespeare's collaborator was none other than Christopher Marlowe. But, contradicting all theories of co-authorship, Jonathan Hope (1994), using "socio-historical linguistic evidence," found little or no evidence of divided authorship in the play. He considers it likely that Shakespeare wrote all of Edward IlL Michael Egan' s analysis of Edward III in The Tragedy of Richard H, Part One (2006) shows conclusively that the two plays were written by the same author, whether he was Shakespeare or another.
King Lear and The Spanish Tragedy
Various critics have speculated about the passages that were added to the first quartos of these two plays, Lear being firmly in the Shakespeare canon, and The Spanish Tragedy attached by a tenuous thread to Thomas Kyd.
The authors found "a consistency in the distribution of some common function words" in both the Quarto Lear (1608) and the Folio Lear (1623), indicating that a single person (or persons) was responsible for the entirety of each text. When they then examined the approximately 900 words in F that did not appear in Q, they found that both function-word and lexical-word tests indicated that these passages were by Shakespeare. This is the view of most editors and critics.
The analysis of The Spanish Tragedy (Q1 1592) consisted of tests of the five passages of the Additions, comprising less than 500 lines, that appeared in the edition of 1602. These have been attributed to Dekker, Webster, Shakespeare and, most often, to Ben Jonson. Craig and Kinney found sufficient similarities in the frequency of common function words and of simple lexical words between the Additions to The Spanish Tragedy and the Shakespeare canon to come to the carefully-stated conclusion that the "readiest explanation" was that Shakespeare was the author of the Additions. But in his recent book on Kyd, Lucas Erne calls the attribution of the Additions to Shakespeare "groundless." What a shame that Craig and Kinney didn't test the rest of the play! There are plenty of questions about its author, and the attribution to Kyd rests on shaky grounds. The senior Ogburns attributed an "early version" of it to Oxford, with Kyd assigned to finish it. More recently, several scholars, especially C. V. Berney, have adduced substantial evidence that it is a Shakespeare play.
Sir Thomas More
Craig and Kinney tested the approximately 1200 words in Additions II (Hand D) and III (Hand C) in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More against texts from the Shakespeare canon, as well as those by other dramatists, such as Dekker, Jonson and Webster. The results were clearly consistent with Shakespeare's authorship of these additions, and no one else's. This led the authors to conclude that "the threshold from conjecture to genuine probability has been crossed," a point again supported by Egan's analysis citing remarkable verbal parallels. Craig and Kinney assert that this "creates a presumption in favour" of the proposition that the handwriting of Hands C and D is the same as that in the six extant signatures of Shakespeare of Stratford, and that this is now "among the surest facts of his biography." Considering the skepticism that many experts have expressed that the six extant signatures of Shakespeare of Stratford represent the efforts of a fluent, or even literate, writer, it is hard to believe that anyone could assert such a thing with a straight face. Although Craig and Kinney's conclusions are not unusual, they contradict those of Elliott and Valenza, who applied their "new optics methodology" to the Hand D portion of Sir Thomas More and published their results in an article earlier this year. They concluded that it belonged "more in the high Apocrypha than in the Canon." Indeed, Arthur Kinney himself wrote ten years ago that "the author of Addition II shares nothing whatever poetically with Shakespeare."
Shakespeare Co-Author?
In one chapter Craig and Kinney report the results of their tests of the claims of Sir Brian Vickers in Shakespeare Co-Author (2002) that four plays in the canon--Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen--are products of collaboration between Shakespeare and George Peele (TA), Thomas Middleton (Timon), and John Fletcher (H8 and TNK). They consider these particular authorship questions "a convenient series of problems where the solution is known to a degree of certainty." But they apparently tested only for the similarity in the use of function words by Shakespeare and the alleged co-author. They report the following results:
* Tests of the five longest scenes in Titus Andronicus indicate that Peele wrote the long opening scene, and Shakespeare the other four, as asserted by Vickers. But according to the scatter plot for these scenes, the score for the "Peele" scene is no farther from the Shakespeare centroid than the scores for several dozen text segments from undisputed Shakespeare plays. The remaining eight scenes, three of which Vickers attributed to Peele, are too short to be tested. Scholarly opinions about the percentage of Titus attributable to Shakespeare range from zero to 100. In the most recent Arden edition, Jonathan Bate declared that "the whole of Titus is by a single hand" and that hand is Shakespeare' s. He based his opinion on a stylometric analysis by A. Q. Morton, who commented that the probability that Peele wrote any part of Titus was "less than one in ten thousand million." Although he is noted for his habit of borrowing from other writers, there is no record of Peele ever collaborating with anyone.
* Tests of the four longest scenes in Timon of Athens indicate that Middleton wrote the second scene, and Shakespeare the other three, as claimed by Vickers. But again, the score for the "Middleton" scene is no farther from the Shakespeare centroid than scores for some text segments from undisputed Shakespeare plays. At least one score for a Shakespeare text block (Romeo and Juliet 1.2.6 to 1.4.46) "placed well into Middleton territory." Here again, the evidence suggests divided authorship, but does not exclude Shakespeare's authorship of the entire play. Most modern studies of the play divide it between Shakespeare and Middleton, but both E. K. Chambers and Una Ellis-Fermor regarded it as entirely Shakespeare' s, but unfinished.
* Tests of six scenes in Henry VIII indicate that John Fletcher wrote 3.1 and 5.2, and Shakespeare the other four, as claimed by Vickers. Again, scores for the two "Fletcher" scenes were no farther from the Shakespeare centroid than scores for more than a dozen text blocks from canonical Shakespeare plays. As with Timon and Titus, the tests do not exclude Shakespeare's authorship of the entire play.
* Scores for tests of two scenes in The Two Noble Kinsmen attributed by Vickers to Fletcher (2.2, 3.6), and one assigned to Shakespeare (1.1) all fell within the cluster for the author predicted. But, as before, neither of the scores for the two "Fletcher" scenes deviated as far from the Shakespeare centroid as did more than a dozen scores for blocks of genuine Shakespeare text. Nor was the score for the Shakespeare scene farther from the Fletcher centroid than numerous scores for scenes from plays by Fletcher alone.
These results are suggestive of co-authorship, but they should be considered in the context of similar tests in the undisputed portion of the canon. Using data obtained about his use of function words from the entire "core" of 27 Shakespeare plays, Craig and Kinney compared them to 62 segments of 2000 words each in six individual Shakespeare plays and 55 such segments from six other plays reliably attributed to five other authors--all twelve plays chosen at random. Of the 62 authentic Shakespeare segments tested, only 50 were correctly classified as Shakespeare's work. (For instance, four of the eight segments tested in A Midsummer Night's Dream and three of the seven in Love's Labour's Lost were classified as "non-Shakespearean.") Of the 55 non-Shakespearean segments tested, seven were not attributed to the correct author. Thus, the success rate for these segments was 87%, and for the Shakespeare plays it was only 81%. A testing method that is incorrect by its own standards 13% to 19% of the time may be termed suggestive, but hardly definitive.
Stylometric Confusion
In the face of such methodological shortcomings, conflicting opinions, and dueling analyses, what is one to think? An obvious explanation is that today's orthodox scholars, including all the stylometricians here mentioned, are groping blindly in the wrong paradigm, and are handicapped by the confines of the conventional Shakespearean dating system. (Craig and Kinney are familiar with the Oxfordian argument, and mention it several times, once even citing an article in The Oxfordian.) In addition, very few scholars of any period have given any consideration to the idea of a substantial corpus of Shakespearean juvenilia. We can be sure that Shakespeare did not always write like Shakespeare.
For those who find the evidence for Oxford as Shakespeare to be broader, stronger, and more reasonable than the Stratford theory, the case for co-authorship is very weak. Even if we accept the orthodox dating of these plays, none of the alleged collaborators was a likely partner for the mature Oxford, who had been entertaining the Queen and her court for as long as 25 years. John Fletcher, for instance, was born in 1579 and did not begin writing plays until 1606, according to his entry in the ODNB, two years after Oxford died. And what sense does it make for the 50-year-old Oxford, with more than 30 plays to his credit (several of them masterpieces), to collaborate with Thomas Middleton, an unknown writer in his early 20s who wrote his first play, a collaboration, in 1602? Why would Oxford allow a mediocre playwright like George Peele to write the long opening scene in Titus Andronicus, in which are introduced all the important characters in one of his most personal plays?
As modern research has demonstrated, Shakespeare was a meticulous and persistent reviser of virtually all his plays over the course of a long career. But the jumbled condition of his printed works, most of which exist in two or more versions, reveals a patchwork of incompletely incorporated additions and deletions, as well as numerous inconsistencies, misnamings, and misalignments. There are several instances where the original passage remains in the text alongside the revision. It is much more likely that the substandard scenes that are attributed to co-authors are Shakespeare's original versions that, by chance or by compositor's error, remained in the play after he improved and refined the rest of it. Moreover, if he did collaborate with anyone, it would more likely have been with the playwrights in his employ, John Lyly and Anthony Munday. Or perhaps his son-in-law, the courtier-poet William Stanley, who in 1599 was reported to be writing "comedies for the common players."
Craig and Kinney and their fellow practitioners of stylistics, stylometry, etc. may have reached the limit of linguistic analysis by computer. Despite their confidence that their method can safely identify the work of an individual author, it seems clear that this type of analysis can never be more than a portion of the evidence needed to do so. External evidence, topical references, and the circumstances and personal experiences of the putative author will remain important factors in any question of authorship.
The noted economist John Maynard Keynes, who was a scholarship winner in mathematics and classics at Cambridge and the author of a dissertation on probability, is said to have remarked that he was "not prepared to sacrifice realism to mathematics." We would do well to follow his example.
Jimenez, Ramon
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jimenez, Ramon. "How reliable is stylometrics? Two orthodox scholars investigate." Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol. 47, no. 1, 2011, p. 11+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA252384344&it=r&asid=c247c54323ce2afb61f669ab0307b5a6. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A252384344
Complaints about A Lover's Complaint
Katherine Chiljan
44.1 (Winter 2008): p1.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Shakespeare Oxford Society
http://www.shakespeare-oxford.com/
Very few Shakespeare fans have read or even know about Shakespeare's poem, A Lover's Complaint. Although published together with SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS in 1609, both making their print debut, A Lover's Complaint is usually left out of most modern editions of the Sonnets, and in scholarship, it is among Shakespeare's most neglected works. Currently one scholar is trying to expel it from the Shakespeare canon, which is odd, considering the trend of adding works to it. Why is this the case? Does A Lover's Complaint have some biographical elements, as do the Sonnets? Are these two works connected? There are distinct parallels between the young man of A Lover's Complaint and the older poet of the Sonnets. If they were the same person, then the great author was a nobleman-courtier who did not spend his youth in rural Stratford-upon-Avon.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
A Lover's Complaint opens with the poet describing, in the first person "I," a scene he is witnessing in the countryside. A woman is ripping up letters and tossing tings into a fiver. An old man appears and asks to know her story. The poet is close enough to hear it. Her "complaint" is regret for allowing herself to be seduced by a known womanizer who pleaded true love, and later "betrayed" her. The poem gives few details about the woman, but her ex-lover is fully described in eight stanzas. He is twice called a "youth," and this is confirmed with line 92, "small show of man was yet upon his chin." He is handsome and very popular.
O one by nature's outwards so commended
That maidens' eyes stuck over all his face (80-81)
Women obtain his picture and fantasize being his lover or wife, and they send him gifts of sonnets, pieces of their hair, and jewels, like offerings to a god. He has had numerous conquests including married women, some of whom had his children ("his plants in others' orchards grew," 171). He attracts followers, young and old, "in personal duty." He is also "accomplished." He is an expert horseman, intelligent, and has a pleasing voice and persuasive speech. In this passage, the woman could easily have been describing Shakespeare's particular gifts:
So on the tip of his subduing tongue
All kind of arguments and question deep,
All replication [replies, a legal term] prompt and reason
strong,
For his advantage still did wake and sleep.
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,
He had the dialect [rhetorics] and different skill,
Catching all passions in his craft of will. (120-125)
This young man moves in a social circle of moneyed people--those who could afford to buy portraits of him, give him expensive presents, and those educated enough to know the sonnet form. He is rich; he gave jewels (of gold and amber) to the woman, and letters tied with silk. Expert horsemanship in so young a man implies that he had the leisure to learn this skill. The phrase, "all replication prompt and reason strong," and the word "dialect" in the passage above hints that he was educated in rhetoric and the law. One of his paramours was a nun who was once wooed by noble courtiers (232-4). The woman's description of a rich, educated and privileged young man, often using the word "grace," indicates that he too is a nobleman.
Fully aware of the young man's "falseness" and numerous affairs, the woman initially resisted his seduction, "with safest distance I mine honor shielded" (151). Eventually he persuaded her that his love was true, and when he started crying, she "daffed" her "white stole of chastity" (297). Later she learned "his passion" was only an act--"an art of craft" (295). He could blush, cry and turn pale whenever it suited his aims. The poem ends with the woman wondering if she would yield again if he tried another seduction. The poet, who opened the poem in his own voice and who was watching the scene and listening to her story, offered no final remarks. He let the deceived lover finish her story without comment. The poet's eavesdropping and his silence at the conclusion of her story suggests that he was the young seducer. Almost certain confirmation of this comes from one phrase at the very beginning of the poem in the poet's words:
Ere long [I] espied a fickle maid full pale (5)
Even before he heard her story, the poet describes the woman as "fickle," a word of judgment, implying that he already knows her and her personality. In the final two lines of the poem, the woman gives it away herself that the youth had seduced her more than once, and that he
Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed
And new pervert a reconciled maid.
"Again" means twice, but "yet again" means three times, so the woman is saying that the youth would attempt to seduce her a third time. Apparently, the woman was hot and cold with him, which inspired the poet's "fickle" comment. It is clear, therefore, that the poet of A Lover's Complaint was the young seducer of the poem. When one recalls that Shakespeare is the author, using the first person, one can see that he was poeticizing a personal incident, and by doing so, indirectly revealed his high status. This makes A Lover's Complaint a prime piece of anti-Stratfordian evidence, especially when viewed in conjunction with SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS.
Resemblances Between the Young Seducer and Sonnets Author
A Lover's Complaint and SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS debuted at the same time in the same publication. They were both attributed to Shakespeare. They were both written in the first person, and all characters involved were unnamed. They both featured one similar character--a young man of high rank, beautiful, admired and sought after. One would think that the youth of A Lover's Complaint and the "Fair Youth" of SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS were the same person, but there are major differences. The youth of A Lover's Complaint is verbally gifted, theatrical, seductive and is an excellent horseman--qualities Shakespeare never credited to the Fair Youth in over one hundred sonnets to him. But if one compares the profile of the Sonnets poet, who described himself as older in at least four sonnets, with the young seducer of A Lover's Complaint, the only difference is age. The Sonnets poet reveals himself as a man of high rank and privilege, older with a tarnished reputation. As noted above, the word "grace" was used to describe the youth of A Lover's Complaint, a word that implied nobility or royalty, and in Sonnet 62, the poet wrote, "Methinks no face so gracious is as mine"; the Sonnets poet also uses the phrases, "I am attainted" (Sonnet 88) and "were it aught to me I bore the canopy" (Sonnet 125), implying he was of high rank and courtier status. In Sonnet 121, the Sonnets poet admits he has "sportive blood."
For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
The young man of A Lover's Complaint, also a man of high rank and privilege, said his sensual "offenses"
Are errors of the blood, none of the mind. (183-184)
The youth of A Lover's Complaint had affairs with married women (lines 171-75); the Sonnets poet admits he is breaking his marriage vow by having an affair with the "Dark Lady" (Sonnet 152). The youth of A Lover's Complaint was a good actor, and the Sonnets poet said,
Alas! 'Tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view (Sonnet 110)
indicating with regret that he acted on the stage, possibly the public stage; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "motley" refers to "the profession or practice of a jester, clown or (occasionally) actor." There are enough parallels between these two characters to suggest they are the same person at different ages. Regardless, there are two Shakespeare works written in the first person using language applicable to noblemen-courtiers, which totally contradicts the Stratford Man's biography. Due to the social conventions of the time, a nobleman-courtier who wrote poetry would most likely have written anonymously or used a pen name, which the hyphenated SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS on the title page and throughout the work seems to imply.
Brief Commentary on Vickers's Case
Placed after the text of SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS, A Lover's Complaint featured a separate title and author listing. For a time, scholars were not sure about the poem's attribution to Shakespeare, but by the 1960s, enough convincing scholarship had ended the discussion. Suddenly, it is changing again. English professor Brian Vickers recently published a book claiming that John Davies of Hereford was the true writer of A Lover's Complaint, a poem he thinks is "un-Shakespearian." Among his reasons why: he finds the poem "extremely mediocre," has "clumsiness and lack of invention," and "the diction is both highly Latinate and archaic." Of course, in the Stratfordian world, Shakespeare had "little Latin and less Greek" despite the fact that his works display considerable knowledge of both. Shakespeare coined over two thousand words and at least eleven derived from A Lover's Complaint--is that not inventive, and Shakespearian?
Furthermore, Prof. Vickers claims that Thomas Thorpe, the poem's publisher, was an unreliable witness to credit A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare. He believes that Thorpe pirated the SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS-A Lover's Complaint publication in collusion with printer George Eld. In his opinion, both were shady: Eld had printed the play, The Puritan, which had falsely named "W.S." as the author, and Thorpe as the publisher of A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter had falsely attributed it to "W.S." Today, The Puritan is attributed to Thomas Middleton and A Funeral Elegy to John Ford. And because there are some verbal parallels between A Lover's Complaint and a few works of John Davies, Davies must be the true author. Prof. Vickers's theory also relies heavily upon stylometry, analysis of a literary style using statistics and computers. After forty years practice, this is still an imperfect, if not unproven, tool. The last work attributed to Shakespeare based upon stylometry, A Funeral Elegy, was initially accepted and then completely discredited. One knowledgeable critic, Joseph Rudman, posed the question: "[A]re these studies an ignis fatuus with just enough legitimate, successful techniques and results to lure unsuspecting practitioners into a quagmire full of half truths and flawed techniques?" (Love 152). This paper is not meant to be a book review, but here are some questions for Prof. Vickers: Davies lived nine years after A Lover's Complaint was published--if it were his work, then why did he not complain or correct the misattribution? And if Thorpe and Eld stole this poem from Davies, then why did Davies subsequently allow Eld to print his other works, Muses Tears for the Loss of Henyr, Prince of Wales (1613) and Wit's Bedlam (1617)? This is enough for me to conclude that the Davies attribution is plain wrong.
Dating A Lover's Complaint
Scholars do not know when A Lover's Complaint was written but usually place it near the time it was first printed, in 1609. Yet some words in the poem were archaic by 1600, for example, eyne (eyes),feat (elegantly), real (regal), sounding (swooning), maund (basket), and teen (suffering, hurt). The author invented many new words for this piece (appertainings, fluxive, impleached, pensived, unexperient, encrimsoned, annexions, blusterer, acture, invised, enpatron, etc.), so the poem is a strange combination of new and archaic words. The logical explanation for this contradiction is that the archaic words were current when the work was written, but this is rarely considered. Stratfordians believe for this work that Shakespeare borrowed from Edmund Spenser's poem, Ruins of Time (published in Complaints, 1591), and Samuel Daniel's poem, Complaint of Rosamond (1592). But the supposed borrowing did not end there. Lines 123-24 of A Lover's Complaint,
For his advantage still did wake and sleep.
To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep
echo lines in Thomas Lodge's work, Phillis (1593):
Then lay you down in Phillis' lap and sleep,
Until she weeping, read, and reading weep. (Induction)
(Phillis was accompanied by the poem, The Tragical Complaint of Elstred.) Finally, one passage in Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) by Barnabe Barnes seemed to borrow lines from both A Lover's Complaint and one Shakespeare sonnet.
Barnabe Barnes's Sonnet 49
A Siren which within thy breast doth bath her
A fiend which doth in graces garments grath [clothe] her,
A fortress whose force is impregnable:
From my love's limbeck still still'd tears, oh tears! (6-9)
(Limbeck was an apparatus used in distillation.) Compare with A Lover's Complaint (Burrow, 716):
Thus merely with the garment of a grace
The naked and concealed fiend he covered (316-17)
Now compare Barnes's passage above with Shakespeare's Sonnet 119 (Doyno 156):
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from Limbecks foul as hell within ...
Two more phrases by Barnes in the same work (Madrigal 1 12-13),
From winds my sighs, from concave rocks and steel,
My sides and voices Echo ...
recall the opening lines of A Lover's Complaint:
From off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sist'ring vale,
My spirits t'attend this double voice accorded ...
That Shakespeare stole or borrowed from other writers is impossible to prove because there is no concrete dating for any of his works. It is far more likely that these four "lesser" poets were borrowing and imitating lines from the creative genius, Shakespeare, rather than the opposite. If this were the case, then A Lover's Complaint was circulating in manuscript as early as 1590, the year that Spenser's Complaints (featuring Ruins of Time) was entered in the Stationers' Register. This earlier time period would explain the presence of archaic words in the poem, but would prove troubling and even untenable in the Stratfordian chronology of Shakespeare's works.
The Earl of Oxford Parallels
What could prove to be even more troubling for Stratfordians are the parallels between the young seducer in A Lover's Complaint and the Earl of Oxford--in fact, the two are a perfect match. Oxford was a well-known courtier. We know from one early portrait, the Welbeck, that he did not have much facial hair--at age 25, he only had "peach fuzz" for a mustache. The youth in A Lover's Complaint had "small show of man on his chin" (92), and his hair is described in line 85:
His browny locks did hang in crooked curls.
The OED defines "browny" as inclining to brown, so it is not actually brown. Oxford's hair color was auburn, which is reddish-brown, and it was curly. Oxford's early popularity with the ladies can be attested to by contemporary commentary after his engagement to Anne Cecil was announced: it "caused great weeping, wailing, and sorrowful cheer of those that had hoped to have that golden day" (Ogburn 483). Oxford had two wives and fathered at least seven children, and was a bit of a cad: when he toured Europe, unaccompanied by his wife, he felt no compunction about taking a Venetian mistress (Nelson, 138), and upon his return, he renounced his wife, and took another mistress, Anne Vavasour. At age 21, his skill in horsemanship was praised by Giles Fletcher (Ogburn 49). Oxford was gifted with words, as evidenced by his signed poetry--several pieces written by age sixteen--and by his high reputation as a comedy writer. It is on record that he acted before Queen Elizabeth in a masque (Ward. 163) and that he sponsored acting troupes.
More evidence exists that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford was the young seducer of A Lover's Complaint and that he was its author. Oxford wrote a much shorter poem quite similar to A Lover's Complaint that may have influenced it, which Stratfordians have never acknowledged. Written in the first person, Oxford as the poet observes a lady speaking out loud about a "youth" that has captured her heart. His name, "Vere," is revealed in an echo.
Sitting alone upon my thought in melancholy mood,
In sight of sea, and at my back an ancient hoary wood,
I saw a fair young lady come, her secret fears to wail,
Clad all in color of a nun, and covered with a veil;
Yet (for the day was calm and clear) I might discern her face,
As one might see a damask rose hid under crystal glass.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Three times, with her soft hand, full hard on her left side she
knocks,
And sigh'd so sore as might have mov'd some pity in the
rocks;
From sighs and shedding amber tears into sweet song she
brake,
When thus the echo answered her to every word she spake:
"Oh heavens! who was the first that bred in me this fever?
Vere
Who was the first that gave the wound whose fear I wear forever?
Vere
What tyrant, Cupid, to my harm usurps thy golden quiver?
Vere
What wight first caught this heart and can from bondage it
deliver? Vere
Yet who doth most adore this wight, oh hollow caves, tell true?
You
What nymph deserves his liking best, yet doth in sorrow rue?
You
What makes him not reward goodwill with some reward or
ruth? Youth
What makes him show besides his birth, such pride and such
untruth? Youth
May I his favor match with love, if he my love will try? Aye
May I requite his birth with faith? Then faithful will I die.
Aye"
And I, that knew this lady well,
Said, Lord how great a miracle,
To her how echo told the truth,
As true as Phoebus oracle.
In the opening lines of A Lover's Complaint, the poet heard echoing sounds coming from a hill, and drawing nearer, saw they emanated from a woman's voice.
From off a hill whose concave womb reworded
A plaintful story from a sist'ring vale,
My spirits t'attend this double voice accorded,
As I laid to list the sad-tuned tale.
Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale
Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain. (1-7)
The woman in A Lover's Complaint is distressed about her lover and is crying ("often did she heave her napkin to her eyne," 15), just as the lady in Oxford's poem is "sighing" and "shedding amber tears" for him. Both the poet of A Lover's Complaint and Oxford in his poem eavesdrop on complaining lady lovers, and each knows the woman in question. Both complaining ladies are in love with a youth who is adored by others, has lied to them, and who does not fully return their love.
Oxford's poem is undated, but because Anne Vavasour was named as the author in two manuscript versions (Oxford was named as author in three), it is assumed that this poem was composed during their love affair. This is doubtful. The "echo" twice describes Oxford as a "youth," the time between adolescence and maturity, and the Oxford-Vavasour affair began when Oxford was at least age twenty-six. The poor lady in Oxford's poem gives the impression that she was hoping to marry him ("may I his favor match with love ...?"), which would date it to before his first marriage (age 21). If so, then she could have been one of many young ladies of the court chasing Oxford. She is described as a "fair young lady ... all clad in color of a nun, and covered with a veil." Could she be the same lady besotted with the young seducer in A Lover's Complaint who was described as "... a nun/Or sister sanctified of holiest note" (232-33)?
Oxford had other qualifications to be the author of A Lover's Complaint. Prof. Vickers complained that the poem is too Latinate for Shakespeare. Latin was included in Oxford's childhood curriculum, and at age 21 he contributed a letter to the reader in Latin for his sponsored translation of Castiglione's The Courtier. The rhetorical and legal and terms in the poem can be accounted for by his attendance at university and law school (Gray's Inn). In the final stanza of A Lover's Complaint, five of the seven lines describe the young seducer, each one beginning with "O," which could have served as the author's true signature.
SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS, and its companion piece, A Lover's Complaint, were both written in the first person and published together. Scholars prefer to study these two pieces separately, as if they had no relationship with each other, when clearly they do. In both works, the author describes himself as a nobleman-courtier: as a younger man in A Lover's Complaint and as an older man and in the Sonnets. The archaic words employed in A Lover's Complaint and other signs of early dating accords with this perspective. Perhaps A Lover's Complaint is so neglected by scholars because the author's self-portrait does not resemble the Stratford Man; but it does resemble, in striking detail, the Earl of Oxford, who had also written a poem upon a similar theme. In conclusion, I propose that A Lover's Complaint was written by the courtier-poet Oxford after he started law school and before his marriage in December 1571, between ages 17 and 21--over thirty years earlier than Stratfordian dating. At such a young age he was already a skilled poet who was inventing new words. Oxford was the young seducer of the poem, which he based upon an actual event in his life, perhaps expanding upon the "echo" poem featured above. Circulating in manuscript in 1590 or before, Oxford's innovative poem, A Lover's Complaint, inspired the trend of "complaint" poems by other writers. This personal poem and his very personal sonnets were published together after his death under his pen name, "William Shake-speare."
Note: All underlines in quoted material were added for emphasis
This paper is based upon my talk presented at the 2007 OS-SF Conference in Carmel, California.
Works Cited
Allen, Percy, Anne Cecil. Elizabeth and Oxford, London, 1934.
Burrow, Colin, William Shakespeare. The Complete Sonnets and Poems, Oxford Univ. Press, 2002.
Chiljan, Katherine, Letters and Poems of Edward, Earl of Oxford, San Francisco, 1998.
Doyno, Victor A., Parthenophil and Parthenophe: A Critical Edition, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971.
Love, Harold, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.
Nelson, Alan H., Monstrous Adversary, Liverpool University Press, 2003.
Ogburn, Charlton, The Mysterious William Shakespeare, New York, 1984.
Vickers, Brian, Shakespeare, "A Lover's Complaint," and John Davies of Hereford, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007.
Ward, B.M., The Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, London, 1928 (1979 reprint).
Chiljan, Katherine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chiljan, Katherine. "Complaints about A Lover's Complaint." Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, vol. 44, no. 1, 2008, p. 1+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA190794075&it=r&asid=8ed1bcfda6319f6c7952060d60454938. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A190794075
Brian Vickers, Approaching Shakespeare's late style
Brian Vickers
13.3 (Jan. 2008):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Matthew Steggle
https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls
Approaching Shakespeare's late style
Brian Vickers
vickersbw@gmail.com
Brian Vickers . "Approaching Shakespeare's late style."Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3 (January, 2008) 6.1-26
When I first saw Russ McDonald's book[1] announced, I was pleasantly surprised. After all these decades of relentless politicizing and fragmenting of literary studies into interest groups (new historicists, cultural materialists, feminists, queerists, psychocritics), I welcomed the idea of a book addressing the language of Shakespeare's plays as a valuable topic in itself. However, to write such a book is no easy undertaking, and several crucial decisions must be made when planning it. The major problem is one of agency and origins: who is responsible for the utterances in these plays? The obvious answer is Shakespeare himself (accepting the scholarly evidence that he worked with co-authors on six plays)[2]. But we must distinguish between the stylistic resources that he drew on (vocabulary, rhetoric, imagery, prosody), and his deployment of them to characterize his speakers and to make their interaction clear and effective. The words are mine', he might say, in the same spirit as the Gravedigger answering Hamlet's question, but I use them for my creations'. It is universally agreed that Shakespeare submerges himself in his own characters, nowhere gives us his own opinions or attitudes. The only two surviving works where he speaks in propria persona are the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. It is significant that these brief passages of prose use the same stylistic resources that are used so profusely by the characters who speak prose in his plays,[3] but once Shakespeare had learned how to use rhetorical figures he then put them in the mouths of his creations.
These two exceptions prove the rule, that the language of Shakespeare's plays is the language of Shakespeare's characters, words written to be spoken in the theatre, subsequently printed for readers and for anyone who wishes to perform the plays, in any language. In reading Shakespeare we are always trying to recreate in our imaginations the exchanges between men and women in unique fictive situations.
Studies of Shakespeare's language have fallen into two main groups, which I shall call the scholastic and the dramatic. The scholastic approach treats the language as a thing in itself, independent of character and dramatic context, to be analyzed according to grammatical categories, or vocabulary, rhetoric, word-play, and other stylistic features. Scholastic approaches include the studies of Shakespeare's grammar by Edwin Abbott, Jonathan Hope, and several books by Norman Blake.[4] Studies of vocabulary include work by Hilda Hulme, Paul Jorgensen, R.W. Dent, David Crystal and Ben Crystal.[5] Shakespeare's word-play has been memorably studied by William Empson and M.M. Mahood[6], while his use of rhetoric has been analyzed by several scholars.[7] Regrettably little work has been done on his syntax, John Porter Houston's book being a rara avis, and nothing of significance on his use of rhyme since F.W. Ness in 1942.[8] Shakespeare's verse has attracted traditionally-based studies by George T. Wright, but the most important contribution has been made by Marina Tarlinskaja, using the quantitative prosodic methods of Russian linguistics to provide for the first time accurate and replicable analyses of Shakespeare's development.[9]
These scholastic approaches have illuminated many aspects of Shakespeare's language, and are required reading for serious students. Other studies have been addressed more to general readers, often taking a broadly chronological approach. They include G.L. Brook, The Language of Shakespeare (1976); S.S. Hussey, The literary language of Shakespeare (London, 1982), which considers vocabulary, syntax, grammar, register and style; W.F. Bolton, Shakespeare's English: language in the history plays (Oxford, 1992), which uses a different approach for each play, and Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language (London, 2000), which is organized chronologically. There are several valuable essay collections, including one by Madeleine Doran, a presentation volume for Kenneth Muir, and an excellent anthology of previously published essays compiled by Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness.[10]
Several of the books in this category have intermittently adopted the second, or dramatic' approach, as I term it, considering language as an instrument used by specific characters for specific purposes. A properly theatrical approach would be to understand speech acts in drama as the means by which represented personages negotiate with each other, attempting to gain power, position, or happiness.[11] Shakespeare's characters interact on a scale between massive self-centredness, usually at the expense of others (King Lear before his madness; Goneril, Regan, Edmund), and non-manipulative openness to others (Lear restored to sanity, Kent, Gloucester, Edgar). All their utterances reflect their goals and values, aggressively or defensively. Their styles are individualized to a degree that no other dramatist ever achieved, and within their idiolects their registers vary according to the changes in their situation. A properly theatrical approach recognizes that within an individualized role language is dynamic, expressing insincerity, deceit, surprise, frustration, anger.
It is not easy to write a sustained account of the linguistic structure of any play, let alone a sequence of plays, in terms of the functions of language in expressing the interaction of characters. But to my mind it is the best way to understand Shakespeare's achievement in creating individualized speakers.
II
As this brief survey suggests, there is no single correct' way to study the language of Shakespeare's plays. But each choice brings with it certain consequences. To judge from the chapter headings, Russ McDonald seems to have opted for the scholastic approach. After the Introduction he discusses The idioms of the late tragedies' (Macbeth, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra), before addressing the late plays' use of Elision', Syntax' (divided into two topics, divagation' and suspension'), Repetition', concluding with a chapter on Style' and the making of meaning'. These titles seem to promise a straightforward confrontation between the critic and the text, but in effect a number of subordinate choices constantly deflect McDonald from attaining this goal.
The first, and most surprising factor is that his orientation is essentially biographical. That is, the nature of Shakespeare's late plays, his choice of genre, his use of language - these and many other questions are explained by invoking the dramatist's preoccupations', or attitudes towards life and the theatre. But since we have no access to what Shakespeare actually thought about any of these issues, such arguments depend on tendentious readings of the plays, attributing to Shakespeare utterances which are always made by individual characters in unique life-situations. For most of the twentieth century the reductively biographical interpretations of Shakespeare both by Victorian critics, like Edward Dowden, and anti-Victorian critics, like Lytton Strachey, were universally discredited, and it is not only surprising but disturbing to find McDonald endorsing their work in the twenty-first century.[12] He quotes Dowden's 1877 division of Shakespeare's career into four phases, In the workshop' (the early plays), In the world' (the histories and mature comedies), Out of the depths' (the problem plays and tragedies), and On the heights' (the last plays). In this final period Shakespeare supposedly emerges from his trials and sorrows and errors' to a state of pure and serene elevation', displaying towards human frailty a grave tenderness, which is almost pity', emphasizing repentance and forgiveness. McDonald finds Dowden's rhetoric' to be overheated', but strangely believes that he continues to exercise a potent, lasting influence' on Shakespeare criticism. (Presumably this claim could be tested by using a citation index.) McDonald then cites Lytton Strachey's 1906 attack on Dowden, which, although iconoclastic, was equally biographical. According to Strachey, in his last period Shakespeare was getting bored' with life, drama, or anything but poetical dreams', which is why he wrote perfunctory pompous verse' in The Two Noble Kinsmen, broke off the tedious history of Henry VIII', and assembled the miserable archaic fragments of Pericles' (p. 12). Disturbingly, a hundred years on, McDonald believes that Strachey has perceptively identified some cardinal features of Shakespeare's late work: the comparative unimportance of character, the fabulous plots and fairy-tale atmosphere..., the episodic and putatively undramatic structure of romance..., the relative undifferentiation among speakers' (p. 13).
Herman Melville coined the phrase the shock of recognition'.[13] Reading Russ McDonald's Stracheyan summary of the late plays I experienced the shock of un-recognition. How can he attribute the comparative unimportance of character' or undifferentiation among speakers' to the dramatist who created Leontes, Hermione, Paulina, Autolycus, and Perdita, each of whom speaks in completely individualized styles? In Cymbeline Imogen, Iachimo, Cloten, Posthumus, and Belarius are equally individual and differentiated: none of their speeches could be given to any other character. In The Tempest even school-children can recognize the differences between the styles of Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, Gonzalo, Ferdinand, Sebastian, and Trinculo. As for their plots, each play uses what McDonald imperiously dismisses as the episodic and putatively undramatic structure of romance', but in differing degrees of elaboration. The Winter's Tale has a sharply-defined two-part structure, The Tempest fluidly synthesizes past and present, while Cymbeline organizes several plot-strands into a staggering final scene, which includes 25 successive denouements. Which other dramatist displayed such mastery of such widely varied structures? Russ McDonald claims that romance is resistant to definition' (p. 38), but if he had given more throught to narrative form he might have realized that, as Vladimir Propp pointed out long ago,[14] plot-units have a predictive power: a quarrel opens up the possibility of a reconciliation, a separation makes possible a reunion, a misunderstanding can be cleared up in the fullness of time. In the late plays Shakespeare opens up many such narrative possibilities, resolving them when he feels that the moment is ripe. Readers and playgoers for nearly four hundred years have had their expectations aroused and satisfied over and over again: husbands are re-united with wives, parents with children, and Prospero, despite finally having his enemies in his power, forgives them once again. McDonald vastly over-states the difficulties of defining romance (pp. 37-40), as if to show the huge problems that the critic faces, and will heroically overcome. But he fails to understand the genre if he can refer to the open-endedness of the romance form' (p. 182).[15] Romances are satisfying because they resolve apparently irrecoverable losses. Even if he has to wait fourteen years, in these plays Jack doth get Jill.
In his attempts to define the late plays' within Shakespeare's career McDonald continually sets them against the preceding tragedies, seeking out modern critics who echo Dowden in attributing the transition between genres to changes in Shakespeare's personality. He follows Anne Barton and others in attributing to Shakespeare, in the tragic period', a negative attitude towards drama and language (pp.43,44, 50, 51, 52-3, 106, 212, 249-50, 251). McDonald subscribes to a quite different agenda in endorsing the cliches of feminist critics, that Shakespeare associated ambiguous speech especially with predatory females', a phobia which apparently gave him an acute ambivalence' and anxiety' about language itself. This is an extraordinary leap from the particular situation of a few male characters (Iago, Othello, Leontes, Posthumus) who, at moments of real or apparent ruin, blame an apparently unfaithful wife for their suffering. It is an elementary logical error to take these utterances as somehow expressing Shakespeare's attitude to language. In the case of Macbeth, often cited by feminists as a woman-hater, the witches' ambivalent gender is far less significant than their apparent supernatural powers clearing his way for the crown. And when he blames his ruin on the witches' use of ambivalent utterances the audience knows that he should be blaming himself and his wife for their destructive ambition. As for Posthumus and Leontes, the one gulled by a plot, the other self-deceived, they use language as an instrument to express both their anger at the imagined deceptions and their relief and contrition when they are reunited with their honest and maligned wives. Their bitterness is temporary, and tells us nothing about their creator's attitude to language. One of the most damaging developments in late twentieth-century Shakespeare studies was the rise of interest groups who gave distorted readings of the plays in order to further their own self-serving agendas.[16] It is most disappointing to find Russ McDonald, supposedly addressing Shakespeare's language, passively endorsing these and other distortions, such as the feminist accusation that Shakespeare wrote misogynistic' tragedies, which reveal his own anxiety about gender', or profound concerns about ... women'[17] (pp. 43, 44, 62-6, 69, 71, 72-3, 74, 75, 235-7, 247; as the page references show, these topics are pursued with much repetition). Shakespeare's tragedies are obviously not misogynistic, for all the women accused - Desdemona, Emilia, Imogen, Hermione - are fully vindicated, their accusers shown to be malicious, or deceived.
Having agreed with each other about the dramatist's misogyny' in the tragedies, exponents of Current Literary Theory magnanimously attribute to the Shakespeare of the Romances a remorseful attitude to women, not unlike that of Leontes or Posthumus. McDonald duly aligns himself with the feminists and psychocritics (C.L. Barber, Richard Wheeler) who praise these plays for effecting an imaginative recuperation of the female and a concentration on the redemptive associations of femininity' (pp. 220, 244, 246, 247-8, 250). McDonald then adds his own seal of approval, claiming to discover in the last plays a refreshed view of language, an affirmative attitude towards theatre and representation generally' (pp. 41, 107, 176-7, 180, 218, 220, 222, 225, 226-7, 230, 235, 248). But, as we shall see, McDonald then delimits Shakespeare's refreshed view of language' to a concern with aural features, sounds divorced from sense. Some readers may be relieved at the amnesty these critics accord to Shakespeare, but at both stages of this scenario pseudo-biographical explanations for stylistic changes merely push the issue back a stage, where no evidence exists. They explain nothing, and in a work whose announced aim is to describe the components of [Shakespeare's] verse' (p. 32), they are irrelevant. It is especially regrettable that McDonald should use this pseudo-biographical mode to assure a position of superiority, accusing Shakespeare of stylistic recklessness' or carelessness', showing an insouciance' towards his drama and his audience, being casual in arranging his speakers' poetic sentences', displaying a cavalier attitude' which at times gives the impression that the inattentive poet is merely piecing phrases together without regard for sequence or interrelation' (pp. 86, 90, 98, 104, 109, 147-8). The critic who attempts to seize the moral high ground to reprove Shakespeare's faults merely displays his own inability to understand the extraordinary range and dynamism of the language in these plays.
By consciously adopting a pseudo-biographical approach Russ McDonald deflects his, and the reader's attention away from the text to external considerations which are then read back into the plays, forming an interpretative loop. When he begins to discuss their language his scholastic approach acts as a further barrier to a direct encounter with the drama and its protagonists. He lumps together all the plays, and all the diverse utterances of the characters, subsuming them under the category late style'. And instead of engaging directly with Shakespeare's text, McDonald first assembles a mosaic of quotations from other writers (A.C. Bradley, B. Ifor Evans[18], F.E. Halliday, A.C. Partridge, Frank Kermode), which he has chosen to emphasize the difficulty' of this late style'.[19] When these judgments (some made in passing) are all run together, they give an exaggerated impression of the plays' complexity. Dr McDonald overlooks the fact that Shakespeare's Romances were written to be performed before spectators of varying educational attainment, who were expected to understand them at first view. They have continued to hold the stage throughout four centuries, delighting audiences in every country where they have been produced, and in the most diverse styles. Of course, to emphasize a work's difficulty places the scholastic critic in a heroic light, as he prepares to offer his readers enlightenment. But it also shows that this analytical method cannot treat plays as theatrical experiences.
Given McDonald's choice of the scholastic approach, we might expect him to have thoroughly researched the secondary literature studying Shakespeare's language, which dates back to the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, he has no interest in the past, and makes little use of modern work on the vocabulary or diction of these plays. He has a few comments on grammar (taken mostly from Jonathan Hope's work), but gives more attention to syntax. As for rhetoric, he identifies (not always correctly)[20] a few of the over 200 rhetorical figures that Shakespeare used, but reluctantly, and with little explanation. Many of the passages he quotes owe their linguistic characteristics to Shakespeare's use of rhetorical devices for clearly-defined functions, as traditionally described, but McDonald makes no comment on their contribution to the plays' expressive language. This is, however, a deliberate choice, as he explains: In studying textual details I usually employ non-technical vocabulary, avoiding the diction of linguistic scholarship: at least in the study of early modern dramatic verse, such specialized terminology usually impedes rather than fosters clarity and understanding' (p. 33). But if the style of the late plays is as complex as he repeatedly claims, a scholar will need to use all relevant historical terms and categories in order to identify the causes of this complexity. (McDonald seems more concerned to adjust down to his readers' level of awareness than to raise it.) In the field of stylistics McDonald's main sources are George T. Wright on prosody and John Porter Houston on syntax. He adds little to their work, indeed he takes away from it, for his citations from their books silently edit out their technical terminology, eroding the careful distinctions they make within Shakespeare's use of these resources, and depriving himself of useful analytical tools. Most regrettably, he does not draw on Marina Tarlinskaja's outstanding study.[21] Her system is complex, but it can be communicated to a general public by degrees, and provides a method for prosodic analysis capable of analysing Shakespeare's adaptation of metrical conventions to recreating the inflections of the spoken voice and representing a wide range of mental states. Compared to her illuminating use of modern quantitative prosody, it is frustrating to see McDonald unable to go beyond occasional comments on a trochee replacing an iamb', or inarticulately counting the number of end-stopped or hypermetrical lines (pp. 86-7, 95-8, 138, 164-5, 200-01). This book fails to perform any fresh or original analyses of Shakespeare's style in the late plays.
Once McDonald begins his scholastic analysis he makes another unfortunate choice, which deflects him further from his announced aim to describe the components of [Shakespeare's] verse'. He believes that the individual features of Shakespeare's style are significant because they somehow mimic' the overall structure of a play, a group of plays, or even a whole genre. In the first paragraph of his discussion of stylistics he announces this assumption programmatically, quoting a remark by the French literary theorist Gerard Genette to the effect that what is true of individual elements is equally true of larger units'.The curious reader who checks the context of this remark in Genette's Fiction and Diction[22] will find that it occurs in a chapter where the author outlines a semiotic definition of style' (p.85). Genette discusses several binary categories that have been used in modern times to describe and differentiate style' from mere communication (denotation/connotation, meaning/signification, exemplification/evocation). Moving back and forth between Frege, Barthes, Sartre, and Nelson Goodman, Genette concludes that in addition to what it says (denotes), discourse is at every moment this or that (for example, dull as dishwater). Sartre would say quite rightly, in his own terms, that words, and thus sentences, and thus texts, are always both signs and things' (p.113). Genette modestly describes these thirty pages as an elementary (in the literal sense).description', and adds a footnote recording that in the interest of brevity, I have based my argument up to this point on verbal elements (essentially words), charged with illustrating the stylistic capacities of discourse in general on that level; my methodological postulate is that what is true of individual elements is equally true of larger units. (p.113, n. 39) Recreating the full context makes it clear that Genette's words refer to his own preceding discussion, and were not meant as a general pronouncement about the symbolic relation between the whole of a complex literary work and any of the hundreds of stylistic devices which can be found within it.
McDonald, however, seizes on the twelve words he has picked out of Genette to give himself far ranging interpretive licence: Delineation of such identities assumes that the smallest grammatical and poetic details not only correspond to larger narrative or dramatic preferences but also serve, especially in the aggregate, as reliable indicators of an artist's way of apprehending the world' (p. 27). Thus, he declares, in the romances as a group Shakespeare's arrangement of his dramatic materials corresponds, in shape and effect, to his ordering of the poetic constituents' (p. 38). Any ellipsis in a phrase or sentence, then, corresponds' to a gap in the plot. A long sentence, where the sense is completed at the end, supposedly mimics the dramatist's intended suspension of meaning, and similarly for a parenthesis, a digression, or an aposiopesis (breaking off a sentence incomplete). Commenting on the impatient, tumultuous speech that Imogen, the heroine of Cymbeline, delivers en route to Milford Haven, eager to meet the husband from whom she has been separated before their marriage could be consummated, McDonald generalizes from part to whole: The apprehension of meaning in dramatic speech demands that we follow the speaker along a winding grammatical path, an experience that, putting it crudely, represents an aural equivalent of the reversals and deviations of the wager plot' (p. 151; my italics). The trouble with such an a priori conception of a necessary relationship between part and whole is that the part becomes subsumed into a thesis which denies it any intrinsic significance, and which ignores all other aspects. A Shakespeare play of any period will include ellipses, but it will also include any number of conjunctions, copulas, hypotactic sentences and other linguistic means of emphasising connections, consequences, causes and effect. Which of these is the more representative of the play as a whole'? Such analogies between a linguistic element, even a whole sentence, and a long and complex play, are the product of a scholastic approach which operates at a more abstract level than that of reading a play or seeing it performed, and foregrounds one detail at the expense of the whole. Such analogies cannot be anything other than superficial. But McDonald uses this supposed correspondence between the part and the whole' as the organizing principle of two whole chapters discussing Shakespeare's syntax: one on 'divagation' (p. 108-48), the other on suspension' (pp. 149-80), and he repeats it with numbing repetition.[23] Collectively, these sequences set up generalized descriptions at quite some distance from Shakespeare's text, and become self-generating, self-confirming, and seriously misleading.
The true significance of any linguistic element lies in its dramatic context, that is, the use that characters make of it in exposing their own feelings, desires, or goals, and in interacting with other characters who may or may not share them. English rhetoricians in Shakespeare's age, whom McDonald dismisses as cataloguers' (p. 82), were pioneers in understanding how rhetorical figures could be used to represent human emotions and thought-processes.[24] Of the figure aposiopesis, for example, which breaks off an utterance incomplete, George Puttenham wrote in The Arte of English Poesie (1579) that when we begin to speak a thing and break off in the middle way' it shows that either it needed no further to be spoken of, or that we were ashamed, or afraid to speak it out. It is also sometimes done by way of threatening, and to show a moderation of anger'.[25] This description lists some of the life-situations in which a rhetorical device provides an appropriate way to show a character speaking under the influence of this or that emotion. The reason why audiences, then as now, can understand these plays at first experience is that the characters and their goals have been vividly defined and differentiated: we know what they want, and why, and we observe their attempts to achieve it. It follows that the language of any utterance in drama is best analyzed in terms of the character who makes it, and for the purposes it is intended to fulfil.
Although Russ McDonald claims to observe the relevance of the dramatic context' (p. 5), all too often he removes a speech from its place in a play, ignoring its local function, and taking it as typical' of the late style'. But the soliloquy in which Cymbeline, duped by Iachimo into believing that Imogen has betrayed him, expresses his anger and despair in misogynistic terms, is typical of what such a man might say in such a situation, and cannot represent the four romances as whole (p. 112). When Paulina confronts Leontes with the news of Hermione's death', her delays in getting to the point have an immediate dramatic function, to arouse attention and build up to a devastating attack on him as a tyrant. They cannot be reduced to proving that the unexpectedly interpolated phrase becomes more prominent in Shakespeare's late work' (p. 119), or showing Shakespeare's mischievous pleasure in grammatical deferral and surprise...' (p. 163). In the realm of interpretation there will always be disagreement, of course, but McDonald does not even reach the threshold of critical discussion when he attempts to establishe a stylistic profile' of the late plays at the cost of ignoring the complex motives and feeling-states behind very diverse speeches by Iachimo (pp. 124, 129-30), Cloten (pp. 131-2), Imogen (pp. 151, 162, 184), and above all Leontes (pp. 156, 159, 189, etc.). On the rare occasions when he does respect the dramatic context, as when Iachimo insinuates to Imogen that Posthumus has betrayed her, and McDonald comments that 'Iachimo is torturing Imogen theatrically, suspending her in a painful syntactical maze' (p. 178), we realize what he has failed to do elsewhere.
One other principle in the linguistic and stylistic analysis of drama (or any form of literature) is so fundamental that one would hardly think it worth stating, namely that the primary function of language is to communicate meaning, and that all other aspects - sound, metre, rhetoric - are subordinate to this end. This is a basic principle of Renaissance linguistic and literary theory. But McDonald ignores history, going off on an idiosyncratic present-day tangent which deflects him still further from a creative involvement with the language of individual characters in unique life situations. Having endorsed the late twentieth-century psychocritics' magnanimous amnesty towards Shakespeare for having achieved an imaginative recuperation of the female' in the late plays, McDonald hijacks their upbeat conclusion by attributing to Shakespeare a rediscovered pleasure in artifice and verbal delights', a devotion to ornament', and a new realization of the value of surfaces'. McDonald presents no evidence for this pseudo-biographical theory, which does, however, give him the interpretative licence to treat the sound of words as a thing in itself. Here again he is able to cite a recent precedent, siding with critics such as Stephen Booth and Mark Womack who have sued for a divorce between "acoustic functions" and "semantic ones"' (p. 29). Their ahistorical manifestos encourage him to look for aurally exciting effects' in Shakespeare's verse, involving sonic echo' and offering repetitive pleasure' (p. 49). The chapter on Repetition' (pp. 181-218) includes many passages pointing out aural repetition' as something that delights the ear and excites the mind' (p. 181) - but not for the meaning or feelings involved, only for the pleasurable effect, as when the repeated letters' in an alliteration produce beguiling sounds' (p. 187). According to McDonald, this resort accounts for the incantatory appeal of all the romances' (p. 189), and the language of the late style generally', with its melodic attractions' (pp. 192-3). This readiness to separate sound from meaning, and to take repetition in itself as pleasing - a view authorized by Freud, no less (p. 206), results in a hedonistic approach to language as an aural' experience, which trivializes Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. Where readers might expect a coherent analysis justifying these claims, all they receive are inventories of acoustic effects, divorced from character and context. When Imogen anguishedly questions Pisanio on the whereabouts of her husband, McDonald quotes twelve lines of her speech (with a complex system of italics, underlining, and bold face type for varying degrees of emphasis which I will not attempt to reproduce), beginning Where is Posthumus? Which is in thy mind / That makes thee stare thus?' (3.4.4-12), and offers the following commentary: An initial w sound begins each of the first three sentences, and the pronoun "One" that opens the fourth effectively mimics the w. Eight instances of "th" occur between the last foot of line four and the end of line six. This assertive pattern of alliterated initial consonants is augmented by further repetitions: the pairing of initial consonants, as in "thy mind / That makes," or "thee stare ... that sigh"; the repetition of internal consonants, such as the r sounds in "stare ... Wherefore ... breaks" (5), and the assonantal and consonantal rhyming of "thy mind" (4) and "makes ... breaks" (5). Further, in addition to the p sounds that decorate lines six through eight, the appearance of a pattern is underscored by the interlocking use of "be," "er," and "ex" in "be interpreted a thing perplex'd / Beyond self-explication." (p. 184) This is a purely external inventory of the sonic echoes' in this passage, implying that they exist to create a pattern'. But the dramatic context is of an increasingly desperate Imogen fearing the worst as Pisanio, instead of answering her questions, merely offers her a letter to read. The key dramatic effects here are those of tempo and tone, suggesting Imogen's imminent breakdown (ere wildness / Vanquish my staider senses', as she puts it). McDonald's scholastic catalogue of sounds without meanings or feelings is at several removes from the drama. Many passages in Shakespeare could be made to yield comparable sound-catalogues, but there is only one Imogen.
McDonald offers more of these reductive sonic inventories as commentaries on such marvellously diverse theatrical moments as Pericles' reunion with Marina (pp. 187-8), and Leontes' psychic breakdown as he witnesses Mamilius playing - where what he terms the sonic integuments of the speech are created by the chiming of "iss" in "issue" and "hiss"' (p. 189). (This is to assume Elizabethans did not pronounce the word ishue', as is common today.) In his concern to prove that in the late plays Shakespeare exhibits an almost self-indulgent attraction' to aural effects (p. 184), McDonald pays special attention to Antonio's sarcastic series of phrases in apposition describing Claribel - She that is Queen of Tunis; she that dwells / Ten leagues beyond man's life...' (p. 194). But he wilfully misses the dramatic point of this scene by claiming that This skein of clauses - it is not even a sentence - is calculated to enchant the auditor into rhythmic sympathy...'. By auditor' McDonald might seem to be referring to Sebastian, Antonio's intended accomplice in the murder of Alonso, but by the end of the paragraph he comes clean: Antonio and Sebastian are the agents of a playwright seeking to seduce his audience with words' (p. 194). Is this all that Shakespeare is doing here? This is to remove the aural surface' of the play's text from the context which alone gives it meaning. Alonso and all his court have been put to sleep by Prospero's magic, giving Antonio a unique chance to work Sebastian up to killing Alonso and usurping his Dukedom, just as Antonio had done to Prospero. Like Macbeth, duped by the witches, Antonio's confidence grows as he sees this apparent opportunity to seize power, and he waxes eloquent in persuading the unwitting Sebastian. The audience's feelings are aroused as they perceive Antonio's vicious egoism, and tension grows as his dupe slowly grasps the tenor of this persuasion to murder a sleeping man. But we also know that his supposed chance is provisional, dependent on Prospero's omniscience, and Ariel soon returns to wake the Court to their danger. We are hardly enchant[ed] into rhythmic sympathy'.
McDonald justifies his decision to divorce sound from sense on pseudo-biographical grounds, alleging that Shakespeare was experiencing a new and virtually unalloyed pleasure in sounds' (p. 218). He has no evidence to support this claim, and he conveniently forgets the frequent use of alliteration and other acoustic effects in the earlier plays - always used functionally, in relation to the speaker's meaning and intention. This seems to me a regressive step, going back beyond the New Critics' and F.R. Leavis, with their rigorous treatment of sound and sense as a unified element in poetry, to the work of Edith Sitwell, with its readiness to indulge in meaningless sounds. I dare say that no theatre-goer has ever regarded Shakespeare's late plays as a pleasing aural experience divorced from meaning. If you were to overhear another member of the audience leaving the theatre and praising The Winter's Tale in these terms you would wonder what was wrong with them.
III
Reviewing this book has been a dispiriting experience. Despite the work Russ McDonald has expended, the result fails to advance our understanding of Shakespeare's remarkable linguistic achievements in these four Romances. His announced aim was to describe the components of [Shakespeare's] verse, to attend to the acoustic surface [sic] of the late style and thereby to assemble an illustrated taxonomy, a survey more specific and wider-ranging than any attempted so far' (p. 32). He is evidently unaware how little he has done to realize those ambitions, being constantly deflected to other agendas, and having made a series of unrewarding choices. The task of analyzing the dramatic language of the late plays is doubtless not a simple one, but some extant work shows that it is not insuperable.
Two modern essays on the remarkably individualized language of Leontes can serve to show how a critic can illuminate a play by treating character in context. Jonathan Smith studied The Language of Leontes' in terms of vocabulary,[26] documenting the struggle between two kinds of language' as the King moves between public and private discourse. When Leontes talks affectionately to Mamilius, while Hermione is obediently urging Polixenes to extend his visit, his vocabulary is at first colloquial, Anglo-Saxon, even jocular (pash', shoots', Most dear'st, my collop!'). But as he broods on Affection' (passion), Leontes shifts to words of Latin root, ... used in their specific Latin sense', some of them words or word-forms that Shakespeare seldom, if ever, used again: intention', communicat'st', co-active', credent' (in the sense of credible'), and conjoin' (p. 317-18). Significantly, Smith notes that a majority of the rare Latinisms that Leontes uses in this scene (1.2) and later (2.1) were included in Henry Cockeram's English dictionary, or a new interpreter of hard English words (1623), as if Shakespeare had intuitively registered the extreme end of the linguistic spectrum.[27] As Leontes cross-examines Camillo as to what he has seen ... or heard? ... or thought?' each reference to the senses is attended by a parenthesis, a device normally used to modify or qualify an utterance by adding a new consideration. However, Leontes's parentheses add nothing, such as this final one: or thought? (for cogitation / Resides not in the man that does not think) / My wife is slippery?' Smith comments that With increasing speed Leontes falls into intellectual circumlocution... "For cogitation .. think" is meaningless, the stiff fumblings of a man given to a decorous mode of language which, although retaining the outward form, is now disembodied, the words of a man losing his faculty for cohesive thought' (p. 321). In his dealings with Hermione and Antigonus in 2.1, Smith shows, Shakespeare gives Leontes more of these excessively rare Latinisms, the words of a man seduced by his own rhetoric and prerogative' (p. 323), again indulging in verbose and vacuous ... self-justification' (p. 324). After Mamillius's real and Hermione's apparent death, Leontes' language changes in response to these disasters, taking on a grave simplicity' (p. 325), and when we see him again in the final act he has found a completely new language', now unequivocal, purged [both] of the pseudo-rational phraseology and the portentous' (p. 326).
Where Jonathan Smith's essay focussed on vocabulary, J.P Thorne focussed on Act 1 scene 2 in order to define the grammar of jealousy'.[28] Unaware of Smith's work, Thorne reached the same conclusion, that Shakespeare wrote the speeches of Leontes in two quite distinct styles, one virtually indistinguishable from that of the other characters in the play, the other highly idiosyncratic' (p. 56). Thorne picks out several unusual features' of grammar and syntax that give Leontes a quite distinct idiom', such as the line To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods' (1.2.109). Normally the nominalisation on either side of the verb to be would take the same form, so it is unusual to combine the infinitive (to mingle') with a participle (mingling'). Thorne comments that the asymmetry of the phrases on either side of the copula draws attention to how forced is the identification that Leontes is making ...' (p. 57). I would add that this present participle is uttered in full view of Hermione courting Polixenes, as if Leontes is anticipating, or re-living, his deluded belief that the two have had sexual intercourse, in which, according to classical biological theories, the couple's blood mingled.
Another syntactical peculiarity which helps define Leontes' state is the irresolvably ambiguous' word order in the sentence This entertainment / May a free face put on' (1.2.111-12), where the occurrence of the second phrase between the modal and the main verb makes it impossible for one to decide whether it is the subject or the object of "put upon"'. It is revealing of Leontes' mental state that he is capable of producing sentences so ambiguous...' (p. 57). Thorne's analysis clarifies the reader's sense - in the theatre one cannot re-read his utterances - that Leontes is creating an imaginary edifice out of verba alone, with no corresponding res or matter. Thorne points out how often Leontes tends to turn his sentences into lists', often little more than synonyms or near synonyms: How she holds up the neb! the bill to him!' (1.2.183) - They're here with me already; whispring, rounding' (1.2.217). As Thorne puts it, Leontes' fantasy is built up word by word. The words of one sentence expressing his morbid imaginings suggest the words of the next, thus extending and elaborating his delusion; the effect on Leontes himself being to convince him that he has a mass of objective evidence' (p. 58).
Thorne's most penetrating observations concern the words Leontes uses most frequently in this scene: nothing (negative indefinite pronoun), something (positive indefinite pronoun) and it (positive indefinite pronoun). Apart from the features animate / inanimate, pronouns are semantically empty' (pp. 58-9). Two passages in particular show how Shakespeare makes Leontes place great weight on these semantically empty parts of speech. The first comes from his meditation on Affection', to which he attributes the powers of creation ex nihilo: With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing; then 'tis very credent
Thou mayst conjoin with something, and thou dost
(And that beyond commission) and I find it.... (1.2.138-49) Here the striking peculiarity in Leontes' use of pronouns' concerns the final it, for the noun phrase to which it is related is itself a pronoun - something. That is, the semantically empty it derives from a form that is also semantically empty. Hence no interpretation attaches to it in this sentence'. (Thorne's analysis converges with Smith's, who had described Leontes' language as disembodied' and vacuous'.) Leontes' impression that a positive interpretation exists merely shows his tragic capacity to take his own expressions of jealousy as reports of states of affairs actually existing in the outside world' (p. 59).
The second passage is the famously extended rhetorical question that Leontes puts to Camillo, Is whispering nothing?', a passage of syntactic incoherence', as Thorne describes it, in which the imaginary cuckold concludes that if all these imagined signs of adultery be nothing', then The covering sky is nothing, ... nor nothing have these nothings' (1.2.284-96). Drawing on the work of two modern linguists[29], Thorne describes the indefinite pronoun something as a noun phrase consisting of the indefinite determiner some, and a "proform", the product of re-writing the noun symbol, not as a full noun, but as a dummy noun, or variable, which appears in the surface structure as thing, one, or body' (p. 63). A further characteristic of indefinite pronouns is that they do not have plurals', so that the conjunction of determiner' and proform' has to be split in order to distinguish the utterances I saw something in the room' and I saw some things in the room'. Reverting to Leontes' use of the word nothing' we can see that his mistake is to confuse the pronoun with the noun ("nor nothing have these nothings")'. But, in Thorne's words, This is a mistake Leontes has been making all along. The most obvious symptom of Leontes' disturbance, the basis from which his whole jealous delusion is projected, is to be found in the use of these forms - the mistake that makes him believe that to talk about something is to talk about some thing (p. 63). I cite these essays by Jonathan Smith and J.P. Thorne as examples of the illumination that can result when a critic focusses on dramatic language as both the embodiment of an individualized character and the instrument of interaction with their world. Thorne makes two additional point relevant to Russ McDonald's scholastic, generalized approach to the language of the Romances. First, that it seems that in his later plays Shakespeare was making an increasingly successful attempt to reproduce in his dialogue the effect of actual speech, with all its hesitations, repetitions, and syntactic irregularities' (p. 64). This awareness of language as the instrument of social exchange in the real world, whether of Shakespeare's day or our own, is sadly lacking in McDonald's work. Secondly, and even more aptly, It is important that one should not try to judge the writing in Shakespeare's later plays in terms of a single criterion, but attempt, as far as possible to relate the (in fact) extreme diversity in the writing of these plays to the wide range of dramatic effects they achieve. (p. 64) Any scholar considering embarking on a study of Shakespeare's late style can be reassured that a good treatment of it is still much needed.
[1] Shakespeare's Late Style. By Russ McDonald (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006). X+260pp. [pounds sterling]48;$85. ISBN 0521820685.
[2] See, e.g., Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author. A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, 2002), discussing Titus Andronicus (with Peele), Timon of Athens (Middleton), Pericles (Wilkins), King Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (Fletcher). See also Vickers, Incomplete Shakespeare: denying co-authorship in 1 Henry VI', Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 311-52.
[3] See Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (London, 1968, 2005), pp. 36-8.
[4] E.A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar (London, 1886??); Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare's Grammar (London, 2003); N.F. Blake, The Language of Shakespeare (London, 1983) and A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language (London, 2002).
[5] Hilda M. Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare's Language. Some Problems of Lexical Meaning in the Dramatic Text (London, 1962); Paul A Jorgensen, Redeeming Shakespeare's Words (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962); R.W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language. An Index (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981); David Crystal and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare's Words. A Glossary and Language Companion (London, 2002).
[6] William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930); Honest in Othello', The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951), pp. 218-49; M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957). See also Herbert A.Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in Love's Labour's Lost' (The Hague, 1973); William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labour's Lost' (Princeton, NJ, 1976); Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse. Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge, 1984).
[7] See, e.g., Sister Miram Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York, 1947); Brian Vickers, Shakespeare's Use of Rhetoric', in K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 83-98; George T. Wright, Hendiadys in Hamlet', PMLA 96 (1981): 168-93.
[8] John Porter Houston, Shakespearean Sentences. A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton Rouge, LA, 1988); F.W. Ness, The Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London, 1941).
[9] George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988); Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare's Verse - Iambic Pentameter and the Poet's Idiosyncrasies (New York and Frankfurt, 1987).
[10] Madeleine Doran, Shakespeare's Dramatic Language (Madison, WI, 1976); Shakespeare's Styles. Essays in honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G.K. Hunter (Cambridge, 1988); V. Salmon and E. Burness (eds.), Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1987).
[11] This is the organizing principle in my book on Shakespeare's prose (note 2).
[12] See Edward Dowden, Shakspere, his mind and art (London, 1877); Lytton Strachey, Shakespeare's Final Period', The Independent Review, 3 (1906), reprinted in Books and Characters (London, 1922), pp. 49-69.
[13] Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole world round'. Hawthorn and his mosses (1850).
[14] See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk-Tale [1928], tr. L. Scott, 2nd edn. rev. L.A. Wagner (Austin, TX, 1968), and Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy (London, 1973.), pp. 183ff.
[15] McDonald shows no knowledge of the scholarly literature identifying the stylized structure of the Greek novel as the main influence on Shakespeare's romances.
[16] See, e.g., Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London,1993); John M. Ellis, Literature Lost. Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven, 1997); Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (eds.), Theory's Empire. An Anthology of Dissent (New York, 2005).
[17] The evasions and self-contradictions behind this claim were exposed in a classic essay by Richard Levin, Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy', PMLA, 103 (1988): 125-38, giving rise to a counter-attack by 24 feminist critics and a cogent reply by Levin in PMLA, 104 (1989): 77-9. Both texts are reprinted in Levin, Looking for an Argument. Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cranbury, NJ, and London, 2003), pp. 29-54.
[18] McDonald claims that Evans cannot conceal his impatience with the late work', and that he gives up on The Winter's Tale midway into the play' (p. 19). I hold no brief for Evans as a major critic, but in fairness', as McDonald puts it (p. 19, n. 48), it should be recorded that Evans's final chapter (pp. 176-88) shows no impatience with these plays, indeed responds to their many variations in style with appropriate quotation and comment. Nor does he give up' on The Winter's Tale at the point McDonald indicates (p. 207'; it is p. 182 in the 1952 edition), but goes on to discuss Act IV.
[19] Cf. pp. 30-7.
[20] For instance, he defines asyndeton as the omission of conjunctions between words' (p. 56), but that figure is known as brachylogia. As for McDonald's knowledge of Latin, having quoted Quintilian's comment that Figures generated by subtraction ... aim principally at the charm of brevity and novelty' (brevitatis novitatisque maxime gratiam petunt; 9.3.58), he seems to think that gratiam' is the nominative form of the noun (pp. 85, 94, 106). His account of the Ciceronian' movement (pp. 61-3) relies on the work of Morris W. Croll and George Williamson, unaware of two comprehensive refutations: Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, 1968), and Robert M. Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, MA, 1968). McDonald's linking of this issue with the misogyny of the Church fathers is ludicrously misplaced.
[21] McDonald knows the book (note 8 above), since he reviewed it in Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 360, 362-3. However, he found it not an easy read', complaining about its daunting charts and graphs and tables', and ingraciously conceding that Tarlinskaja demonstrate[s] statistically what we all "know" to be true: that Shakespeare's metrical style evolved from strict to loose over the course of his career'. (We knew it, but we lacked the tools to demonstrate it.) However, when McDonald writes that her analyses of the progressive shift in emphasis from the fourth to the sixth foot provides helpful evidence' to those of us interested in the sound of the line and the connection between that sound and other dramatic functions or ideas' (p. 362; my italics), he adds an alien element to Tarlinskaja's work, which is concerned solely with verse movement, not sound.
[22] Fiction and Diction (Ithaca and London, 1993), tr. Catherine Porter from Fiction et diction (Paris, 1991).
[23] See, e.g., pp. 34, 38, 39, 40, 54, 56, 75, 80, 90, 94-5, 98, 114, 115, 129, 140-1, 144, 149, 151, 153, 156, 159, 160, 169, 170, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 187, 217.
[24] See Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), ch. 6, The Expressive Function of Rhetorical Figures', pp. 294-339. Other theorists listed additional feeling-states which could be represented by aposiopesis: see the index, p. 499.
[25] See Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1998), pp. 238-9, with indication of Puttenham's sources. McDonald actually cites Puttenham's account of the polysemous nature of this figure, giving examples from the late plays, but as if dissatisfied with Shakespeare's local uses of it, he takes it as symbolic of the shifts of locale in the Romances: "The figure of silence" represents the playful Shakespeare's suppression of logical connectives, his asking the audience to follow the jerks and inventions of the fable' (pp. 128-9). But many other plays have such shifts, and aposiopesis cannot be elevated to a genre-defining element.
[26] Shakespeare Quarterly, 19 (1968): 317-27.
[27] See also Bryan Garner, Shakespeare's Latin Neologisms', Shakespeare Studies, 15 (1982): 149-70, repr. in Salmon and Burgess (note 9),
[28] The grammar of jealousy: A note on the character of Leontes', in A.J. Aitken, Angus MdIntosh, and Hermann Palsson (eds.), Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots (London, 1971), pp. 55-65.
[29] J. Katz and P. Postal, An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions (Cambridge, MA, 1964), p. 91.
Responses to this piece intended for the Readers' Forum may be sent to the Editor at M.Steggle@shu.ac.uk.
[c] 2008-, Matthew Steggle (Editor, EMLS).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Vickers, Brian. "Brian Vickers, Approaching Shakespeare's late style." Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2008. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA177314451&it=r&asid=958d5941213ad84a508b357987017b22. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A177314451
A Lover's Complaint Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare canon: interpreting shared vocabulary
MacDonald P. Jackson
103.3 (July 2008): p621.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Modern Humanities Research Association
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Journals/mlr.html
A Lover's Complaint was published in the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnet and was given its own ascription to 'William Shakespeare', but in recent years several specialists in attribution have questioned its authenticity. Brian Vickers has argued that the true author is John Davies of Hereford. However, the Complaint and Cymbeline use certain rare words in similar contexts, and the links between the two works can best be explained as due to common authorship. Shakespeare's responsibility for the Complaint is further demonstrated by striking vocabulary links between the poem and other Shakespeare plays. 'Literature Online' researches reveal the strength of this association.
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A Lover's Complaint was published in Thomas Thorpe's 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's Sonnet and given its own separate attribution to 'William Shakespeare'. Since the 1960s, most scholars and editors have accepted the poem's authenticity. (1) It has attracted some stimulating criticism. (2) But several recent studies have concluded that the Quarto ascription is erroneous. (3) The most comprehensive of these is Brian Vickers's Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint' and John Davies of Hereford, (4) which argues for Davies's authorship. Vickers's presentation of his case has already persuaded Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen to exclude A Lover's Complaint from their RSC Shakespeare Complete Works. They believe that Vickers has 'devastated' the Quarto claim. (5) think that all these distinguished scholars are wrong and that A Lover's Complaint belongs within the Shakespeare canon.
Vickers makes little attempt to explore links between A Lover's Complaint and Shakespeare's undoubted works, but those that he discusses are explained as due to (a) coincidence, 'Shakespeare and Davies sharing a Jacobean vocabulary' (p. 208), or (b) Davies's having imitated or echoed Shakespeare, or (c) Shakespeare's having been influenced by Davies' A Lover's Complaint which he read after Thorpe had fraudulently included it with Shakespeare's sonnets (p. 213). Thus, citing several triple rhymes shared by A Lover's Complain and The Rape of Lucrece, Vickers argues not that Shakespeare was recycling rhymes from the only other work of his in which triple rhymes were repeatedly needed for the rhyme royal stanzas (ababbcc) that the poems have in common, but that we can detect instead 'the methods of an imitator writing down rhymes in his notebook for future re-use'(p. 198). Any similarities between A Lover's Complaint and Davies's works, on the other hand, are apt to be seen as evidence that Davies wrote the poem.
Here, however, I want to focus on vocabulary, and especially on one set of verbal connections between A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline. They were pointed out in 1987 by A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, who offered a very different explanation of them from that which Vickers prefers. (6) Some background information will clarify my own discussion.
Well over a hundred years ago the fine German scholar Gregor Sarrazin, working from Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare Lexicon, listed for every play, the two narrative poems, the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint all the words that occur only twice or thrice in Shakespeare's oeuvre and gave references for these other occurrences. (7) His tables demonstrated a strong association between chronological proximity of plays or poems and the numbers of such rare words that they shared. A Lover's Complaint exhibited an overwhelming preponderance of vocabulary links with Shakespeare's seventeenth-century plays. (8) In 1965 I showed that words used in A Lover's Complaint and not more than five times in Shakespeare's canonical works followed the same pattern. (9) Eliot Slater's more refined statistical analysis yielded similar results. He confirmed Sarrazin's and my findings on A Lover's Complaint and, after compiling a card index of all words that Shakespeare used ten or fewer times, recorded a tendency for words considerably less 'rare' than Sarrazin's 'dislegomena' and 'trislegomena' to cluster chronologically. (10)
The fact that A Lover's Complaint s links in vocabulary are so predominantly with his seventeenth-century plays is good evidence that if it is by Shakespeare it is a work of his maturity, not of his youth, but in itself it is not, as Slater supposed, good evidence that Shakespeare was indeed the poem's author. Rare-word links between Shakespeare and works by other writers might display the same tendency to congregate in Shakespeare plays of about the same period of composition. New words were entering the language each year, so that poems or plays written in 1600, let us say, potentially shared items of vocabulary that they could not have shared with poems or plays written around 1590. Conversely, some elements of literary English current around 1590 were passing out of use by 1600. Slater found that a disproportionate number of the rare-word links between the anonymous Edward III (published in 1596 and perhaps first performed as early as 1590) and the Shakespeare canon were with the three parts of Henry VI and other early Shakespeare plays, and concluded that Shakespeare was sole author of Edward III. But M. W. A. Smith and Hugh Calvert showed that Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's James IV exhibit the same concentration of word-links with Shakespeare's earliest plays. (11) In these two cases, the distribution of links to Shakespeare's dramatic canon was governed by chronology rather than authorship.
However, other aspects of the vocabulary linkages yield good evidence for attribution. Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson, following Slater, argue that Shakespeare began A Lover's Complaint around 1600-03 and worked on it again in preparation for its inclusion in Thorpe's 1609 Quarto. As they point out, the excess of observed over expected rare-word links with Shakespearian plays, though considerable for some composed earlier in the seventeenth century, is greatest for Cymbeline, dated 1610 in the Oxford Textual Companion. (12) They examine the contexts of these words within poem and play. The words, all of which occur no more than five times within Shakespeare's dramatic canon, are: gyves sb., physic v, amplify v, blazon v, ruby sb., outwardly adv., tempter sb., aptness sb., commix v, spongy a., slackly adv., feat a., rudeness sb., usury sb., and pervert v.
Dismissing the claim that the co-occurrence of these words in both A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline points to common authorship and Shakespeare's involvement with the poem not long before its publication, Vickers asserts that two other explanations are possible: either the fifteen words 'were circulating in general usage in London between 1603 and 1609' or, 'since Sonnets were published in about June 1609, and the composition of Cymbeline is usually dated to 1609-10, it may well be that Shakespeare had read A Lover's Com plaint and recalled it while writing the play' (p. 213). Vickers realizes that in this instance the option of casting John Davies of Hereford as Shakespearian imitator is precluded by the probable date of Cymbeline's first performance and the undoubted date, namely 1623, of its first appearance in print. Let us consider Vickers's alternative explanations.
Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson show that the contexts in which at least eight of the fifteen words appear are strikingly similar in one respect or another. For example, gyves denotes 'in both Cymbeline and Complaint imprisoning devices desired by the prisoner': Posthumus speaks of gyves | Desired more than constrained' (v. 5. 108-09, my italics, here and elsewhere in these quoted extracts), and the nun described in the Complaint is in 'unconstrained gyves' (l. 242). (13) Both uses of the verb physic relate to love: 'it doth physic love' (III. 2. 340), 'love to physic
your cold breast' (l. 259). Each instance of outwardly applies to a symbolic ornament connected with seduction. The word aptness 'relates in both works to shifts of amorous technique according to need'. (14) And so on. In discussing slackly they overlooked the detail that in the Complaint some of the Fickle Maid's hair, not quite breaking its 'bondage', is 'slackly braided in loose negligence' (ll. 34-35), while in Cymbeline the king's children were 'slackly guarded' due to negligence' (I. I. 65-67). The shared associations in these cases make Vickers's first explanation in terms of sheer coincidence very improbable. The whole 'Literature Online' (LION) electronic database, comprising over 350,000 works of English drama, poetry, and prose, yields only two works in which gyves are collocated with the words constrained or unconstrained--A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline. (15)
Moreover, at least two words might reasonably be added to the Hieatt list: the past-participial adjective seared and the word outward used as a noun (in the plural in A Lover's Complaint. (16) Some editors refuse to emend the First Folio's 'fear'd' to 'seared Cymbeline at II. 4. 6, but confusion between 'f' and long 's' is one of the most frequent of all errors in early modern texts and the imagery requires the emendation, adopted without comment in the Oxford Collected Works and fully defended by Martin Butler in his New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the play. (17) The Folio contains the same mistake in Measure for Measure at II. 4.9. The word, meaning 'dried up, parched, withered', occurs in A Lover's Complaint within the initial description of the central character: 'spite of heaven's fell rage, | Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age' (ll. 13-14). The broadly contextual link with Cymbeline is that shortly after Posthumus has spoken of his 'seared hopes' (II. 4. 6) and within the same conversation, he says of Innogen 'let her beauty | Look through a casement' (II. 4. 33-34). The whole of LION yields only one other instance of 'beauty' looking or peeping through a lattice or casement, and that is in an eighteenth-century play doubtless influenced by Cymbeline: in Henry Brooke's tragedy The Earl of Westmorland (1789), Rowena says of her husband that 'beauty from each limb, | As through a summer casement, look'd abroad, | And found no rival'. But the idea also turns up in Thomas Shipman's poem 'Beauty's Periphrasis' from Carolina: or, Loyal Poems (1683): 'She looks as Beauty prisoner was | And peeping through a double grate'. In literature before this date there is no parallel so close as afforded by Sonnet III's image: 'So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, | Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time' (ll. 11-12), where, as in A Lover's Complaint beauty is to be glimpsed through the lattice or window of 'age', and this 'despite' (or 'spite of) the ravages of time.
The noun outward is used in both A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline in praise of a man's exceptionally attractive physical appearance, or 'fair parts'(A Lover's Complaint l. 83). In the poem the woman's seducer is 'one by nature's outwards so commended | That maidens' eyes stuck overall his face' (ll.80-81), while in the play the First Gentleman reports of Posthumus, 'I do not think | So fair an outward and such stuff within | Endows a man but he' (I. I. 22-24).
These two additional items bring the number of 'rare-in-Shakespeare' words shared by A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline to seventeen, reinforcing the conclusion that, in view of the similar contexts in which so many of them are set, their presence in both poem and play is due to something more than coincidental use of words 'circulating in general usage in London between 1603 and 1609' (Vickers, p. 213).
A search of 'Literature Online' that extends the chronological limits five years before and after Vickers's dates and encompasses works of any genre published in the period 1598-1614 and all plays, masques, and entertainments (some 230 altogether) composed or first performed within these same years reveals that four of the seventeen words were seldom or never used in literature outside the Shakespeare canon: physic v, slackly adv., seared ppl.a, outward sb. Outside of Cymbeline and A Lover's Complaint physic is used as a verb only in Shakespeare's As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and Addition iii of Sir Thomas More, and in John Norden's poem The Labyrinth of Man's Life(1614). Slackly, shared by A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline, is used elsewhere only in the anonymous Stonyhurst Pageants, dated 1617 in The Annals of English Drama and so falling outside the set 1598-1614 limits. (18)
Again, apart from the Complaint and Cymbeline, the only works to use seared as a participial adjective are Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and the play The Valiant Welshman (by 'R. A.'), dated 1612 in Annals and published in 1615. And outward is a noun only in the Complaint, Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida, Sonnet LXIX, Sonnet CXXV, and one non-Shakespearian work. In all the Shakespearian examples of outward the word is clearly a noun. LION yields a small handful of non- Shakespearian examples of adjectival outward with a following noun understood, such as 'Fitting their outward to their inward hue' in Francis Rous' Thule; or, Virtue's History (1598). But there is also one somewhat enigmatic instance of substantival use in Samuel Rowlands's The Betraying of Christ (1598). Rowlands includes a series of lines describing Judas and beginning with successive letters of the alphabet, A to Z. The line for 'X' reads: 'X plan the outward, inward, not at all'. This becomes more intelligible with the comma after 'inward' deleted and the old abbreviation (normally 'Xpian') expanded to 'Christian': Judas was Christian in outward show but not inwardly. Although outward is here a noun, it is less distinct from the kind of elliptical 'outward ... inward' plus noun formation than are the Shakespearian examples: 'beauty's outward' in Troilus and Cressida (III. 2. 158), 'Thy outward thus with outward praise is crowned' in Sonnet LXIX. 5, 'With my extern the outward honouring' in Sonnet CXXV. 2.
So within Vickers's specified narrower range, about 1603-09, LION yields no non-Shakespearian instances of any of these four words, whereas, if, on the strength of Vickers's 'about', we allow slackly in Cymbeline, Shakespeare uses them all within that period.
Vickers lists ten of the fifteen Hieatt words shared by A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline that occur in Davies's writings. (19) Of these, the instance of physic v. comes within Wit's Bedlan (1617), which falls outside Vickers's 'between about 1603 and 1609' and also outside the wider limits of my LION search. Vickers has forgotten ruby, which truly is common in the period and which Davies uses in five of his volumes. Neither outward sb. nor seared ppl.a. is used by Davies. (20) So his canon contains examples of eleven of the seventeen words, and excludes three of the four rarest (slackly adv., outward sb., and seared v); also absent are outwardly, aptness, and rudeness.
Shakespeare, of course, employs all seventeen, since all are found in Cymbeline. But what we are attempting to determine is whether it is more likely (a) that A Lover's Complaint is by Davies and that Shakespeare, in writing Cymbeline, was influenced by reading the poem when it was published with his own sonnets, or (b) that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint as well as Cymbeline. The seventeen words have already been identified as linking poem and play. We may now examine their incidence in other Shakespearian works. As Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson record, all except commix and slackly are to be found in at least one, and usually in several, Shakespeare plays, besides Cymbeline. But the significant feature is their chronological distribution. The nineteen plays up to and including Henry V (1598-99) have seven instances, whereas the nineteen plays from Julius Caesar to The Two Noble Kinsmen have twenty-nine. (21) This is pertinent to dating the poem rather than to determining its authorship. More importantly, Measure for Measure (1603) has six, namely gyves, ruby, tempter, usury, pervert, and seared. Troilus and Cressida (1602) has five, namely physic, spongy, rudeness, outwards, and outwardly. Macbeth (with physic, outwardly, and spongy) and Coriolanus (with amplify, aptness, and usury) both have three. Measure for Measure follows Troilus and Cressida in the Oxford Shakespeare's chronological order of plays, so that two consecutively written plays (1602-03), covering about six hundred lines, contain eleven of the seventeen Cymbeline-A Lover's Complaint words, as many as the whole Davies canon, amounting to over 42,000 lines. (22) In the whole of LION, four works contain spongy, outwardly, and physic as a verb: Troilus and Cressida, Macbeth, Cymbeline, and A Lover's Complaint.
Davies never used outwardly, aptness, slackly, rudeness, outward sb., or seared ppl.a. Before the 1609 publication of A Lover's Complaint Shakespeare had used outwardly in Troilus and Cressida (1602), Macbeth (1606), and possibly The Winter's Tale 1609); aptness in Coriolanus (1608); rudeness in Julius Caesar (1599), Twelfth Night (1601), and Troilus and Cressida (1602); outward sb. in Troilus and Cressida (1602) and Sonnets LXIX and CXXV (1593-1603); and seared in Measure for Measure (1603). Of course, he used all these words in Cymbeline. By 1609 Davies had not used physic as a verb, his sole example coming from Wit's Bedlam(1617), whereas Shakespeare had used it in As You Like It (1599-1600), Troilus and Cressida (1602), Sir Thomas More, Addition iii (1603-04), Macbeth (1606), and possibly The Winter's Tale (1609). (23)
In the light of all the preceding data it seems highly improbable that in Cymbeline Shakespeare echoed a Complaint by John Davies of Hereford. It seems much more likely that in Cymbeline Shakespeare recycled some of the words he himself had used not only in A Lover's Complain but in various other works, and placed several of them in strikingly similar contexts because they formed part of a network of associations in his mind.
Further scrutiny of the Complaint contexts of some of the seventeen words confirms this conclusion. We have already said something about seared. A Lover's Complaint tells us in regard to the 'fickle maid' that 'spite of heaven's fell rage, | Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age' (ll. 13-14). The word seared thus occurs within lines that have a close, and almost unique, parallel in Cymbeline's 'let her beauty | Look through a casement', besides a striking similarity to Sonnet III's: 'So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, | Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time', which offers the same idea of glimpsing beauty through the lattice or windows of withered or wrinkled age, and in similar wording: through [...] age [...] spite of/Despite of. In A Lover's Complaint the criss-crossed strips of lattice-work themselves evoke the sonnet's 'wrinkles'. It seems probable that Shakespeare three times used variations on the same image, not that in Cymbeline he was reclaiming an image that Davies had borrowed from one of his sonnets.
Moreover, the metaphorical 'peeping through' of the Complaint can be paralleled in Shakespeare, but not in any other LION work of 1598-1614. In other authors, cases of literal peeping through (often through 'crannies') are common enough, and the sun, morning, heaven, or light may peep through some space or other. But only in Shakespeare can we find a figurative peeping through comparable to beauty's in the Complaint: 'I'll force | The wine peep through their scars' in Antony and Cleopatra (III. 13.192-93); 'your youth | And the true blood which peeps so fairly through it 'in The Winter's Tale (IV. 4. 147-48), where 'true blood' means both 'virtuous passion' and 'noble lineage'; 'I can see his pride | Peep through each part of him' in All Is True or Henry VIII (I. I. 68-69). None of these plays was published until 1623, and yet the composition of Antony and Cleopatra certainly pre-dated the writing of Cymbeline and the publication of A Lover's Complains Davies has only the one example of the commonplace 'Heaven's bright eye [...] Peeps through the purple window of the east', in Summa total is (1607). (24)
The rare noun outward was seen to have similar associations in the Complaint and Cymbeline. Its context in the Complaint also connects with other Shakespearian works. In the poem, the Youth is said to be
O, one by nature's outwards so commended
That maidens' eyes stuck over all his face.
Love lacked a dwelling and made him her place,
And when in his fair parts she did abide
She was new-lodged and newly deified.
(11.80-84)
Sonnet LXIX's use outward as a noun begins:
Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend.
All tongues, the voice of souls, give thee that due,
Utt'ring bare truth even so as foes commend.
Thy outward thus with outward praise is crowned.
(11. 1-5)
Here, as in A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline, the noun outward relates to praise of a man's exceptional physical attractiveness, with the sonnet and the poem sharing 'parts' and 'commend'. Like A Lover's Complaint, the sonnet goes on to suggest that the inward man, as manifested in his deeds, 'matcheth not thy show' (1. 13). The Complaint stanza's 'maiden's eyes stuck over all his face' may seem grotesque, but 'stuck over' probably has little more metaphorical content than our 'all eyes were fixed upon him'. Maiden's eyes lingered over him. There are good Shakespearian parallels: Timon speaks of 'The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men |[...]| That numberless upon me stuck' (Timon of Athens, iv. 3. 162-64), and the Duke in Measure for Measure exclaims: 'O place and greatness, millions of false eyes I Are stuck upon thee' (IV. 1. 58-59). The Complaint stanza's idea of 'love' (or 'Love') using the beautiful Youth as 'a dwelling' recalls a passage in Venus and Adonis where 'Love', imagining his own burial in the hollows of Adonis's dimpled cheeks, knows well that 'if there he came to lie, | Why there love lived, and there he could not die' (ll. 245-46). And of the Young Man of Sonnet XCIII it is said that' heaven in thy creation did decree | That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell' (ll. 9-10). (25)
The Complaint stanza thus has notable parallels with a sonnet published in the same volume as itself, a narrative poem published in 1593 and therefore available for Davies to borrow from, and two plays that did not reach print till 1623 and, in the case of Tinton, had almost certainly not been staged by 1609.
It must be emphasized that I am not offering these parallels as in themselves proving that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint. Rather, I have cited them as further evidence that can help us determine the most plausible explanation for the presence in both the Complaint and Cymbeline of the rare noun outwards. The fact that outwards occurs as a noun in a stanza of the Complaint that affords such Shakespearian parallels surely tells against the idea that the Complaint was written by Davies, and that Shakespeare, reading it for the first time in 1609, echoed Davies in Cymbeline, taking over from him a word that Shakespeare himself had used in Troilus and Cressida and in two sonnets but that Davies never used in his acknowledged canon.
Among the Hieatt words is feat. In A Lover's Complaint letters are 'With sleided silk feat and affectedly l Enswathed and sealed to curious secrecy' (ll.48-49). The whole LION database yields only one other instance of 'sleided silk'--in the Gower chorus of Pericles that, in unmistakably Shakespearian terms, describes the accomplishments of 'absolute Marina' (sc. 15. 21). (26) Shakespeare could not have appropriated this phrase after encountering it for the first time in the Complaint as printed in the Sonnets Quarto of 1609, since Pericles had been first performed some time within the period 1606-08. Davies could have borrowed the phrase from Pericles only if he had heard it at a performance of the play or read it in the 1609 Quarto of Pericles after the unknown month of the play's publication but before publication of the Sonnets Quarto, which had been entered in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609. It is more plausible that Shakespeare reused his own unique phrase. Again, the word common to A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline is found in the poem in association with a phrase that affords a unique parallel to a different Shakespearian play.
The links in vocabulary between A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline, to which Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson drew special attention, are important because the poem was published before Cymbeline was available for imitation, even by a playgoer hearing it in performance, let alone a reader, the play's first appearance in print having been in the First Folio of 1623. But of course there are also several very rare words in the Complaint that, although not found in Cymbeline, do occur within other Shakespeare plays: the verbal substantive appertainings and the adjective credent (as distinct from the Latin third-person plural verb), for example. LION yields no non- Shakespearian instances of either word before the nineteenth century. But appertainings occurs in the Complaint (1. 115) and in the Quarto of Troilus and Cressida (1609) at 11. 3. 79 (where F 1623 has 'appertainment'), while credent occurs in the Complaint (1. 279), Hamlet (1. 3. 30), Measure for Measure (IV. 4. 25), and The Winter's Tale (1. 2. 144). Since The Winter's Tale was composed in 1609-10, credent was thus used by Shakespeare in plays written both before and after the probable composition date and certain publication date of A Lover's Complains All the extant evidence points to its having belonged to Shakespeare's word-stock, but not to Davies's. Indeed, before the nineteenth century it appears to have been Shakespeare's alone.
Another rare word, pelleted, occurs in the Complaint (1. 18) and in Antony and Cleopatra (iii. 13. 168), and, as Kenneth Muir noted, 'In the poem, the tears are the pellets of sorrow; in the play, Cleopatra's frozen tears, turned to hail, are the pellets of her grief.' (27) LION's only other pre-nineteenth-century uses of the word are in civic pageants by Heywood, Munday, and Middleton, and in every case it is used in a technical, heraldic sense ('marked or charged with [heraldic] pellets'), especially with reference to 'pelleted lions', often 'golden'. OED places its citations from the Complaint and Antony and Cleopatra under a separate headword: they are the only citations in which the verb pellet means 'form or shape into pellets' and in each case it is water that is so formed-as teardrops, as hailstones. Since Antony and Cleopatra was first printed in the First Folio (of 1623), Vickers has again to suggest that either Davies 'may well have seen it in the theatre' or to invoke pure coincidence (p. 168).
The Complaint stanza containing pelleted is another with many connections to Shakespeare's works:
Oft did she heave her napkin to her eyne,
Which on it had conceited characters,
Laund'ring the silken figures in the brine
That seasoned woe had pelleted in tears,
And often reading what contents it bears;
As often shrieking undistinguished woe
In clamours of all size, both high and low.
(ll. 15-21)
Vickers finds much to deprecate here (pp. 167-68). But there are many striking Shakespearian parallels, whatever one's critical judgement on the way the images are developed. The use of a napkin to wipe away tears may seem commonplace, but among LION plays of 1590-1610 I found it only in Titus Andronicus (twice) and 3 Henry VI. (28) Davies never mentions a napkin and the sole handkerchief ('handkercher') in his verse does not wipe away tears. In the Complaint, the woman's napkin, embroidered with 'conceited characters' and 'silken figures', is reminiscent of Desdemona's, which had 'magic in the web' (III. 4. 69), and was sewn with 'silk' (III. 4.73) embroidery that included 'straw-berries' (III. 3. 440). (29) Vickers reviles as 'laboured' the 'spelling out of the chain of associations' in 'Laund'ring [...] brine [...] seasoned [...] pelleted in tears' (p. 168). But Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, repeatedly thinks of tears in terms of their saltiness, and 'tears', 'brine', and 'season' are brought together in All's Well That Ends Well: tears. | 'Tis the best brine a maiden can season her praise in' (II. 1. 44-46). (30) The metaphorical content of Shakespeare's verse is customarily produced or enhanced by the kind of submerged punning that leads from the brine of tears to salt as a seasoning: the associations in the Complaint lines are not 'spelt out' at all. Romeo and Juliet adds washing or laundering (though of the cheeks, not a napkin), when Friar Laurence, learning of Romeo's new love, exclaims:
Jesu Maria, what a deal of brine
Hath washed thy sallow cheeks for Rosaline!
How much salt water thrown away in waste
To season love, that of it doth not taste!
(II.2.70-73)
In Twelfth Night, Valentine reports to Orsino of Olivia that
like a cloistress she will veiled walk
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine--all this to season
A brother's dead love [...]
(I. I. 27-30)
In The Rape of Lucrece, the heroine 'must sit and pine, | Seasoning the earth with showers of silver brine, | Mingling my talk with tears, my grief with groans' (ll. 795-97). (31)
In the Complaint, 'seasoned woe' is of long duration, established, matured over time (like seasoned timber), but the wordplay helps create 'pelleted in tears'. The same punning is present in The Merchant of Venice in Portia's 'How many things by season seasoned are I To their right praise and true perfection!' (V. 1. 107-08): as M. M. Mahood explained, in 'season' there is 'a play on the meanings "time" and "spice", which is extended to "seasoned"'. (32) In fact, the same wordplay seems present in the Twelfth Night passage: Olivia preserves in the brine of tears the memory of her dead brother, maintaining the piquancy of her sense of loss, but there is a suggestion also of her allowing her grief to ripen and mature.
Vickers, retailing eighteenth-century editor George Steevens's assertion that pellet was 'the ancient culinary term for forced meat ball', finds such an extension of the image 'from the kitchen' that is touched on in 'seasoned' to be an offence against 'the Renaissance concept of decorum'(pp. 167-68). OED lends no support whatsoever to Steevens's gloss. If the sense claimed by Steevens did indeed exist and was known to the poet, it may have operated as an unconscious association. But the sense of pellet relevant for a reader is OED's 'globe, ball, or spherical body, usually of small size'. The woman's 'seasoned woe' has produced globular tears. Vickers believes that 'This poet has been thinking too literally about tears and their shape' (p. 168). To me, it is through the workings of a Shakespearian visual imagination that teardrops are so economically brought into focus. The pellet as 'shot, projectile, gunstone' is also pertinent, as John Kerrigan explained. As he noted, Shakespeare's use of pelleted in Antony and Cleopatra also 'associates tears with a destructive bombardment. Accused of being cold-hearted towards Antony, Cleopatra protests that, if she is so, heaven should "engender hail" from her tears and in a "pelleted storm" destroy herself, her heirs, and nation' (III. 13. 161-70). (33)
As for 'Laund'ring', this first use of the verb known OED is a natural extension of the washing with tears that, while common enough in early modern texts, turns up with special frequency in Shakespeare. (34) 'Laund'ring' refreshes the commonplace, particularly in association with the napkin or handkerchief.
To move to the stanza's lines 19-21, reading the contents of something is far from unusual, but in an earlier study I found the verb and the noun juxtaposed only in three plays of 1590-1610, one of them being King Lear. (35) Vickers regards the woman's 'shrieking undistinguished woe' as 'excessive, melodramatic', points out that the shrieks in Shakespeare are 'mostly associated with night, omens, and unnatural behaviour', and argues that Davies was under the influence of Spenser (pp. 60-61). But the melodramatics are no blemish. The 'I' of the poem's opening stanza is a detached spectator to the woman's histrionics and an eavesdropper on the story of her seduction as she relates it to a 'reverend man'. Even that initial 'I' cannot be equated with the poet, whose sympathy towards the main character in this little drama is complicated by his sense of the ridiculous. As John Kerrigan has written, 'In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare is drily sceptical about the kind of lamenting amplitude which features so largely in A Lover's Complaint. The Complaint has its share of 'the ingrained tonal wit which comes from derivativeness in the genre'. The poem's 'knowingness' about its 'Spenserian trappings' imparts an air of the 'urbane and droll'. (36)
The self-conscious drollness extends into the stanza's final 'clamours of all size, both high and low' (1. 21). Vickers objects: 'The collocation of "clamours" and "size" leads us to expect such qualifying epithets as "great" and "small", which makes either "size" or "high and low" an inappropriate word choice' (p. 219). Yet, among LION dramatists of 1590-1610, Shakespeare is the only one to use either 'size' or 'both high and low' in connection with sounds. (37) In The Winter's Tale, a servant reports that Autolycus 'hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes' (IV. 4. 192). The Arden 2 editor, J. H. P. Pafford, glossed 'sizes' as 'lengths, kinds', citing OED, s.v. 12, and Schmidt, s.v 3. (38) The songs are thus both short and long and for male (low) and female (high) voices. Likewise, the complaining woman's 'clamours' or wailings vary in pitch and duration. The Complaint's 'both high and low'(which also includes 'loud and soft'), is not 'an unmotivated piece of padding', as Vickers supposes: it adds a further descriptive element. In Twelfth Night the 'true love' of Feste's song 'can sing both high and low' (II. 3. 40)--again both pitch and volume seem relevant. As OED makes clear, 'size' had a wider range of meanings than Vickers recognizes, but even in its ordinary modern sense, it is not at odds with' high or low', which need not be taken as in apposition. As Katherine Duncan-Jones remarks, the line has a tinge of 'mockery or burlesque' about it, but this does not make it inept. (39)
Vickers cites six examples of 'high or low' in Davies's poetry (p. 220). But the phrase is used seven times in Shakespeare's plays, and, as in the complaint and Twelfth Night, in The Merry Wives of Windsor (II. I. 109) we find the full phrase 'both high and low' (my italics), which Davies never user 'Nor does he ever apply 'high and low' to sounds. The web of Shakespearian connections with the stanza in which 'pelleted' is placed renders incredible Vickers's offered explanation of the word's occurrence, with the meaning 'formed into (non-heraldic, water-based) pellets', in both 4 Lover's Complaint and Antony and Cleopatra but in no other LION work. Coincidence is inconceivable. And even if we were to suppose that Davies, like Sir Andrew Aguecheek collecting unfamiliar words that tickle his fancy, not only jotted down 'pelleted' after attending a performance of the play but also remembered its context, we would still have to postulate a degree of intimacy with other Shakespearian works (some not published by 1609) of which there is no evidence in his acknowledged verse--or none, at least, that Vickers supplies.
Vickers's interpretation of another link between A Lover's Complaint and Shakespeare is especially vulnerable. The seduced woman of the poem is seen 'storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain'(l. 7), which furnished OED's earliest citation of storm as a transitive verb. (41) It has long been known that there is an analogous use in The History of King Lear (sc. 8. 9-10), where Lear 'Strives in his little world of man to outstorm | The to-and-fro conflicting wind and rain'. The parallel is most unlikely to be coincidental, because it not only covers the newly minted verb and the reference to the microcosm but also encompasses the phrase 'wind and rain'. (42) Vickers claims that 'since Lear was published in 1608, the Complaint's author could easily have imitated those lines' (p. 208). But had Davies read The History of King Lear in the 1608 Quarto he would have encountered not outstorm but outscorne. Steevens was able to cite A Lover's Complaint's line, 'Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain', in support of an emendation to Lear that has rightly been followed by almost all editors. Lacking such an analogue, Davies would not have recognized the authentic verb behind the misreading, especially when 'outstorm' had never before appeared in print. (43)
In the course of the above discussion, I have mentioned the following eight words that occur in A Lover's Complaint and in the undisputed Shakespeare canon but are very rare in other LION works of 1598-1614, whether first published during that period or, in the case of plays, first performed then: appertainings vbl.sb., credent a., outward sb., pelleted (pellet v), physic v, seared ppl.a., slackly, sleided ppl.a. There are nineteen instances of these words in Shakespeare's acknowledged works, only three in other LION works of 1598-1614, by three different authors, Davies not being one of them. (44) Pelleted, meaning 'formed into pellets', and sleided do not appear outside Shakespeare at all, while appertainings and credent are not found outside his work till the nineteenth century. One might add to the list. Within the period 1598-1614, a-twain is used only in the Complaint (l. 6), The Tragedy of King Lear (II. 2.74), and Othello (Q 1622, v. ii. 213; 'in twain' in F 1623); plurkisures appears only in the Complaint (l. 193), The Merchant of Venice (I. I. 68), Timon of Athens (II. 2. 125), and the anonymous Nobody and Somebody (1606); the Complaint's reworded (reword v) is used only in Hamlet (III 4. 134); laugher occurs only in the Complaint (l. 124) and Julius Caesar (l. 2. 74); (45) origin appears once in the Complaint (l. 222), twice in Hamlet (Additional Passages B.10, III. I. 180), and once in The History of King Lear (sc. 16. 32); disciplined (discipline v) is used only in the Complaint (l. 261), Troilus and Cressida (II. 3. 255), Coriolanus, and Arthur Gorges's Lucan's 'Pharsalia' (1614); dialogued (dialogue v) is found in the period only in the Complaint (l. 132), Timon of Athens (II. 2. 52), and William Warner's Albion's England (1602). When these seven words are added to the eight, we have fifteen words that are used thirty-one times by Shakespeare within the period 1598-1614 and six times by other authors, all different and none of them Davies.
I have concentrated on the period 1598-1614, because it adds five years to both the upper and lower limits of the 1603-09 in which Vickers suggests that all the rare words common to A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline 'were circulating in general usage in London' (p. 213), and because it serves to test Vickers's further suggestion that vocabulary links that I cited in 1965 between the Complaint and Shakespeare's maturer plays 'may only show that the poem reflects word usages of [c. 1601-08]' (p. 145). On the contrary, many of them appear to have been used within the period exclusively, or almost exclusively, by Shakespeare.
The evidence of the fifteen words, with their thirty-one appearances in Shakespeare and mere six in all other authors of the period, heavily outweighs the evidence that in his section on 'Diction: Rare Words' Vickers advances as connecting the Complaint to Davies (pp. 214-17). He discusses the following words: lover with reference to a woman, platted, maund, affectedly, fancy with reference to a person, forbod, and spongy. Vickers concedes that while Davies uses lover of a woman once, Shakespeare does so five times, so we can summarily dismiss this usage as evidence of Davies's rather than Shakespeare's authorship. The form forbod (for 'forbidden' or 'forbade') is common in LION poetry published in the period 1598-1614, occurring eleven times, apart from the single instance in Davies's Wit's Pilgimage (1605). Besides, it is used by Shakespeare, although outside the period--within The Rape of Lucrece (1. 1648), though most editors modernize to 'forbade'. Maund occurs ten times in LION poetry of 1598-1614, besides the instance that Vickers notes in Davies's Microcosmos (1603).
Spongy (sometimes spelt with medial 'u'and sometimes with '-ie' ending) is even more common. Davies employs it only once, whereas Shakespeare employs it in Troilus and Cressida (II. 2. II), Macbeth (I. 7. 71), Cymbeline (IV. 2.351), and The Tempest (IV. I. 65). There are twelve further examples in LION works of the set period. Vickers makes much of the fact that the Complaint has the phrase 'spongy lungs' (1. 326, 'spungie' in the original spelling), and that, although none of the four instances of spongy in Shakespeare's plays associates it with the lungs, Davies tells us in Microcosmos:
The lungs therefore are spongy, soft, and light,
That air might enter, and from them depart,
Which guard the heart (on left side and the right)
From bord'ring bones, that else annoy it might.
But Davies's prosaic retailing of physiological information is strikingly different from the Complaint's turning of the lungs' sponginess to poetic use: 'O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed' (l. 326), exclaims the woman of her seducer. 'His lungs, like a sponge, can squeeze out the sighs stored in them', as Colin Burrow explains. (46) Vickers judges the epithet 'spongy' to be 'incongruous' (p. 216). Burrow shows that it is not. (47) Shakespeare is apt to place 'lungs' in negative contexts. In the Complaint 'that infected moisture of his eye' (l. 323) is the first of the brief catalogue that includes the 'spongy lungs', and Pericles has the phrase 'belched on by infected lungs' in one of the brothel scenes (sc. 19. 194), while Troilus and Cressida collocates 'raw eyes' and 'wheezing lungs' (Additional Passages A, V. I. 17). Vickers agrees with me that Shakespeare had dipped into Microcosmos, so he may well have read Davies's doggedly informative lines and turned fact to poetic account. (48) But among the quite numerous examples of 'spongy' in 1598-1614 is Thomas Winter's allusion to 'our spongy lungs' in The Second Day of the First Week (1603). In any case, 'spongy' is not a rare word in the period.
Nor is platted as rare as any of the fifteen Shakespeare words we have considered, since it occurs as a participial adjective in Robert Chester's Love's Martyr (1601), Arthur Gorges's Lucan's 'Pharsalia' (1614), Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum (1598), and the King James Bible (1611), besides several times as a verb. In Humour's Heaven on Earth (1609), Chronos has a 'platted' beard. Shakespeare does not use the participial adjective, but in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, Mab 'plaits the manes of horses in the night' (I. 4. 89): 'platted' and 'plaited', 'plats' and 'plaits' are spelling variants of the same word. Plaited mane and plaited beard seem about equally close to the Complaint's 'plaited hive of straw' (l. 8).
This leaves (a) affectedly and (b) the noun fancy applied to a person. Vickers states that the only two instances of affectedly in the LION database for poetry and drama between 1590 and 1620 are in A Lover's Complaint and in Davies's Select Second Husband for Sir Thomas Overbury's Wife (1616) (p. 215). But this is wrong, because affectedly occurs in Cyril Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy published in a Quarto of 1611. And of course Davies's use of the word in 1616 falls outside the defined period, 1598-1614. Davies instructs the husband to 'Teach not thy wife to speak [...] affectedly', and Puttenham had used affectedly in anatomizing faults in speech and writing in his The Art of English Poetry (1589). It also occurs twice in George Whetstone's Heptameron (1582). These instances are earlier than our period, of course. In the Complaint, letters are 'With sleided silk feat and affectedly Enswathed and sealed to curious secrecy' (ll. 48-49). The primary meaning here hardly seems to be 'with affectation'; rather, the enswathing and sealing have been done 'with loving care'. Davies is closer to Puttenham than to the Complaint.
In A Lover's Complaint the lamenting woman is called 'this afflicted fancy' (l. 61). Vickers points out that Davies three times uses the noun with reference to a person-a tubby, over-dresssed lecher in Humour's Heaven (1609), the effeminate Glaucus in an epigram in The Scourge of Folly (1611), and male lovers (of women) in Microcosmos. In his undisputed works Shakespeare does not apply the word in this way. Editors differ in their understanding of fancy in the Complaint. Katherine Duncan-Jones glosses afflicted fancy as 'unhappy apparition' or 'victim of delusion', appealing WED senses 2 and 3. (49) Others have accepted Schmidt's explanation that here and in the plural wounded fancies at line 197 the noun is a kind of metonym from the very common Shakespearian meaning 'love', that it is a case of 'the abstract for the concrete', so this afflicted fancy means something like 'this woman who is distressed by love-sickness' This tendency for the abstract to shade into the concrete makes it very difficult to assess the degree of likeness between Vickers's three Davies examples and the Complaint examples, and no less difficult to decide how many of the scores of instances of fancy or fancies in the period 1598-1614 come close to matching either Davies or the Complaint. In one of Richard Alison's songs in An Hour's Recreation in Music (1606) the singer laments 'I weep and she's a-dancing', and 'O cruel, cruel, cruel fancy' seems directed at the desired 'she', not simply the state of mind that possesses him and makes him dote on her. Thomas Greaves has 'Farewell sweet Flora, sweet fancy adieu' in a song (1604). In John Dowland's 'To catch young fancies in the nest' the fancies may be persons (1603). In Thomas Lyly's 'a lady's heart, though it harbour many fancies, should embrace but one love' in Love's Metamorphosis (1601) both 'fancies' and 'love' seem to be at once the emotion and its object. Robert Armin's The Two Maids of More-Clacke affords 'I must have fancies, playfellows' and goes on to specify pet animals and things-the objects of his fancy. And in Nicholas Breton's An Old Man's Lesson (1605) 'they that will be fools to give money for fancies' are disparaged, where the fancies are again the objects of desire. Davies's human fancies are all male, and the first two are more 'fantastic' than lovesick, whereas those in the Complaint are female. Too many ambiguities surround this particular Davies--Complaint link for it to carry much weight.
Even if, despite these doubts, we were to accept fancy as a lexical link to the Complaint of the same order as the Shakespearian ones, there would still be fifteen items of the Complaint's rare vocabulary shared with Shakespeare and only one with Davies. Allowing Davies's physic v. in Wit's Pilgrimage (1617) and affectedly in Second Husband (1616)--although (unlike all the Shakespeare items) they do not fall within the period 1598-1614--would bring the Davies total to a mere three. Yet, since performance or publication within the period 1598-1614 cuts out ten of Shakespeare's plays and his two early narrative poems, Davies's total searched output is more than half the size of Shakespeare's and has the advantage of being all in the same genre as the Complaint--poetry, not drama. (50)
The findings of this analysis may be summarized as follows. Vickers's explanations of why A Lover's Complaint and Cymbeline have so many rare-in-Shakespeare words in common are open to serious question. Several of the words were not 'circulating in general usage in London between 1603 and 1609' (p. 213). In fact, four of them physic v, slackly, seared ppl.a., outward sb.--were used by no non-Shakespearian writer during those years, whereas there are nine instances of their use within this period in works by Shakespeare other than Cymbeline. Nor is it in the least likely that Shakespeare, in writing Cymbeline, was influenced by a Complaint of which Davies was the author, borrowing from it rare words that he himself had used in other plays, but that Davies never used. The view of Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson-that Shakespeare wrote A Lover's Complaint and was still working on it not long before its publication-best fits the data. Moreover, there are words that do not recur in Cymbeline but do appear in other Shakespearian works, so that altogether at least fifteen words link the Complaint to Shakespearian plays first published and/or performed 1598-1614 or to sonnets in the Quarto entitled Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) and to not more than one non-Shakespearian work. (51) These fifteen words are used thirty-one times by Shakespeare within this period and only six times by all the other writers of poetry, drama, or prose, and never by John Davies of Hereford. Commenting on the list of Complaint words that I published in 1965 as 'rare' in the Shakespeare canon, occurring not more than five times, Vickers writes: 'Neither in this study, nor in the intervening years, did Jackson perform the "negative check" by examining the occurrence of these words in other Jacobean authors'. (52) The electronic database LION facilitates such checking. The results confirm my earlier conclusions that the author of A Lover's Complaint was William Shakespeare.
MACDONALD P. JACKSON
UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND
(1) Two studies argued for Shakespeare's authorship and a seventeenth-century date of composition: Kenneth Muir, '"A Lover's Complaint": A Reconsideration', in Shakespeare 1564-1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, ed. by Edward A. Bloom (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), pp. 154-66; MacD. P. Jackson, Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity, University of Auckland Bulletin, 72, English Series, 13 (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1965). The following major editions have appeared: The Sonnets and 'A Lover's Complaint', ed. by John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); The Poems, ed. by John Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Nelson, 1997); The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. by Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Throughout this article I quote the Complaint and other works by Shakespeare from the compact edition of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
(2) John Kerrigan returned to the poem in his excellent Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and 'Female Complaint'. A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). For a summary of recent work, plus new essays, see Critical Essays on Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint', ed. by Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); also Catherine Bates, 'The Enigma of A Lover's Complaint', in A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 426-40.
(3) Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, 'Did Shakespeare Write A Lover's Complaint? The Jackson Ascription Revisited', in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, ed. by Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 117-40. Marina Tarlinskaja, 'The Verse of A Lover's Complaint: Not Shakespeare', ibid., pp. 141-58; 'Who Did NOT Write A Lover's Complaint', Shakespeare Year book, 15 (2005), 343-82.
(4) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Simple page references to Vickers's book are incorporated into my text.
(5) The RSC Shakespeare: William Shakespeare. Complete Works, ed. by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), p. 2397.
(6) A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, 'Shakespeare's Rare Words: "Lover's Complaint", Cymbeline, and Sonnets', Notes and Queries, 232 (1987), 219-24.
(7) G. Sarrazin, 'Wortechos bei Shakespeare', Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 33 (1897), 121-65, and ibid. 34 (1898), 119-69. 'Words' in Sarrazin's tables are essentially different OED headwords or entries Schmidt's Lexicon. I have used Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary: Third Edition, rev. by Gregor Sarrazin, 2 vols (New York: Dover, 1971). However, my own analysis includes one or two rare usages or inflexions, such as plural leisures. My list in Shakespeare's Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity of words occurring no more than five times Shakespeare's works followed Schmidt in not distinguishing participial adjectives from the verbs from which they derived, but here I do make the distinction, as does OED.
(8) Sarrazin's tables on pp. 34 and 132-33, display nine links between A Lover's Complaint and Shakespeare's first seventeen works but fifty-five between the Complaint and his next twenty-two. These figures exclude links to the Sonnets.
(9) Jackson, Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity, pp. 8-14.
(10) Eliot Slater, 'Shakespeare: Word Links between Poems and Plays', Notes and Queries, 220 (1975), 157-63; The Problem of 'The Reign of King Edward III': A Statistical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): see especially the tables on pp. 158-96.
(11) M. W. A. Smith and Hugh Calvert, 'Word-Links as a General Indicator of Chronology of Composition', Notes and Queries, 234 (1989), 338-41.
(12) Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 131-32. There was a minor flaw in the way that Slater calculated figures 'expected' on a random distribution of links, but this does not seriously affect his conclusions. See MacDonald P. Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: 'Pericles' as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 41. Correctly calculated figures would still give Cymbeline themost significant excess of actual over expected links, with All's Well That Ends Well coming next.
(13) Hieatt, p. 221.
(14) Hieatt, p. 222.
(15) 'Literature Online' is available to subscribing institutions at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk. It is now administered by ProQuest UK. Checking collocations with gyves necessitates also searching giues, a common early modern spelling of the noun. When quoting LION texts, which reproduce early manuscripts or printed texts, I have modernized spelling and punctuation, but in making searches I have, of course, been aware of the full range of possible original spellings.
(16) Seared ppl.a is given a separate headword in OED; outward is OED B sb. Schmidt gives outward(s) as a substantive ('external form, exterior') its own separate entry.
(17) Cymbeline, ed. by Martin Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 131, II. 4. 6 n.
(18) Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975-1700, rev by S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964). LION's datings derive from Annals, but one or two plays may sometimes be included erroneously in a period set for searching.
(19) Vickers, p. 217. He states that Davies uses 'all but three' of the fifteen Hieatt words but counts 'apt' as though it were aptness and 'slack' as though it were slackly.
(20) Davies used seared as a verb (Vickers, p. 243) but not as a participial adjective.
(21) I have relied on the chronology in the Oxford Textual Companion, pp. 109-34. Hieatt (p. 222) says that feat occurs in The Two Noble Kinsmen, but instances of the word in that play are of the modern noun meaning 'exploit, action, skill', not of the archaic adjective meaning 'dexterous, neat, trim' (with adverbial force in A Lover's Complaint) The instance of gyves in The Two Noble Kinsmen falls within a Shakespeare scene (III. I. 73). Not counted in the figures given is the one link to Addition in of Sir Thomas More.
(22) This figure is from Vickers, p. 202. The concentration of rare Complaint-Cymbeline words in Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure is consistent with Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson's belief that Shakespeare began writing A Lover's Complaint around 1600-03 and prepared it as late as 1609 for inclusion in the Sonnets Quarto.
(23) Davies's only use of feat was in The Muse's Sacrifice(1612). Shakespeare anticipated him with the example in Cymbeline (1610). Davies's uses of the verb pervert in Humour's Heaven on Earth (1609) and The Holy Rood (1609), were also anticipated by Shakespeare--in Measure for Measure (1603) and All's Well That Ends Weld 604-05).
(24) Vickers discusses 'Some beauty peeped through lattice of seared age'(p. 255), but cites no passage in which Davies has beauty figuratively peeping or looking through a lattice, casement, or window. 'Peeping through' is juxtaposed to 'lattice' not only in A Lover's Complaint but also in 2 Henry IV, II. 3.72-76, and in only one other LION work of 1580-1640-Thomas Brewer's prose Merry Devil of Edmonton (1631), where 'Smug [...] stood peeping through his lattice'.
(25) Vickers (p. 245) quotes Davies's 'Love, leave lodge (my heart) and enter hers' in Wit's Pilgrimage (1605) and 'Thus interchang'd we either's form impart | To other's liking by the love we have, I And make the heart the lodge it to receive' in Microcosmos (1603). These variations on the commonplace exchanges of hearts or the love within them seem very different from the figure in the Complaint, Venus and Adonis, and Sonnet XCIII whereby a young man's beautiful face or 'fair parts' is the dwelling-place of a personified Love.
(26) Moreover, the First Folio (1623) text of Troilus and Cressida has the variant 'Sleyd silke'(that is, 'sleid silk'), where the 1609 Quarto has sleiue silke' (that is, 'sleave-silk')'At 1. 28. OED found no instances other than those in the Complaint and Pericles of the irregular form sleided (spelt 'sleded' in Pericles).
(27) Muir, '"A Lover's Complaint": A Reconsideration', p. 159.
(28) MacD. E Jackson, 'A Lover's Complain Revisited', Shakespeare Studies, 32 (2004), 267-94 (p. 283).
(29) Napkin and handkerchief were interchangeable terms, as in Othello, where 'handkerchief' is the usual term but 'napkin' appears at III. 3. 291, 294, and 325. Othello asks for Desdemona's handkerchief in order to wipe away 'a salt and sorry rheum' (III. 4. 51). In Richard III, Queen Elizabeth mockingly tells Richard to present her daughter, whom he wishes to marry, with a handkerchief with which to 'wipe her weeping eyes' (IV. 4. 264). And in All's Well That Ends Well Lafeu, declaring, 'Mine eyes smell onions, I shall weep anon', requests of Parolles, 'lend me a handkerchief' (V. 3. 322-23).
(30) A quick look through entries for 'salt' in an online Shakespeare concordance (http://www.it. usyd.edu.au/~matty/Shakespeare/test.html) reveals at least sixteen references to salt tears, while 'salt' and 'season' are juxtaposed again in Much Ado About Nothing, IV. 1. 143, and Troilus and Cressida, 1. 2. 251, and tears form a 'brine-pit' in Titus Andronicus, III. 1. 129.
(31) Vickers (pp. 243-44) cites a passage in Davies's The Holy Rood (1609) that collocates 'tears', 'brine', and 'season'. The parallel is good, but no better than the Shakespearian ones, which Vickers ignores, and which I quote simply as contributing to the various Shakespearian ideas and images surrounding the very rare word pelleted.
(32) The Merchant of Venice, ed. by M. M. Mahood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), P. 159, v. 1. 107 n.
(33) Kerrigan, Sonnets, p. 398, 1. 18 n.
(34) LION, or scrutiny of a Shakespeare concordance, reveals at least twenty Shakespearian instances of washing associated with tears.
(35) Jackson, 'A Lover's Complaint Revisited', p. 283.
(36) Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, pp. 65-66.
(37) Jackson, 'A Lover's Complaint Revisited', p. 283.
(38) The Winter's Tale ed. by J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 2000), p. 100, IV. 4.193 n.
(39) Duncan-Jones, Sonnets, p. 433,1. 21 n.
(40) LION readily traces Shakespearian examples of the collocation 'high and low', which was given a separate entry in John Bartlett's Complete Concordance (London: Macmillan, 1894). in The Merry Wives it refers to social standing, which Burrow considered of possible subsidiary relevance to the Complaint context (Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 696,1. 21 n.).
(41) Vickers retains the 1609 Quarto's 'sorrowes wind and raine', which editors have rightly modernized as 'sorrow's wind and rain': the woman creates a storm in her little world with the wind and rain (sighs and tears) of her sorrow.
(42) LION detects 'wind and rain' in only a handful of other plays first performed, or poems first published, between 1598 and 1614, including Shakespeare's As You Like It (written 1599-1600, first printed 1623) but also Davies's The Scourge of Folly (1611). Of course 'the wind and the rain' occurs in the song with which Feste ends Twelfth Night (written 1601, published 1623).
(43) The transitive use of storming in the Complaint and of outstorm in King Lear is quite distinct from Davies's intransitive use of the verb (Vikers, p. 242) on three occasions between 1611 and 1617.
(44) But Davies does, as we have seen, use physic as a verb in Wit's Bedlam (1617).
(45) The Oxford Complete Works does not, however, follow most editors in emending F's 'a common laughter', which seems to me utterly unidiomatic.
(46) Burrow, Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 717, l. 326 n.
(47) So also does Duncan-Jones, who glosses spongy as 'soft, absorbent', adding 'presumably here suggesting a treacherous capacity to generate false breath, or words'(Sonnets, p. 316, l. 326 n.).
(48) MacDonald P. Jackson, 'Shakespeare's Sonnet CXI and John Davies of Hereford' Microcosmos (1603)'Modern Language Review, 102 (2007), 1-10; Vickers, pp. 41-46.
(49) Duncan-Jones, Sonnets, p. 435,1. 61 n.
(50) Vickers notes that Davies used the collocation' fell rage' and was 'very fond' of the adjective 'fell', using it thirty--seven times (p. 219). But Shakespeare used it forty-three times. Davies has a 'conjuring, proud, remorseless priest | Rend, in fell rage [...] pompous vestures'(The Holy Rood, 1609). The Complaint's phrase about the woman's retaining some beauty in 'spite of heaven's fell rage' is really more akin to 'time's fell hand', as agent of decay, in Sore. Within the period 1598-1614 'fell rage' occurs in Edward Fairfax Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600) and John Marston's Antonio and Mellida (1602), and LION detects forty-two examples of the collocation in the whole database.
(51) One might reasonably add to this total. OED's first example of sistering ppl.a. is from A Lover's Complaint (1. 2), while its first citation for the verb sister is from Shakespeare' Pericles: Marina's art' sisters the natural roses'(sc. 20. 7). But OED puts the verb and the present-participial adjective under separate headwords. No other examples of verb or participial adjective appear in LION 1598-1614.
(52) Vickers, p. 206; Jackson, Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity
Jackson, MacDonald P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jackson, MacDonald P. "A Lover's Complaint Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare canon: interpreting shared vocabulary." The Modern Language Review, vol. 103, no. 3, 2008, p. 621+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA181463660&it=r&asid=9275fcf0aed261a17184b357107865fb. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A181463660
Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels
Cedric Watts
46.184 (Nov. 1995): p563.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 Oxford University Press
http://res.oxfordjournals.org/
Professor Vickers applauds Edward Said's declaration:
[I]t is the critic's job to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests, to point up those concrete instances drawn from everyday reality that lie outside or just beyond the interpretive area necessarily designated in advance and thereafter circumscribed by every theory.
The first two chapters of Appropriating Shakespeare argue that Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and others promulgated predominantly anti-democratic, anti-rationalistic, and self-contradictory notions of language: among others, the notions that language could not reliably represent reality, or that no reality lay beyond language, and that literature could not represent life. (`Language cannot posit meaning', posited de Man.) After discussing the problems raised by the Cours de linguistique generale which has been conferred posthumously on Ferdinand de Saussure, Vickers analyses the confusions and contradictions in Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and those other influential writers. He then surveys various recent schools of Shakespearian literary criticism (psychoanalytic, deconstructionist, new historicist, cultural materialist, feminist, etc.), suggesting limitations and dangers in their approaches, and using repeated reference to Shakespearian texts to question their claims.
Professor Vickers argues that these schools have repeatedly exaggerated their own merits by `demonising' and travestying opposing views. Their anti-democratic bias, he suggests, is implicit not only in their frequent use of an intimidating and obfuscating jargon but also in their tendency to use a litany of pejorative terms (`humanism', 'liberalism', bourgeois humanism', liberal humanism') to refer to relatively democratic and empirical approaches. Furthermore, their procedures are often imperialistic, as when they frankly declare their intention to annex Shakespearian texts so as to advance their own political interests. By insisting on the superiority of their own designated approach, he argues, such writers often imply the anti-rationalistic notion that the approach will never be substantially changed by experience, whether it be experience of the Shakespearian text or of life generally. Vickers also deplores the narcissism and circularity of these schools: so often, he says, if you know their approach, you know what message they will elicit from or attribute to the text under examination.
Professor Vickers's book is long and substantial, very detailed in its examination of the various approaches, interestingly eclectic in its choice of commended critics (ranging from Perry Anderson and A. D. Nuttall to Sebastiano Timpanaro and Linda Woodbridge), and frequently persuasive in showing how appropriative theorists may reduce or misinterpret Shakespeare's plays: Stephen Greenblatt's methodology receives penetrating treatment. At the centre of the argumentation of Appropriating Shakespeare is a concern for objectivity. Whereas fashionable theorists have often talked as though objectivity is a chimera and what matters is the power of particular `discourses', Brian Vickers endorses Professor Nuttall's claim:
If . . . `objective truth' means truth which is founded on some characteristic of the material and is not invented by the perceiver', there is no reason whatever to say that [it] has been superseded. Indeed its supersession would mean the end of all human discourse, not just Newtonian physics but even Tel Quel. Objective atomism is dead but objectivity is unrefuted.
As Nuttall indicates here, and as Vickers argues at length, followers of Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and kindred mentors have failed to appreciate the extent to which the most radical claims of these theorists are self-defeating. Many of the main points in Appropriating Shakespeare have by now been made familiar by a wide range of critics, among them George Watson, Laurence Lerner, and Terry Eagleton (who, in Literary Theory, deemed extreme deconstruction not only `mischievously radical' but also `utterly conservative': `as injurious as blank ammunition'). I found Brian Vickers's own interpretations of Shakespeare at times disappointing, and the tone of Appropriating Shakespeare occasionally lapsed into exasperation; but his advocacy of empiricism, of the belief that theories should be tested against evidence and be revised in the light of it or abandoned when contradicted by it, remains cogent, in view of the hospitality which some teachers of literature have accorded to theories which erode the bases of rational teaching. Professor Vickers endorses Edward Said's remark that `criticism modified in advance by labels . . . is . . . an oxymoron. The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum "solidarity before criticism" means the end of criticism.'
It is when Vickers offers his own readings of Shakespeare's plays that I experience misgivings. His interpretations of Macbeth and The Tempest seem rather staidly conventional. His claim that since the witches in Macbeth are `profoundly evil and destructive' `they belong outside all social order' does not take one very far: the drama hinges on their relationship to the social order, and Shakespeare's changes to the source-materials suggest ways in which the witches (and the play as a whole) belong to a `social order' in which the Scottish author of Daemonologie had recently succeeded Queen Elizabeth. Cultural materialism is assailed by Professor Vickers; but Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy, which does not appear in his bibliography, was a richly provocative study: it provoked fresh thinking about Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and the tragic tradition. For criticism of Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Foucault, and Greenblatt, I may well turn to Appropriating Shakespeare; for criticism of Shakespeare, I suspect I shall find Eagleton, Dollimore, and Sinfield (even when, or particularly when, I disagree with them) more fruitful than Vickers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Watts, Cedric. "Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels." The Review of English Studies, vol. 46, no. 184, 1995, p. 563+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17963245&it=r&asid=8ed3329a713d8428732fd9e1fb2db2ee. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17963245
A Lover's Complaint: Shakespeare's or not?
Grace Tiffany
58.2 (Fall 2008): p71.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Shakespeare Newsletter
http://www.iona.edu/snl/
A Lover's Complaint, a twenty-stanza poem written in rhyme royal and generally attributed to Shakespeare, was published with Shakespeare's sonnets in 1609, but Brian Vickers thinks he didn't write it. MacDonald P. Jackson thinks he did. The debate is an old one, and many others have weighed in on both sides of it. In a 2008 article in Modern Language Review, Jackson himself, who has been championing (some would say defaming) Shakespeare as the poem's author since the 60s, relies heavily on the pro-Complaint arguments of A. Kent Hieatt, among others, to restate his case. Freely acknowledging his debt to other scholars, Jackson provides some fresh comparative analyses of Complaint and Shakespeare's plays and sonnets which make Shakespeare's authorship more plausible. Jackson, like many modern textual scholars, relies heavily on computer analysis--a method which, though by now inescapable, seems suspect to some, and to others just sad. But in this essay he employs the LION (Literature Online) database to best effect. He keeps LION in its place, using it to uncover some "unShakespearean" terms in Complaint in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets (and to show the relative absence of those terms in the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries), then drawing conclusions not from these findings alone, but through applying his own interpretive skills to the question. He compares the terms' situational contexts, and links the phrases from Complaint to characteristic "network[s] of associations" in the poet's mind. Particularly fine is Jackson's commentary on the "self-conscious drollness" of the account of passionate erotic lament in Complaint, a tone similar to Shakespeare's "dr[y] sceptic[ism]" in Venus and Adonis. The hyperbolic Complaint phrase "clamours of all size, both high and low" has earned Vickers's skepticism, since "The collocation of 'clamours' and 'size' leads us to expect such qualifying epithets as 'great' and 'small,' which makes either 'size' or 'high and low' an inappropriate word choice" (Vickers, quoted in Jackson). But Jackson courteously responds that The Winter's Tale's Autolycus advertises "songs for man or woman, of all sizes," and concludes that in that phrase "sizes" means not only both short and long but "for male (low) and female (high) voices." For Shakespeare, pitch and volume seem indicated by the term. Granted, despite this and other evidences of a Shakespearean "network of associations," the Complaint is not very good--but then, Shakespeare didn't authorize its publication. We look forward to Vickers's answer. ["A Lover's Complaint, Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare Canon: Interpreting Shared Vocabulary," Modern Language Review 103:3 (July 2008): 621-38]
Tiffany, Grace
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tiffany, Grace. "A Lover's Complaint: Shakespeare's or not?" Shakespeare Newsletter, Fall 2008, p. 71. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA202704608&it=r&asid=fcc40e1d8ae5a22d957cf3b37ef35c92. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A202704608
Talking books with: Brian Vickers
Michael P. Jensen
52.2 (Summer 2002): p35.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Shakespeare Newsletter
http://www.iona.edu/snl/
In the preface to his 1989 book Returning to Shakespeare, Brian Vickers wrote, "Shakespeare is always there, in my consciousness, as an enrichment and a challenge, partly because I find it necessary periodically to move away to other literary forms and other periods. However great the writer, or composer, to limit oneself wholly to one oeuvre is unhealthy, as specialism cramps and confines the imagination. How little they know of Shakespeare who only Shakespeare know!" Thus Brian has written about Greek drama in Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth and Society (1973), Renaissance science in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (1984), and edited the comprehensive anthology English Renaissance Literary Criticism (1999). These are just three of several books not in one of the three areas where he has published most often: Shakespeare, Bacon, and rhetoric.
His editions of Bacon's works include The History of the Reign of King Henry VII: And Selected Works (1998) for the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral (1999) was published by Oxford World's Classics. A revised edition of the 800-page anthology, Francis Bacon: the Major Works, came out in September from Oxford World's Classics. Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (1968) was Brian's first book, and Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon was published the same year.
His second book, The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (also 1968), won the Harness Shakespeare Essay competition. A short book on Coriolanus (1976) was expanded and included in Returning to Shakespeare. The controversial Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (1993) takes a hard, but very logical, look at theory as practiced in Shakespeare studies. The monumental six volume Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (1974-1981) presents all the significant, and much of the less significant, Shakespearean criticism published between 1623 and 1801. Recently Brian has become the "hands-on" General Editor of a new series designed to continue the documentary history of Shakespeare's reception down to 1920 or 1940, depending on the play. Entitled Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition, and published by Continuum, four volumes have so far appeared: King John, edited by Joseph Candido (1996), Richard II, by Charles R. Forker (1998), A Midsummer Night's Dream, by Judith and Richard Kennedy (1999); and Measure for Measure, by Georg Geckle (2001). Imminent titles are Coriolanus, edited by David George, and The Merchant of Venice, by William Baker.
Two books on authorship are coming in 2002. A look at the attributions of "Shall I die?" and The Funeral Elegy, entitled `Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye should be out from Cambridge University Press by the time this column sees print. Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays is due from Oxford University Press by the end of 2002.
Brian is on the brink of a busy retirement, researching and writing more books. For the past 27 years he has been Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). He has many additional honors and publications.
MPJ: Brian, I am under-read in Bacon. Have you any suggestions?
BV: I think the best place to start would be with some of Bacon's early works. For instance, there is the "device" that he wrote in about 1592 called "Of Tribute; Or, Giving That Which Is Due" (pp. 22-51 in my anthology, where I print for the first time the complete text, newly discovered by Peter Beal, which I have co-edited with Henry Woudhuysen). In this debate four speakers meet to argue their case, the first praising "the worthiest virtue" (Fortitude), the second "the worthiest affection" (Love), the third pleading for "the worthiest power" (Knowledge), the fourth celebrating "the worthiest person" (Queen Elizabeth). So often in early Bacon one feels that he is about to launch into drama. Alternatively, one could start with the first book of The Advancement of Learning (1605), which is a marvelous defense of the importance of study against its detractors. The best single modern account of Bacon is by an American scholar, Perez Zagorin, called Francis Bacon (1998), published by Princeton. I don't think he's got the Essays right, but everything else is clearly expounded and well documented.
MPJ: Since you have two books on authorship/collaboration coming out, how can someone lacking a background in these issues inform themselves about them?
BV: Well, that's not easy, since there is no single book that can answer your question. Unfortunately, a lot of suspicion and misunderstanding exists in Shakespeare circles concerning attribution studies. Some scholars simply mistrust statistics; others don't understand them. It's entirely typical of this stand-off that the last four editions of Titus Andronicus all ignore the overwhelming case for George Peele as author of 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, and 4.1. I hope that Shakespeare, Co-Author will show people that attribution studies can be trusted.
MPJ: Ah, a preview of your results. Thank you. One result of the language barrier is that English-speaking Shakespeareans usually read books by other English-speaking Shakespeareans, and miss a lot of the literature in other tongues. As a multi-lingual scholar, are there any books you want to bring to wider attention?
BV: Although outstanding works by German scholars (such as Wolfgang Clemen and Dieter Mehl) have been translated, several other excellent studies in German ought to be better-known, preferably by having English translations issued. For instance, there is the outstanding book on Shakespeare's language by Jurgen Schafer, Shakespeares Stil: Germanisches und romanisches Vokabular (1973), which combined historical and statistical approaches to the question of Shakespeare's use of Anglo-Saxon as against Latin-derived words. Many of the great German nineteenth century scholars, such as Nicholas Delius and Gregor Sarrazin, who were not lucky enough to be widely read in English translation (as were Schlegel, Gervinus, Ulrici) are always worth consulting. Also, there are still many valuable dissertations on specific aspects of Shakespeare's language, and that of his contemporaries, produced when German universities still had a strong philological tradition based on a good classical education at the Gymnasium. Alas, since the Second World War German universities seem to have lost their autonomous intellectual tradition, and younger German scholars often seem to be playing catch-up with current literary theories, mostly of a fashionable but insubstantial nature. In Shakespeare studies, as everywhere else, literary scholarship has been contaminated by so-called "political" attitudes, from which German critics have not been immune. I wish they would re-establish their own scholarly traditions.
MPJ: Let's hope an English language publisher will take in interest in the best work. What books helped direct your career?
BV: Looking back, I think two books that specially influenced me placed Shakespeare's language and style in its historical context, the humanist curriculum (that is, the studia humanitatis, involving rhetoric, moral philosophy, history, and poetry). They were both by American scholars: T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (1944), and Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (1947). These were the first two detailed historical studies of the grammar-school curriculum as Shakespeare absorbed it, and of his knowledge of the expressive devices of rhetoric. I have worked on these topics from time to time in my career, but am convinced that an enormous amount may still be learned about Shakespeare's creative forging of an individual style and his debt to these traditional disciplines.
MPJ: Baldwin keeps coming up in these conversations, but I can't find a copy of Small Latine. I will someday. Which books influenced you the most?
BV: I studied at Cambridge between 1959 and 1964, and learned a great deal from the teaching of Muriel Bradbrook and Leo Salingar. Of their books, I would recommend anyone to read her Themes and Conventions in Elizabethan Tragedy (1936), and his Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (1974). Both books put Shakespeare in the context of the dramatic traditions on which he drew and re-shaped, and both bring out all the playwrights' reliance on theatrical conventions. Here, too, ! am convinced that a good deal of fruitful work can still be done. I have also learned a great deal from books on the practicalities of writing and staging Elizabethan drama by such scholars as (G. E. Bentley, Andrew Gun', and Alan C. Dessen. I remember once being stimulated by Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952), although like many people I now find it too schematic in its contrast between the private and the public theatres. However, it does contain much illuminating criticism. Another scholar whom I greatly admire is G. K. Hunter, whose book John Lyly, The Humanist as Courtier (1962) showed an admirable grasp of the actual literary situation confronting writers trying to start a career in London, and which includes a brilliant account of what Shakespeare learned from the plot-structures of Lyly's plays. Hunter's recent volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, English Drama 1586-1642. The Age of Shakespeare (1997) is the distillation of a lifetime's involvement with this genre, and should be on everybody's shelf.
MPJ: Are there any books that you refer to frequently?
BV: I am a great admirer of properly prepared reference works. Among those I consult most frequently are W. Ebisch and L. L. Schucking, A Shakespeare Bibliography (1931), with a Supplement (1936; 1964); Gordon Ross Smith, A Classified Shakespeare Bibliography 1936-1958 (1963); John W. Velz, Shakespeare and the Classical Tradition. A Critical Guide to Commentary, 1660-1960 (1968)--an outstanding tool: would it were updated; Bruce T. Sajdak, Shakespeare Index. An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Articles on the Plays 1959-1983 (1992)--a Gargantuan task--would it were also updated; and the invaluable World Shakespeare Bibliography produced by Shakespeare Quarterly over the years, brought up to modem standards first by Harrison T. Meserole, ably continued by Jim Hamer, and now available online from Johns Hopkins. I also use that magnificent work compiled by Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Vol. 1 1450-1625, in two parts (1980), Vol. II, 1625-1700, in two parts (1987; 1993): I gather that an updated online version is being considered. I am also looking forward to Steven May's extension of William Ringler's Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed 1476-1558 (1988), which will cover the period up to 1603. Having been privileged to see draft excerpts, I can report that, among other things, it will provide for the first time an inventory of English verse forms, a little-studied but important topic.
MPJ: What needs are there crying out for a book that perhaps you don't want to write?
BV: I remember once reading a report in the Guardian newspaper about the international Shakespeare conference at Stratford-upon-Avon one year, where John Dover Wilson was interviewed, including his remark that "everything in Shakespeare studies is yet to be done!" I would like to draw attention to the paucity of studies on Shakespeare's language: on his grammar (although Jonathan Hope is now producing a sequel to Edwin Abbot's Shakespeare's Grammar, which dates back to the 1880s); on his metrics (the statistical analytical studies of Philip Timberlake, Ants Oras, and Marina Tarlinskaja are all outstanding in tracing the gradual development of Shakespeare's verse style in its use of feminine endings, internal pauses, and the distribution of strong and weak stresses within the line, but there are hardly any intelligent studies of the functions of verse in relation to character and situation as they metamorphosed during Shakespeare's career). There are, equally, no good studies of Shakespeare's use of alliteration (although with modem computer programs adequately modified to take account of similarities of pronunciation across differences in spelling this would seem to be a relatively straightforward matter). There are no detailed studies of Shakespeare's use of rhyme--even the fact that Helge Kokeritz, in his book Shakespeare's Pronunciation (1953), included an inventory of all of Shakespeare's rhymes (running to over 8000) seems to be an unknown fact to many scholars today, even those working in the field. The only usable book on Shakespeare's syntax is the all-too-brief study by John Porter Houston, Shakespearean Sentences: Study and Style in Syntax (1988), which has many intelligent comments on syntax in relation to speaker across the whole of Shakespeare's career. But a professional linguist today would find the methodology inadequate, although he or she would not have the interpretative skills that Houston had. This, to me, is the greatest problem, how we can educate future Shakespearians who know his plays inside out, know the work of at least 10 other Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline dramatists, and have the curiosity and self-discipline to do proper interdisciplinary study in some of the many areas on which his works touch. If anyone has ideas on how to solve this problem, I would be glad to hear from them.
MPJ: Maybe, ifI live forever, I'll work on it. Brian, I know how hectic your schedule has been, and how we even had to delay this interview. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk books with me.
Jensen, Michael P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jensen, Michael P. "Talking books with: Brian Vickers." Shakespeare Newsletter, Summer 2002, p. 35+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA94671515&it=r&asid=87ce4536d251780e1553a6aef414ee1d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A94671515
The Text Is Foolish: Brian Vickers’s “The One King Lear”
By Holger S. Syme
SEPTEMBER 6, 2016
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, a book comes along that fundamentally challenges the way we think. Brian Vickers’s The One King Lear is such a book. It constitutes a real challenge to the belief that our system of academic peer reviewing works as it should. Published by one of North America’s most august university presses, it is nonetheless a volume riddled with basic methodological errors, factual blunders, conceptual non-sequiturs, and vituperative ad hominem attacks. It is a book that should never have been printed in its present form. But one of its two prominent, if non-committal, blurbists is right: now that it exists, this is not a book one can ignore. Precisely because Harvard University Press seems to have set scholarly standards aside in putting Vickers’s tome into print, The One King Lear now requires the rigorous critique the press either did not solicit or, more likely, chose to ignore.
I. A Debate is Reignited
What is this book about? Vickers is out to settle a very old score. King Lear exists in two distinct texts: the 1608 Quarto contains about 290 lines not to be found in the 1623 (posthumous) Folio, but it also lacks around 100 lines that are only printed in the later text. Aside from those obvious differences, there are hundreds of variants between the two texts. Generations of Shakespeareans have puzzled over the relationship between the editions and their relative authority. For a long time, it was standard editorial practice to conflate the two versions and preserve as many lines from both as possible, while negotiating the textual variants either on aesthetic grounds or on the basis of a general judgment as to which of the two texts was more reliable. In the mid-1980s, however, under the influence of a landmark collection of essays edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (The Division of the Kingdoms [Oxford, 1983]), that practice changed profoundly. From then on, the two texts were increasingly regarded as conceptually separate: closely related but appreciably distinct treatments of the same material. Although it remained unclear how the 1623 text came into being — whether as a result of the play’s evolution in the theater or as the author’s (or another playwright’s) deliberate revision of the Quarto version — the two Lears were now considered worthy of separate discussion and interpretations. A corollary theory saw the Folio as the product of authorial revision, and both texts as equally authoritative: as a consequence, conflation could now be pitched as running counter to Shakespeare’s own changing ideas about the play. The Quarto became Shakespeare’s first Lear play, with preoccupations and thematic foci of its own; the Folio his second tragedy of Lear, with subtly distinct perspectives and angles. In its most extreme form, this revisionist position remains contentious. Claims for Shakespeare’s complete control over the Folio revision have proven difficult to sustain. The view that the two texts can be read as two different plays, however, has found more favor, reflecting, in part, a growing interest in theatrical practices and the diminished status of the author as the singular focus of interpretation. The Folio Lear may not be all Shakespeare’s, but it is interestingly and coherently different from the earlier text nonetheless, and may be read as a company’s or a revising collaborator’s take on the play.
Vickers isn’t having any of this. He rejects the idea that the two printed texts constitute two separate versions of the play at all, and he reserves particular scorn for the theory that Shakespeare could have had anything to do with the later text: “it is impossible to believe,” he writes, that he would “make such crude cuts to a play on which he had expended so much care and imaginative energy.” Later: “At no point can Shakespeare be considered as the agent who destroyed his own design.” And: “He had no reason to go back to his greatest play. Nothing needed to be changed.”
Vickers’s anger at the success of the revision theorists and their “disturbingly vacuous” ideas is palpable. In two extraordinarily scathing chapters, he repeatedly suggests his intellectual opponents find some other employment, and casts aspersions not only on their own scholarly standards but also on those of the journals and presses that published their work. He paints the revision theorists as a small, incestuous cabal of scholarly snake-oil salesmen whose ideas were never accepted by the Shakespearean community at large despite the invidious influence they’ve exerted over some academic publishers.
The authorial revision hypothesis has always had its critics, and rightly so. But to claim that only the “members of [the] group” of scholars represented in the 1983 collection of essays have “accepted the Two Versions theory,” and that this “group” has been holding the debate hostage for decades now, is nothing more than a conspiracy fantasy. As even a casual glance at the scholarship published about King Lear in the last few decades shows, the idea that there are two authoritative versions of the play has been adopted by many Shakespeare scholars who had nothing to do with Taylor and Warren’s “group.” The revisionist camp includes such eminently sober-minded scholars as the editor of the most recent Arden text, the late R. A. Foakes — who (in an essay Vickers ignores, though he must know it, since it appears in a collection he cites frequently) reaffirmed a few years before his death his view that “the most plausible explanation for [the differences] is that someone (probably Shakespeare) skillfully reshaped the play by cuts, additions and numerous small changes accordant with a detailed overall view.”
To some, this may seem like a storm in a rather tiny teacup. Yet Vickers writes with a broad, non-academic audience in mind: his first chapter offers a basic introduction to the “terms and technical processes that feature in subsequent discussions” precisely because he does not want to limit his reach to “those familiar with bibliography and textual criticism.” Despite their highly technical nature, his arguments, no less than those made by Taylor et al. in the 1980s, could potentially have a profound effect on Shakespeare studies at large, on all levels of erudition. What is true of most bibliographical discussions is true of Vickers’s book as well: the debates are arcane, but their impact is fundamental. They are designed to redefine what the very text of King Lear is.
If the hypotheses of The One King Lear were accepted, we would return to editions of King Lear that dismiss the differences between the Quarto and the Folio as interpretatively irrelevant. We would accept that the Folio lines absent from the Quarto were part of the text Shakespeare wrote before 1608, rather than later additions; and we would reject all the cuts made to the Folio text as non-authorial theatrical omissions. In other words, in the post-Vickers textual universe, neither the Quarto nor the Folio would have real independent authority, and editors would reconstitute the ideal text Shakespeare actually wrote from both imperfect printings. That is why Vickers not only rejects the authorial revision hypothesis but the very idea that the Folio text is anything more than a cut-down version of Shakespeare’s lost original. In his eyes, nothing can have been added to the later text; all the seemingly new lines are merely restored from Shakespeare’s pre-1608 vision of the play.
This is a truly radical position. It diverges from practically all recent scholarship on King Lear, which holds that the 1623 text includes additions by Shakespeare or someone else as well as alterations and cuts that are either authorial or not. Even the most strident critics of the authorial revision theory concede that the Folio is a different version of the play. And Vickers knows this, since he quotes one of those critics: “the question is not whether there was revision — of course there was — but who did it, and when, and why.” That’s Richard Knowles, in a passage Vickers reproduces without comment despite the fact that he relies on Knowles more than on any other critic for support.
Ironically, by rejecting all notions of revision so totally, Vickers ends up reiterating his revisionist foes’ conviction that both the Quarto and the Folio are equally Shakespearean. In other words, he rejects the two-version theory that almost no one has questioned in decades, but accepts the argument about authorship that has been rather more difficult to sustain: that most of what can be found in the two texts is by Shakespeare — but not because he rewrote his own play. Both printed versions instead preserve different selections from the one authorial Ur-text.
Precisely because he stakes out such an idiosyncratic claim, Vickers works extraordinarily hard, on the one hand, to distance himself from the Taylor and Warren “group,” despite some of the common ground he and they actually occupy; and, on the other, to claim alliance with “independent scholars” (his phrase) who sometimes do not in fact share his position. In the process, he misquotes and misrepresents not just those with whom he disagrees, but also authors whose support he attempts to claim. A case in point is the late Ernst Honigmann, one of the most distinguished modern Shakespeare editors. Vickers presents Honigmann as an ally, a former believer in the revision theory who supposedly recanted in The Texts of “Othello” and Shakespearean Revision (1996). Vickers quotes a long passage as if Honigmann were writing about King Lear and even claims that he “recognized [the Folio-only passages] as having been cut from the Quarto,” but Honigmann does nothing of the sort. In fact, although he notes his change of mind about revisions in Othello, Honigmann explicitly sets aside the question of whether Shakespeare revised Lear: “whether or not this affects the case for the revision of King Lear I leave to others to determine.” About cuts to the Quarto, Honigmann says nothing at all. Similarly, Vickers cites Knowles — his favorite witness for the prosecution — to dismiss the revisionists’ claim that the typesetters of the 1623 Folio made reference to the 1619 Second Quarto; he asserts that Knowles “disproved” any such notion. Odd, then, to find Knowles, in the very article Vickers references, say this: “Compositor E [of the Folio] […] continually consulted printed copy, the Second Quarto (Q2) edition of Lear […] Compositor B also consulted Q2 frequently.”
Vickers’s enemies fare no better than his friends. Again, a single spotlight will have to do. No one comes in for more of a drubbing in this book than Gary Taylor, a critic who “has lost contact with the play and should seek some other occupation.” But when he tries to summarize Taylor’s influential hypotheses, Vickers’s own critical reading skills fail to impress. First, he quotes a long passage in which Taylor starts off with the express assertion that “we have no need to postulate the loss of the original promptbook” (the theatrical manuscript used during performance), then comments that “Taylor had to hypothesize first that the King’s Men had (conveniently for the revisionist thesis) lost their 1606 Booke” (“booke” is Vickers’s idiosyncratically faux-early-modern term for promptbook). This might feel like mendacious misrepresentation, had Vickers not graciously given us Taylor’s own words, displaying openly just how severely he distorts the argument. It seems, then, that the egregious misreading is genuine — though no less baffling for that.
Most bizarrely, Vickers consistently writes as if his opponents actually agreed with him that nothing was added to the Folio: “it is hardly conceivable,” he notes, that Shakespeare would have revised the play “merely by making cuts.” Indeed. Which is why quite literally no one makes such a claim. All the revision theorists argue that Shakespeare (or someone else) wrote additions, changed the wording of lines in dozens of instances, and made cuts; no one argues that he “revised by cutting” alone. It is simply false to claim that the “whole theory [is] based on passages omitted from the Folio.”
II. A Textual History Reimagined
Vickers’s case clearly does not rest on an especially nuanced reading of previous scholarship, or on a particularly thorough review of that scholarship. (He tends to rely on works published before World War II rather than in the last few decades.) So how does he try to make the case that there only ever was one authorial manuscript of King Lear? Essentially, by devising two interlinked narratives of textual corruption at the hands of two separate sets of agents. That all-inclusive text, he posits, was first mutilated by the printer Nicholas Okes, who cut over 100 lines and did violence to Shakespeare’s verse by altering its lineation or setting it as prose when producing the 1608 Quarto. The same text was then subjected to a separate indignity when it was cut again (but in different places than the Quarto) by someone working with Shakespeare’s company of actors, the King’s Men, and subsequently edited for publication in the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Vickers’s story thus imagines one originary act of authorial creation, yielding a masterpiece unrivalled in its perfection, and three subsequent acts of non-authorial vandalism.
It is worth unpacking these hypothetical scenarios a little, to separate out evidence-based argument from speculation. There is broad (if not unanimous) scholarly consensus these days that the Quarto was printed from a fairly rough manuscript in Shakespeare’s own hand. Vickers spends a long section summarizing and slightly extending the case Madeleine Doran made for this position in 1931, but he is pushing at open doors. Although Doran’s book was savaged and dismissed upon publication by W. W. Greg, the most influential bibliographer of the time, in the last 30 years or so her ideas have found far more favor than Greg’s. Similarly, few scholars would dispute the assertion that Okes, in printing the Quarto, made some efforts to economize his use of paper (though not consistently). And there is little question that the later version of the text printed in 1623 was shaped by various “editorial” hands, including those of the compositors that typeset the Folio. That the Folio text displays the efforts of someone intermittently keen on regularizing Shakespeare’s meter is widely accepted. There is also general consensus that the 1623 version reflects a version of the play edited (and perhaps revised) for performance.
Beyond those areas of agreement, Vickers is largely on his own. The strategies he adopts to come to terms with the challenges of the two texts are strikingly distinctive: in his discussion of the Quarto, he relies heavily on the history of the early book trade and of early modern printing practices; in his treatment of the Folio, he largely abandons bibliographical arguments and adopts the mantle of the literary critic (and, occasionally, the theater scholar). The former strategy runs into far more severe problems, on which I will spend much of the rest of this review. The account of the Folio text does not merit this kind of in-depth engagement simply because its arguments do not rely on factual assertions of the same kind. I may find it strange that Vickers can spend 93 pages confidently identifying specific changes as either a playhouse scribe’s or a stationer’s agent’s edits while also postulating “the impossibility of knowing who was responsible for the Folio omissions,” but this is the kind of conceptual stretch some critics can sustain or ignore. I may find it odd that Vickers’s reading of King Lear frequently seeks guidance in an 1875 essay by Nikolaus Delius and never tries to enter into any kind of dialogue with more current interpretations of the play, but critical nostalgia is any reader’s prerogative. I may find his account of the ethics of the play simplistic and uninspiring, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong and I am right. I will therefore make just two general points about what I find troubling in Vickers’s discussion of the Folio text, and then move on to his quite different approach to the Quarto.
In dismissing revision theories, Vickers castigates his opponents for using “aesthetic rather than textual criteria” to support their case. But his entire analysis of the Folio relies exclusively on aesthetic criteria. He moves from example to example, assessing their merits with a connoisseurial eye: “I feel that the Quarto abridger made the better choice,” and so on. (He even subjects typographical marks to this treatment: ampersands, for instance, are judged “ugly.”) His criticism may not rise to an especially sophisticated level — representative “arguments” include the claim that feminine endings are “often more expressive” or that “thou wilt” is more “colloquial” than “thou’lt” — but it is nevertheless entirely grounded in questions of aesthetic merit, not textual or bibliographical analysis.
Vickers’s central point is that King Lear is Shakespeare’s “most complex, most carefully designed play,” and that the 1623 text does terrible damage to that design. He never argues this claim, nor does he address the paradox that this supposedly perfectly designed play does not in fact exist, but needs to be brought into being through editorial intervention (since neither printed text fully represents Shakespeare’s vision). Having settled on a reading that emphasizes a balanced moral structure to the play, though, Vickers has to characterize any aspect of either text that deviates from that interpretation as destructive of the playwright’s artistic intention. In that sense, his interpretation of King Lear is not a reading of either of the surviving versions, but imagines the existence of a text that can support such an interpretation, which then becomes the basis of an editorial approach. A newly edited, ideally realized King Lear will be one that lives up to the play as Vickers understands it, and leaves out all the lines and textual differences that complicate the picture. As literary critical methods go, this is an unusually creative approach.
Such a text will be based more on the Quarto than the Folio, since the later text distorts Shakespeare’s “moral design” more profoundly; again and again, Vickers identifies moments of “goodness” that are cut in the 1623 text. But as he lists these changes, it seems that a pattern emerges — not a pattern of “thoughtlessness” and ignorant destruction of the play’s purpose, as Vickers thinks, but of subtle changes that amount to a different (not a “distorted”) “moral design.” It would be easy to mount a narrative of revision on the very evidence Vickers provides, of a reconceived King Lear depicting a much darker moral universe than the Quarto. I am not at all convinced that this would be a good reading of the Folio, but as Vickers presents his evidence, it seems to support the case for purposive reshaping more than his own case for pointless textual vandalism. He does not dismiss such a reading: he does not even consider it. Since he rejects the very possibility of real revision a priori, all change has to be destructive.
In effect, though, Vickers ends up replicating the very critical maneuver for which he mocks the revision theorists. He ridicules them for “canonizing” the Folio text as Shakespeare’s “final conception” and for disregarding the Quarto: “in upgrading the Folio, revisionists are patronizing toward the fundamental text.” But Vickers does the exact same thing: declaring one of the two texts “fundamental” is no different than regarding the other as “final.” Except he takes the game one step further. Where (some) revisionists consider the Folio closer to Shakespeare’s ultimate intentions for the play, Vickers sees those intentions ideally realized not in any actual text, but only in the editorial reconstruction he proposes — a reconstruction grounded in his own aesthetic preferences and choices. The one King Lear is neither the Quarto nor the Folio, but the play Brian Vickers wants King Lear to be.
One major difference between Vickers and the revisionists is how they feel about something they both regard as established fact: that the Folio text derives from a promptbook and therefore reflects the theatrical life of the play. For Taylor et al., Shakespeare’s willingness to alter his text in response to the demands of the stage marks him as the consummate playwright. For Vickers, the changes may have been made “for theatrical reasons,” but they destroy “carefully worked out elements of plot and motivation” and cannot be ascribed to the author. The early modern theater, in his account, emerges as a place where dramatic works of art are treated with disrespect and a deep lack of understanding.
Vickers believes the cuts as a whole make the play more difficult if not impossible to understand, and that many of those cuts are “in fact theatrically impractical.” Among other things, the Folio omits some of Edgar’s asides and soliloquies while he is in disguise as Poor Tom: Vickers thinks this would have caused a “problem” in the theater because “there is a danger that the audience may forget that ‘Poor Tom’ is still Edgar.” He never hesitates to assume that Shakespeare was surrounded mainly by dullards: audiences slow to pick up on things unless they were clearly explained, actors who neither understood how the play worked nor what would fly over their spectators’ heads. The necessary correlative of that attitude is that the modern critic has to suppose that he knows better than Shakespeare’s company what an early modern audience needed from a playtext.
That would seem like an arrogant attitude if Vickers did not clarify that his understanding of how King Lear worked on the Jacobean stage relies not simply on his intuition, but also on modern performers and their statements about the play. Thus, having learned that some audience members at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1990 production found some of the Folio cuts confusing, Vickers concludes that those omissions would not have been practicable in the 1610s either. But while his respect for contemporary theater makers is laudable, it does not solve his historiographical dilemma.
That modern actors or audiences find particular textual moments difficult has no evidentiary weight in a consideration of what a Jacobean actor or playing company may have considered theatrically effective. Vickers, however, not only considers his own (and the 1990s RSC’s) judgment superior to that of Shakespeare’s colleagues, he thinks little of actors’ power to shape a play or its performance at all. At one point, he notes that the Folio cuts cannot have amounted to a deliberate shift in interpretative perspective, because they were made by “the company” — and therefore, their effect would have been “coincidental.” When Shakespeare’s actors cut, in other words, they only cut to save time; their interventions could not have been motivated by a desire to reshape the meaning or effect of the play. Instead, companies were driven by “contingencies of cost, practicality, and the availability of specific performers.” With those considerations in mind, they often blundered into cuts, with unforeseen consequences, because, as Vickers reminds us, “a work of art is an ecosystem: damage it at one point, and it will suffer unforeseen consequences somewhere else.” Small wonder he thinks theater and opera can be discussed as equivalent enterprises, and that he is unwilling to grant the outcome of such an exercise in cost- and time-reduction the status of a “revision.” But it needs to be said that this extreme belief in the inviolability of an organically coherent text, and the extremely limited role Vickers grants theater professionals in the transformation of a play into a performance, have much more to do with the 20th century than with anything we know of Shakespeare’s time.
III. A Printer Abridges
If Vickers’s discussion of the Folio is designed to reveal the un-Shakespearean weaknesses of an ostensibly authoritative text, the Quarto requires him to do the opposite. Since he wants to tether it closely to Shakespeare’s original (“fundamental”) and ideal manuscript, Vickers works hard to maintain the authority of the 1608 text despite its manifest bibliographical problems, and to explain how so good a manuscript yielded such a poorly printed book.
Decades ago, when the Quarto was believed to have been printed from a “reported” text, either memorially reconstructed or taken down by shorthand during a performance, differences between that version and the Folio could be explained as errors of transmission. However, now that the consensus has shifted to regarding the Quarto as based on an authorial manuscript, that explanation has evaporated: under the more recent explanatory regimen, scholars broadly agree that the passages missing from the 1608 version simply did not exist yet in Shakespeare’s manuscript, and were added to the play sometime between the composition of the first draft and the printing of the Folio. Vickers wants to revive the conclusions of previous generations of scholars while rejecting the “memorial reconstruction” hypothesis: the passages found only in the Folio were present in Shakespeare’s manuscript all along, he argues, they just didn’t find their way into the printed Quarto text. The corruption of transmission did not occur in the written document from which the book was set, but in the printed book itself.
The One King Lear offers an inventive scenario in place of the old narrative of corrupt transmission. That narrative featured a motley cast of characters (note-taking audience members or bit-part players), a clear motive (money from selling the text of a successful play), and a coherent theory of how lines might go missing (a slow pen, an errant memory, an actor off-stage in a particular scene). Vickers’s new story likewise encompasses a colorful cast of characters (the commissioning stationer, Nathaniel Butter; the incompetent printer, Nicholas Okes), a clear motive (money, from saving on the amount of paper used), and a coherent-sounding theory (lines were cut to make the text fit the amount of paper available). But despite these apparent differences, his approach and that of the memorial reconstructionists share a central assumption: that the Folio-only passages are not additions to the later text, but omissions from the earlier one. Vickers never attempts to ground this assumption in textual evidence: that the two versions spring from an “original unity” is simply the fundamental conviction with which he begins his narrative of what must have happened in Okes’s printing house. It is, and remains throughout, a credo, not an argument.
The old “memorial reconstruction” hypothesis relied on a powerful, if now discredited, account of book trade practices that went well beyond the single example of King Lear’s first Quarto. By the late 1930s, nine of Shakespeare’s quartos had been identified as “bad” and possibly pirated: King Lear was far from unusual, but rather part of an industry-wide trend. The resurgence of the view that the 1608 Quarto was printed from authorial manuscript copy went hand in hand with the general collapse of the “memorial reconstruction” thesis. As scholars lost faith in that hypothetical context, what kind of text the Lear Quarto was thought to be had to change as well. And the new range of perspectives on that 1608 volume left little room for agents that might have cut over 100 lines from Shakespeare’s manuscript. If the book no longer represented an instance of corrupted transmission, the text it contained had to be substantively what was in the document from which it was set. The question therefore became why the two versions differed as much as they did, and when the passages only found in the Folio were added. Vickers’s challenge in persuading scholars to change how they think about Lear consequently is twofold: in the absence of textual evidence to support his theory that those passages were omitted rather than added, he needs to establish that it is reasonable to believe that Nicholas Okes would have cut over 100 lines in this particular instance; and, as with the memorial reconstruction hypothesis, he needs to show that it is reasonable to believe that any printer would have done such a thing.
Without accomplishing these objectives, the entire anti-revisionist thesis of The One King Lear collapses. Vickers never attempts to make a textual or critical argument for the presence of the Folio-only lines in the manuscript from which the 1608 book was set. Although it would be difficult to imagine what such a case might look like, he certainly acts as if he, unlike his opponents, had in fact made it. The revisionists, he keeps writing, marshal no “material evidence”; their theory relies exclusively on aesthetic judgments, not on “marks left by print on paper.” That may or may not be a fair criticism, but it fully applies to Vickers’s own case: there is no bibliographical evidence for cuts in the Quarto (what kind of “mark” would the non-printing of an absence leave “on paper” anyway?), nor is there such evidence that Shakespeare did or did not revise the Folio text. Print is not the work of authors, nor is it, typically, a type-facsimile of a manuscript source. The kinds of arguments Vickers (and his foes) want to make cannot be made on purely bibliographical grounds.
Moreover, Vickers makes no argument of any kind for the belief that the Folio-only lines always were in Shakespeare’s original draft. His entire case rests on his ability to show that it is more plausible, as a matter of print history, to posit that Okes cut those lines than to believe that they were added to the play in a revision. Never mind that this is a comparison between two categorically different kinds of arguments (one based on the history of a craft, the other on aesthetic judgment): the plausibility of Vickers’s bibliographical and book-historical claims bears a very heavy burden. It alone can provide a basis for giving any credence to the notion that the Folio-only lines even existed prior to 1608.
Does Vickers make his case? With regard to the wider context, not at all. He offers no systematic analysis of how other printers (or even Okes himself, elsewhere in his output) compressed and abridged copy to fit a specific page-count. A scattered selection of other printed plays provides some anecdotal evidence. For the most part, they are by Shakespeare; four pages are devoted to Ben Jonson’s plays in an account indebted to the textual essays in the recent Cambridge Jonson. Vickers’s most sustained effort to “test” his arguments comparatively amounts to 12 pages of commentary on three other Jacobean quartos of Shakespeare plays — one of which is the second Quarto of King Lear, a reprint from printed copy. As sample sizes go, this is what one might expect from an unambitious seminar paper. In a scholarly age that offers immediate access to a vast electronic corpus of texts, Vickers draws on a startlingly inadequate archive, though that does not stop him from concluding that he has “shown” what “printers in the period” “commonly” did. Even if he had managed to gather relevant evidence in the handful of other plays he has looked at, the sample size is so small that it cannot bear probative weight.
But that’s not even the key problem. It also turns out that virtually none of the examples Vickers offers for comparison match Okes’s situation. To detail why that is, a brief technical detour is necessary. In producing a printed book, early modern stationers had two distinct choices of approach: in simplified terms, they could either set the pages seriatim, proceeding through their copy line by line, typesetting page after page until they had enough to assemble them into a “forme” — the frame holding, in the case of a quarto, four pages worth of type.[1] When setting seriatim, a compositor (the person responsible for turning copy into type) would have to set a total of seven pages before anything could be printed: at that point, the “inner” forme was complete and could be made ready for the press (or “imposed”). Alternatively, a stationer could set by formes. In that approach, the copy first needed to be analyzed (“cast off”) to determine where the page breaks would fall; that done, each page could be set individually and out of order. As a consequence, a compositor only needed to complete the four pages of either the inner or the outer forme before printing could commence. Setting by formes allowed for a more efficient work-flow between typesetting and printing, maintaining a steadier supply of new formes to the pressmen. It also required less type: the seriatim method made it necessary for the printer to have 11 pages of type available at all times, whereas setting by formes theoretically only required eight, because the type could be reused more quickly.
However, that efficiency came at a price. Casting off was an imprecise art, and potentially time-consuming. Worse, if the compositor miscalculated (easy to do especially in prose, with its unpredictable space requirements) he might find himself with too much or too little text for the pages he still had to fill. If this occurred once one of the formes (usually the “outer”) was in press, there was nothing to be done: where the four mostly non-consecutive pages on that side of the sheet began and ended could no longer be changed. A compositor in such a situation might stretch his copy by breaking verse lines more frequently than required by the meter, say, or inserting extra line breaks or ornaments; or he might have to compress the text to make it fit. When setting seriatim, these problems would not normally arise: a compositor would simply set line by line, until he had reached the number of lines he was planning to include on each page. There would still have been specific spatial pressure points even in this method, in particular the end of a book’s last sheet. But in general, the specific need to begin and end each page at a certain point that was the major disadvantage of setting by formes did not arise when using the seriatim method.
Nicholas Okes, as Peter Blayney established over 30 years ago, set King Lear seriatim — an understandable decision given the play’s frequent switches between prose and verse, which might have made casting off a daunting prospect. Early modern stationers used both techniques, sometimes even within the same book. Okes himself set other play quartos by formes, including The Two Maids of Mortlake the year after Lear. Vickers labors under the misapprehension that setting the text of Lear seriatim was a strange choice. He is largely alone in this belief, even if he occasionally ascribes his own surprise to scholars who are in fact not at all puzzled when encountering plays not set by formes.[2]
This is where our detour rejoins the main road: why does the distinction between two methods of setting type matter? As we saw, setting by formes could frequently create spatial complications unlikely to arise in seriatim work. It so happens that all the relevant examples Vickers draws on to establish a context for Okes’s work on the 1608 Quarto are drawn from books set by formes; they exhibit problems common in such books, but normally absent from books set seriatim. In fact, a number of the scholars Vickers cites, including John Creaser, make this very point: a book that shows few signs of a fluctuating treatment of space, such as having some pages crowded and others with excessive spaces between lines, is likely to have been set seriatim. In other words, the context Vickers establishes is not only extremely thin, it is also a completely inappropriate context for Okes’s 1608 volume (although it may be appropriate for some other book set by formes). Even in books set by formes, though, Vickers can find almost no unequivocal examples of stationers cutting lines from their copy to solve a space problem; in the few arguable instances he can offer, the problem invariably arises from the hard boundaries created when setting by formes, and would not at all have arisen in a text set seriatim, such as King Lear. Without such examples, there is no evidence against which to test Vickers’s theory that Okes sliced over 100 lines from Shakespeare’s manuscript. It is a story without context or historical precedent.
Even so: What about the narrative’s inherent plausibility? Okes may, after all, have been a spectacular outlier. Here is what Vickers imagines must have happened: Okes provided the stationer Nathaniel Butter with a binding estimate for the cost of printing the book, based on the assumption that he could fit the text onto 10.5 sheets of paper. When he discovered, after the job started, that his original estimate was too optimistic, he did not tell Butter, who would have supplied the paper, that he needed more stock, but instead instructed his compositors to compress the type as much as possible and cut a substantial number of lines from Shakespeare’s manuscript to make sure he would not exceed the 10.5 sheet allotment.
Some aspects of Vickers’s story find a degree of support in the text. It is certainly true that Okes employed a number of space-saving techniques: his compositors sometimes set verse as prose, they often eliminated blank lines before and after stage directions, they sometimes placed directions in the margin, and they sometimes set two short lines of dialogue on the same line. There is no question that the 1608 Quarto is not a generously printed volume. But neither are many other early modern printed plays. In the absence of a real corpus of books by which to assess Okes’s attempts at spatial economy, it is quite impossible to know if he appears to have been under unusual pressure or if he simply applied common means of economizing on the use of paper. (Vickers asserts that Okes “differs from his peers” in these practices, but he has no significant evidence to back up this claim. Three other books do not a corpus make.)
However, one feature of the 1608 Lear sits strangely with Vickers’s narrative: Okes repeatedly neglected to use all the space available to him. On the first page of the text, he chose to reuse the large type from the title page to begin the play: “M. William Shak-speare / HIS / Historie, of King Lear” and an ornament take up a good third of a page that shows little to no evidence of its printer’s sense that space was at a premium. Similarly, Okes followed his usual preference of leaving the last page of the book as well as the entire leaf preceding the title page blank to protect the text from stains before the book was bound — a thoughtful practice, but by no means an industry standard and certainly not a requirement in Okes’s printing house or elsewhere. And, on the last page of the text, instead of using all available space, his compositors left a generous four lines for a large “FINIS” (Vickers, bizarrely, counts six lines). None of these decisions were dictated by rules or even conventions. There certainly was no need to repeat the title of the play on the first page, let alone in such large type. There was no need to insist on a final large “finis.” And there was no need at all to leave three pages entirely blank (although Okes certainly followed a well-established convention in leaving a fourth page, the verso of the title page, blank).
If these readily apparent instances of unused available space challenge Vickers’s thesis, the same is true of less immediately visible but no less significant unexploited opportunities. For instance, Okes’s compositors set most of the 1608 Quarto with 38 lines of text to the page. In two cases, however, they added an extra line — demonstrating that his press could easily print pages with 39 lines of text. It would therefore have been easy, simply by adding an extra line per page, to accommodate an additional 77 lines of text. When one adds up all the additional space readily available to Okes in the 10.5 sheets of the Quarto, it becomes clear that the urgent need to cut lines simply did not exist. Without interfering in the text at all, he could have found room for well over 200 additional lines — far in excess of the 102 Vickers says he was forced to cut.
Finally, as Vickers describes at length, Okes set verse as prose with some frequency; extending this practice would have been a far easier and far less invasive means of saving space than cutting lines. If Vickers’s story is right, the stationers learned and then forgot this lesson during the printing of King Lear. Okes is said to have cut 13 lines from the first sheet, and a further 12 from the second. He didn’t have his compositors set any verse as prose on the first sheet, although he seems to have grasped the potential use of this method by the time the second sheet was being printed, possibly saving up to 17 lines this way. It thus took Okes nine pages to think of the additional and far less invasive expedient of relining verse as prose. Having implemented this highly effective method with great success on the third sheet (where, according to Vickers’s tabulation, it saved 61 lines), Okes then more or less abandoned it; for the next three sheets, he cut 39 lines of text while saving only 21 by printing verse as prose. Vickers’s story therefore requires us to believe that Okes preferred to cut text wholesale to altering line breaks — that he saw significant cuts not as the last resort, but as his best opportunity for reducing demand on paper. This review is not the place to mount an alternative reading of Okes’s practices, but, as I have argued elsewhere, the confusion between verse and prose in the 1608 volume can actually be interpreted as evidence that the printer was actively trying to avoid altering the text, and was doing his best to reproduce faithfully what he thought he saw in his manuscript copy.
The problems do not end there. One might reasonably ask when Vickers imagines Okes realized that his original estimate was wide of the mark. Blayney has established that the title page was printed before the rest of the book. Accordingly, we might think that Okes’s decision to leave three pages of that sheet blank (the leaf preceding the title and the back of the title page itself) expressed an initial misplaced confidence that evaporated later in the process. But as Vickers’s own tabulation of the printer’s purported abridgments shows, the “cuts” begin almost immediately: on the second page of the text, eight lines that can be found in the Folio are absent. How could Okes possibly have known this early in the printing process that he had made a catastrophic mistake? Did he suddenly realize that the majority of King Lear was in verse, and would therefore take up more space than anticipated? Perhaps — but if so, why would he come to that realization during the setting of the first page, which is in prose? The supposed “cut” occurs almost as soon as the play switches into verse, after five lines. Okes would have to be a remarkably quick study, and a shockingly overzealous editor, to surmise the consequences of his mistake in that instant and jump to as drastic a measure as simply dropping eight full lines of verse.
As it turns out, the explanation Vickers offers is more surprising still. He first establishes his fundamental thesis that an adequately printed text of Shakespeare’s full manuscript would have taken an additional 11 pages (or just under 1.5 sheets, for the total of 12 sheets Vickers erroneously counts in the 1619 Second Quarto). In providing his apparently binding estimate to Nathaniel Butter, the printer therefore misjudged the actual length of the text by 14 percent. The Okes that initially looked at the manuscript and calculated the amount of paper required is, in Vickers’s story, a seriously incompetent craftsman. But as soon as the narrative shifts to an account of the supposed cuts to the text, we encounter a very different Okes: this one sat down, “reading through the text in advance and making whatever cuts he could.” So astute was this Okes in judging the relationship between manuscript and print that he focused the majority of his cuts on sequences no longer than five words in length — apparently now able to tell, without printing a single line, where such abridgments in the manuscript would result in a likely reduction of lines in print. Perhaps needless to say, this kind of fine-tuned intervention would require a vastly more complete understanding of the relationship between copy and printed page than the relatively straightforward operation of calculating the rough estimate that Okes allegedly got so catastrophically wrong. Nevertheless, Vickers now supposes the printer to be so acute a reader of Shakespearean drama that he could cut with a great deal of sensitivity and responsibility, having “establish[ed] a ranking order of semantic importance and dramatic function.”
If all of these narrative inconsistencies and leaps of logic were not enough to discredit Vickers’s theory, the very evidence he tries to marshal in its support only serves to undermine it further. For one thing, many of the “omissions” in the Quarto do not actually reduce the number of lines at all. Vickers admits this in a section titled, with spectacular sang-froid, “Unnecessary Cuts.” In many cases, if the Quarto text in fact represents alterations made with a view to saving space (rather than simply an earlier state of the play than the Folio), those changes bespeak yet another level of printerly ineptitude: not only could Okes not estimate properly, his compositors also could not tell if their rearranging of words in fact used up fewer lines or not. That they ever managed to produce a book at all must appear a small miracle in Vickers’s mind.
And there are still more problems. If Vickers is right and the Quarto really is an edited version of the same text that also underlies the Folio, then Okes did not just cut: he actively rewrote the text. Vickers’s story of space shortage has no way of accounting for this, so he simply leaves the issue unaddressed. Here is what might be the most glaring example: in the Quarto, Lear laments (sig. D2v):
symes1
In the Folio, that passage reads thus (sig. Qq5r):
Symes2
Vickers describes Okes’s imagined intervention here as the deleting of a phrase “thought to be redundant”: “Ha? Let it be so.” But even a casual glance makes it obvious that such a characterization fails to account for the complex difference between the two texts. It is simply not true to say that Okes “cut” the Folio’s “Ha? Let it be so” — at most, Vickers could claim that he replaced it with a similar but slightly longer phrase, “yea, i’st come to this?” But why would a printer trying to reduce the text make such a change? Furthermore, why would he then also rewrite the next phrase, “I have another daughter,” as “yet have I left a daughter”? It seems obvious that this is an instance of revision of some kind — that the manuscripts underlying the two printed versions simply differed in this passage. Only if one is determined to rule out the very idea of revision as zealously as Vickers does it make sense to settle for the wholly inadequate description of the Quarto text as an “abridgement.” This is the opposite of following one’s evidence: Vickers ignores the evidence in order to pursue the tale he has already decided to tell.
Vickers’s story of the stationer who ran out of paper is a fantasy. It has no historical or bibliographical context or precedent and it lacks all internal narrative logic. It cannot explain many of the textual phenomena Vickers himself identifies in the Quarto. And it casts Okes as an extraordinarily strange figure: a printer who valued blank space more highly than his copy, and thought the publisher for whom he was producing the Quarto would find less fault with a book lacking over 100 lines than with a printer asking for an extra half-sheet of paper per volume.
In one corner, then: A total absence of textual evidence in the Quarto that there are lines missing, and a narrative rich in inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical gaps. In the other: An explanation of the differences between the Quarto and the Folio as the outcome of one or more revisions over many years. It is difficult to see how Brian Vickers’s account could come out on top in this contest.
IV. A Scholar Stumbles
Vickers’s hypothesis is not simply poorly supported and logically incoherent, though. Its presentation is also marred by a string of serious technical errors that cast doubt on the author’s basic bibliographical competence. It might appear unkind to dwell on these, but since large parts of the book are taken up by strongly worded attacks on scholars whom Vickers accuses of relying on fanciful “literary-critical arguments” rather than sound “textual evidence,” a thorough critique of his own ability to discuss such evidence would seem to be in order.
Late in The One King Lear, Vickers sagely notes that “genuine textual criticism” is “a sober scholarly discipline concerned with establishing the process and results of textual transmission on the basis of material evidence.” It is certainly true that many textual scholars would aspire to that ideal, though few embody it as faithfully as three of the authors Vickers relies on most frequently: Peter Blayney, Adrian Weiss, and the late D. F. McKenzie. Vickers ignores most of what Weiss writes about seriatim setting (in an essay he nevertheless cites frequently), declares Blayney’s epochal 740-page work on the Lear Quarto “not entirely satisfactory,” and finds McKenzie disappointingly unaware of “the dynamics of typesetting.” Fighting words — and one might consequently expect an extraordinarily high level of bibliographical expertise from their author. It is therefore disappointing to discover that Vickers does not actually understand a good part of Blayney’s bibliographical argument: he puzzles why Blayney “should single out page C3v as the point at which seriatim setting certainly began,” when Blayney in fact shows that, after page C3v, there is unequivocal evidence that the Quarto was set seriatim (before that, no one can know, since the only reliable way to spot the difference is to trace recurring pieces of type; before they recur, the setting method is impossible to determine). Later in the book, Vickers’s misunderstanding has morphed into a complete misrepresentation of Blayney’s argument, and now allows Vickers to state that “the casting off was terminated” on the “final page of sheet C” — a claim for which there is absolutely no bibliographical evidence whatsoever.
Other similarly basic failures of comprehension abound. Just a few more examples: Vickers offers a stemma — a diagram that charts the textual genealogy of the Folio; but his stemma does not correspond to the argument about textual genealogy he makes in the accompanying text. He thinks that Andrew Wise printed the First Quarto of 1 Henry IV (1598) and “encountered the same overall length problem that Okes faced with King Lear” — but Wise, the publisher, did not own a printing press (the printer was Peter Short) and the 1598 Quarto is highly regarded for its quality; it shows very few of the kinds of issues evident in Okes’s volume. He calls setting seriatim a “casting-off method” — when “casting off” is neither a typesetting method nor something a compositor has to do when setting seriatim. He does not seem to know what a catchword is — he thinks it is the last word “in the last line of the page,” when in fact it is printed below the last line and repeats (or rather, anticipates) the first word on the next page.
And on and on. These are extremely technical blunders, it’s true. They may seem too insignificant to merit this amount of attention. But they point to a disturbing lack of bibliographical expertise in a book that repeatedly claims to make a case grounded in bibliographical detail in order to argue against a competing interpretation that Vickers repeatedly accuses of lacking scholarly rigor.
Just how unrigorous Vickers’s own work can get is perhaps best illustrated with one final example. Few skills are more fundamental to the discipline of textual studies than bibliographical description. It is one of the first things students interested in the field are taught. Any first-year PhD in the discipline should be able to tell at a glance how many sheets of paper a book was printed on when she learns that its signatures run from A to L: 11. Given the modern alphabet, we might expect the number to be 12, but early modern books did not normally have both I and J as signatures (or U and V). Vickers does not seem to know that, and consequently claims that the Second Quarto of King Lear, with signatures running from A to L, has 12 sheets. What is startling about that assertion: Vickers spends many a page discussing the differences between the two Quartos. He argues at great length that the extra paper the printers of the later Quarto had available allowed them to “undo Okes’s extreme crowding of the text on the page.” In fact, he claims that this was expressly the printers’ “goal” — a curious assertion from a scholar who elsewhere in the book castigates his academic opponents for inferring “intention from effect.” And yet he does not seem to have realized that the Second Quarto was not printed, as he implies, on 96 pages (as 12 sheets would have), but in fact on 88 — as compared to the 84 pages of Okes’s 10.5 sheets. Nor is this a mere slip-up: he repeatedly praises the Second Quarto’s spacious 12 sheets and even uses that figure as the proper amount of paper required for a faithful printing of Shakespeare’s ideal manuscript: it is the figure Okes ought to have picked for his estimate. Yet that number bears no relation to any actual text of King Lear; it is a figment of Vickers’s imagination.
More broadly, and just as problematically, Vickers frequently applies modern expectations to early modern printed artifacts and finds them wanting, although many of the phenomena he describes were perfectly common and entirely unremarkable at the time. His sole reference point appears to be Joseph Moxon’s 1683 treatise on printing; anytime Okes or another stationer deviates from the norms outlined in that (much later) work, Vickers charges them with faults, repeating Moxon’s term “botch” with tireless judgmental regularity. Instead of studying and comparing a wide range of books to develop a sense of what was “normal” — and just how loose and capacious that category was in Elizabethan and Jacobean printing — he simply judges Okes’s Jacobean work by Moxon’s Restoration aesthetic principles. By that standard, few of Okes’s contemporaries should ’scape whipping.
V. Whose Shakespeare?
A kind of arrogant anachronism emerges over the course of The One King Lear as its author’s intellectual hallmark. Over and over again, Vickers claims superior knowledge about historical objects and phenomena than could have been available to the people who made and lived with those objects. Perhaps the most baffling of those assertions comes late in the book, when Vickers mocks one of Taylor’s group mates, MacDonald P. Jackson, for assuming that Shakespeare knew that printers often mixed proofread and corrected sheets with uncorrected ones. Since that habit was not “noticed before the late nineteenth century and only properly documented by Greg in 1940,” Shakespeare could not possibly have been aware that “such things existed.” That is to say: In Vickers’s world, historians of print and bibliographers reconstructing stationers’ practices merely by looking at the books they produced know more than could possibly have been grasped by someone who actually had his plays and poems printed in the 16th century and probably set foot in actual printing houses with some regularity.
Historians know more than historical subjects. Modern actors know more than early modern actors. Modern scholars know more than early modern printers, scribes, acting company members, or audiences. Those assumptions inform Vickers’s approach throughout the book, and they underpin his recurrent insistence on analytical clarity and certainty. He has little time or room for ambiguity, doubt, or mess.
Small wonder, then, that this book portrays Shakespeare as a paragon of the unequivocal. The central goal of his dramaturgy, says Vickers, was to “make sure that playgoers — and, later, readers — fully understand what the characters say and why they behave as they do.” In particular, “moral clarity” is a key characteristic of Shakespearean playwriting; Vickers considers it a mere “anachronistic modern” attitude to dislike the “explicit moral judgment” a play such as King Lear supposedly dispenses. It’s a single- rather than a myriad-minded Shakespeare that’s on offer here.
Vickers’s judgment is often anachronistic, but his reading of how Shakespeare’s plays work goes beyond mere historical misperception. It is almost a case of mistaken identity: the author he describes sounds barely like Shakespeare and a lot like Ben Jonson. In any case, Vickers’s analysis is difficult to square with much of the critical literature produced since the days of the New Critics. Has anyone previously singled out Shakespeare for writing exceptionally easy-to-understand dialogue, designed to ensure everyone would understand everything “fully”? How can one read a play like The Winter’s Tale or Othello and cling to that view — or the view that clarity of motive was central to Shakespeare’s dramaturgy? How can one consider plays such as The Merchant of Venice or Coriolanus or Measure for Measure and think “explicit moral judgment” was Shakespeare’s obvious goal? How read Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night and think that all characters’ actions always have to be perfectly comprehensible? How, for that matter, can one feel such certainty about King Lear?
I do not know — but Brian Vickers evidently does. Thus the title of his book, and its project, are not ultimately grounded in a bibliographical claim. The One King Lear he wants to reveal to us is not primarily a lost-but-recoverable manuscript, it is an interpretation: a reading of Shakespeare’s play so unambiguous, so convinced of its own unassailable correctness, so certain of its perfect correspondence to a perfectly realized text, that the existence of a similarly closed-off, unimpeachably clear, perfectly finished and whole manuscript simply becomes a necessity. King Lear has one meaning, always has had one meaning, and must, therefore, have only one text.
It is a strange interpretative kingdom, this: so narrow, so constricted, so sure of itself, so uninviting. But Brian Vickers is more than welcome to live in it. I just wish he would not insist quite so aggressively that the rest of us must join him there, or else.
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Holger S. Syme is associate professor of English at the University of Toronto.
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[1] The “outer” forme contains pages 1, 4, 5, and 8; the “inner,” 2, 3, 6, and 7, though no early modern stationer would have expressed this in terms of modern page counts.
[2] Vickers makes it sound as if two of the Cambridge Jonson editors, Suzanne Gossett and John Creaser, shared his surprise to find play texts set seriatim, but neither of them expresses any sense that this is an unusual feature in the essays Vickers cites.
Seeing the Fingerprints of Other Hands in Shakespeare
By WILLIAM S. NIEDERKORNSEPT. 2, 2003
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In matters of Shakespeare authorship, it is often said that nothing is ever resolved. But in a recent book Brian Vickers, director of Renaissance Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare.
In ''Shakespeare, Co-Author'' (Oxford University Press, 2002), Professor Vickers, 65, shows how numerous tests by many generations of scholars demonstrate substantial work by other playwrights in five Shakespeare plays. Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit.
The plays are not the top five in the Shakespeare canon. But the overwhelming evidence in the book shows that George Peele, not Shakespeare, wrote almost a third of ''Titus Andronicus''; Thomas Middleton, about two-fifths of ''Timon of Athens''; George Wilkins, two of the five acts of ''Pericles''; and John Fletcher, more than half of ''Henry VIII.'' ''The Two Noble Kinsmen,'' originally published in 1634 as the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, is shown to be about two-fifths Shakespeare's.
None of the complete editions of Shakespeare have given a full account of Peele's work on ''Titus Andronicus,'' and they often hedge on the co-authorship of the other plays. Rarely does any edition state with confidence what scenes or parts of scenes are by co-authors. The evidence has been out there, some of it for over a century, some for only a few years, but even experts have found it hard to keep track of the players. Now Professor Vickers has given them a score card.
Calling the book ''a triumphant application of scientific method to literary-attribution studies,'' the writer and editor Jonathan Bate, who left Peele out of his 1995 Arden edition of ''Titus,'' wrote in a recent article in The TLS, the British literary weekly, ''I am in the privileged -- or perhaps embarrassing -- position of being able to confirm the accuracy of Vickers's diagnosis.''
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Gary L. Taylor, the co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare with Stanley Wells in 1986 noted that co-authorship credit had been given there for four of the plays and that, based on other research, in the future '' 'Titus' will be treated in the same way as the other collaborative plays.''
The Norton Shakespeare uses the Oxford text and generally follows the Oxford's lead on co-authorship. Stephen Greenblatt, the general editor of the Norton and once a student of Professor Vickers at Cambridge, said, ''I think the next edition of the Norton Shakespeare should acknowledge the arguments for the collaborative nature of 'Titus.' ''
On Friday Professor Vickers said by phone from London: ''The general editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Prof. Brian Gibbons, said to me recently, 'Looks as if we'll have to bring out a new edition of ''Pericles.'' ' Let's hope they do. They could scrap their editions of 'Timon' and 'Henry VIII' too, while they're at it.''
Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius.
But the purists, or fundamentalists, as the 20th-century Shakespeare scholar W. W. Greg called them, are not going to disappear. Speaking of Shaksper (www.shaksper.net), an online discussion group, Professor Vickers said, ''My 'Shakespeare, Co-Author,' especially the ascription of four scenes in 'Titus Andronicus' to Peele, has put me in the unenviable position of being attacked by the diehard conservators determined not to lose a 'drop of that immortal man,' while being praised by the anti-Stratfordians trying to use me as grist for their mill.''
Anti-Stratfordians, those who doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, might well see a parallel between the derision they face and the ridicule co-authorship scholars were long subjected to. But Diana Price, the author of ''Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography'' (Greenwood Press, 2000), which updates and sharpens the anti-Stratfordian case, expressed some disappointment with ''Shakespeare, Co-Author'' for having little to say about the nature of co-authorship arrangements. ''Was it an interactive collaboration or an ex-post-facto revision?'' she asked. ''Did Fletcher get hold of an unfinished manuscript and finish 'Henry VIII'?''
Professor Vickers acknowledged, ''The issue of simultaneous collaboration or not is hard to settle.'' But he said, ''I'd be very unhappy to think that my exposure of Shakespearians' shilly-shallying on the co-authorship issue were to be exploited by the so-called anti-Stratfordians.''
Another recent book by Professor Vickers, '' 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare'' (Cambridge University Press, 2002), demolishes the Shakespeare attribution for the poem ''Funeral Elegy,'' using all the weapons familiar from ''Shakespeare, Co-Author.'' The news of this book's imminent publication was at least partly responsible for recantations last year by Donald W. Foster and Richard Abrams on their assignment of ''Funeral Elegy'' to Shakespeare, and the decisions by Norton and the editors of two other editions of the canon, Riverside and Longman, to remove it.
As a curtain raiser, ''Counterfeiting'' (''CoSh,'' Professor Vickers notes, was his printer's abbreviation, ''as in 'cosh,' a blunt instrument''), also takes aim at ''Shall I Die?,'' a poem the Oxford editors inserted into the canon, with the Norton following suit. Will that attack dislodge it from the Oxford's next edition?
Professor Taylor said, ''At this time, the Oxford editors have no intentions of removing 'Shall I Die?,' '' but added that he planned to re-examine the Vickers argument soon ''with the help of databases that were not available in 1985.''
''We are also planning to include, as collaborative work, the whole of 'Sir Thomas More,' '' Professor Taylor said.
That's the play in which the hero -- later canonized as St. Thomas More by the Roman Catholic Church -- uses a urinal onstage in the last act. That's not the part Shakespeare supposedly wrote, though.
Many Shakespeare scholars think the manuscript of ''Sir Thomas More'' includes a patch or two of Shakespeare's handwriting, but some disagree. David Bevington, the editor of the Longman edition, which does not include the excerpts that are in the Norton and Riverside, said he felt it was ''rather brash for handwriting experts to claim too much on that score.''
Ms. Price said it was ''an important issue to put on the front burner,'' because if the manuscript was written by a scribe rather than an author, ''then all bets are off.''
In ''Shakespeare, Co-Author,'' Professor Vickers supports the mainstream position on ''Sir Thomas More,'' reviewing the evidence at length, but he does not subject the play to rigorous analysis. ''That doesn't mean to say that in the future I might not attempt to expend it,'' he said, ''but I thought for the time being that that wasn't a priority in the sense that the other plays were.''
So there is still at least one controversy left on the issue of Shakespeare co-authorship, even with several questions largely resolved.
Sneers and jeers over Lears
There’s only one true version of King Lear, says Sir Brian Vickers — and any Shakespeare scholar who disagrees can go hang
Jonathan Bate
Alex Otto, the German actor and theatre director, as King Lear c. 1920
Jonathan Bate
28 May 2016
9:00 AM
The One King Lear Sir Brian Vickers
Harvard University Press, pp.387, £30
In the 18th century, as Shakespeare began to take on classic status, editors began to notice differences between the texts of the plays preserved by his fellow actors in the posthumously published First Folio of his Comedies, Histories & Tragedies and those that had been published in the playwright’s lifetime in the cheap pocket editions, analogous to modern paperbacks, known in the trade as Quartos.
In the case of King Lear, the subject of Sir Brian Vickers’s new book, the Quarto of 1608 is strikingly different from the Folio of 1623. The Quarto has nearly 300 lines that are not in the Folio; the Folio has over 100 lines that are not in the Quarto; there are more than 800 verbal variants in the parts of the play that the two texts share. For a long time, the standard editorial response to this difficulty was to treat the Quarto as a ‘memorial reconstruction’ by actors — a phenomenon that accounts for the First Quarto of Hamlet, which includes the immortal and presumably half-remembered line ‘To be or not to be, ay, there’s the point.’ This was, however, a difficult position to maintain because Quarto Lear, although corrupt in many places, does not have the usual characteristics of memorial reconstruction.
In the 1970s the scholar Peter Blayney proved decisively by means of meticulous and highly technical bibliographic investigation that Quarto Lear was not a bad text based on actors’ memories but an authoritative one, almost certainly deriving from Shakespeare’s own holograph. The poor quality of the text was the result of the personnel in the printing shop being unused to drama. Thus the fact that much of Shakespeare’s verse was set as prose was due to the printer running out of the blocks that were needed to fill in the margins when setting verse. Blayney and a group of other scholars concluded that both Quarto and Folio texts were authentically Shakespearean. The substantial differences between them were to be explained by revision.
That plays change in the course of their stage life is not exactly news. Anyone who works in the theatre will tell you that. The editors of the 1986 OUP Shakespeare accordingly decided it would be worth illustrating the evolution of the text of King Lear by printing both the Quarto and the Folio versions. It was a shame that they chose sequential as opposed to parallel texts, which would have made comparison much easier, but the exercise was a valuable one, stimulating a wealth of interesting scholarly debate and challenging students to question their assumptions about the singularity of great literary works.
Now, though, Sir Brian Vickers rides into the lists with the intention of knocking the Oxford team off their chargers. There is, he announces, just one King Lear. He argues that the omissions in the Quarto were abridgements carried out by the printer because he was short of paper (which was expensive) and that those in the Folio were cack-handed actors’ cuts. The fons et origo, he concludes, was a single Shakespearean manuscript, so the right approach is the traditional one of conflating Quarto and Folio to reconstruct the lost original. The two-text Oxford school can, like Lear’s Fool, go hang.
Vickers may well be right that the Folio revision of King Lear was not a single, carefully crafted intervention by Shakespeare himself. The evolutionary nature of all theatre scripts would suggest that the changes are far more likely to have been gradual accretions over the years, some purposeful and others haphazard. But he is unnecessarily dismissive of what he calls the ‘ill-judged’ Folio text: it comes with the imprimatur of the actors who knew and loved Shakespeare, and it crystallises a moment in the evolving stage life of what Vickers calls Shakespeare’s ‘greatest pay’ (I assume that is a misprint for ‘play’, unless he has discovered some hitherto unknown box-office returns).
Folio Shakespeare offers a constant reminder of the collaborative nature of theatre, just as the Oxford school of editors worked as a team. But Vickers is not a team player. Over the past decade he has published a stream of books and articles arguing that all sorts of new ideas about the attribution of Shakespearean or possibly partially Shakespearean texts are wrong, and only he is right.
Vickers gained his reputation with some splendid books on the power of Renaissance rhetoric. But where Shakespearean rhetoric is all plenitude and wit, Vickers has, in the manner of certain other Elizabethans such as ‘snarling John Marston’, locked himself into the trope of vituperatio. He relishes the sneer and the jeer, is a master of the lofty dismissal and the throwing up of rhetorical hands in mock incredulity at the sheer stupidity of the younger generation of textual scholars and the gullibility of those older peers, such as Stanley Wells of the Shakespeare Institute, who have been taken in by their newfangled theories.
The polemical monograph, like the unremittingly barbed review, ought to be a young man’s game. It’s a sign of male insecurity, like revving a car at the lights. Few women feel the need to write such things. And when men approaching the age of King Lear do so, there is usually some sadness or bitterness or, to use the proper Shakespearean phrase, ‘ancient grudge’ lurking in the background. I have no idea what that may be in Vickers’s case, but there can be no doubting his insecurity.
Many historians and a handful of literary scholars have been knighted for their work but, as far as I am aware, Sir Brian is the only one to parade his knighthood on his title page instead of confining it to its due place in the blurb. Mind you, Shakespeare did something similar: King Lear is the one Quarto to announce the status of gentleman that its author purchased in order to restore the honour of his family name: it is attributed to Master William Shakespeare.
Jonathan Bate is provost of Worcester College, Oxford; his books include Shakespeare and Ovid, The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of the Age
Shakespeare didn't shorten King Lear - it was his printer, says scholar
New book The One King Lear by Sir Brian Vickers attempts to tackle a long-held belief about the most authoritative version of Shakespeare's tragedy
Clarisse Loughrey
@clarisselou
Monday 2 May 2016 15:28 BST
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The Independent Culture
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There's are two versions of Shakespeare's great, mournful tragedy King Lear.
The 1608 Quarto version and the 1623 Folio: with the former containing 100 lines absent from the latter, and the latter containing 300 lines absent from the former. A curious state, yet for centuries the two have been combined in an attempt to create what was conceived as the 'full' King Lear.
However, a revisionist movement in the '70s and '80s claimed Shakespeare himself had shortened the Folio; and that, in fact, the two copies existed as separate versions of the play. Though a conflated version of both copies is still most regularly performed, many now consider the Folio the more perfected and more authoritative version.
Until now; as a new book by Shakespearean scholar Sir Brian Vickers (via The Guardian) argues the revisionist angle is incorrect; it wasn't Shakespeare who edited the Folio text, but a thoughtless printer who miscalculated how much paper would be needed to print the play.
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Indeed, The One King Lear insists there is absolutely no evidence Shakespeare had ever edited the Folio text. "The unique thing about Lear is that the cuts in the Quarto and in the Folio occur in different places, so the two physically interlock perfectly," said Vickers, who is a senior fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
"For 300 years, people just took the bits which were missing from one, and put them in the other, and everyone was happy. But in the 70s, people were trying to overthrow the assumptions and attitudes of previous generations, and to overthrow what they thought to be orthodoxies."
Vickers actually considers the revisionist theory "quite damaging" to the play; jettisoning the Quatro's 'mock trial' scene in which Lear hallucinates Goneril and Regan upon the heath, as well as a scene in which Kent and a Gentleman discuss the states of mind of both Cordelia and Lear.
"The revisionists said we don’t really need this scene, that it’s not important – that we’d much rather see Lear than hear what’s said about him," says Vickers of the latter scene. "[But] it’s a very important scene which shows he’s now aware of what he did. Shakespeare deliberately wrote the scene to prepare for what follows, it’s a very tightly written scene with not a word wasted [and to cut it] is an act of mutilation."
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Vickers' theory is bound to attract its fair share of controversy. "I imagine battle will be joined," UCL English professor John Mullan commented. "The excitement of the revisionist theory was that for the first time, we could see evidence of Shakespeare at work."
"The thought was that if you looked at the variations for the Folio and the Quarto you would be able to see the genius at work. It absolutely became the orthodoxy. I accepted it and I’ve been teaching Lear that way for decades… But Brian is very convincing and it will be interesting to hear what others say in return."
For now, the jury's still out on whether the King Lear we watch onstage today is what Shakespeare intended us to see.