The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion

by Gary Taylor (Editor), Gabriel Egan (Editor)

Overview

This companion volume to The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works concentrates on the issues of canon and chronology—currently the most active and controversial debates in the field of Shakespeare editing. It presents in full the evidence behind the choices made in The Complete Works about which works Shakespeare wrote, in whole or part. A major new contribution to attribution studies, the Authorship Companion illuminates the work and methodology underpinning the groundbreaking New Oxford Shakespeare and casts new light on the professional working practices, and creative endeavors, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We now know that Shakespeare collaborated with his literary and dramatic contemporaries and that others adapted his works before they reached printed publication. The Authorship Companion's essays explore and explain these processes, laying out everything we currently know about the works' authorship. Using a variety of different attribution methods, The New Oxford Shakespeare has confirmed the presence of other writers' hands in plays that until recently were thought to be Shakespeare's solo work. Taking this process further with meticulous, fresh scholarship, essays in the Authorship Companion show why we must now add new plays to the accepted Shakespeare canon and reattribute certain parts of familiar Shakespeare plays to other writers. The technical arguments for these decisions about Shakespeare's creativity are carefully laid out in language that anyone interested in the topic can understand. The latest methods for authorship attribution are explained in simple but accurate terms and all the linguistic data on which the conclusions are based is provided.

The New Oxford Shakespeare consists of four interconnected publications: the Modern Critical Edition (with modern spelling), the Critical Reference Edition (with original spelling), a companion volume on authorship, and an online version integrating all of this material on OUP's high-powered scholarly editions platform. Together, they provide the perfect resource for the future of Shakespeare studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199591169
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/26/2017
Series:	New Oxford Shakespeare
Pages:	776
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Gary Taylor is Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University.

Gabriel Egan is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at De Montfort University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Tables xiii

List of Abbreviations xvii

The Counting of Acts and Scenes in the New Oxford Shakespeare xix

List of Contributors xxix

Part 1 Methods

1 Artiginality: Authorship after Postmodernism Gary Taylor 3

2 A History of Shakespearean Authorship Attribution Gabriel Egan 27

3 One-Horse Races: Some Recent Studies MacDonald P. Jackson 48

4 The Limitations of Vickers's Trigram Tests Gabriel Egan 60

5 Who Wrote the Fly Scene (3.2) in Titus Andronicus?: Automated Searches and Deep Reading Gary Taylor Doug Duhaime 67

6 Refining the LION Collocation Test: A Comparative Study of Authorship Test Results for Titus Andronicus Scene 6 (= 4.1) Anna Pruitt 92

7 Potential Shakespeare: The Poetic Apocrypha and Methods of Modern Attribution Francis X. Connor 107

8 Shakespeare, Arden of Faversham, and A Lovers Complaint: A Review of Reviews MacDonald P. Jackson 123

Part 2 Case Studies

9 Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship, and 'The Print of Many' Jack Elliott Brett Greatley-Hirsch 139

10 A Supplementary Lexical Test for Arden of Faversham MacDonald P. Jackson 182

11 The Joker in the Pack?: Marlowe, Kyd and the Co-authorship of Henry VI, Parts John Burrows Hugh Craig 194

12 Rawlinson Poetry 160: The Manuscript Source of Two Attributions to Shakespeare Gary Taylor 218

13 Mine of Debt: William White and the Printing of the 1602 Spanish Tragedy… with new additions David L. Gants 231

14 Shakespeare and Three Sets of Additions Hugh Craig 241

15 Did Shakespeare Write The Spanish Tragedy Additions? Gary Taylor 246

16 Shakespeare and the Painter's Part John V. Nance 261

17 Thomas Middleton in All's Well that Ends Well? Part One Rory Loughnane 278

18 All's Well that Ends Well 4.3: Dramaturgy Terri Bourus Farah Karim-Cooper 303

19 Thomas Middleton in All's Well that Ends Well7. Part Two Rory Loughnane 307

20 Middleton and the King's Speech in All's Well that Ends Well John V. Nance 321

21 All's Well that Ends Well: Text, Date, and Adaptation Gary Taylor 337

22 Shakespeare and Middleton: A Chronology for 1605-6 Roger Holdsworth 366

23 The Versification of Doable Falsehood Compared to Restoration and Early Classical Adaptations Marina Tarlinskaja 385

24 Using Compressibility as a Proxy for Shannon Entropy in the Analysis of Doable Falsehood Giuliano Pascucci 407

25 The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Works Gary Taylor Rory Loughnane 417

Datasets 603

Works Cited 675

Index 711

Editorial Reviews

"The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion is a text that challenges the ways in which we attempt to define what we mean by Shakespeare and his work, and we should expect nothing less from Taylor and the Oxford Shakespeare. In the present, the text stands as partly an experimental attempt to affirm an approach to authorship and partly a traditional updated reference text. Its greatest measure will of course be its use in the future and the influence it has on the next phase of Shakespeare editing and authorship studies." — Jennifer Young, The English Association

"This is a great book that every Renaissance scholar and student at all levels needs to read to understand the hidden chaos behind the seeming certainty in the attributions to an author that has been perceived as a unified and unshakable entity in British literature." — Anna Faktorovich, Pensylvania Literary Journal

"It serves not only as a guide to its readers but as the essential accompaniment to the other volumes of the New Oxford Shakespeare" — Heather Hirschfeld, Bulletin of the Comediantes

"The Authorship Companion is a specialist's banquet, a garden of discussion, argument, analysis, interpretation, speculation, information, and theoretical reflection, equal parts majestic survey of the state of authorship and deep dives into technical questions." —Henry S. Turner, SEL

From the Publisher