'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare

Evidence, Authorship and John Ford's Funerall Elegye

AvBrian Vickers

Häftad, Engelska, 2009

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Beskrivning

'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare addresses the fundamental issue of what Shakespeare actually wrote, and how this is determined. In recent years his authorship has been claimed for two poems, the lyric 'Shall I die?' and A Funerall Elegye. These attributions have been accepted into certain major editions of Shakespeare's works but Brian Vickers argues that both attributions rest on superficial verbal parallels; both use too small a sample, ignore negative evidence, and violate basic principles in authorship studies. Through a fresh examination of the evidence, Professor Vickers shows that neither poem has the stylistic and imaginative qualities we associate with Shakespeare. In other words, they are 'counterfeits', in the sense of anonymously authored works wrongly presented as Shakespeare's. He argues that the poet and dramatist John Ford wrote the Elegye: its poetical language (vocabulary, syntax, prosody) is indistinguishable from Ford's, and it contains several hundred close parallels with his work. By combining linguistic and statistical analysis this book makes an important contribution to authorship studies.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2009-10-01
Mått:152 x 229 x 34 mm
Vikt:870 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:600
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9780521120357

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Mer om författaren

Brian Vickers is Professor of English Literature, and Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His publications on Shakespeare include The Artistry of Shakespeare's Prose (1968, 1979); a six-volume collection of early Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623-1801 (1974-1981, 1996); Returning to Shakespeare (1989); and Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (1993).

Recensioner i media

Review of the hardback: 'The reader of this long book, which largely consists of close stylistic analysis, is swept along by the power of its indignation … this battleship of a book delivers what are likely to be the final salvos of a hard-fought literary engagement.' The Times Literary Supplement

Innehållsförteckning

Prologue: Gary Taylor finds a poem; Part I. Donald Foster's 'Shakespearean' Construct: 1. 'W.S.' and the Elegye for William Peter; 2. Parallels? Plagiarisms?; 3. Vocabulary and diction; 4. Grammar: 'the Shakespearean who'; 5. Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns; 6. Rhetoric: 'the Shakespearean hendiadys'; 7. Statistics and inference; 8. A poem 'indistinguishable from Shakespeare'; Part II. John Ford's Funerall Elegye: 9. Ford's writing career: poet, moralist, playwright; 10. Ford and the Elegye's 'Shakespearean diction'; 11. The Funerall Elegye in its Fordian context; Epilogue: the politics of attribution; Appendices: 1. The text of A Funerall Elegye; 2. Verbal parallels between A Funerall Elegye and Ford's poems; 3. Establishing Ford's canon; Bibliography.