MACD. P. JACKSON
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260508
- eISBN:
- 9780191717635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260508.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter details evidence of dual authorship of the Pericles. Eliot Slater conducted vocabulary tests on Shakespeare's plays by compiling card-indexes recording all instances of words that occur ...
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This chapter details evidence of dual authorship of the Pericles. Eliot Slater conducted vocabulary tests on Shakespeare's plays by compiling card-indexes recording all instances of words that occur in at least two Shakespeare plays but not more than ten times altogether. Acts 3-5 of Pericles are most significantly linked with The Tempest. For Acts 1-2, however, there is no strong relationship with any of Shakespeare's single play or protracted series of plays. The best explanation of the bewildering explanation in the pattern of relationships between Pericles 1-2 and the Shakespeare canon is that these acts were written by another dramatist. Slater's analyses of Shakespeare's vocabulary are certainly valuable aids to the establishment of the chronology of Shakespeare's works. Whatever faults may be found in the Shakespeare Clinic's methods, it seems fair to claim that their painstaking and dispassionate research provides yet another obstacle to believing that Pericles is wholly Shakespeare's.Less
This chapter details evidence of dual authorship of the Pericles. Eliot Slater conducted vocabulary tests on Shakespeare's plays by compiling card-indexes recording all instances of words that occur in at least two Shakespeare plays but not more than ten times altogether. Acts 3-5 of Pericles are most significantly linked with The Tempest. For Acts 1-2, however, there is no strong relationship with any of Shakespeare's single play or protracted series of plays. The best explanation of the bewildering explanation in the pattern of relationships between Pericles 1-2 and the Shakespeare canon is that these acts were written by another dramatist. Slater's analyses of Shakespeare's vocabulary are certainly valuable aids to the establishment of the chronology of Shakespeare's works. Whatever faults may be found in the Shakespeare Clinic's methods, it seems fair to claim that their painstaking and dispassionate research provides yet another obstacle to believing that Pericles is wholly Shakespeare's.
MACD. P. JACKSON
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260508
- eISBN:
- 9780191717635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260508.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter discusses a new technique for attribution studies that seems capable of casting light on the darker regions of the Shakespeare canon and apocrypha. It has been developed only since the ...
More
This chapter discusses a new technique for attribution studies that seems capable of casting light on the darker regions of the Shakespeare canon and apocrypha. It has been developed only since the creation of the Chadwyck-Healey electronic database ‘Literature Online’, which enables scholars to search virtually the whole corpus of early modern English drama, as well as most significant poetry and a good deal of prose. It involves the collecting, not of parallels of the kind dealt with in the previous chapters, but of phrases and collocations, and in such a manner as to revolutionize old practices. The new method can be applied in cases where there is a small number of candidates for the authorship of a scene or passage, and each of these candidates was the sole author of several plays.Less
This chapter discusses a new technique for attribution studies that seems capable of casting light on the darker regions of the Shakespeare canon and apocrypha. It has been developed only since the creation of the Chadwyck-Healey electronic database ‘Literature Online’, which enables scholars to search virtually the whole corpus of early modern English drama, as well as most significant poetry and a good deal of prose. It involves the collecting, not of parallels of the kind dealt with in the previous chapters, but of phrases and collocations, and in such a manner as to revolutionize old practices. The new method can be applied in cases where there is a small number of candidates for the authorship of a scene or passage, and each of these candidates was the sole author of several plays.
MACD. P. JACKSON
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260508
- eISBN:
- 9780191717635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260508.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter provides an introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon. Pericles, it is widely agreed, is the first of Shakespeare's ‘last plays’, that highly distinctive group of romances and ...
More
This chapter provides an introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon. Pericles, it is widely agreed, is the first of Shakespeare's ‘last plays’, that highly distinctive group of romances and tragicomedies. However, it was omitted from the First Folio collection of his plays assembled by his friends and fellow actors after his death and published in 1623. The very gateway to the final period of Shakespeare's playwrighting career is thus obstructed by thorny problems of text and authorship. Investigation of the authorship of Pericles can scarcely be disentangled from broader issues concerning the Shakespeare canon as a whole and the methods by which it is most convincingly to be defined. T.S. Eliot held that ‘the full meaning of any one’ of Shakespeare's plays ‘is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays’.Less
This chapter provides an introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon. Pericles, it is widely agreed, is the first of Shakespeare's ‘last plays’, that highly distinctive group of romances and tragicomedies. However, it was omitted from the First Folio collection of his plays assembled by his friends and fellow actors after his death and published in 1623. The very gateway to the final period of Shakespeare's playwrighting career is thus obstructed by thorny problems of text and authorship. Investigation of the authorship of Pericles can scarcely be disentangled from broader issues concerning the Shakespeare canon as a whole and the methods by which it is most convincingly to be defined. T.S. Eliot held that ‘the full meaning of any one’ of Shakespeare's plays ‘is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays’.
MacDonald P. Jackson
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260508
- eISBN:
- 9780191717635
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260508.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto ...
More
‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto of 1609, but was not included in the First Folio (1623) collection of his plays. This book examines rival theories about the quarto's origins and offers compelling evidence that Pericles is the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and the minor dramatist George Wilkins, who was responsible for the first two acts and for portions of the ‘brothel scenes’ in Act 4. Pericles serves as a test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to identify co-authors. A wide range of metrical, lexical, and other data is analysed. Computerized ‘stylometric’ texts are explained and their findings assessed. A concluding chapter introduces a new technique that has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.Less
‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto of 1609, but was not included in the First Folio (1623) collection of his plays. This book examines rival theories about the quarto's origins and offers compelling evidence that Pericles is the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and the minor dramatist George Wilkins, who was responsible for the first two acts and for portions of the ‘brothel scenes’ in Act 4. Pericles serves as a test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to identify co-authors. A wide range of metrical, lexical, and other data is analysed. Computerized ‘stylometric’ texts are explained and their findings assessed. A concluding chapter introduces a new technique that has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
MACD. P. JACKSON
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199260508
- eISBN:
- 9780191717635
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199260508.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
For various reasons, attempts to establish ‘who wrote what’ have lost their former allure. The Cambridge editors of A Funeral Elegy, Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, and Timon of Athens regard ...
More
For various reasons, attempts to establish ‘who wrote what’ have lost their former allure. The Cambridge editors of A Funeral Elegy, Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, and Timon of Athens regard Shakespeare as sole author. Those who have disagreed with them are stigmatized as ‘dinstegrators’. Motivated by a bardolatrous desire to exculpate Shakespeare from supposed weaknesses of style, structure, or dramaturgy that, on more expert scrutiny, may be redefined as strengths, being integral to an overall design. If in authorship studies one function of analysis is division, as McKenzie cautioned, unification is invariably another. Perceptions of difference are complemented by perceptions of similarity. Disintegration entails integration. The task of defining Shakespeare may be undertaken with clear consciences, confident that painstaking scholarship enlarges knowledge and that questions about ‘who wrote what’ really do matter. There is, therefore, something at stake in decisions about the limits of the Shakespeare canon.Less
For various reasons, attempts to establish ‘who wrote what’ have lost their former allure. The Cambridge editors of A Funeral Elegy, Titus Andronicus, 1 Henry VI, and Timon of Athens regard Shakespeare as sole author. Those who have disagreed with them are stigmatized as ‘dinstegrators’. Motivated by a bardolatrous desire to exculpate Shakespeare from supposed weaknesses of style, structure, or dramaturgy that, on more expert scrutiny, may be redefined as strengths, being integral to an overall design. If in authorship studies one function of analysis is division, as McKenzie cautioned, unification is invariably another. Perceptions of difference are complemented by perceptions of similarity. Disintegration entails integration. The task of defining Shakespeare may be undertaken with clear consciences, confident that painstaking scholarship enlarges knowledge and that questions about ‘who wrote what’ really do matter. There is, therefore, something at stake in decisions about the limits of the Shakespeare canon.