'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship and John Ford's Funerall Elegye
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 8/28/2009
EAN 9780521120357, ISBN10: 0521120357
Paperback, 600 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm
Language: English
'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.
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.