Shakespeare attribution studies
 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (October 2010) |
Shakespeare attribution studies is the scholarly attempt to determine the authorial boundaries of the
classical studies.[1]
The studies include the assessment of different types of evidence, generally classified as internal, external, and stylistic, of which all are further categorised as traditional and non-traditional.
The Shakespeare canon
The Shakespeare canon is generally defined by the 36 plays published in the
Brian Vickers proposing that 40% of the play was written by Shakespeare, and the remainder by Thomas Kyd (1558–1594).[3]
The Booke of Sir Thomas More
Sir Thomas More is an
Thomas Dekker, and possibly Shakespeare, who is generally credited with two passages in the play. It survives only in a single manuscript, now owned by the British Library.[4]
The suggestion that Shakespeare had a hand in certain scenes was first made in 1871–72 by Richard Simpson and James Spedding, based on stylistic impressions. In 1916, the paleographer Sir Edward Maunde Thompson judged the addition in "Hand D" to be in Shakespeare's handwriting. However, there is no explicit external evidence for Shakespeare's hand in the play, so the identification continues to be debated. [citation needed]
A Funeral Elegy
In 1989,
Donald Foster attributed A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter to William Shakespeare on the basis of a stylometric computer analysis of its grammatical patterns and idiosyncratic word usage. The attribution received much attention and was accepted into the canon by several highly respected Shakespeare editors. However, analyses published in 2002 by Gilles Monsarrat and Brian Vickers showed that the elegy more likely was one of John Ford's
non-dramatic works, not Shakespeare's, a view to which Foster conceded.
See also
- Chronology of Shakespeare's plays
- Early texts of Shakespeare's works
- Higher criticism
- Philology
- Shakespeare Apocrypha
- Shakespeare's editors
- Textual criticism
- Stylometry
Footnotes
- ^ Love 2002, pp. 12, 24–25
- ^ Evans 1974, p. 27
- ^ Malvern 2009
- ^ Michael Dobson, Stanley W. Wells, (eds.) The Oxford companion to Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 433
References
- ISBN 978-0-19-512823-9
- Boyd, Brian; Jackson, Macdonald P., eds. (2004), Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, University of Delaware Press, ISBN 978-0-87413-868-9
- Craig, Hugh; Kinney, Arthur F., eds. (2009), Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-51623-5
- ISBN 978-0-395-04402-5
- Hope, Jonathan (1994), The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio-linguistic Study, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-41737-2
- Ioppolo, Grace (2006), Dramatists and their manuscripts in the age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-33965-0
- ISBN 978-0-19-926050-8
- Kathman, David (2003), "The Question of Authorship", in Wells, Stanley; Orlin, Lena C. (eds.), Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide, Oxford University Press, pp. 620–32, ISBN 978-0-19-924522-2
- Love, Harold (2002), Attributing Authorship: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-78948-6
- Malvern, Jack (2009), "Computer program proves Shakespeare didn't work alone, researchers claim", The Times
- OCLC 189895
- ISBN 978-0-19-926916-7
- ISBN 978-0-7139-9773-6
External links
- "An Application of Authorship Attribution by Intertextual Distance in English" by Thomas Merriam
- The Claremont Shakespeare Clinic
- London Forum for Authorship Studies Archived 23 September 2010 at the Wayback Machine at the University of London
A series on alternative authorship theories for the works of William Shakespeare | ||
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