Dear Brian,
It will be interesting to see whether Arthur
Kinney and Hugh Craig’s analysis of Shakespeare’s texts (based
apparently on a new method) comes to the same conclusions. Vickers’s
recent suggestion that John Davies wrote A Lover’s Complaint has been (I
think) convincingly shattered by Marina Tarlinskaja, using an analysis based on
where stress falls in a line of verse. (See Shakespeare and the
I find the Peele collaboration the least
convincing one; but I am no good at statistical analysis, only at thinking up
scenarios according to which its assumptions could be considered unsafe.
Best wishes, Penny McC.
From:
Sent: 12 October 2006 23:33
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L]
Shakespearean joint authorship
This may be of interest to nobody but Sam and me, but in any case:
Samuel Schoenbaum was indeed a distinguished Shakespearean. Alfred
Appel gave Nabokov Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life as a
present, prompting VN to say "This is how biography should be done."
Nevertheless, Schoenbaum's mastery of the documents of Shakespeare's
life and times made him assume that only documentary evidence counted. Most of
the modern work on collaborative authorship had not been done at the time
Schoenbaum made his judgements on internal as opposed to external evidence, but
the convergence of findings by scholars like Mac Jackson, Gary Taylor (editor
of the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, general editor of the Oxford
Middleton) and John Jowett (associate editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and the
Oxford Middleton, and general editor of the Arden Early Modern Drama series)
puts beyond doubt the division of scenes in all the cases I cited. Modern
databases allow possible authors--ALL the works of ALL the playwrights writing
at the time--to be analyzed statistically. If Schoenbaum had known the
evidence, even if only through Vickers's assessment, he would have changed his
mind.
Brian Boyd
On 13/10/2006, at 10:59 AM, NABOKV-L wrote:
As always, there is little to add to what Brian remarks, but since
Steve kindly invites, a few thoughts.
My knowledge is a bit older -- much gained from my days as graduate
assistant to Samuel Schoenbaum, who was to Shakespeare biography what
Brian is to Nabokov!
Schoenbaum also wrote extensively on Elizabethan dramatic authorship.
From him, I learned some skepticism about the kind of pinpoint division
of plays scene-by-scene or line-by-line which still persists. I tell
my undergraduate students that about the only thing of which they can
be sure in this area is this: not everything in your "Complete Works
of Shakespeare" is actually by Shakespeare, and not everything by
Shakespeare is in your "Complete Works." Certainly for over a half
century (W.W.Greg, P. Williams, J.C.Maxwell, etc.), critics and editors
of "Timon" have seen evidence of multiple authorship.
Non-Shakespeareans might also be interested in knowing that the play's
place and even inclusion in the First Folio of 1623 is also rather
vexed.
In relation to the ongoing discussion of "Pale Fire," it
might be noted
that nobody has ever suggested that "Timon of Athens" was written by
Apemantus, "a churlish philosopher."
--------------------------------------
Sam
Dr. Samuel Schuman
Garrey Carruthers Distinguished Chair
in Honors
The
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