'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare
Evidence, Authorship and John Ford's Funerall Elegye

Vickers examines authorship claims for two poems, finding neither to be the work of Shakespeare.

Brian Vickers (Author)

9780521120357, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 October 2009

600 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.4 cm, 0.87 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Counterfeiting Shakespeare is an admirable book, erudite, witty, incisive and vigorous in its narrative thrust. It makes important contributions to authorship studies as well as to Ford and Shakespeare scholarship and it authoritatively dispose once and for all of the 'counterfeit' claims of 'Shall I die?' and A Funerall Elegye.' Shakespeare in Southern Africa

'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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD]