Determining the Shakespeare Canon

Determining the Shakespeare Canon
Author: MacDonald Pairman Jackson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198704410

Editors of Shakespeare's Complete Works must decide what to include. Although not in the First Folio collection of 1623, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III have now entered the canon as plays co-authored by Shakespeare. Determining the Shakespeare Canon makes the case for lifting Arden of Faversham, first published in 1592, over the same threshold. A wealth of evidence indicates that Shakespeare was wholly or largely responsible for several of its central scenes (constituting Act III in editions divided into acts), and that the domestic tragedy can thus be added to the mounting list of his dramatic collaborations. Shakespeare's beginnings as a playwright are due for reconsideration. The second half of this volume provides solid grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe's inclusion of A Lover's Complaint within the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. While A Lover's Complaint has long been part of the Shakespeare canon, according to most editors, the poem's authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto's ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.

Defining Shakespeare

Defining Shakespeare
Author: MacDonald Pairman Jackson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780199260508

'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 bookexamines 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 asa test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to rdentify 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 techniquethat has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

The Shakespeare Canon (Classic Reprint)

The Shakespeare Canon (Classic Reprint)
Author: J. M. Robertson
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-07-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781440085741

Excerpt from The Shakespeare Canon Old doubts as to the possibility of getting attention for such inquiries have been partly removed by the welcome emergence, in this field, of Messrs. Pollard and Dover Wilson, who in 1919 asked the readers of the Times Literary Supplement whether Shakespeare was likely to write in 1599 in the manner of certain passages cited by them from henry V. The same challenge may as fitly be put with regard to much of julius cesar. After many more revisions, accordingly, I have since decided to table certain discussions as putting some of the more prominent problems that have arisen for me in Shakespeare study, the origination of henry V being one of them. Others have been set forth in previous essays these, which before were but outlined, are now handled at some - I hope not undue length, after a renewed pilgrimage. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Shakespeare's Apprenticeship

Shakespeare's Apprenticeship
Author: Ramon Jiménez
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476633312

The contents of the Shakespeare canon have come into question in recent years as scholars add plays or declare others only partially his work. Now, new literary and historical evidence demonstrates that five heretofore anonymous plays published or performed during his lifetime are actually his first versions of later canonical works. Three histories, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, and The Troublesome Reign of John; a comedy, The Taming of a Shrew; and a romance, King Leir, are products of Shakespeare's juvenile years. Later in his career, he transformed them into the plays that bear nearly identical titles. Each is strikingly similar to its canonical counterpart in terms of structure, plot and cast, though the texts were entirely rewritten. Virtually all scholars, critics and editors of Shakespeare have overlooked or disputed the idea that he had anything to do with them. This addition of five plays to the Shakespeare canon introduces a new facet to the authorship debate, and supplies further evidence that the real Shakespeare was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.