The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion

Adding and Subtracting Attributions Amidst the “Shakespeare” Canon
Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion. 741pp, hardback. $190. ISBN: 978-0-199591169. Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online: Oxford University Press; The New Oxford Shakespeare, 2017.
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This is one of the volumes that makes up a new addition to the collected “Shakespeare” show more works that Oxford has been editing and re-releasing every few decades. This collection is called The New Oxford Shakespeare, and it was just released a couple of years ago, though the covered attribution or “authorship” studies reviewed or included in this particular volume are a bit older, as just-released studies have a tendency to be proven wrong pre-press. The primary objective of my “Shakespeare” re-attribution project is to prove that the conclusions of all of these most highly regarded past attribution studies are wrong. The number of these attempts alone is rather frightful, and the works included in this collection are a mere fraction of the scholarship released over nearly five centuries on the “Shakespeare” attribution question. So far, I reviewed a few of these chapters more closely than the others, but I will eventually re-read all of them as I am sure editors will not accept the number of my past study citations as sufficient until I at least debunk all of these field-leaders. The chapter that has attracted most of my research time up until now is “Chapter 25 The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works”; this is an important chapter for my project because it considers the body of “Shakespeare” attributions as a whole rather than focusing on comparing an individual test to other samples. Among the clues in these pages for further research there is a giant diagram from Ahmed Shamsul Arefin’s study, “Clustering outcome of the MST-kNN + kNN Clique graph partitioning algorithm on the distance matrix produced by using pair-wise Jensen-Shannon divergence of the works’ token frequencies”, which is more specifically explained in Arefin’s essay, but is summarized in this chapter to prove the validity of the current attributions. This diagram reminded me of my own attribution clusters, but Arefin excludes nearly all of the main authorial signature holders to whom I am re-attributing the texts in question; when they are excluded as potential authors, it appears as if a single author called “Shakespeare” might have written several logically distinct and only slightly connected (outside of their individual groups) clusters of texts. Without repeating my findings regarding several other studies covered in these pages, suffice it to say that these summaries of reasons why scholars trust the established attributions are indeed the walls that I have to prove to be faulty to be believed in my re-attributions.
To spare the readers of this review the effort of googling this book in search of a summary: “This companion… concentrates on the issues of canon and chronology – currently the most active and controversial debates in the field of Shakespeare editing. It presents in full the evidence behind the choices made in The Complete Works about which works Shakespeare wrote, in whole or part.” This is why debunking the covered studies in these pages is essential to shifting this entire field; if Oxford is going to re-attribute the entire “Shakespeare” canon, as I am suggesting, they need to know how exactly my findings contradict the evidence that is current accepted or debated as uncertain. “A major new contribution to attribution studies, the Authorship Companion illuminates the work and methodology underpinning the groundbreaking New Oxford Shakespeare and casts new light on the professional working practices, and creative endeavors, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.” This project does not only review the old attribution studies, but shows patterns of change and divergence or agreement between them; a critical compilation like this is needed in this field because with up to a thousand (or more) past attempts at re-attribution or attribution-confirmation, the field is too cumbersome for comprehension without a pattern analysis. “We now know that Shakespeare collaborated with his literary and dramatic contemporaries and that others adapted his works before they reached printed publication.” The “essays explore and explain these processes, laying out everything we currently know about the works’ authorship. Using a variety of different attribution methods,” it “has confirmed the presence of other writers’ hands in plays that until recently were thought to be Shakespeare’s solo work.” Oxford appears to have contracted computational linguists to assist them with adding to past attribution studies specifically for this project; I was told by the editor that the current Marston project contracted linguists in a similar manner to double-check the attributions in this author’s established canon. This is a good time for me to pitch my no-“Shakespeare” theory given this climate of accepting multi-signature contributions across the canon, but apparently my findings are still too shocking for scholars who have spent a lifetime writing about “Shakespeare’s” imaginary biography and the giant status of this “original” literary thinker… Re-interpreting “Shakespeares” as a plural clearly requires more effort. The “essays… show why we must now add new plays to the accepted Shakespeare canon and reattribute certain parts of familiar Shakespeare plays to other writers.” This addition of new plays to the “Shakespeare” canon is extremely troubling as if some attribution scholars are given the reins, they might expand this canon from a few dozen plays to most of the texts produced across the period, as has happened in the “Defoe” canon, which was over 550 attributions a few decades ago. Scholars might feel tempted to add attributions to the “Shakespeare” canon if they find similarities between texts written by the same ghostwriter under different names, whereas the subtraction might be the result of finding two ghostwriters’ divergent signatures. The assumption that one of the compared texts must be by “Shakespeare” is causing the illogical shuffling of texts between the multi-signature “Shakespeare” canon and the canons of individuals who hired shared ghostwriters. Too many computational linguists appear to create computing methods that are detached from linguistic rules; these types of problems are only revealed upon close scrutiny of studies such as the ones included here. This next line stresses the reason this is a better resource for this type of analysis than others I have consulted: “The latest methods for authorship attribution are explained in simple but accurate terms and all the linguistic data on which the conclusions are based is provided.” I doubt these are really “simple” explanations, but they lack the digressive nonsense too many modern scholars insert to confuse readers.
This is a great book that every Renaissance scholar and student at all levels needs to read to understand the hidden chaos behind the seeming certainty in the attributions to an author that has been perceived as a unified and unshakable entity in British literature. show less