Details

Subject(s)

• Poetry—Authorship [Browse]
• W. S.—Funerall elegye in memory of the late virtuous master William Peeter of Whipton neere Exetour [Browse]
• Shakespeare, William 1564-1616—Authorship [Browse]
• Ford, John 1586-approximately 1640—Authorship [Browse]

Summary note

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. 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.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. 554-562) and index.

Contents

• Prologue: Gary Taylor finds a poem
• pt. 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'?
• pt. 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
• App. I. The text of A Funerall Elegye
• App. II. Verbal parallels between A Funerall Elegye and Ford's poems.

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ISBN

• 0521772435
• 9780521772433
• 9786610160198
• 6610160198

LCCN

2001052632

OCLC

48265599

International Article Number

• 9780521772433

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