Words that Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (review)

This is a festschrift for a remarkable Shakespearean. As the bibliography published in this volume reminds us, MacDonald P. Jackson published his first article applying quantitative methods to Shakespeare in 1962 and has produced essays and papers in this field regularly ever since. His Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case was published by Oxford University Press in 2003, and there is a stream of substantial contributions forthcoming.

There are two introductions and ten essays on authorship problems, formal and thematic questions, aspects of theatrical practice—all focusing on the early modern English stage. A number of these essays draw on work for the two editions Jackson is currently involved in—the Cambridge Webster and the Oxford Middleton. Other common threads are provided by debates on continuing questions of attribution. Two essays challenge the attribution of A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare, an attribution which Jackson played a large part in securing in the 1960s, and which led John Kerrigan (who writes one of the introductions here) to construct an elaborate system of connections between the Complaint and Shakespeare's Sonnets, printed with it. Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza apply a series of objective tests to Shakespeare's authorship of the poem, and they also combine the tests in a composite distance measure from "core" Shakespeare. They conclude that the Complaint is not by Shakespeare. Marina Tarlinskaja subjects the poem to three metrical analyses, suggesting that while it is closer to early Shakespeare than to mature Shakespeare, its pattern does not really fit the latter either. All this indicates a commendable openness to revision and to new evidence. Another interesting thread is the discussion on the relative merits of internal and external evidence. Many of the contributors rely on linguistic and stylistic evidence. In this they ally themselves with Jackson, who emphatically rejected Leeds Barroll's description of internal evidence as "'most often an oxymoron'" (the comment, and the response, are cited on page 17). Andrew Gurr's essay admits freely that even documentary evidence can change its form like a kaleidoscope (39), and the disputed Peacham drawing of a Titus Andronicus play, mentioned by Brian Boyd (59, 75-76n), is a further example of the precious external evidence for performance aspects of early modern English drama whose interpretation rests on a chain of contestable assumptions.

The most satisfying essays offer clear-cut propositions. Gurr argues that, under an arrangement brokered by the Lord Chamberlain and his associates in 1594, the Chamberlain's Men got all of the Shakespeare plays in the repertory, and the Admiral's Men all of Marlowe's. The reconstruction depends (as Gurr concedes) on a lot of suppositions but makes good sense. Brian Vickers presents a convincing case that George Peele wrote The Troublesome Raigne of King John. Gary Taylor offers evidence that The Spanish Gypsy is a collaboration involving two pairs of writers, Middleton and Rowley and Dekker and Ford. He stretches linguistic tests for authorship almost to destruction—juggling the four authors involved, sometimes relying on the presence of a single abbreviation, and giving authorial partnerships, as well as authors, their own characteristic rates of usage. In the end he brings things back from the brink and gives a bravura display of attribution tightrope walking.

David Gunby's essay rebuts the conventional view that Webster's plays are broken-backed and lack structural integrity. He points out the careful patterns of repetition that give all three of the canonical tragedies—The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, and The Devil's Law-Case—a recognizable two-movement structure. While conceding Gunby's well-supported line of argument about the patterning, if these echoes are so subtle as to escape detection until now, one wonders whether they are sufficient to outweigh the abrupt shifts and changes of direction in the plays, and in performance especially. In his essay David Carnegie describes how...