Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon by Peter Kirwan (review)

One of the guiding principles of Peter Kirwan’s important new book Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha: Negotiating the Boundaries of the Dramatic Canon occurs parenthetically in the heart of the book—at almost its mathematical center. Reflecting upon Sir Thomas More in a broader context of attribution studies, Kirwan praises Ward Elliot and Robert Valenza’s “call for acknowledgement of uncertainty (a productive agnosticism rather than a reactionary atheism or unquestioning faith),” concluding the section with the dictum that “critics should be as willing to lose Shakespeare as to find him” (127).

This willingness to lose Shakespeare—or, more properly, the cultural construction known as “Shakespeare”—motivates the entirety of Kirwan’s monograph, with its resolute focus on that odd group of plays heretofore known as the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha “are the plays attributed to, but emphatically not by, Shakespeare” (3). They are “a deeply problematic group on the fringe of Shakespeare Studies” (5) that seem to attract critical attention exclusively because of their uncertain attributions. To be sure, their situation near (though not quite in) the canon of thirty-odd plays called “Shakespeare’s” has ensured the persistence of glancing attention throughout literary history. But until Kirwan’s book, the apocryphal plays have rarely been studied as literary texts, and their status as apocryphal has been woefully undertheorized. Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha rebels against that trend, marshaling literary criticism, critical canon theory, attribution studies, and historical sleuthing in an eclectic and ambitious attempt to interrogate the apocryphal nature of the Apocrypha. In so doing, Kirwan proposes to continue destabilizing the monolithic “Shakespeare,” a project he traces back two decades. His attempt is largely successful.

This success may be due in part to the aforementioned eclecticism of Kirwan’s argumentation. To accomplish his aims, Kirwan begins by establishing the history of the idea of a Shakespearean Apocrypha. His magisterial first chapter narrates this history, highlighting its key moments: Philip Chetwind’s 1664 addition of “‘seven Playes, never before Printed in Folio’” (18), the Editors’ Wars between Pope and Theobald, Malone’s Supplement, and C. F. Tucker Brooke’s pivotal 1908 collection of The Shakespeare Apocrypha. Having established the unreliability of appealing to editorial tradition to construct the “Shakespearean,” Kirwan proposes a solution: reading the Apocrypha against company repertory, which he does in chapter 2. Turning from historicizing to criticizing, Kirwan’s plotting of apocryphal themes, characterizations, and aesthetics against those of contemporaneous Chamberlain’s/King’s Men plays yields a startlingly diffuse, unexpectedly consistent corpus of plays linked by company ownership, rather than by what he argues is the anachronism of authorial ownership.

Motivated to trouble “post-Romantic ideals of individual authorship” (114), Kirwan turns from the esoteric realm of theorizing author/ization to the often-grubby arena of attribution studies. After the demonstration in chapter 2 of the viability of collaborative repertory authorship, Kirwan’s argument transitions naturally to interrogate attribution studies’ frequent obsession with the “Author.” Locrine, Edward III, and Arden of Faversham are Kirwan’s case studies, but his concerns are more far-reaching than authorship. Rather, Kirwan takes issue with “the did-didn’t binary” (“reductive from any perspective”), which “oversimplifies attribution . . . disregards history . . . [and] is theoretically unsatisfactory” (143). Boldly, he offers agnosticism to replace the “did-didn’t binary.” This yields “the possibility of Shakespeare’s contribution” to Locrine (137) or a proposed differentiation between “Shakespearean” and “by Shakespeare” (161). This third chapter may inflame more controversy than anything else in the book. Its challenge is well timed: in the wake of MacDonald P. Jackson’s recent book on Arden of Faversham and A Lover’s Complaint, as well as Brian Vickers’s and Eric Rasmussen’s responses to that book, the field of attribution studies desperately needs critical metacognitive appraisals of its methods, its successes, and its failures. Kirwan’s assessment of and engagement with attribution...