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

This volume testifies to the delight MacDonald Jackson takes in counting words, and the affection and respect he has inspired in colleagues. In 1965, before computers, electronic concordances, and searchable databases, Jackson argued, based on painstaking statistical analysis, that Shakespeare was the author of A Lover's Complaint (Kenneth Muir had come to the same conclusion independently in 1964). Since then he has rigorously and sensibly analyzed texts by counting words and phrases, testing hypotheses about single authorship and collaboration. Several essays in this collection employ Jackson's craft: Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, who see themselves unabashedly as "radical measurers and counters"run A Lover's Complaint through a number of computer-enabled tests. Marina Tarlinskaja, a linguist, analyzes the metrical features of A Lover's Complaint's blank verse (both essays come to the conclusion that the poem is not Shakespeare's). Brian Vickers counts and compares a dizzying number of different things to conclude that George Peele did indeed write The Troublesome Raigne of King John, that it antedates Shakespeare's King John, and that it is Shakespeare's major source for that play.

Yet the best essays in this festschrift do not count words literally. Michael Neill's piece on the sacralization of service in Othello and King Lear is a suggestive discussion of the cultural resonance of servitude, its connections with notions of slavery, and the shock generated by staged challenges to traditional notions of hierarchy and service. Andrew Gurr picks his way carefully through fragments of evidence to propose that by 1594 when the two major theater companies divided ownership — Marlowe's dramatic corpus going to one and Shakespeare's early work to the other — the deal demonstrates that both writers were equally valued theatrical commodities. Brian Boyd argues cogently that the scene of Titus killing his son Mutius was added by Peele after Shakespeare had written his sections of the play, but Boyd also uses this conjecture to think substantially about revenge tragedy and family ties.

For a number of proofs in this volume, the Chadwick-Healey database, Literature Online (LION) is the crucial research tool. This powerful search engine allows anyone with access to it — from the most sophisticated of scholars to a first-year undergraduate — to think historically, contextually, and dialogically. LION allows for a word or phrase search of a wide swath of published work, far beyond the usual canon. The possibilities are many and exciting. Too often in Words that Count, however, LION seems to be potent magic in the hands of the sorcerer's apprentice. Many contributors describe themselves as practitioners of modern attribution studies, which apparently means a commitment to specific authorial attribution right down to lines and even phrases, proven with data that is scientific in the sense that anyone with a computer could replicate results. Even in the hands of someone as adept as Gary Taylor, however, the results can seem more like number-crunching than literary proof.

The material existence of dramatic texts (except for A Lover's Complaint, all the examples of early modern authorship considered in this collection are plays) should complicate trust in the results of computer data entry as absolute proof of authorship. Yet no essay discusses the multiple, complicating, and often non-authorial routes to print in the early modern period. This absence is particularly striking given Jackson's own work on compositors' significant influence on the text of Shakespeare's quartos. Nor do essays in Words that Count weigh fairly the ensemble nature of performance, the demands of different acting companies, or seasonal trends. John Jowett, for example, in an essay that attempts to identify exactly which lines in Timon of Athens were written by Shakespeare and which by Middleton, assumes polemically "that writers play an overwhelmingly important role in the social production of the written...