Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (review)
- Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case
This meticulous study offers a thoroughly scholarly resolution to a problem that has exercised Shakespeareans over several centuries. It presents evidence from an impressively varied number of sources that George Wilkins, otherwise best known for his play The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, was the writer of Acts 1 and 2 of Pericles, and that Shakespeare is the author of almost all of Acts 3 through 5. By no means a new suggestion about the authorship of Pericles, it remains a disputed one. Brian Vickers's book Shakespeare Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (2002) has also recently made the case for Wilkins as collaborator, but the current Riverside edition (1997), while it supports the idea of dual authorship, deems Wilkins's involvement "most unlikely," and the latest Cambridge edition (1998) regards Shakespeare as the play's sole author.1
Jackson's title puts its focus the other way round, suggesting that the primary interest is a definition of Shakespeare. No one will be surprised that Shakespeare is hardly defined by this book. Assembling markers that serve to differentiate Shakespeare's writing from that of his contemporaries is an important task, but it is not exactly "defining Shakespeare," a phrase that implies something much more final, comprehensive, and even hubristic. Nevertheless, in digesting and reassessing (sometimes recalculating) the work of his predecessors, and in introducing and executing new measures, Jackson has performed heroic labors in the tradition of the great nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Shakespeare stylisticians. In his hands the assembled evidence gives great confidence.
On method, I would take issue only with Jackson's occasional, common-sense reference to modern literary experience as corroborative evidence. The number of plays that modern editors generally accept as single-author products and include in modern anthologies of early modern English drama, or that are revived on the modern stage, is not necessarily good evidence for the notion that the best plays were single-author ones. That modern editors refer to a play as "Shakespeare's" even when they believe it [End Page 462] is collaborative seems to me neither here nor there in assessing seventeenth-century practices of this kind (34). Twentieth-century language change is not always useful when considering change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (40). I would disagree also with the notion that the only "[p]erfectly valid" comparative authorship studies are made by a single scholar at one time (84): I believe there are measures (such as counts of function words) that can be accurately replicated across researchers and even across generations.
Toward the end of the book, Jackson presents a fascinating new method for attribution, which relies on the vast corpus of English drama now available and easily searchable through Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online database. At its simplest, this method involves comparing the number of phrases shared between a disputed text and the works of two rival authors, adjusted for the size of the two canons searched (bearing in mind that one would expect more "hits" in a larger canon merely by chance). In this way the discredited technique of "parallel passages" can be revived and given a sharper evidential edge. This approach no longer suffers from the weakness that while an impressive list of parallel passages can be produced between one author and the disputed text, there may be a list for another author which is just as (or even more) impressive. Jackson's method is indeed extremely promising. My only caveat is that a truly rigorous method still needs to be found for determining the list of phrases to be searched and then defining what constitutes a match in other works.
The book suggests some areas for further work. Many of the tests Jackson reports are designed to establish whether or not Acts 1 and 2 of Pericles are distinct stylistically from Acts 3 through 5, rather than testing exhaustively the authorship of the two portions or of sections within them. An interesting thread relating to...
