Customer Reviews

Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of the Five Collaborative Plays

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Brian Vickers deftly reviews and summarizes the most relevant aspects of 200 years of scholarship surrounding the five most likely candidates for collaborations in the Shakespeare canon (excluding I Henry VI and Edward III on the grounds that he could not identify the co-authors of those works), exposing just how poor the arguments for single-authorship have been. In most cases, editors of recent editions have simply ignored most or all of the massive amount of scholarship that has accrued to these five plays -- often misunderstanding or misrepresenting the evidence when they do deign to mention it, usually dismissing it as representing spurious attempts at "degeneration" of the canon. The most impressive chapter here is devoted to examining the arguments for George Wilkins' co-authorship of Pericles; these were expanded upon by MacDonald P. Jackson in his book Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as a Test Case. Vickers aptly demonstrates how foolish the current New Cambridge edition of Pericles (edited by Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond) is when dealing with this subject -- if you need a copy of this play, get the current Oxford version instead. (The Amazon reviewers who defend the New Cambridge edition, it can be safely assumed, haven't read either this book or Jackson's.) Vickers very patiently and expertly lays out the case for each play, and I can't imagine any living scholar more adept at this task. Though very technical at times, Shakespeare Co-Author is a profitable experience for the general reader wanting to know more about not just Shakespeare and stylometry, but Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatic collaboration as a whole.

Now that Vickers has apparently discovered Kyd and Shakespeare collaborated on Edward III, we should expect a grand sequel to this book soon.