Brian vickers why not shakespeare

With a program called Pl giarism, Vickers detected strings of three or more words in Edward III that matched phrases in Shakespeare's other works. Usually, works by two different authors will only have about 20 matching strings. Among Shakespeare's recycled bits of phrases: "come in person hither," "pale queene of night," "thou art thy selfe," "author of my blood" and even the whole phrase "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. Using the plagiarism software, Vickers has also attributed four more anonymous plays to Kyd.

Simply because, as literature scholars have documented, the London theaters of the day were competing for audiences and had to churn out material as quickly as possible to stay ahead of one another. To do so, they often used groups of authors to write playbooks in a matter of weeks, paying each author by the scene.

It constitutes a real challenge to the belief that our system of academic peer reviewing works as it should. It is a book that should never have been printed in its present form.

But one of its two prominent, if non-committal, blurbists is right: now that it exists, this is not a book one can ignore. What is this book about? Vickers is out to settle a very old score.

King Lear exists in two distinct texts: the Quarto contains about lines not to be found in the posthumous Folio, but it also lacks around lines that are only printed in the later text. Aside from those obvious differences, there are hundreds of variants between the two texts.

Generations of Shakespeareans have puzzled over the relationship between the editions and their relative authority. For a long time, it was standard editorial practice to conflate the two versions and preserve as many lines from both as possible, while negotiating the textual variants either on aesthetic grounds or on the basis of a general judgment as to which of the two texts was more reliable. In the mids, however, under the influence of a landmark collection of essays edited by Gary Taylor and Michael Warren The Division of the Kingdoms [Oxford, ] , that practice changed profoundly.

From then on, the two texts were increasingly regarded as conceptually separate: closely related but appreciably distinct treatments of the same material. In its most extreme form, this revisionist position remains contentious. The view that the two texts can be read as two different plays, however, has found more favor, reflecting, in part, a growing interest in theatrical practices and the diminished status of the author as the singular focus of interpretation.

Nothing needed to be changed. In two extraordinarily scathing chapters, he repeatedly suggests his intellectual opponents find some other employment, and casts aspersions not only on their own scholarly standards but also on those of the journals and presses that published their work. The authorial revision hypothesis has always had its critics, and rightly so.

To some, this may seem like a storm in a rather tiny teacup. They are designed to redefine what the very text of King Lear is. If the hypotheses of The One King Lear were accepted, we would return to editions of King Lear that dismiss the differences between the Quarto and the Folio as interpretatively irrelevant. We would accept that the Folio lines absent from the Quarto were part of the text Shakespeare wrote before , rather than later additions; and we would reject all the cuts made to the Folio text as non-authorial theatrical omissions.

In other words, in the post-Vickers textual universe, neither the Quarto nor the Folio would have real independent authority, and editors would reconstitute the ideal text Shakespeare actually wrote from both imperfect printings. This is a truly radical position.

It diverges from practically all recent scholarship on King Lear , which holds that the text includes additions by Shakespeare or someone else as well as alterations and cuts that are either authorial or not. Even the most strident critics of the authorial revision theory concede that the Folio is a different version of the play. In other words, he rejects the two-version theory that almost no one has questioned in decades, but accepts the argument about authorship that has been rather more difficult to sustain: that most of what can be found in the two texts is by Shakespeare — but not because he rewrote his own play.

Both printed versions instead preserve different selections from the one authorial Ur-text. In the process, he misquotes and misrepresents not just those with whom he disagrees, but also authors whose support he attempts to claim. A case in point is the late Ernst Honigmann, one of the most distinguished modern Shakespeare editors. Again, a single spotlight will have to do.

It seems, then, that the egregious misreading is genuine — though no less baffling for that. Which is why quite literally no one makes such a claim.

He tends to rely on works published before World War II rather than in the last few decades. So how does he try to make the case that there only ever was one authorial manuscript of King Lear?

Essentially, by devising two interlinked narratives of textual corruption at the hands of two separate sets of agents. It is worth unpacking these hypothetical scenarios a little, to separate out evidence-based argument from speculation. Vickers spends a long section summarizing and slightly extending the case Madeleine Doran made for this position in , but he is pushing at open doors.

Similarly, few scholars would dispute the assertion that Okes, in printing the Quarto, made some efforts to economize his use of paper though not consistently.

There is also general consensus that the version reflects a version of the play edited and perhaps revised for performance. Beyond those areas of agreement, Vickers is largely on his own.

The strategies he adopts to come to terms with the challenges of the two texts are strikingly distinctive: in his discussion of the Quarto, he relies heavily on the history of the early book trade and of early modern printing practices; in his treatment of the Folio, he largely abandons bibliographical arguments and adopts the mantle of the literary critic and, occasionally, the theater scholar.

The former strategy runs into far more severe problems, on which I will spend much of the rest of this review.

As a consequence, Vickers continued, his essays, articles and editions have begun to be refused. I do feel a bit desperate. But the Vickers edition is based on his own massively inflated definition of what Kyd wrote. OSO version 0. University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up. Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search.