Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case

by MacDonald P. Jackson

Overview

Many plays of Shakespeare's time were, like modern movie and television scripts, products of collaboration between two or more writers. This book shows that in the first of his Late Romances, Pericles, Shakespeare collaborated with the minor playwright George Wilkins. It explores a wide range of new techniques for identifying the co-authors in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199260508
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2003
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Mac Jackson is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His publications include Shakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity (Auckland UP 1965), Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg UP 1979). He is editor of A. R. D. Fairburn: Selected Poems (Victoria UP 1995) and Selected Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (Edwin Mellen Press 2002), and is co-editor of The Selected Plays of John Marston (CUP 1986) and The Oxford Book of New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (OUP NZ 1986). He has contributed chapters to a further 16 books and has written over 150 articles for academic journals. He wrote the annual critical survey of Shakespeare editions and textual studies for Shakespeare Survey from 1984 to 1990.

Table of Contents

List of TablesList of FiguresPrefaceAbbreviations and References1. Defining Shakespeare2. Introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon3. Pericles: evidence of dual authorship4. Identifying the author of Pericles, Acts 1 and 25. A literary-critical approach to style in Pericles6. Wilkins as co-author: the case summarized and defended7. A new technique for attribution studiesAppendix 1: The text of PericlesAppendix 2: 'Literature Online' dataIndex

Editorial Reviews

"This work exhaustively defends the case for the Oxford Shakespeare's editorial decision concerning Pericles.... Essential...to those concerned with textual scholarship."—Notes and Queries

"'There is, therefore, something at stake in decisions about the limits of the Shakespearean canon. This book shows how we can get them right.' This is a bold claim, but one borne out in the scrupulous methodologies that follow."—Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

From the Publisher