n matters of Shakespeare authorship, it is often said that nothing is ever resolved. But in a recent book Brian Vickers, director of Renaissance Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare.
In "Shakespeare, Co-Author" (Oxford University Press, 2002), Professor Vickers, 65, shows how numerous tests by many generations of scholars demonstrate substantial work by other playwrights in five Shakespeare plays. Examining factors like rhetorical devices, polysyllabic words and metrical habits, scholars have been able to identify reliably an author of a work or part of a work, even when the early editions did not give credit.
The plays are not the top five in the Shakespeare canon. But the overwhelming evidence in the book shows that George Peele, not Shakespeare, wrote almost a third of "Titus Andronicus"; Thomas Middleton, about two-fifths of "Timon of Athens"; George Wilkins, two of the five acts of "Pericles"; and John Fletcher, more than half of "Henry VIII." "The Two Noble Kinsmen," originally published in 1634 as the work of Shakespeare and Fletcher, is shown to be about two-fifths Shakespeare's.
None of the complete editions of Shakespeare have given a full account of Peele's work on "Titus Andronicus," and they often hedge on the co-authorship of the other plays. Rarely does any edition state with confidence what scenes or parts of scenes are by co-authors. The evidence has been out there, some of it for over a century, some for only a few years, but even experts have found it hard to keep track of the players. Now Professor Vickers has given them a score card.
Calling the book "a triumphant application of scientific method to literary-attribution studies," the writer and editor Jonathan Bate, who left Peele out of his 1995 Arden edition of "Titus," wrote in a recent article in The TLS, the British literary weekly, "I am in the privileged — or perhaps embarrassing — position of being able to confirm the accuracy of Vickers's diagnosis."
Gary L. Taylor, the co-editor of the Oxford Shakespeare with Stanley Wells in 1986 noted that co-authorship credit had been given there for four of the plays and that, based on other research, in the future " `Titus' will be treated in the same way as the other collaborative plays."
The Norton Shakespeare uses the Oxford text and generally follows the Oxford's lead on co-authorship. Stephen Greenblatt, the general editor of the Norton and once a student of Professor Vickers at Cambridge, said, "I think the next edition of the Norton Shakespeare should acknowledge the arguments for the collaborative nature of `Titus.' "
On Friday Professor Vickers said by phone from London: "The general editor of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Prof. Brian Gibbons, said to me recently, `Looks as if we'll have to bring out a new edition of "Pericles." ' Let's hope they do. They could scrap their editions of `Timon' and `Henry VIII' too, while they're at it."
Professor Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate. On one side are scholars who use ingenious methods to dissect a text for clues to co-authorship. On the other are so-called conservators, who ridicule those efforts and want no deviation from the idea that the entire canon was written by a solitary genius.
But the purists, or fundamentalists, as the 20th-century Shakespeare scholar W. W. Greg called them, are not going to disappear. Speaking of Shaksper (www.shaksper.net), an online discussion group, Professor Vickers said, "My `Shakespeare, Co-Author,' especially the ascription of four scenes in `Titus Andronicus' to Peele, has put me in the unenviable position of being attacked by the diehard conservators determined not to lose a `drop of that immortal man,' while being praised by the anti-Stratfordians trying to use me as grist for their mill."
Anti-Stratfordians, those who doubt that Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was the author of the Shakespeare canon, might well see a parallel between the derision they face and the ridicule co-authorship scholars were long subjected to. But Diana Price, the author of "Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography" (Greenwood Press, 2000), which updates and sharpens the anti-Stratfordian case, expressed some disappointment with "Shakespeare, Co-Author" for having little to say about the nature of co-authorship arrangements. "Was it an interactive collaboration or an ex-post-facto revision?" she asked. "Did Fletcher get hold of an unfinished manuscript and finish `Henry VIII'?"
