Defining Shakespeare Pericles as Test Case [Hardcover]

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.

List of Tables
List of Figures
Preface
Abbreviations and References
1. Defining Shakespeare
2. Introduction toPericlesand the Shakespeare canon
3.Pericles: evidence of dual authorship
4. Identifying the author ofPericles, Acts 1 and 2
5. A literary-critical approach to style inPericles
6. Wilkins as co-author: the case summarized and defended
7. A new technique for attribution studies
Appendix 1: The text ofPericles
Appendix 2: 'Literature Online' data
Index

This work exhaustively defends the case for the Oxford Shakespeare's editorial decision concerningPericles.... 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

Mac Jackson is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His publications includeShakespeare's 'A Lover's Complaint': Its Date and Authenticity(Auckland UP 1965),Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare(Salzburg UP 1979). He is editor ofA. R. D. Fairburn: Selected Poems(Victoria UP 1995) andSelected Poems of Eugene Lee-Hamilton(Edwin Mellen Press 2002), and is co-editor ofThe Selected Plays of John Marston(CUP 1986) andThe Oxford Book of New Zealand Writinglˆ