The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion [Hardcover]

This companion volume toThe New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Worksconcentrates on the issues of canon and chronology--currently the most active and controversial debates in the field of Shakespeare editing. It presents in full the evidence behind the choices made inThe Complete Worksabout which works Shakespeare wrote, in whole or part. A major new contribution to attribution studies, theAuthorship Companionilluminates the work and methodology underpinning the groundbreakingNew Oxford Shakespeareand casts new light on the professional working practices, and creative endeavors, of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We now know that Shakespeare collaborated with his literary and dramatic contemporaries and that others adapted his works before they reached printed publication. TheAuthorship Companion's essays explore and explain these processes, laying out everything we currently know about the works' authorship. Using a variety of different attribution methods,The New Oxford Shakespearehas confirmed the presence of other writers' hands in plays that until recently were thought to be Shakespeare's solo work. Taking this process further with meticulous, fresh scholarship, essays in theAuthorship Companionshow why we must now add new plays to the accepted Shakespeare canon and reattribute certain parts of familiar Shakespeare plays to other writers. The technical arguments for these decisions about Shakespeare's creativity are carefully laid out in language that anyone interested in the topic can understand. The latest methods for authorship attribution are explained in simple but accurate terms and all the linguistic data on which the conclusions are based is provided.

The New Oxford Shakespeareconsists of four interconnected publications: theModern Critical Edition(with modern spelling), theCritical Reference Edition(with original spelling), a companion volume on autholľ