Coauthors and closed minds.

ONE OF THE DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS of human knowledge is its capacity for growth. As Ben Jonson put it, in a poem of self-examination and self-criticism,

      Where do'st thou carelesse lie
        Buried in ease and sloth?
        Knowledge, that sleepes, doth die;
        And this Securitie,
          It is the common Moath,

   That eats on wits, and Arts, and [oft] destroyes them both. (1)

In early modern English "securitie" meant "complacency," here the conviction that the knowledge one possesses is adequate, when it may be moth-eaten. History confirms that in the mainstream of human inquiry knowledge has never remained static. New sources come to light, old ones are reinterpreted; new paradigms are proposed, some are disputed but accepted, others are accepted but displaced or superseded, and so on. Historical scholarship uncovers neglected areas of inquiry, revalues issues formerly regarded as settled, and produces new knowledge, the product being the result of a process of inquiry and discovery that is both critical and self-critical. Francis Bacon was the first modern thinker to fully recognize growth as an innate quality of knowledge, outlining his vision in The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and human (1605)--where "proficience" has the older sense of an "Improvement in skill or knowledge; progress." Bacon's dynamic concept of knowledge as something that can be continually extended included every human being's power to improve his or her ability. In his words, the rationem totius or "essence of the whole" is that learning

   disposeth the constitution of the mind not to be fixed or settled
   in the defects thereof, but still to be capable and susceptible of
   growth and reformation. For the unlearned man knows not what it is
   to descend into himself or to call himself to account, nor the
   pleasure of that "suavissima vita, in dies sentire se fieri
   meliorem" [this most happy state, to feel one's self becoming a
   better man day by day]. The good parts he hath he will learn to
   shew to the full and use them dexterously, but not much to increase
   them, the faults he hath he will learn how to hide and colour them,
   but not much to amend them; like an ill mower, that mows on still
   and never whets his scythe: whereas with the learned man it fares
   otherwise, that he doth ever intermix the correction and amendment
   of his mind with the use and employment thereof. (2)

By the process of self-examination and self-criticism (to "descend" into oneself), those who approach new discoveries with an open mind can improve their knowledge indefinitely; those who avoid this confrontation remain trapped in a state of ignorance or prejudice. In addition to these two categories of open and closed minds, Bacon diagnosed a third state, where systems, ideologies, or even individuals block the advancement of learning, and "are indeed but remoras and hinderances to stay and slug the ship [of knowledge] from further sailing" (ibid., 198). The "Remora remora," in our terminology, is a pelagic marine fish that uses a sucking disc on top of its head to obtain rides from other animals such as large sharks and sea turtles. In antiquity the remora was thought to attach itself to ships, slowing their progress, and the famous engraved title page to Bacon's Instauratio Magna shows the ship of learning returning successfully from its voyage of discovery, with some remoras observing it disgruntedly. (3)

Historical scholarship of Elizabethan drama made enormous advances over the last century, in particular in clarifying the conditions under which plays were written. When English literary history began to emerge in the eighteenth century, the normal paradigm for literary production was that of a single author, whether as poet, novelist, or dramatist. That had also been the norm for classical antiquity, despite Michel Foucault's bizarre claim that the author was a modern concept. (4) But the single-author paradigm, though appropriate for Virgil and Horace, Spenser and Milton, Fielding and Richardson, does not fit the material conditions under which drama was produced in London between 1579 and 1642. As I have observed elsewhere, the best analogy is with the bottega of the Renaissance painter, bronze-maker, or scupltor, where a group of craftsmen executed a contract specifying the delivery of a given artwork, of an agreed subject matter and dimension, by a specified date. (5) The analogy does not fit completely, of course (analogies are not meant to), for although Philip Henslowe fills the role of the patron who commissioned and paid for the composition, literary production was organized differently. Whereas the bottega was organized around a master craftsman (Filarete for the bronze doors at St. Peter's, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, or Rembrandt with their assistants), no evidence exists that Elizabethan dramatists worked for a dominant figure. From Henslowe's diary we can see that he kept many dramatists in business by his practice of offering payment in installments for the delivery of scenes or acts of the agreed play, and that he ran what have been called "drama writing syndicates." (6) In some cases the "senior" dramatist might have been the named person who received the largest payment, but in others the fee was shared equally among any number from two to four playwrights, and no master craftsman can be identified. But otherwise it is clear that collaborative writing was very common in the hotly competitive London theater world, and that perhaps a quarter to a third of all plays were coauthored. (7) Apart from John Lyly, who wrote for the special capabilities of the boy actors, almost every dramatist took part in coauthored plays: Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, Chettle, Ford, Chapman, Webster. Even Jonson did so, although four of his coauthored plays have perished, and he fastidiously rewrote one of the survivors (Sejanus) in order to remove all trace of his collaborator.

Scholars and critics working on any of the dramatists mentioned above accept coauthorship as a fact of life, an inevitable feature of that amazingly productive sixty-year period in the London theater. But some readers and writers have great difficulty in seeing Shakespeare as a normal Elizabethan dramatist. We now know that George Peele wrote act 1 and three other scenes in Titus Andronicus, totaling 775 lines; that Thomas Middleton contributed 894 lines to Timon of Athens; George Wilkins supplied the first two acts of Pericles (1,013 lines); and that John Fletcher was responsible for 1,645 lines of King Henry VIII and for 1,477 lines of The Two Noble Kinsmen. (8) Altogether, about 6,000 of the approximately 120,000 lines in the Shakespeare canon were supplied by coauthors. We also have strong evidence that he wrote neither of the anonymously published poems recently ascribed to him, the lyric "Shall I die?" and the Funerall Elegye for William Peter, and I know that I am not alone in wanting to remove "A Lover's Complaint" from Shakespeare's Sonnets and transfer it to John Davies of Hereford. (9)

Expressing doubts about the authenticity of some scenes in canonical Shakespeare is not a new phenomenon. It dates back to the early nineteenth century, in the work of Charles Lamb, Henry Weber, Charles Knight, W. A. Spalding, and James Spedding. Rejecting these doubts and asserting "the integrity of the Shakespeare canon" is also no new phenomenon. The rationale behind these rejections is primarily the prestige that posterity has thrust on him. As Ashley Thorndike wrote in 1901, scholars "have found it difficult to think of Shakspere condescending to write a play in company with another dramatist, especially when, as in Henry VIII, his part is somewhat the less important." (10) But, he went on, "This objection is simply another exhibition of the common fallacy of always regarding Shakspere as a world genius and never as an Elizabethan dramatist. Shakspere's own practices and the general practice of Elizabethan dramatists, show that his collaboration with Fletcher would be no cause for wonder" (35-36). The unhistorical nature of the bardolatrous elevation of Shakespeare must be obvious to all, but such prejudices are deep-rooted. Half a century later Marco Mincoff was making the same complaint:

   Anyone attempting to ascribe non-canonical plays or parts of plays
   to Shakespeare is faced with an even more difficult task than in
   other cases of doubtful authorship. Not so much because of the
   difficulty of recognizing his style but because of the tremendous
   body of prejudice one has to overcome. The canon of Shakespeare's
   works has been conned so religiously and invested with such an
   odour of divinity that conditioned aesthetic reflexes have been
   established in most critics which place him in a very special
   position--his beauties have received an additional glamour both
   through familiarity from childhood and through a constant chorus of
   praise. (11)

The ingrained resistance to accepting Shakespeare as a dramatist sharing the normal theatrical practices of his day has not diminished in the half century since Mincoff wrote. In my contribution to this forum, I will document this resistance in three case studies, and examine the grounds on which it is based.

II

In 1919 the widely read scholar T. M. Parrott, who produced an excellent edition of Chapman, recognized that act 1 of Titus Andronicus, along with two other scenes, had one prosodic feature quite unlike Shakespeare, a very low percentage of feminine endings. Other un-Shakespearean elements that Parrott identified suggested the presence of George Peele as coauthor. Over the following eighty years a succession of reputable scholars--P. W. Timberlake, John Dover Wilson, J. C. Maxwell, R. F. Hill, MacDonald Jackson, Marina Tarlinskaja, and Brian Boyd, using several different and independent analytical methods, endorsed Parrott's rejection of these scenes as un-Shakespearean, and agreed that Peele was the collaborator. In Shakespeare, Co-Author, I brought all this evidence together, added new tests of my own confirming Peele's coauthorship, and recorded that none of the current editions of Titus Andronicus took notice of these well-established scholarly findings, (12) since Peele's poor reputation had preceded him. By whatever complex process a writer acquires a reputation at a given point in time--an amalgam of inherited tradition, untested by an actual knowledge of the texts, a mixture of rumor and ignorance--Peele has been set down as a clumsy, uninventive dramatist unworthy to lace up Shakespeare's sandals, let alone jointly plot and write a play with him.

An especially revealing instance of the tendency to disqualify Peele out of hand, among even experienced scholars of English Renaissance drama, was provided by Ralph Berry, in reviewing Shakespeare Co-Author. (13) Berry conceded that the book had "set forth compelling arguments from many sources for the existence of various hands in 'Shakespeare'" (684), and accepted without demur the case made for Middleton, Wilkins, and Fletcher as coauthors. But although he conceded that "a non-Shakespearian hand is discernible in the early stages" of Titus Andronicus--in fact, the first three scenes, totaling 656 lines, and also act 4, scene 1, a further 129 lines--Berry claimed that "here, and throughout the rest of the play, a dominant mind commands the action" (685). In other words, only one dramatist could have planned the whole. Of course, this cannot be disproved, but reason suggests that the hundreds of coauthored plays that reached the stage between 1576 and 1642 must have been the result of joint planning in advance, during the writing, and perhaps even after delivery of the manuscript. Without a generally agreed plan, dramatists could hardly set to work. Having skimmed over this issue, Berry then summarized the action of the opening scene, with its dispute between the two brothers Saturninus and Bassanius over who is to become consul of Rome, suggesting that this is the same "'hostile brother' motif that opens As You Like It and is the groundplot of The Comedy of Errors." Not reflecting that there must be hundreds of literary works based on conflicts between brothers, from Cain and Abel onward, Berry asserted that the rest of the play has an "organic logic" deriving from this opening scene, and with the help of a rhetorical question, a device much favored by Shakespeare conservators, he reached his conclusion: "Is it seriously concluded that George and Will got together to impose this hard, driving logic upon the raw material?" Readers will not be surprised by his answer:

   I think not. Given that there are two metrical strata, Peele looks
   to have drafted some scenes, together perhaps with a "treatment,"
   which Shakespeare took over and made into a proper play of his own.
   That is what Heminge and Condell thought. Shakespeare absorbed
   Peele into his own vision: even the repetitious and limited
   diction, a feature of Peele's style, is perfectly suited to the
   unvaried insistences of the main characters. Repetition signifies
   enclosure within narrow mental boundaries, and that suits the
   "super-objective" of this drama. To elevate Peele to "co-author" is
   unearned promotion. (685)

A more attentive reading of Titus Andronicus would reject Berry's claim that the play's "organic logic" springs from the opening scene. Although it does generate much of the conflict, this does not mean that only one dramatist planned it. Moreover, a wholly unexpected source of destruction emerges in the character of Aaron, sketched by Peele but brought into full potential by Shakespeare in act 2, scene 3 and following.

However, the significant point for us is Berry's condescending attitude toward Peele, who may have "drafted some scenes, together perhaps with a 'treatment' "--presumably a plot outline or scenario is meant--but had to wait until Shakespeare came along to make it into "a proper play." This patronizing attitude extends to Peele's "repetitious and limited diction," which is indeed a feature of his style, but Professor Berry errs in stating that Shakespeare "absorbed" it as somehow suitable to the "narrow mental boundaries" of this play. He did not; indeed, it is precisely the many differences between Peele's style and Shakespeare's that allow us to separate the play so clearly into two different strata. Earlier Berry had even objected to the term "collaboration," which for him "implies some kind of negotiation between authors, an active mutuality" (685), a mutuality that he categorically refused to grant Peele: "Either Peele drafted an entire play, and Shakespeare threw out nearly all of it while revising what was left, or Peele handed over a mere torso for Shakespeare to complete. In each case Shakespeare is the incontestable master. This is not a meeting of minds.... Titus Andronicus strikes me as a rewrite job, and Shakespeare's role that of play-doctor. He should get the award" (686). It is symptomatic of the unhealthy ascendancy that Shakespeare enjoys even among professional scholars of Elizabethan drama that Ralph Berry never bothered to form a firsthand knowledge of Peele's career. The fact is that Peele had a far wider experience of theater than any other dramatist working in London in 1593-94, the likely date of Titus Andronicus, and that several elements in the play's dramaturgy reveal his hand. (14)

Turning to the second of my three test cases, 1 Henry VI, a similar pattern can be seen. Doubts about the play's authenticity were first expressed by Malone in 1780, and continued to be heard over the next two centuries. Many readers noticed the great variations in style throughout the play, with act 1 being regularly singled out as un-Shakespearean, together with clumsy or nonexistent joins between the various plot levels, and at least two scenes surviving alongside those they were apparently designed to displace (compare 2.4 with 2.5, 4.5 with 4.6). It was generally agreed that 2.4, the "plucking of the roses" scene, was by Shakespeare, together with several scenes in act 4 dealing with the last stand of the English hero Talbot and his son John. As a candidate for the authorship of act 1, Thomas Nashe was the strongest of those considered by H. C. Hart in 1909, and a series of largely independent studies--by Archibald Stalker in 1935, John Dover Wilson in 1952, Marco Mincoff in 1965 and 1976, Gary Taylor in 1995, and Paul Vincent in 2002--confirmed Nashe's authorship of act 1. (15) The Nashe ascription rests on several observable and quantifiable stylistic characteristics that clearly differentiate him from Shakespeare: a liking for many short sentences and brief questions, often two within a line, resulting in an oddly "staccato" utterance; and the high use of syntactical inversions, especially of subject and object, all elements that are also found in Nashe's one play, Summer's Last Will and Testament. Further, a considerable number of verbal parallels have been identified between act 1 of 1 Henry VI, and Nashe's acknowledged works, sustained parallels of both words and thoughts, several deriving from literary works often used by Nashe but never by Shakespeare.

Most of this evidence was available to the four most recent editors of 1 Henry VI: Norman Sanders for his New Penguin edition (1981), Michael Hattaway for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1990), Edward Burns for the 3rd Arden (2000), and Michael Taylor for the Oxford World's Classics series (2003). Hattaway rightly criticized A. S. Cairncross (2nd Arden edition, 1962) for explaining away the play's many variations in style and incongruences in plot and characterization in terms of scribal error and interference by the company's book-holder. However, resolved to reject all evidence of coauthorship, Hattaway in turn attributed the many inconsistencies and "vexing problems" of the text to another convenient agent of blame, "compositorial interference" (187-95). As for the "stylistic faults" that had provoked Cairncross's orgy of emendation, Hattaway flatly denied that "quality of writing can be used ... as a test for authorship," and he dismissed "earlier critics" (such as Mincoff) for having "generally worked impressionistically," using "various ad hoc stylistic methods." Done with those, Hattaway turned to Taylor's (as yet unpublished) essay, "based on vocabulary, spelling, and metrical tests, as well as on scene divisions, and orthographical and linguistic features" (42). Nobody could call Taylor's work "impressionistic," but Hattaway avoided discussing it by lumping it together with "stylistic" evidence: "I do not believe that stylistic analysis is sufficient to prove or disprove authorship, as it is likely that at an early stage in his career Shakespeare was moving freely between the various verse registers that were being deployed in the plays in which he was probably acting" (42-43). That is a glib attempt to deflect the issue, since it fails to address either the evidence of a high concentration of feminine endings in 2.4 and 4.2-4.5, characteristic of Shakespeare, or the evidence of an unusual number of syntactical inversions in act 1, characteristic of Nashe. Both elements are deeply rooted in the play's language, transcending any supposed effect caused by an actor-writer moving between various verse registers of the plays staged in the 1580s and early '90s. Hattaway closed his discussion with a defiant rhetorical question: "And even if it could be proved that the play was in whole or in part not by Shakespeare, should that affect the way in which we read or direct it?" (43). To use a rhetorical question is to assume that the answer to it is self-evident. But scholars from many disciplines would object that to ask who was responsible for the Missa Solemnis, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or King Lear, is a legitimate and pertinent question. The link between creator(s) and creation cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.

Michael Hattaway's position on the possibility of coauthorship might be defined as "nescience." That of Edward Burns can only be described as confused. Commenting on his two predecessors as Arden editors, Burns judged that Cairncross "presents powerfully an argument for a single author, Shakespeare" (74), and dismissed the arguments for coauthorship made by H. C. Hart (1909), "based on parallels of verbal detail," as "unconvincing, and its motives unsympathetic." (What can be "unsympathetic" about trying to establish the authorship of a text?) However, despite having sided with Cairncross, Burns then decided that Hart's case for coauthorship "may intuit" a "more plausible process of writing and devising" than that offered by those who conceive of Shakespeare having projected "an epic cycle" of three interlinked plays (74-75). Indeed, Burns did more than "intuit" coauthorship, for he cited Gary Taylor's 1995 article and, despite the reservations he had expressed a page earlier, now declared himself "in broad agreement with [Taylor's] conclusion that the major identifiable contributors to the play are Shakespeare and Nashe, that Nashe is largely responsible for the first act, Shakespeare for the fourth [sic] and parts of the second, and that several other writers, now impossible to name, were also involved" (75). Having reached this point the reader versed in authorship studies may breathe a sigh of relief, thinking "at last we find an editor willing to concede that the many inconsistencies and incongruences in this play point to coauthorship." But within a few pages Burns veered back to nescience: "in the absence of external evidence, no certain division of authorship is ever attainable. I do not believe that we can ever finally know who wrote this or indeed many other plays of the period, nor do I believe that putting a name (or names) to it should determine our sense of the quality and nature of the text" (82; my italics). Shakespeare conservators often use this strategy, denying the possibility of certainty and finality--which sensible proponents of attribution studies would never make--while misdescribing the attributional scholar's enterprise. No serious scholar first ascribes an author's name to a text, as Burns later alleges ("a prior ascription would have to be made on some other basis" than empirical evidence), and then allows that to determine his or her judgment on the quality of a text, let alone its "nature" (whatever that might mean). Attribution scholars work the other way around, beginning from the perception of incongruences in the language of a text, its use of sources, characterization, and dramaturgy, and then seeking to identify the authors concerned. As far as the editors of 1 Henry VI are concerned, we have been wasting our time.

My third test case is Pericles, which appeared in a quarto text (1609) but was not included in the 1623 Folio. Doubts about its authorship were expressed in the first modern edition, by Nicholas Rowe (1709), and eighteenth-century commentators lined up either to denounce its authenticity (Pope, Whalley, Steevens), or accept it as partly Shakespearean (Theobald, Farmer, Malone). In 1868 the distinguished German scholar Nicholas Delius displayed great acuity in assigning the first two acts to George Wilkins, the last three to Shakespeare. Delius's authorship division was confirmed over the next century and a half by a gallery of scholars working in Shakespearean authorship studies: F. G. Fleay, Robert Boyle, H. Dugdale Sykes, C. A. Langworthy, Ants Oras, Marina Tarlinskaja, Kenneth Muir, Ernst Honigmann, David J. Lake, M. W. A. Smith, and MacDonald Jackson. My survey of this satisfying agreement between scholars over more than a century, using several different and independent tests, appeared in 2002. (16) The following year MacDonald Jackson published a definitive study of the Wilkins-Shakespeare collaboration, an exemplary study in every way. (17) Although one modern edition (the New Cambridge Shakespeare by Anthony Hammond and Doreen Del Vecchio, 1998) dismissed any notion of coauthorship, Wilkins's contribution can be safely described as settled, for the majority of Shakespeareans.

But not all Shakespeare critics bother to keep up with scholarship. A recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement published a long essay by Barbara Everett, entitled "By the rough seas reft: How the 'badness' of the Pericles Quarto may be of Shakespeare's making.' (18) Professor Everett is a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, less than a mile away from Oxford University Press, but she seems blissfully ignorant of the two books it had recently published containing abundant evidence of the coauthor's identity. Referring only to the New Penguin edition by Philip Edwards (1976), which espoused the now discredited theory that the many incoherences in the play can be put down to compositorial incompetence, Everett dismisses "textual questions" as secondary, declaring that sometimes "it is necessary to suppose that the textual is subordinate to the literary. We decide first what we are dealing with, and then discuss how the compositor printed it" (14). Writing de haut en bas, Everett reports the widespread feeling that the play "appears so badly written as for the most part not to be trusted to be by Shakespeare," but dismisses the "rationalistic explanations" offered by "collaborationist scholars." Although acknowledging that Pericles contains "difficulties and bewilderments that may be schematized into collaboration," she categorically rejects any such explanation: "The collaborative case has grave flaws. No known Jacobean playwright writes badly enough to be the author of Pericles, and nothing suggests why the age's most successful dramatist should have chosen, or agreed to collaborate with a writer so helplessly incapable" (13; my emphases). The passages I have italicized are breathtaking in their combination of authoritative-sounding utterance and actual ignorance. If Everett had shown any knowledge of the sixty or so known dramatists working in Jacobean London, or even read the other work of Wilkins, she might have been qualified to make such a pronouncement. Her innocence in other matters relating to authorship attribution is shown by her reaction to a passage in Wilkins's act 1 in which the eponymous hero describes himself as "A Gentleman of Tyre, my name Pericles." Everett comments: "There is something too good for any collaborator in the entire lack of a main verb here, of a syntax, and really of a meaning." That overstatement is unaware that in 1780 George Steevens noted the large number of ellipses found in the play, and that in 1880 Robert Boyle identified this as a recurrent feature of Wilkins's style. (19)

As we can see, Everett oscillates between seeing the verse of Pericles as being too badly written for any known collaborator, or being too well written for anyone else but Shakespeare. She finally comes down on the side of badness, but of badness with a difference: "Pericles is often bad, and bad in a special way: it is archaic" (14). Conservators of the canon, resolutely rejecting the notion that the Bard needed help, have--"always already," as one used to say--another explanation for the un-Shakespearean quality of a play. Everett's commonplace observation on the "archaic" nature of the verse given to the Chorus figure Gower (whose version of the story in Confessio Amantis provided the main source) suddenly takes on an explanatory function. Everett suggests that "the badness of Pericles may be seen ... as an ironic artefact: an antique or antic badness, invented by the author and fit for a play about love, a 'Chronicle of wasted time'" (14). This now becomes an interpretative key that explains everything "bad" about Pericles, namely, that

   the effect of badness comes from Shakespeare teaching himself to
   write like a botched and patchworked old script: to carefully
   stumble, to punctiliously ruin the flow of his paragraphs with
   fatally-placed internal couplets, conscientiously flattening his
   emergent rich late medium into a grey fustian rhythmically and
   verbally forty years out of date. I suspect that in the second
   half, where the verse gets better, it was Shakespeare, not his
   printers, who for pure aesthetic pleasure and consistency wrote
   most of it down as prose. (15)

That final sentence, with its picture of Shakespeare deliberately mangling his verse into prose "for pure aesthetic pleasure and consistency," is one of the most ludicrous suggestions ever made by an experienced Shakespeare commentator. Everett's idea that Shakespeare could deliberately write badly, so as to give the impression of an "antique badness," is reminiscent of the arguments of nineteenth-century scholars trying to preserve biblical chronology, who argued that God had deliberately created fossils so as to deceive later scientists into thinking that the earth seemed older than it was. But why should God have done this? And what sense does it make to think of Shakespeare "conscientiously flattening his emergent rich late medium into a grey fustian rhythmically and verbally forty years out of date"? Both arguments seem desperate attempts to cling to a paradigm that has been comprehensively displaced.

To revert to my starting point, it seems evident to me that those who deny the very idea of Shakespeare as a coauthor have opted out of the process by which knowledge grows. They have closed their minds, preferring to rest in a state of "securitie," in Jonson's terms, that "common Moath" that "eats on wits, and Arts." In Bacon's diagnosis, by failing to "descend into" themselves and examine their preconceptions, they accept a condition in which the mind becomes "fixed or settled in [its] defects," never amending its faults. When they enter the republic of letters as authors and book reviewers, they act as remoras to "stay and slug" the ship of learning's progress. A forum such as this provides the valuable opportunity to draw attention to these "hinderances," and to encourage others to open their minds to the fact that Shakespeare sometimes got a play written for his company with the help of a fellow dramatist. Surely no shame attaches either to his having done that, or to our recognizing it.

Notes

(1.) "An Ode To Himself," in The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. W. B. Hunter Jr. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1963), 159. The editor notes that several mss. contain the word "oft," which completes the meter.

(2.) Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 165, with annotation at 607.

(3.) See The Oxford Francis Bacon XI: The Instauratio Magna Part II, Novum organum and Associated Texts, ed. Graham Rees with Maria Wakely (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), facing xxxii.

(4.) For a preliminary consideration of Foucault's misinterpretation, parroted by so many uncritical modern followers, see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), appendix 2, "Abolishing the Author? Theory versus History," 506-41.

(5.) See Brian Vickers, "Incomplete Shakespeare: Denying Co-Authorship in 1 Henry VI," Shakespeare Quarterly 58 (2007): 311-52, at 312-14.

(6.) See Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and "Collaborative Playwriting: The Chettle, Dekker, Heywood Syndicate," Theatre Research International 14 (1981): 13-23.

(7.) See G. E. Bentley Jr., The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time (1971; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 18-21.

(8.) Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author, 137-500. Line counts are based on The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

(9.) See Brian Vickers, "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

(10.) A. H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere (Worcester, MA, 1901; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1966), 35.

(11.) M. Mincoff, "The Authorship of The Two Noble Kinsmen," English Studies 33 (1952): 97.

(12.) Shakespeare, Co-Author, 148-243. The editions I examined are the Oxford one-volume edition by E. M. Waith (1984), the New Cambridge text by Alan Hughes (1994), and the Arden 3 by Jonathan Bate (1995).

(13.) Review of English Studies n.s. 54 (2003): 648-46.

(14.) See Shakespeare, Co-Author, 138-41.

(15.) See Vickers, "Incomplete Shakespeare," 328-46.

(16.) Shakespeare, Co-Author, 291-332.

(17.) Jackson, Defining Shakespeare: Pericles as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

(18.) Times Literary Supplement, August 11, 2006, 13-16.

(19.) Shakespeare, Co-Author, 292, 297.