The New Oxford Shakespeare, vol 4: Authorship Companion
- Submitting institution
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The University of Kent
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 8588
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780199591169
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The Authorship Companion constitutes volume four of The New Oxford Shakespeare edition. Loughnane co-authored the book-length chapter ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’ (105,000 words), which synthesises, analyses, and critiques all documentary evidence and studies connected to the dating and authorship of all 60+ works attributed and/or misattributed to Shakespeare between 1590 and 2017. Research on this chapter took four years. Loughnane also single-authored the two chapters about the authorship of All’s Well that Ends Well (33,500 words) which identify Middleton as adapter of the play for the first time. Research for these two chapters took three years.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Authorship Companion is the fourth volume of The New Oxford Shakespeare (and the last to have appeared to date – a fifth volume is in preparation). Loughnane authored or co-authored three chapters in the Companion, amounting to c. 140,000 words in total. These three chapters are:
1) Chapter 17 (pp. 278-302), ‘Thomas Middleton and All’s Well that Ends Well? Part One’ (single-authored)
2) Chapter 19 (pp. 307-320), ‘Thomas Middleton and All’s Well that Ends Well? Part Two’ (single-authored)
3) Chapter 25 (pp. 417-603), ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’ (co-authored)
Loughnane’s two-part study of All’s Well That Ends Well identifies the hand of Middleton as adapter of the play for the first time. He identified an unusual passage in Act 4, scene 3, which contains a cluster of linguistic markers favoured by Middleton. He undertook a full lexical analysis of this scene, demonstrating through unique rare phrase and collocation usage that this clustering was indicative of Middleton’s authorship.
In ‘The Canon and Chronology’, Loughnane and his co-author synthesise and analyse all documentary evidence, and studies thereof, connected to the dating and authorship of all the 60+ works attributed and/or misattributed to Shakespeare between 1590 and 2017. Based on all the available internal and external evidence, and on stylometrical analysis, several works (or parts of works) are here attributed to Shakespeare for the first time: Arden of Faversham, Edward III, and Additions to The Spanish Tragedy; others are identified as co-authored for the first time: 1-3 Henry VI, All’s Well that Ends Well. The study also changes the dating and order of many of the plays in the Shakespeare canon, including pushing back his earliest preserved work to c. 1588.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
