Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, eds. The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion.

Abstract

This volume in The New Oxford Shakespeare series is like a cross between the 1987 Textual Companion and an authorship roundup, such as Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002) or Hugh Craig and Arthur F. Kinney’s Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship (2009). While its core remains the “Canon and Chronology” essay, here updated by Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane, most of its pages are devoted to original essays on attribution, starting with eight pieces on methodology by six different scholars, and an additional sixteen case studies by almost that many individuals. Unlike its predecessor, then, this Companion is less an owner’s manual for the complete New Oxford set than it is a series of lab results concerning a pressing set of problems: Arden of Faversham, 3 Henry VI, the Additional Passages to the 1602 Spanish Tragedy, the fly-killing scene in Titus Andronicus, the Mucedorus additions, Middleton’s contributions to All’s Well That Ends Well, and the Shakespearean remnants in Double Falsehood. Taylor himself revisits “Shall I Die?,” if only to recuse himself as a biased witness.