Henry VIII, All is True?

Abstract

WRITING about All is True; or, Henry VIII, Gary Taylor and Rory Loughnane state, ‘In the New Oxford Shakespeare we identify Shakespeare as sole author of 1.1, 1.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.2.1–204, and 5.1; Fletcher is wholly or primarily responsible for the remainder, and is therefore the dominant author, as he is again in Two Noble Kinsmen.’1 As a member of the New Oxford’s Attribution Advisory Board, MacDonald P. Jackson was influential in confirming the attributions to Shakespeare and Fletcher made by James Spedding in 1850.2 In his note of 2013, Jackson cites the percentages of feminine endings in the nine disputed passages which I reversed (Fletcher to Shakespeare and Shakespeare to Fletcher) and showed that they accord more closely with Spedding’s findings.3 ... Jackson also demonstrates that phrases of 2–6 words and 12 words demarcated by punctuation in the Arden 2 edition of the play favour Spedding’s attribution of the nine disputed passages. Rather than embark on a detailed critique of Jackson’s case, I would observe that it is based on univariate descriptive statistics gathered from 1874 (Furnivall) to 1997 (Jackson)—the most recent published six years earlier than my foundational chart for Henry VIII, incorporating multivariate inferential statistics.4