Schedule
Tuesday 22 April 2014, 15h30-17h30.
Room: V106A.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Paola Pugliatti, University of Florence (Italy) and William Leahy, Brunel University London (UK)
Participants
- Christy Desmet, University of Georgia (USA)
If the Style is the Man, Who Wrote Hamlet Q1? - Jeffrey Kahan, University of La Verne (USA)
“I tell you what mine author says”: A Brief History of Stylometrics - William Lehay, Brunel University, London (UK)
Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare) - John V. Nance, Florida State University (USA)
Defining Co-authorship in Shakespeare’s Early Canon - Donatella Pallotti, University of Florence (Italy)
Issues of (Collaborative) Authorship in Shakespeare’s Poems - Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University (USA)
‘Fabricated Lives’: Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms - Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
Faking It: Imitating Shakespeare in Double Falsehood and Cardenio
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Christy Desmet, University of Georgia (USA)
If the Style is the Man, Who Wrote Hamlet Q1?
Hamlet offers a good a test case for attribution studies because even the editorial patchwork that created the conflated text of modern editions has a recognizable rhetorical style. George Wright has analyzed the style of Hamlet‘s conflated text through the trope of hendiadys. This paper examines Hamlet Q1 through the trope of brachylogia and Hermogenes’ “rhetoric of speed.” I consider early modern habits of composition, imitation, listening, and writing – the processes by which texts interacted – to consider how a text like Hamlet Q1, which may be the product of multiple processes and hands, nevertheless might evince a stylistic ethos.
2. Jeffrey Kahan, University of La Verne (USA)
“I tell you what mine author says”: A Brief History of Stylometrics
It’s been over 230 years since William Richardson first dreamed of identifying Shakespeare scientifically. Since then, we’ve had countless counters, new methods, and endless errors. Cardenio and other hitherto Apocryphal plays may be in part or in full by Shakespeare, but any reliance on mathematics concerning such questions should be deeply sounded. This paper will trace the history of stylometrics and their uneven results from 1774 to the present. The history reveals that many of the same issues crop up again and again.
3. William Lehay, Brunel University, London (UK)
Shakespearean Biography: Too Much Information (but not about Shakespeare)
In his article ‘What Was He Really Like?’, Stanley Wells imagines Shakespeare’s youth: “As adolescence came on he began to experience erections and to feel desire. He masturbated and, earlier than most of his contemporaries, copulated.” This paper argues that the article by Wells contains many of the problems which biographers have to negotiate, not least the problem of biography becoming autobiography. This is a pervasive trend in Shakespeare biography and can be attributed to the principles which delineate this sub-genre. These principles constrain the biographer and operate in a way that is unique to this form of biography.
4. John V. Nance, Florida State University (USA)
Defining Co-authorship in Shakespeare’s Early Canon
Identifying collaborators in Shakespeare’s plays has not diminished the status of the canon (or of Shakespeare), it has instead enriched our understanding of the productive conditions in the early modern theatre and the types of relationships that were generated by it. This essay extends current debates on the status of the co-author in attribution studies to demonstrate new evidence of collaboration in Shakespeare’s early plays (dramatic works to 1596). By limiting this analysis in terms of Shakespeare’s early period, I will extend current efforts to reassess the beginning of Shakespeare’s career, and provide an original approach for evaluating authorial evidence.
5. Donatella Pallotti, University of Florence (Italy)
Issues of (Collaborative) Authorship in Shakespeare’s Poems
Shakespeare’s poems and those attributed to him were transmitted across a range of texts in early modern England; the forms of these texts, their modalities and structures, inevitably affected the reading of the poems themselves. Therefore the role stationers, printers, compilers and their editorial apparatuses had in the construction of the meaning of Shakespeare’s poems and of Shakespeare’s authorial figure cannot be overlooked. My paper investigates how Shakespeare’s poems were presented to the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reading public, and the part played by the forms of their presentation in the construction of the early modern canon of Shakespeare’s works.
6. Robert Sawyer, East Tennessee State University (USA)
‘Fabricated Lives’: Shakespearean Collaboration in Fictional Forms
My essay examines fictionalized accounts of the collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on those which portray Christopher Marlowe as occasionally Shakespeare’s co-author. Beginning with two novels by Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-life (1964), and A Dead Man in Deptford (1994), I then look at Peter Whelan’s play, The School of Night, before concluding with the film Shakespeare in Love (1999). By looking at these popularized renditions of collaboration and biography, I show that they too contribute to the “building up of [a] personality structure.”
7. Gary Taylor, Florida State University (USA)
Faking It: Imitating Shakespeare in Double Falsehood and Cardenio
The Creation and Recreation of Cardenio (2013) demonstrates that Double Falsehood cannot be a forgery, partly by showing that Theobald’s best attempts to imitate Shakespeare can be clearly differentiated, stylistically and statistically, from comparable passages in DF. This paper extends that analysis, by comparing Theobald’s attempts to imitate Shakespeare with the efforts of Stephen Greenblatt, Charles Mee, and Gregory Doran to imitate Shakespeare in their reconstructions of the lost Cardenio. It also discusses ambiguous cases in Double Falsehood, where existing attribution techniques cannot distinguish between Theobald and Shakespeare.