How Hot is Shakespeare Still?

Answer: very. One of the jobs of the editor is to look at all the works attributed to Shakespeare and decide what to include and what to exclude - the certain and uncertain attributions. We're convinced that "Shall I die? shall I fly?", which the Oxford edition made such a song and dance about, and "A Funeral Elegy", which the Norton edition and Second Riverside edition both attributed to Shakespeare, are not by him. The case for John Ford as the author of the latter is irrefutable. Brian Vickers also persuaded us that "A Lover's Complaint" is not by Shakespeare - though we've put it on the website so you can make up your own mind. The one "new" poem -- poem not firmly attributed in any previous edition, not modernised in spelling and placed with the other poems -- in which we have faith is "To the Queen by the Players". Unusually, this has both internal and external evidence for attribution. Externally, it can be tied with precision to the performane given by Shakespeare's acting company before the queen at Richmond Palace on 20 Feb 1599. Internally, its metre, grammar and vocabulary are all deeply Shakespearean (note especially the genitive-without-an-apostrophe, "their father queen", and compare "my father house" in Antony and Cleo). So we're the first edition to give it true canonical staus (Oxford ignores it, Riverside and Norton bung it in the back in old spelling with assorted background documents). It was Jim Shapiro's book 1599 that made me think it was worth investigating the attribution in detail. We arranged for it to be read on the "Today" programme tomorrow morning by RSC actor Geoffrey Streatfeild, the conceit being that it is Queen Elizabeth II's birthday and here is a little-known poem by Shakespeare in honour of Queen Elizabeth I. But the result of announcing the upcoming broadcast was that a single journalist got the wrong end of the stick and published on the newswire that we'd found a hitherto unknown Shakespeare poem. The real story is less dramatic, thogh still a story: on considered reflection we have upgraded a poem discovered some thirty years ago from dubia to canonical status. What is scary is how within minutes of the exaggerated story being put onto the wire, I had tabloid journalists from several national papers on the phone. But for some rapid news management, a false story would have been flashed around the world. I hope the story will now be reported modestly and accurately, but the way that it nearly went big without good cause shows how Shakespeare's cultural capital is close to an all-time high. When my late-lamented friend Jeremy Maule discovered a new Ford poem some years ago, there was no fuss whatseover ... All this reinforces the point I made in the Dr Who and Love's Labour's Won posting that if LLW were ever found, it would be the biggest cultural news story since, since I don't know what -- perhaps since the story that the Hitler diaries would have been, had they proved authentic and not forged. 

Comments

[jonathan hope]

Hi Jonathan - very much enjoyed your debate with Brian Vickers on Radio 4 the other Saturday.

I've just posted this piece of pedantry on the Shaksper list. Hope you don't feel I'm being unfair:

In his blog on the 'new' poem (http://palgrave.typepad.com/rsc/), Jonathan Bate writes

>Internally, its metre, grammar and vocabulary are all deeply
>Shakespearean (note especially the genitive-without-an-apostrophe, "their
>father queen", and compare "my father house" in Antony and Cleo).

ok, this is a blog not a scholarly article, but I read the comment as implying pretty strongly that the presence of 'genitive-without-an-apostrophe' in a text can be taken as positive evidence for Shakespearean authorship.

These zero genitives are derived from Old English, and they are a feature of English as a whole in the Early Modern period, not just Shakespeare's idiolect. They are Shakespearean in the sense that they occur in Shakespeare's language; but not in the sense that they distinguish it from the language of other writers in the period.

(One of the arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of The Funeral Elegy rested on a similar claim that relative 'who' with a non-human antecedent was 'Shakespearean' in the diagnostic sense of 'indicates the presence of Shakespeare', rather than 'Shakespearean' in the general sense of 'is one of the features of Early Modern English'.)

While I'm on, I might as well get *really* pedantic and point out that Bate's nonce term for this type of genitive, 'genitive-without-an-apostrophe', is misleading, since what we are really dealing with here (as the linguistic term 'zero genitive' implies) is a genitive which is entirely unmarked (i.e. neither apostrophe nor 's' appear).

The Folio almost never uses an apostrophe for genitive constructions, even where the 's' is present (e.g. 'for Fames sake' LLL 4.1.32) so the term doesn't distinguish between zero and non-zero forms.

Jonathan Hope
Strathclyde University, Glasgow

[Jonathan Bate]

Thanks Jonathan - very helpful correction. I kind of agree with Vickers that the poem is too short to feel secure on internal stylistic evidence. But the evidence of provenance and occasion is so strong --- and when we had it read on the stage of the Courtyard theatre on Sunday, all doubt fell away. The *voice* was there.

We're about to embark on a new volume of apocrypha, so we may be calling on you over questions of attribution.

Where do you stand on the Lover's Complaint? Can't now remember if it's mentioned in your book.

best wishes
JB