'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship and John Ford's Funerall Elegye

by Brian Vickers

Brian Vickers addresses the fundamental issues of what Shakespeare actually wrote, and how this is determined. In recent years Shakespeare's authorship has been claimed for two poems, the lyric "Shall I die?" and A Funerall Elegye. These attributions have been accepted into certain major editions of Shakespeare's works. Through a new examination of the evidence, Professor Vickers shows that neither poem has the stylistic and imaginative qualities we associate with Shakespeare. He identifies the poet and dramatist John Ford as the actual author of the Elegye.

598 pages, Hardcover

First published September 18, 1998

Reviews

[Michael P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several years ago an old crappy poem was attributed to Shakespeare. The evidence for the attribution was half-assed, at best, but the media picked up on it so the usual process of scholarly debate and deliberation was circumvented and the poem went into at least one "Complete Shakespeare" edition. Several people wrote articles refuting the evidence for inclusion or showing that method of investigation was deeply flawed. Two scholars working at the same time gutted the case for Shakespeare's authorship. Gilles D. Monsarrat much briefer essay was published first and Sir Brian Vickers was published later but is more complete.

This book begins with reviewing the previous scholarship, both for the poem and against it being Shakespeare's, and then adds a ton of new evidence against. It was a bit of old news by the time this book was published because the original attributor had withdrawn his attribution on the basis of Monsarrat's essay, but Vickers’s book is still a clinic on how to do attribution studies correctly. Ah, if only others would study it before publishing their fantasies attributing non-Shakespearean works to Shakespeare.