Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays

This major new study asks the question, "how much do we know about Shakespeare's collaborations with other dramatists?", and sets out to provide a detailed evaluation of the claims made for Shakespeare's co-authorship of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Through an examination of the processes of collaboration and the methods used in authorship studies since the early nineteenth century, Brian Vickers identifies a coherent tradition in attribution work on Shakespeare.

Review :
"Brian Vickers...has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare. Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate."--The New York Times "[A] magisterial survey of (almost) everything written on the subject of Shakespearean collaboration in the past 150 years."--Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement "Rewarding...sharp glimpses of what it was like to write for the stage in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Vickers gives an indelible impression of the sheer hunger for plays of London's theatre companies from the 1590s."--John Mullan, The Guardian "A brilliant and irrefutable case for coauthorship defined in strictly empirical terms.... A work of meticulous and painstaking scholarship.... Vickers paints a vivid picture of the material conditions of play-scripting, of the demand and pace as well as the method by which texts for performance were produced."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "[Vickers] makes his case, and it will be an obdurate reader indeed who is not persuaded.... The book is as entertaining as it is informative.... It is exemplary in its logic, historical grounding, and inclusiveness, and is certain to be the definitive book on its subject for the foreseeable future."--Renaissance Quarterly "It is potentially the most influential and certainly the most scholarly book on the constitution of Shakespeare's canon since Sir E. K.Chamber's The Disintegration of Shakespeare (1924)."--Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America "Vickers provides a marvelous review of standard Elizabethan stage practices, particularly the considerable degree of collaborative work, a practice that would persist in theater into the Caroline era. Equally interesting is his review of another potentially dry subject, the history of critical approaches to the assignation of authorship employed by literary critics for the last few centuries.... The intelligence and marvelous erudition of this fine book are complemented by a fine and clear prose style. Four centuries of interesting ideas are subsumed under this heading. Scholarly fussiness, argumentation, and technical preoccupation could have rendered such a book less engaging. But such is fortunately not the case with this exceptionally scholarly work. This rich monograph is a pleasure to read and ponder, from beginning to end."--Virginia Quarterly Review