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All That Is Shakespeare Melts into Air The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion. Edited by Gary Taylor & Gabriel Egan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. $168.84 USD.
The Shakespeare deniers are at it again. Here is yet another book filled with socalled "evidence" hidden in the texts - which only the deniers can decode - to support their conspiracy theory that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. It's the old hoary argument that a commoner from Stratford-Upon-Avon could not have possibly written the greatest works in the English language.
By himself, at any rate.
Yes, the argument in The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion - a supplementary volume to Oxford University Press' prestigious new edition of the Shakespeare plays - is that Shakespeare wrote with some eleven collaborators and co-authors. These would include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Anonymous on seventeen of the dramas; the editors also suggest we need to expand the size of the canon from 37 to 44 plays, only two-thirds of which are entirely by Shakespeare. Yet, as we shall see, the theories and methods used to reach these conclusions are as problematic as the scholarship's all but single-minded focus on cryptic analysis at the level of single words and even syllables, in service of a group authorship theory. The rhetorical conceit in the opening paragraph above is intended to be more than tongue-in cheek; instead, it underscores the extent to which the Shakespeare establishment has started to resemble the nineteenth century Baconians it professes to abhor.
The premise behind these latest claims of collaboration is the idea that the author of the canon was a "working dramatist" (or "artisan") who initially made his mark in the London theatre world as a "fixer up" of other men's plays, when he wasn't actively plagiarizing them. In the words of co-editor Gary Taylor of Florida State University, "Shakespeare made an honest living stealing other men's work" (21). The idea of a newcomer fixing up plays of working dramatists is a strange one, and there is almost no external evidence to corroborate it.
All of which begs the question why OUP would even bother calling this mammoth four-volume work the New Oxford Shakespeare, when New Oxford Elizabethan and Jacobean Artisans might be more apropos....