Abstract:
At various points between 1709 and 1821, Shakespeare’s scholarly editors called
into question the authenticity - either in whole or in part - of at least seventeen of the
plays attributed to him in the First Folio. Enabled largely by Alexander Pope’s attack, in
his 1723–25 edition of Shakespeare, on the Folio’s compilers, eighteenth-century textual
critics constructed a canon based upon their own critical senses, rather than the ‘authority
of copies’. They also discussed the genuineness of works that had been excluded from
the 1623 Folio - Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, the Sonnets, and the
poems published in The Passionate Pilgrim. Although these debates had little effect on
the contents of the variorum edition - by 1821, only Pericles, the Sonnets, and the
narrative poems had been added to the canonarguments and counter-arguments about
the authenticity of Shakespeare’s works continued to abound in the notes. These would,
in turn, influence the opinions of new generations of critics throughout the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.
In this thesis, I return to these earlier canonical judgements, not in order to
resuscitate them, but to ask what they reveal about eighteenth-century conceptions of
authorship, collaboration, and canonicity. Authorship in the period was not understood
solely in terms of ‘possessive individualism’. Neither were arguments over
Shakespeare’s style wholly contingent upon new discourses of literary property that had
developed in the wake of copyright law. Instead, I argue, the discourse of personal style
that editors applied to Shakespeare emerged out of a pre-existing classical-humanist
scholarly tradition. Other commentators adopted the newly fashionable language of
connoisseurship to determine where Shakespeare’s authorial presence lay. Another group
of scholars turned to contemporary stage manuscript practices to ascertain where, and
why, the words of other speakers might have entered his plays.
If, however, Shakespeare’s plays were only partly his, this implied that
Shakespeare had written alongside other writers. In the last part of my thesis, I examine
the efforts of eighteenth-century critics to understand the social contexts of early modern
dramatic authorship. Pope represented the theatre as an engine of social corruption, whose influence had debased Shakespeare’s standards of art and language. Other
eighteenth-century commentators, however, had a more positive understanding of the
social aspects of authorship. Drawing on contemporary discourses of friendship and
sociability, they imagined the Elizabethan stage as a friendship-based authorial credit
network, where playwrights collaborated with their contemporaries in the expectation of
a return on their own works. This language of sociable co-authorship in turn influenced
the way in which Shakespearean collaboration was understood. Conceptions of
Shakespearean authorship and canonicity in the period, I conclude, were - like
authorship in the Shakespeare canon itself - not singular, but manifold and multivocal.