A Lover's Complaint revisited

Shakespeare Studies

Volumn 32, Issue , 2004, Pages 267-294

  Jackson, MacD P ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60949399054     PISSN: 05829399     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (55)

1. Kenneth Muir, "'A Lover's Complaint': A Reconsideration," in Edward A. Bloom (ed.), Shakespeare 1564-1964 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1964), 154-66;
2. reprinted in Muir's Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies (London: Heinemann, 1973), 204-19;
3. MacD. P. Jackson, Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint": Its Date and Authenticity, University of Auckland Bulletin 72, English Series 13 (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1965).
4. Roger Warren, "'A Lover's Complaint,' 'All's Well,' and The Sonnets," Notes and Queries 215 (1970): 130-32;
5. A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, and E. A. Nicholson, "Shakespeare's Rare Words: 'Lover's Complaint,' Cymbeline, and Sonnets," Notes and Queries 232 (1987): 219-24.
6. Among the more significant editions are John Kerrigan (ed.), The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986);
7. Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.), Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Nelson, 1997);
8. John Rowe (ed.), The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
9. Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). I quote A Lover's Complaint from Burrow's edition.
10. Throughout this article other Shakespeare works are cited from The Complete Works, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, (gen. eds.) (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986).
11. In their editions, as in the previous note and also in Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Was the 1609 Shake-speare's Sonnets Really Unauthorized?" Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 151-71;
12. and John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and "Female Complaint": A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Editors Rowe and Burrow agree with Duncan-Jones and Kerrigan.
13. Jennifer Laws, "The Generic Complexities of A Lover's Complaint and its Relationship to the Sonnets in Shakespeare's 1609 Volume," AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 89 (1998): 79-97;
14. MacD. P. Jackson, "Aspects of Organisation in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Parergon 17 (1999): 109-34;
15. Ilona Bell, "'That which thou hast done': Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint," in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 455-74;
16. Katherine A. Craik, "Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession," Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 437-59.
17. For further arguments for the authenticity of the 1609 quarto's ordering of sonnets, see MacD. P. Jackson, "Shakespeare's Sonnets: Rhyme and Reason in the Dark Lady Series," Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 219-22;
18. "The Distribution of Pronouns in Shakespeare's Sonnets," AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 97 (2002): 22-38.
19. Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, "And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants," Computers and the Humanities 30 (1996): 191-245;
20. "Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 177-207.
21. For a history of, and verdict on, the controversy over A Funeral Elegy see Brian Vickers, 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's "Funerall Elegye" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
22. Elliott and Valenza, "Glass Slippers," 197.
23. See Elliott and Valenza's full tables in "And Then There Were None," especially 237 and 241. Sonnet 145, in tetrameters is rightly ignored, but (a matter of no practical consequence) the figures given overlook the fact that Sonnet 99 has fifteen lines and Sonnet 126 twelve.
24. For the dating of Shakespeare's Sonnets, see MacD. P. Jackson, "Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 59-75;
25. "Rhymes in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition," Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 213-19;
26. "Dating Shakespeare's Sonnets: Some Old Evidence Revisited," Notes and Queries 247 (2002): 237-41.
27. See Elliott and Valenza, "And Then There Were None," appendix 4 for A Lover's Complaint and appendix 5 for poems by other poets (237-40).
28. However, some figures are corrected in Elliott and Valenza, "The Professor Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Problems with the Foster 'Response,'" Computers and the Humanities, 32 (1999), 425-90; two more that in "And Then There Were None" are lower than that for A Lover's Complaint are raised: 46 for a sample from Aurora (1604) becomes 380 and 93 for a sample from a translation by Queen Elizabeth (1598) becomes 152. And the ratio for A Lover's Complaint rises from 111 to 120.
29. Marina Tarlinskaja's "The Verse of A Lover's Complaint: Not Shakespeare" is forthcoming in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship, ed. Brian Boyd (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses). The same volume contains a restatement by Elliott and Valenza of their case against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint. But even since these forthcoming articles were completed, "new enclitic and proclitic counts" by Tarlinskaja have altered Elliott and Valenza's "Shakespeare range minima from 43/365 to 27/265, both more favorable than the old ones to a Shakespeare ascription" for A Lover's Complaint. Its proclitic rate of 267 is within the new Shakespeare range, though its enclitic rate of 12 remains anomalous. (Quotation and new data from Elliott, private e-mail, 17 July 2003.)
30. For this "regression effect," whereby discriminators are apt to lose some of their original potency when applied to a new set of data, see Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), 200.
31. The tendency for rare words to link Shakespearean works most closely to others of approximately the same date has since been demonstrated decisively by Eliot Slater, The Problem of "The Reign of King Edward III": A Statistical Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
32. Alfred Hart, "Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen," Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 274-87;
33. Shakespeare and the Homilies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1934);
34. "Vocabularies of Shakespeare's Plays," Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 128-40;
35. For The Shadow of the Night I have used Phyllis Brooks Bartlett's edition of Chapman's Poems (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962).
36. The data collected by Elliott and Valenza are helping fill these gaps in our knowledge, but they tell us nothing about non-Shakespeare writers' rate of use of OED first citations, or about their use of rare words when these are differentiated according to meanings, rather than according to graphic presentation. But see Jürgen Schäfer, Documentation and the O.E.D.: Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
37. J. W. Mackail, "A Lover's Complaint," Essays and Studies 3 (1912): 51-70, at 65.
38. Mackail, "Complaint" 65.
39. A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879; repr. Heinemann, 1918), 61-62.
40. The website is 〈http://80-lion.chadwyck.co.uk〉.
41. MacD. P. Jackson, "Determining Authorship: A New Technique," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002): 1-14;
42. Defining Shakespeare: "Pericles" as Test Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 190-215.
43. MacD. P. Jackson, "Late Webster and his Collaborators: How Many Playwrights Wrote A Cure for a Cuckold?," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 95 (2001): 295-313;
44. Gary Taylor, "Middleton and Rowley - and Heywood: The Old Law and New Attribution Technologies," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 96 (2002): 165-217;
45. "Appendix: The Authorship of [Anything for a Quiet Life] IV.ii.1-44," in The Works of John Webster, volume 3, ed. David Gunby, David Carnegie, and MacDonald P. Jackson (forthcoming);
46. Gary Taylor and MacD. P. Jackson, "Thomas Middleton and The Spanish Gypsy: Protocols for Attribution in Cases of Multiple Collaborators" (forthcoming).
47. MacD. P. Jackson, "John Webster, James Shirley, and the Melbourne Manuscript" (forthcoming).
48. The fullest previous discussion of the manuscript is Antony Hammond and Doreen DelVecchio, "The Melbourne Manuscript and John Webster: A Reproduction and Transcript," Studies in Bibliography 41 (1988): 1-32.
49. Alfred Harbage, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, rev. S. Wagonheim, Annals of English Drama 975-1642 (London and New York: Methuen, 1989);
50. all dates that I give for dramatic works other than Shakespeare's are those of Annals, except in two cases: Peele's The Old Wives Tale is dated as in the chronological table in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, repr. 1997), 419-42, which is based on the Annals, but with a few adjustment;
51. and the anonymous Woodstock is redated 1608, in accord with the findings of MacD. P. Jackson, "Shakespeare's Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock," Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2002): 17-65, which gives grounds for attributing the play to Samuel Rowley.
52. The Oxford Textual Companion's allocations to collaborators were accepted, except that Peele's hand in Titus Andronicus is regarded as now established: see Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 148-243.
53. James Sutherland, "The Language of the Last Plays," in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London: Longmans: 1959), 145, 148;
54. G. K. Hunter (ed.), All's Well That Ends Well (London: Methuen, 1959, repr. 1967), lvi.
55. Since this article was copyedited, Brian Vickers has proposed John Davies of Hereford as author of the poem: "A rum 'do': The likely authorship of 'A Lover's Complaint'," Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 2003, 13-15.