Shakespeare or Davies? A clue to the authorship of 'a lover's complaint'

Notes and Queries

Volumn 56, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 62-63

  Jackson, MacD P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 76049128685     PISSN: 00293970     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjn237     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover's Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford (Cambridge, 2007)
2. MacD. P. Jackson, 'A Lover's Complaint, Cymbeline, and the Shakespeare Canon: Interpreting Shared Vocabulary', Modern Language Review, ciii (2008), 21-38
3. 'The Authorship of A Lover's Complaint: A New Approach to the Problem', Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, cii (2008), 285-313
4. 'Neologism and Non-Shakespearian Words in A Lover's Complaint', Literaturen, ccxlv (2008), 288-302 Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen
5. I have used the concordance http://www.it.usyd.au/matty/Shakespeare
6. These figures include compounds such as 'a hell-broth' and 'a hell-hound'
7. I have searched Davies's work through the electronic database 'Literature Online' (http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk). Davies's normal spelling of 'heart' is 'hart'; I have excluded one instance where 'an hart' is a stag
8. In his very last collection of poems, Wit's Bedlam (1617), Davies avoided 'an' before 'h' and used 'a hill', 'a hell' (twice), and 'a heart'. But this was a volume of epigrams, in which he must have decided, at the end of his career, to change his habitual usage
9. He would surely have retained it for a formal love complaint published, like his The Holy Rood and Humour's Heaven on Earth, in 1609. In fact, if we discount Wit's Pilgrimage, Davies never used 'a heart' or 'a hill'. Before 1616 his an:a ratios are 25:3 before hell; 1:0 before hill, 10:0 before heart