Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Abstract

The title of this book is in many respects misleading. A more appropriate title would have been "Collaboration in the Early Shakespeare." The approach of this collection of essays is clearly set forth in MacDonald P. Jackson's essay "Shakespeare's Early Verse Style": "Computer-aided techniques of author identification have revolutionized studies in attribution.. .. It has become increasingly clear that in the beginnings of his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights. Early Shakespeare is being redefined" (102). Gary Taylor, Rory Loughnane, and Jackson are among the many authors in this volume also represented in The New Oxford Shakespeare: Authorship Companion (2017). Taylor and Loughnane wrote the book-length account of "The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays" in the Authorship Companion, to which the present volume may be seen as a complement, even a sequel. Late Shakespeare, edited by Power and Loughnane (Cambridge University Press, 2012), follows a more conventional pattern, with essays on seven plays, starting with Pericles, and seven more essays on general topics, such as magic, Shakespeare and James I, and the actors of the King's Men, Shakespeare's acting company. In Early Shakespeare, nearly half of the volume is concerned with a single play, Arden of Faversham, not considered as part of the Shakespeare canon before the New Oxford Shakespeare, and several significant works of Shakespeare's early career (The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, even Edward III, another recent addition to the Shakespeare canon) are treated only briefly. If a reader would be interested in the relationship between the early comedies and the later comedies of Shakespeare, or between Titus Andronicus and later tragedies, or Modern Philology, volume 118, number 3.