SHAKESPEARE, "A LOVER'S COMPLAINT", AND JOHN DAVIES OF HEREFORD.
By Brian Vickers.
329pp. Cambridge University Press. £50 (US $90)
978 0 521 85912 7.
Not by Shakespeare: mindless alliteration, unrescuable rhyme and other clues
to what makes bad Jacobean poetry bad and good Jacobean poetry good
Leaving the question "Who wrote Shakespeare?" to the conspiracy theorists, the
more urgent problem remains of what the author known as Shakespeare actually
wrote and did not write. For over a century and a half, scholars have been
trying to codify the defining characteristics of Shakespearean parole. The
enterprise has been a troubled one, often vitiated by mistaken methodology,
debatable suppositions and vested interests; but with the aid of the
computer and the application of proven statistical methodologies, mainstream
Shakespearean stylistics has arrived at a consensus which, while still open
to debate, rests its case on solid, publicly accessible evidence. Several
recent books, including Brian Vickers's own Shakespeare Co-author (2002) and
Counterfeiting Shakespeare (2003), and Defining Shakespeare: "Pericles" as a
test case (2004) by MacDonald Jackson, offer an overview of this enterprise
and some of the methods by which practitioners reach their conclusions. Two
recent proposed additions to the canon, the lyric "If I die" and the
"Funeral Elegy" on William Peter, after briefly finding a place in collected
editions, have now been discredited in the light of evidence ably summarized
by Vickers.
Vickers has now turned his formidable powers to "A Lover's Complaint". This
329-line amorous oration was published with the Sonnets in 1609, though it
is probably little read even by those for whom the Sonnets are a form of
poetic oxygen. Vickers claims that "A Lover's Complaint" was written by
Shakespeare's acquaintance, the poet and calligrapher John Davies of
Hereford. In his new book, he describes Davies's career, principal writings,
mental world and poetic style, all of which he sees as similar to those of
the "Complaint" but distinct from Shakespeare's. Further arguably non
Shakespearean features of the poem are moral attitudes, linguistic
derivations from Spenser, and the use of unusual words in forced senses. For
the last of these, Vickers is able to cite the bewildered comments by
earlier scholars, some of whom preceded him in rejecting the piece as the
work of Shakespeare. Syntax and the use of figures of speech are analysed
with great thoroughness, and one important section of Vickers's new book
deals with neologisms. We know that Shakespeare possessed a vast vocabulary,
which he used with astonishing precision; he unerringly finds the right,
often unexpected, word to convey a concept or experience, and when that does
not exist will boldly coin a new one. Yet it appears that this inventiveness
has been too easily used for distinguishing his work from that of his
contemporaries. Davies and the author of the "Complaint" turn out to be just
as fertile coiners of new words, though dismally less exact in their
application. The linguistic evidence cited by Vickers shows that this was
characteristic of the whole period around 1600, not just of individual
writers.
Vickers has convinced me personally that Shakespeare was not the author of the
"Complaint". The central chapters of Vickers's book are, among other things,
a brilliant investigation into just what makes bad Jacobean poetry bad and
good Jacobean poetry good. To this Vickers adds convincing demonstrations
that the specific kinds of badness found in almost every stanza of the
"Complaint" are also widely encountered in the works of John Davies. The
value of these analyses is that they do not rest on modern notions of good
and bad verse (which might well approve of such things as wilful obscurity,
torturous syntax and episodes of Kerouac-like automatic writing) but
Elizabethan and Jacobean ones of the kind familiar from The Arte of English
Poesie by George Puttenham and "E. K."'s notes on Spenser's Shepheardes
Calendar. Thus, Vickers is alert to the incompetent use of rhetorical
tropes, both of the "sensible" and "auricular" kinds, inept distortions of
normal word order, mindless alliteration, constipated metrics and the
fabrication of lexical oddities purely so as to rescue a rhyme. He rules on
these matters as the acknowledged expert on Elizabethan understandings of
classical rhetoric. In each case, Shakespeare's practice in the two
narrative poems is shown to be far superior to the fumblings of Davies and
to the author of the "Complaint"; critics who have praised the poem for its
literary competence are left sadly exposed. However, this does not of itself
establish Davies's authorship, since there were many other bad poets at work
at the time.
And herein lies the difficulty. While it is impossible not to be impressed by
Vickers's mastery of his sources and accumulation of stylistic similarities
between Davies and the author of the "Complaint", it would be a pity if his
confidence in his case were to bring about its elevation from a promising
hypothesis to a moral certainty. De-attribution, just as much as its
opposite, has to meet strict criteria of proof. There is still too much
reliance here on the discredited method of "parallel passages". This
proceeds through the accumulation of words and phrases that occur in the
works of two authors, but it can only be meaningful (as Vickers himself
concedes) when they are not also present in the work of contemporaries, or
the product of derivation from a common source, and their incidence exceeds
what might be expected purely by chance. An older generation of scholars of
Renaissance drama, who were arraigned in S. Schoenbaum's classic Internal
Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship, proceeded in exactly this way
to what are now recognized as disastrously wrong conclusions, principally by
finding evidence for attribution in expressions that were the common
property of the time. Vickers was led to Davies by the number of words from
the "Complaint" he found during a computer search of the invaluable LION
archive; but any such investigation is bound to favour such a voluminous
author against the less prolific or minimally preserved. In similar work on
Restoration poets, I continually found parallels with the verse of Ned Ward
for works that it was chronologically impossible for him to have written.
The reasons were that, like Davies, he wrote a vast amount of verse and that
his style had a chameleonlike quality that brought it close to the poetic
mean of the time.
The recognition of similarities in vocabulary is often the clue that guides a
scholar towards the establishment or rejection of an attribution; but in
order to proceed further, in the absence of convincing external evidence,
either the parallels have to be so frequent and so incontestably exclusive
that the common- sense case becomes overwhelming, or the linguistic practice
has to be subjected to advanced kinds of statistical testing, familiar to
readers of Literary and Linguistic Computing, that Vickers nowhere performs.
Indeed, his attempt to excuse this omission, in a brief apologia on pages
217-19, suggests he lacks real understanding of the field's present range
and variety. As far as I am able to follow him, he seems to be thinking of
an old-fashioned kind of testing that, by establishing frequencies for
individual words or collocations and then summing (or, in less responsible
hands, multiplying) them, produces astronomical probabilities. More
up-to-date methods, such as John Burrows's Delta algorithm, based on complex
statistical probing of lengthy frequency lists, are much more sensitive
instruments than Vickers allows. The kinds of analysis offered by advanced
computational stylistics are not infallible but they are too important to be
neglected in any investigation like the present one. Moreover, while Vickers
is generous with numbers he is not their master. Throughout, he presents his
findings as raw scores not probabilities. On page 239, a table asks us to
compare frequencies for "all/al" in Shakespeare and in the "Complaint",
calculated at occurrences per 1,000 words, with those from works by Davies
calculated as recurrences per x verse lines (a less reliable measure owing
to the varying word-length of lines). Vickers then claims "I doubt whether
any other English poet has used 'all' so frequently or so consistently". But
he has not looked.
Occurrences at Davies's level of one "all" every 12.4 lines are typical of
Spenser and poets of his tradition. Giles Fletcher the Younger's Christs
Victorie, and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth, Over, and After Death gets as
low as one "all" every 8.14 lines. The case for Davies, while certainly
enticing, should be left open until more rigorous quantitative verification
has been secured.
Vickers is also prone to make claims for echoes and influences that many
readers will regard as tendentious. A suggestion that Shakespeare borrowed
parts of the Porter's speech in Macbeth from a poem by Davies is based on
the bare resemblance that both passages attribute three operations to drink.
In Davies these are to aid "Concoction", to mix food in the stomach, and to
"bring it to the Liver's heate"; in Shakespeare, "Nose-painting, Sleepe, and
Urine". Not much similarity there. Arguments based on assumed moral
positions also seem dubious. Consider the claim that a couplet by Davies
-"Base humane Beasts, how senslesse is your sense / That will gainst sense
and reason so exceed!" -represents "the exact wording . . . only seen from
the viewpoint of normal morality" of the "Complaint"'s "Loves armes are
proof gainst rule, gainst sence, gainst shame". This is surely a shaky basis
for an attribution and far from "exact". On page 228, Vickers makes a point
of the spelling "perticular" in the "Complaint" being echoed once in a work
by Davies; but this is to make the bold assumption that Renaissance
compositors faithfully reproduced the spellings of their manuscript copy.
Internal evidence of the kind that is given pride of place in this study
should ideally be supplemented by external evidence; but here there is still
much uncertainty. In order to establish his case, Vickers has had to revisit
the publishing history of the Sonnets. Thomas Thorpe, the bookseller who
penned the notorious dedication to "Mr. W. H.", is often represented as a
pirate who had published the poems without Shakespeare's approval from an
intercepted manuscript; but a case has also been made, most notably by
Katherine Duncan-Jones in 1983, that Thorpe was a respectable publisher
acting for the author. Vickers, required by his hypothesis to revive the
view of Thorpe as undependable, cites his use of the initials "W.
S." on the funeral elegy for William Peter, now accepted as by John Ford; but
neither here nor in his otherwise convincing earlier study does he consider
Lisa Hopkins's attribution of that poem to Ford's relative and imitator,
William Strad-ling, which would make sense of the initials. Thorpe is a
puzzle who will need to be revisited before the "Complaint" can be securely
transferred from the Shakespearean canon to that of Davies. I suspect that
the transfer may eventually take place; but we have not yet reached the
degree of assuredness that this bracing, immensely erudite, but overpositive
study would like us to assume.
