A question of attribution

After an exchange with Brian Vickers relating to disputed questions of dramatic collaboration I had researched with Laurie Maguire and aired in the TLS (April 20, 2012, and following), I received a final email from him. It carried the subject line “Unexpected Sad Trip!!!”, and told a tale of woe. Having lost his “wallet and cell phone”, the professor was now in dire need of a loan of £1,800 to spring his passport from an unyielding Manila hotelier. He admitted glumly that “I have only very few people to run to now” and added, fervently, “I promise to refund it in full … please, let me know soonest”. The email footer was, as usual, Vickers’s London address and landline number.

As a coda to our scratchy discussions, this was perfectly meta. It revealed the ways authorship always intersects with genre, tradition, context and plausibility. Here was a text whose alleged authorship immediately unravelled. Its correct attribution could not be secured by a reliance on the name attached to it, even as it ironically riffed on alienated markers of identity such as the lost wallet and impounded passport. Certain grammatical features drew particular attention. Surely those triple exclamation marks could not have come from the keyboard of Sir Brian Vickers? Presumably not, though he did use identical punctuation in a mocking advert circulated to English departments denouncing the New Oxford Shakespeare: “We bring you the texts with 38% less Shakespeare!!!” Nevertheless, this story of the sad trip purports to be by an author who on all other grounds seems unlikely to have written it. Authorship then emerges not as a prior label attached to a text, but as a consequence of it.

There is much work to do to construct a canon of Thomas Kyd. We know relatively little of his biography: born in 1558, he entered Merchant Taylors’ School in 1565 but seems not to have attended university; he may have followed his father as a scrivener; he apparently wrote plays for the Queen’s Men in the early 1580s. The best documented time of his life is its end. Caught up in the political whirlwind around Christopher Marlowe, with whom he shared lodgings, Kyd was accused of “vile heretical conceits” denying the divinity of Christ. In a letter to the lord keeper, Sir John Puckering, he shifted the blame for these incriminating documents onto Marlowe, following up with a fuller denunciation of his fellow playwright’s transgressive sympathies. Marlowe was dead at Deptford within days; Kyd was imprisoned, probably tortured, and died in the summer of 1594.

Other than the desperately self-preserving letters to Puckering, Kyd’s writing is fugitive. He is famously credited with The Spanish Tragedy, a blockbuster success on stage and in print, but that play’s multiple reprints carried no author attribution, and it was not identified with Kyd until two decades after its first performances at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre in 1592. The main claim of Soliman and Perseda, also published anonymously, to be by Kyd is that it appears to amplify the entertainment of the same name that Hieronimo baits for his revenge at the end of The Spanish Tragedy. Only Cornelia, a translation of a French tragedy by Robert Garnier, has contemporary attribution. The initials “T. K.” at the end of its dedication to the Countess of Sussex in its first edition of 1594 were expanded to “Thomas Kid” on the title page of the second edition the following year.

It is not much on which to build a collected works, but, taking inspiration from the epithet “industrious” attached to Kyd by his contemporary Thomas Dekker, Brian Vickers and associate editor Darren Freebury-Jones have been busy and ingenious in expanding the Kyd canon. This volume is the first of a pair published by Boydell and Brewer, who must have answered Vickers’s advert under “Miscellaneous” in the back of the TLS of March 23, 2018: “Publisher wanted for ground-breaking edition of the works of Thomas Kyd, including 1 Henry VI and Edward III (part-authored), Arden of Faversham, Fair Em, King Leir, and much else”. First to be printed are The Spanish Tragedy (edited by Vickers) and Soliman and Perseda (Matthew Dimmock), along with Verses of Praise and Joy, a collection of poetry published under the initials T. K. after the Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth (Daniel Starza Smith), The Householder’s Philosophy, a prose translation from Tasso (Domenico Lovascio), and King Leir, the play best known as a source for Shakespeare’s near-doppelgänger tragedy (Eugene Giddens).

Regular readers of the TLS have had fair warning of this collection. In 2008 Vickers published an article claiming Kyd’s collaborations with Shakespeare, discovered via a “new software programme” called “Pl@giarism”, a university-developed algorithm for comparing two texts and identifying identical strings of words. Vickers used these strings of triple words to show that 1 Henry VI and Arden of Faversham shared numerous “idiosyncratic phrases” with The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda: of course, these latter plays must be attributed to Kyd a priori, otherwise there is no canon against which to check. This methodology differs markedly from other standard authorship tests, which focus on “function words”, that is to say, on unidiosyncratic linguistic habits; for Vickers, the author is the producer of distinctive phrases, whereas other attribution scholarship tends to focus on the syntactic infrastructure to which authors unconsciously default. Less helpful in these quantitative measurements was the example of Cornelia. Despite being the only play with a contemporary attribution to Kyd, it did not present any significant overlap with the contested plays. Kyd’s one acknowledged play emerges as insufficiently Kydian. Vickers explained that this anomalous result was because “this play was translated from the French, which restricted Kyd’s normal freedom of composition”.

These matching phrases continue to be the keynote of the attribution of plays to Kyd in the new edition. All critical commentary and glossary notes are relegated to the end of the text, whereas footnotes emphasize questions of authorship. So, for example, the opening speech of King Leir, the most substantial new attribution of this volume, glosses the king’s weary response to the death of his wife with parallels to Cornelia and to The Spanish Tragedy. “[T]he obsequies performed” (Leir) is compared to “perform his obsequies” (Cornelia); “royal marriage with some princely mates” (Leir) to “for the marriage of his princely son” (The Spanish Tragedy); and “by no better means may be effected” (Leir) to “all your hopes with hap may be effected” (Cornelia). Probably many readers of this play in its first modern edition might prefer on-page annotations that explore the play’s literary and dramatic possibilities.

Elsewhere, text editors emphasize authorship over other considerations, sometimes less than convincingly. “Since”, Lovascio admits, “the primary aim of the present edition … is the re-definition of Kyd’s canon”, then the recurrent phrase “princely lion” in The Householder’s Philosophy (questions of the impact of translation on authorial signifiers do not seem to operate here) and in King Leir is relevant. A simple search, however, shows that this phrase appears twice in contemporaneous works by John Lyly: does that mean its repetition in the two Kyd works is, or is not, significant in determining authorship? “Thrall” is likewise identified as a distinctly Kydian word, but it also appears in contemporary writing by Thomas Watson, Robert Greene, Shakespeare and Marlowe. Despite the certainty of the edition about its attributions, it is hard to know how reliable these linguistic markers are.

In his introductory essay “Recognizing Kyd”, Vickers asserts that the anonymous plays Arden of Faversham, Fair Em the Miller’s Daughter and King Leir are solely authored by Kyd, although only the last of those three is included here. Strikingly, his argument has none of the graphs or tables that have become the usual evidentiary register for new attribution claims. Instead, his immediate contention is based on plot similarities. All three of the “new” plays share elements with The Spanish Tragedy and Soliman and Perseda: “murderous intrigues, the use of comedy in tragedy, and the presence of women ready to stab the man whom they – rightly or wrongly – accuse of having harmed them”. It is not immediately the most robust of claims, and nor is it strengthened when Vickers acknowledges that Fair Em includes neither a vengeful woman nor generic mixture.

What is at stake here? Does it matter who wrote King Leir, or Fair Em? Vickers states that his “long-term aim is to establish Kyd as a major dramatist, in his rightful place alongside Marlowe, Peele, Shakespeare and Jonson”, which suggests that authorship attribution is really about repairing Kyd’s literary reputation – but Peele is a very different comparison point from Shakespeare. So far it still looks as if Kyd wrote one dramatic masterpiece: The Spanish Tragedy, a play that shaped the imagination of a generation, including all those fellow playwrights. But this argument is less about Kyd’s own canon than the ways he has become the proxy candidate in a war about Shakespeare attribution.

Arden of Faversham is the current flashpoint for this quarrel, and it is tempting to see this true-crime drama allegorizing its own authorial agon, with the play as a rebellious Alice, pulled between her husband, Kyd, and her lover, Shakespeare. Vickers’s triple exclamation marks over the New Oxford Shakespeare included among that edition’s many crimes the allocation to Shakespeare of Arden, “a play long attributed to Kyd”. In the TLS of April 24, 2015, Vickers reviewed a book by MacDonald P. Jackson which claimed Shakespearean authorship of parts of Arden. Under the headline “No Shakespeare to be found”, he again made his case for Kyd as author, and concluded his review by scolding Jackson for failing to “listen to both sides equally”. Pot’s detailed claims over kettle will have to wait for Volume Two.

Attribution studies are so heated because, contrary to the general tenor of literary criticism, the correctness of one argument cannot usually coexist with the correctness of its opposite. Not since the theory wars has literary scholarship been so polarised: arguments over early modern dramatic authorship can feel akin to those soldiers who emerged from the jungle not knowing the war was over. Critical conflict, like military combat, always rewards adversarial energy over collaborative discussion. For more on that energy, see the TLS letters page next week.

Vickers’s editorship-in-chief of the Oxford edition of the works of John Ford seems much less contentious. Volume Four continues the elegant and detailed scholarship of the previous volumes, presenting single-authored plays about which there is no apparent controversy. Authorship of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (edited here by Katsuhiko Nogami and introduced by Vickers), The Lover’s Melancholy (Tom Cain) and The Broken Heart (Lisa Hopkins) has never been challenged, while “everything about [the anonymously printed play The Queen] – its language, its tone, its verbal tropes – corresponds with the literary fingerprints of John Ford” (edited by Eleanor Lowe and Martin Wiggins). But questions of what literary authorship means, and where differences across the canon are evidence of the development of an authorial style, and where they suggest another author, continue to nag.

For instance, one of the scholarly claims of this volume is that ’Tis Pity, first published in 1633 and typically dated within two or three years of publication, was in fact written in 1617–18. Vickers uses two distinct methodologies to reach this conclusion. One, familiar from the Kyd volume, depends on plot. ’Tis Pity is seen in close parallel to the “Italianate revenge tragedies of Webster and Middleton”, and particularly Cyril Tourneur’s play The Atheist’s Tragedy (1610), though the possibility that this might comprise consciously retro writing, rather like the allusions to Romeo and Juliet, is not considered. Vickers is clear that this play has no transcendence or heroism, unlike the later Ford, suggesting that it sets “abnormal psychology … against the background of a wholly corrupt society in a tragedy offering no consolation”: an early date allows Ford the moral and aesthetic opportunity to recover.

Vickers’s other approach is quantitative. Surveying calculations of markers such as the proportion of disyllabic or trisyllabic endings, and of patterns of strong and weak stresses and pauses, he establishes that these produce different results for different Ford plays: 16 per cent of the line endings in ’Tis Pity are “feminine”, whereas the proportion is 60 per cent for The Broken Heart. ’Tis Pity also bucks the Ford trend for the position of stresses in a line. Analytical measures reveal that in every case it is out of line with other Ford plays. This kind of evidence – and the same academic authors – were deployed in the Kyd volume to identify authorship. There, authorial identity was understood as sameness. Here, when the same quantitative measures throw up discrepancies, they are explained away as development. Authorial identity is now understood as varied and evolving. A writer writes differently at different points in his career. It is all very confusing, but I just hope he got his passport back.

Emma Smith teaches English at Hertford College, Oxford

The post A question of attribution appeared first on TLS.