A new Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s works plans to list Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of the three Henry VI plays, officially crediting him with partial authorship after a history of contested attribution.
In other words, Shakespeare plays might no longer be known as Shakespearean plays. Instead, we might get a clunky title like “Shakespeare and Marlowe’s Complete Works.”
The controversy over authorship of Shakespeare’s works has been centuries long, exploring his contemporaries’ access to knowledge, stylistic elements and related evidence in an effort to uncover the true identity of the iconic Anglophone playwright and poet.
Putative authors have ranged from Sir Francis Bacon to Mary Herbert to Marlowe. The Wikipedia “List of Shakespeare Authorship Candidates” includes 86 possible authors. But, until this point, Shakespeare’s name has remained on the cover of his works and on the front of playbills.
In society at large, Shakespeare is not so much a writer as a cultural icon. He is a representative of the Anglophone writing tradition, the art of performance and the traditional English curriculum.
Even if evidence indicates that he did not write the complete body of works, Shakespeare’s name bears significance beyond that of a writer who died 400 years ago. Urban Dictionary is an example. Ignoring all the definitions that would be unfit to print here, submitted meanings tend to reference the rite of passage of slogging through Shakespeare in high school.
Other definitions allude to Shakespeare’s penchant for inventing new words, including the verb form of “shakespeare,” which means “to invent, or put a new word into practice.”
If Urban Dictionary is not sufficient, the Oxford English Dictionary defines Shakespeare as “a person ... comparable to Shakespeare, esp. as being pre-eminent in a particular sphere.”
The point is, Shakespeare has entered our lexicons, and the resultant term has less to do with who actually wrote the plays than his cultural role.
In high school we discussed Shakespeare authorship. After seeing compelling arguments for alternative writers, the class took a vote on whether Shakespeare was actually the author. Overwhelmingly, Shakespeare won the vote, not because of the evidence presented, but because the class didn’t see the point in altering the l tradition.
Of course, within historical and literary studies, there is more at stake in these questions of authorship. Understanding Marlowe’s probable contributions to Shakespeare’s work could influence our comprehension of Marlowe and related cultural productions. Advances in digital humanities now enable a stylistic matching game between writers, as we can digitally mine texts for similarities between writers’ lexical and syntactic constructions.
While this kind of textual analysis is fascinating, it’s also important to acknowledge that an author’s work progresses beyond its original conditions of production and takes on a cultural life of its own. As such, the next step will be to see whether the shifting attribution of Shakespeare’s works influences their constantly evolving cultural role.
After all, what’s in a name, anyway?
kmilvert@indiana.edu
