Shakespeare, Co-Author · A Historical Study of the Five Collaborative Plays

This major new study asks the question, "how much do we know about Shakespeare's collaborations with other dramatists?", and sets out to provide a detailed evaluation of the claims made for Shakespeare's co-authorship of Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Through an examination of the processes of collaboration and the methods used in authorship studies since the early nineteenth century, Brian Vickers identifies a coherent tradition in attribution work on Shakespeare.

Review"Brian Vickers...has brought clarity to the old and hotly debated question of Shakespeare's work with co-authors. As a result changes will be made in some future editions of Shakespeare. Vickers's book also gives a good sense of the opposing forces in the co-authorship debate."--The New York Times

"[A] magisterial survey of (almost) everything written on the subject of Shakespearean collaboration in the past 150 years."--Jonathan Bate, Times Literary Supplement

"Rewarding...sharp glimpses of what it was like to write for the stage in Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Vickers gives an indelible impression of the sheer hunger for plays of London's theatre companies from the 1590s."--John Mullan, The Guardian

About the AuthorBrian Vickers is Chair of English Language and Literature, Centre for Renaissance Studies, Zurich.