'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare

'The reader of this long book, which largely consists of close stylistic analysis, is swept along by the power of its indignation ... this battleship of a book delivers what are likely to be the final salvos of a hard-fought literary engagement.' Times Literary Supplement 'No one doing attribution work can ignore this book ... Vickers has set out a programme and an example for authorship studies ...'. Jonathan Hope, Literary and Linguistic Computing 'Brian Vickers, a scholar brilliantly suited in intellectual acumen and feisty temperament for such a controversy ... [has produced] a very valuable study, and one that justifies its length and attention to technical detail ... This book is a tour de force of considerable beauty'. David Bevington, Renaissance Quarterly 'Marshalling a fearsome array of stylometric tables and statistical charts Vickers demonstrates in detail that every one of the linguistic, prosodic and rhetorical features that supposedly stamp the Funerall Elegye as 24-carat Shakespeare prove nothing of the sort ... Counterfeiting Shakespeare [is] a major contribution to the arcane domain of attribution studies, which has wider implications for our understanding of Shakespeare's poetry and plays. For, in the course of confuting misattributions ... Vickers equips us with the means of identifying more confidently than was previously possible, the unmistakable music of Shakespeare's mind at play in language ...'. Kiernan Ryan, Timer Higher Education Supplement 'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare ... demolishes the case for including either poem in Shakespeare's canon. The book would be impressive if it did only that, but it is also a teach-by-example on how to correctly do authorship studies to an exacting standard ... It is an important work about the Ford canon'. Michael P. Jensen, The Shakespeare Newsletter 'Vickers is a well-informed and sympathetic reviewer of quantitative work in attribution, and has emerged as a notable practitioner ... His book is a profoundly interesting one and thoroughly justified as an essay on method and good practice in scholarship. It also includes valuable and persuasive evidence about revising the Ford canon ...'. Hugh Craig, Shakespeare Quarterly 'Counterfeiting Shakespeare is an admirable book, erudite, witty, incisive and vigorous in its narrative thrust. It makes important contributions to authorship studies as well as to Ford and Shakespeare scholarship and it authoritatively dispose once and for all of the 'counterfeit' claims of 'Shall I die?' and A Funerall Elegye.' Shakespeare in Southern Africa