Spellings in A Lover’s Complaint as Evidence of Authorship
MacDonald P. Jackson · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014
Every unusual-seeming spelling in A Lover’s Complaint, as preserved in the 1609 quarto, was checked by means of Literature Online for rarity within plays of 1590–1614 and poems of 1593–1617. These periods covered all works by Shakespeare and John Davies of Hereford. Spellings meeting a predetermined criterion of rarity were more common in Shakespeare’s plays and poems than in any other playwright’s or poets, and a disproportionate number of the Shakespearean instances were found in texts probably based on manuscripts in Shakespeare’s hand. The more exclusive the criterion for rarity, the stronger the association between the Complaint and Shakespeare. A control test of a substantial passage of Davies’s verse, in contrast, yielded more rare spelling links to Davies’s works than to anybody else’s. Some unusual forms found everywhere in Davies’s oeuvre, but largely eschewed by Shakespeare, are absent for A Lover’s Complaint