Brian Vickers is Professor of English Literature, and Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His publications on Shakespeare include The Artistry of Shakespeare''s Prose (1968, 1979); a six-volume collection of early Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, 1623-1801 (1974-1981, 1996); Returning to Shakespeare (1989); and Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (1993).
Prologue: Gary Taylor finds a poem
Part I. Donald Foster's 'Shakespearean' Construct: 1. 'W.S.' and the Elegye for William Peter
2. Parallels? Plagiarisms?
3. Vocabulary and diction
4. Grammar: 'the Shakespearean who'
5. Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
6. Rhetoric: 'the Shakespearean hendiadys'
7. Statistics and inference
8. A poem 'indistinguishable from Shakespeare'
Part II. John Ford's Funerall Elegye: 9. Ford's writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
10. Ford and the Elegye's 'Shakespearean diction'
11. The Funerall Elegye in its Fordian context
Epilogue: the politics of attribution
Appendices: 1. The text of A Funerall Elegye
2. Verbal parallels between A Funerall Elegye and Ford's poems
3. Establishing Ford's canon
Bibliography.
