Talking Books Update

Michael P. Jensen

[For years, Michael P. Jensen has interviewed leading scholars and educators in his regular Shakespeare Newsletter column, “Talking Books.” In the latest issue, 65.2, Jensen interviews Russ McDonald. Below is an update on his interview with Peter Holland, which appeared in 53.1, Spring 2003.]

This Peter Holland update considers the last two volumes of Shakespeare Survey and three volumes edited by others that have chapters written by Holland. All these books were published by Cambridge University Press.

Shakespeare Survey 67, edited by Holland with the assistance of Ton Hoenselaars, has the theme of Shakespeare and collaboration. It is a mix of articles in content and, in my opinion, quality. Perhaps most intriguing is former “Talking Books” guest (52:2, #253, Summer 2002) Sir Brian Vickers’s “The Two Authors of Edward III,” which uses a battery of stylometric tests to suggest that the non-Shakespearean portions of that play were written by Thomas Kyd. The nadir, though my feelings may be because I am treated as a dupe on p. 165, is Breen Hammond’s “Double Falsehood: The Forgery Hypotheses, the ‘Charles Dickson’ Enigma and a ‘Stern’ Rejoinder,” in which Prof. Hammond writes a rather intemperate response to Tiffany Stern’s article, “The Forgery of some modern Author”?: Theobald’s Shakespeare and Cardenio’s Double Falsehood” in Shakespeare Quarterly 62:4, Winter 2011, pp. 55-93. Stern shows the practical impossibility of Lewis Theobald having even one, let alone the multiple manuscript copies of the lost play Cardenio, that he claimed to have. Hammond, who has a…