Shakespeare's Medieval Co-Authors.
- Author/Editor
- Bauer, Matthias.
Zirker, Angelika.
- Title
- Shakespeare's Medieval Co-Authors.
- Published
- Bauer, Matthias, and Angelika Zirker. "Shakespeare's Medieval Co-Authors."In Lukas Rösli and Stefanie Gropper, ed. In Search of the Culprit: Aspects of Medieval Authorship. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 217-38.
- Review
- Only two of Shakespeare's plays refer to a source by its author's name: John Gower in "Pericles" (co-authored perhaps with George Wilkins), and Geoffrey Chaucer in "The Two Noble Kinsmen" (with John Fletcher). Both of these tributes are "exceptional" and much remarked on. Bauer and Zirker believe "it makes sense to go a step further" and call these poets Shakespeare's "medieval co-authors" (218). Per Bauer and Zirker, co-authorship could be "diachronic" as well as "contemporaneous," with a long-dead "creative partner[] in the present" shedding light on the "poetics of co-authorship" in these (probably) both co-authored plays (218-19). In the first section, "'Our imagination': Gower and the Audience as Co-Authors of Pericles," the authors explain how Gower as a choric character moves his theater audience through "a process from [hearing] the monologic 'song'[1.0.1] . . . to [co-creating] 'our play' at the end (Epilogue 18)," by calling on the help of "our imagination" (4.4.3), per editor Gossett an "inclusive plural" that should not be emended to "your" (219-220). The playwright(s) participates as "the anonymous agent" who makes the ancient story "for itself perform" (3.0.53) in the minds of the audience (221). By choosing a co-author so distant in time, Shakespeare was able to "de-present" as well as to present the "monstrous lust" of the incest theme, much as Gower's Genius does by explaining the practice as necessary in the time of Adam and Eve, but not in the time of Christ (p. 226; Epilogue 2). By contrast, Chaucer is addressed in the Prologue of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" as the father of the play, but in a spirit of rivalry and fear (229). In parallel fashion, the imprisoned Arcite and Palamon descend from harmonious flights of imagination, to deadly competition for Emelye, who viewed from afar, becomes their mutual brainchild (233). [LBB. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.1]
- Date
- 2021
- Gower Subjects
- Influence and Later Allusion