And Vickers's argument that he didn't is nonsense. Duncan-Jones's objection cited in this piece--which Rosenbaum waves away--is actually a powerful one: if you can't trust the authorship of "LC", then you can't trust that of the sonnets either. Too much of Vickers' case rests on the notion that Thorpe is a notoriously underhanded publisher, but his career is actually fairly normal.

The recent disintegration of "LC" seems like blowback from the battles over "Shall I Die?" and "The Funeral Elegy." The arguments against their Shakespearean origins began by claiming that they don't sound like Shakespeare; once all the linguistic evidence came in, this proved prescient. But now we seem to be reliving the Shakespearean attribution wars of the later 19th/early 20th century, where everything that doesn't "sound like" Shakespeare is claimed to be the hand of another author. "LC" may not be his best work (although it's a much better poem than the likes of Rosenbaum suggest, particularly as a coda to the sonnets), but there's no evidence at all that someone other than Shakespeare wrote it.

"Duncan-Jones's objection cited in this piece--which Rosenbaum waves away--is actually a powerful one: if you can't trust the authorship of "LC", then you can't trust that of the sonnets either."

This isn't that powerful an objection. Many corpuses of documents originate from a single "publisher" but are routinely (and basically uncontroversially) divvied up by scholars as authentic or inauthentic on language grounds. The works of Plato and the epistles of St. Paul come quickly to mind; the Book of Isaiah is normally seen as the work of two different authors though there is no warrant for this from its "publisher"; for a Renaissance author, Samuel Kirkman published two plays he claimed to be by John Webster, though mainstream scholarship only swallows one of these attributions. The issue with Lover's Complaint has always been that while scholars have generally found the sonnets consistent in style with other Shakespearean works, Lover's Complaint is not so clear a witness for itself. There are competent people who come down on both ends of the question.

Francis Kirkman was a Restoration publisher who occasionally printed Renaissance authors; dramatic attributions of Restoration texts first printed decades after they were performed present different attribution problems than the Shakespeare attribution...Biblical texts, too, are a whole other can of tuna...

Still, misattributions are not uncommon in early modern (or contemporary!) publishing, but you can't use this as a foundation for denying Shakespeare's authorship of "LC" unless you have some grounds to suspect Thorpe did so (does the poem appear attributed to someone else in a printed or MS anthology? Does Thorpe have a bad habit of doing so?) And, of course, if it is not a Shakespeare poem, why would Thorpe want to print it as Shakespeare at all? If he wanted to use Shakespeare's name to sell a spurious poem, he could have published it as a broadside or a small quarto and probably have earned a better return. Unless there's other compelling evidence to the contrary, "LC"s appearance in the 1609 quarto is enough "a witness for itself."

(Shakespeare's name does appear spuriously on some plays around this time, like The Yorkshire Tragedy, but their exclusion from Shakespeare's folio suggests they are likely not entirely his work...)

In short, it's not enough to say "Early modern publishing practices are sketchy, therefore all texts are suspect" while then picking and choosing what texts we, in practice, consider suspect. There are stylometric studies that conclude Shakespeare wrote "LC'; it is first published with Shakespeare's sonnets; there are no contemporary indications that the attribution was spurious. No one really questions the authorship of the sonnets, yes, but, on language alone, without other contexts, someone can make a hypothetical case that he didn't: for instance, to what degree are the sonnets' stylistic anomalies explained away by the hypothetical that Shakespeare revised the sonnets throughout his career? Could they indicate another author instead?

An attribution case needs to be made on both bibliographic and stylometric/linguistic evidence; it the case of "Lover's Complaint", the former isn't there, and the latter in very contested.

You were implying that if we lose the Complaint we lose the Sonnets, and the examples of Kirkman et al is that that hardly follows. People may be right about one thing but wrong about another. It's true that some texts were misattributed in Shakespeare's day --- and the grounds for the skeptics of A Lover's Complaint is that many find the style and language of the poem inconsistent with the assertion.

Thorpe did not have a good manuscript to send to the printer, as shown by the lacunae and misprints present in the text he published. It was common for scribes to copy together works by different authors in the manuscripts they prepared, and if Thorpe's source-text was one of these it easily accounts for how a non-Shakespearean poem ended up with the sonnets. Thorpe may not have known it was non-Shakespearean, depending on how studious the scribe was in delineating authorship divisions. Or the printer himself, George Eld, decided on his own to change a correct scribal attribution or to create one for what was, in his manuscript, an unsigned poem following the Sonnets: in 1607 Eld printed a play called "The Puritan" which he attributed to "W.S." even though modern scholarship universally regards it as a drama that's actually by Thomas Middleton. Since we don't know what the Thorpe attribution is based on we can only go so far with it.

What you mean is that *ideally* an attribution case is made on both bibliographic and linguistic evidence; in practice, the latter rules, as it must, since the bibliographic evidence from the period is incomplete and/or derived from uncertain grounds, as Thorpe's is. To give a spectacular case from another field, Greek scholars increasingly regard "Prometheus Bound" as a non-Aeschylean work, even though the bibliographical evidence from pre-modern times is all in favor of it. The case is built entirely on style. For a Shakespearean example, Nathaniel Butter (the first publisher of King Lear) attributed "The London Prodigal" to Shakespeare in 1605, though it's been universally rejected based on style. Butter's attributions otherwise seem correct, and we don't know what went wrong there. But it seems something did.

If you can make a strong case against the Sonnets, have at it. If it's strong competent people will probably believe you. The state of the matter is that a strong case currently exists against A Lover's Complaint, one that has swayed many smart people in the field, and if it is wrong it needs to be disposed of more convincingly than has yet been done to it. And likewise, the doubters have more work to do: good scholars are on the other side. We'll see where it is in 30 years.

The problem with the Kirkman example is that it's an entirely different publishing field: every book has a different, unique publication history, and you can't use any single copy as an example of standard practice. Kirkman's books may or may not tell us something about Webster's authorship; one has to study the book. (Being so late after Webster's death. and after the interregnum, I can't see it having to much authority about whether or not its texts are Wenster's at all.) Thorpe's book may or may not tell us something about Shakespeare' authorship; one has to study the book. And I'll trust Duncan-jones's bibliographics far more than Vickers' (she's a renowned textual scholar, he's...not.)

It's probably not Eld's call to attribute LC to Shakespeare--he's the printer, not the publisher, so he's be working from copy provided for him. But again, arguing whether he did so or not is hypothetical--we simply don't know, although we have no reason to think he did.

Yes, manuscripts--like printed books--could accrue non-authorial texts, but is that the case with 1609? It's not perfectly clear that the underlying MS to 1609 is particularly bad; lacunae and misprints are common to all MS and printed texts of the era (and the only major lacuna I can recall in the sonnets, #126, is supposed to be there.) So it's possible that a non-Shakespeare poem was added. But "possible" is a very low bar--you have to move to the probable and the demonstrable.

This leads to a crucial point--yes, the bibliographical evidence of the period is relatively thin, but that doesn't mean you can ignore it. And you have to approach early modern texts with different methods than classical texts--with the Sonnets, we do have early published copies, we know a lot about the people who made and wrote the book, we know a lot about the contemporary trade and its practice--which again, makes it an entirely different case tha Aeshylus. If you can't muster the bibliography, you can't make the attribution. Otherwise every single authorial attribution is suspect.
With the example of Butter and Eld's misattributions of Shakespeare's plays, we do have some external, if not bibliographical evidence that he didn't write them: the editors of Shakespeare's dramatic folio excluded them and didn't attempt to acquire printing rights. It's that sort of evidence that's necessary to an attribution study--it suggests that contemporaries did not think them Shakespearean texts.

Just to make it clear--I used the Sonnets as a hypothetical example. I'm not inclined to challenge its authorship either. But since that and LC share the same bibliographic field, you need to make a very convincing case for a bifurcated authorship. The Vickers case is grounded so much on his (unfair) conception of Thorpe as a disreputable publisher that it flaws the rest of his case---he has no "probable cause."

Vickers's "LC" attribution hasn't, I feel, really taken hold among Shakespeareans at least--it doesn't help that his book ends up being close to being a "parallel passages" study reminiscent of old-school disintigrationists. At its core, it's a moot question: whether or not Shakespeare wrote it, it circulated with its name and no challenges to this attribution, so it will always remain, at its core, a "Shakespearean" text. I actually find attribution studies wonderfully quaint, and I'm really not all that invested in "where it is in 30 years." But Vickers' case here is so arbitrary and based on a fundamental disregard for the publishing conventions of Shakespeare's time that I find it particularly ridiculous and I hate to see it taking hold--the RSC Shakespeare's decision is disgraceful.

The Kirkman example is relevant for the reason I stated, as is the Butter example, or any other case where attributions credited to a single source are considered good in one instance but not in another. It's a correction to the "powerful objection" you started the thread with.

Duncan-Jones is a renowned Sidney scholar; her position in the study of Shakespeare's text isn't nearly so high, and, to the point, her contention that Shakespeare authorized the publication of the Sonnets/ALC and gave the manuscript to Thorpe collides with obvious errors in its printing and the lack of a signed dedication, a stark contrast to Shakespeare's clean authorized poems printed in 1593-94. Even scholars who accept ALC as Shakespearean certainly don't buy that. The main case is about style anyway.

No one has said that you should ignore attributions such as Thorpe's. It's simply evidence, which may be outweighed by other considerations, as Butter's earlier attribution to Shakespeare of "The London Prodigal" is. Besides excluding "The London Prodigal" (though in spite of what you say, we can't know the editors never attempted to acquire rights), the First Folio also kept out Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Cardenio, and Love's Labor's Won (if it was indeed a unique play), which everyone regards as Shakespearean, and "Edward III" too for which there is a strong case (one I feel is accepted by the majority now) that it is also Shakespearean. So where does that take us? Style, as always.

It seems to me that you're seeking a way to quickly shut down discussion of the Complaint's authenticity, even if it leads into positions that are accepted in no academic field or which you can possibly support. We don't know that Lover's Complaint circulated with no challenges to its attribution, for example, yet you say it anyways. The historical record isn't nearly complete enough to try to turn lack of known interest in ALC (which more approximates the real truth) into a statement of acceptance.

Scholars make the attribution without external evidence all the time. Thomas Middleton wrote "The Revenger's Tragedy"; what bibliographic evidence there is is against him, but that's the mainstream view. Nearly all John Fletcher's plays were published as his and Beaumont's; yet the mainstream view is that they contain as much or more work by Philip Massinger, Nathan Field and others, and the attributions of particular plays in the Fletcher canon to single or multiple authors are uncontroversial, with only a few exceptions. We don't even know that it's true that Thorpe is our only witness to the Complaint; Eleazer Edgar tried to publish in 1600 a manuscript he called "Sonnets by W. S. with Amours by J.D.", which is a description that could fit Thorpe's later publication of Shakespeare's sonnets --- except for the authorship of the companion piece. Were they the same thing? Who knows, but Vickers thinks a stronger stylistic case can be made for John Davies's authorship of the Complaint than for Shakespeare's. Was that "J.D."? Wish we all knew.

I agree that Lover's Complaint shouldn't be thrown out of complete editions. Even if standard opinion does eventually turn its nose on the Complaint, nobody's tossed out the extra poems in Passionate Pilgrim, and my copy of Chaucer's works published by Riverside still contains all the poems the scholars don't think he wrote. Whether you think the opinions of Vickers, Bate, Love etc. on style are arbitrary is up to you, but it's absolutely false to claim that they're arguing in disregard of the publishing conventions of the time. It's simply no shocker that a Jacobean publisher would screw up an attribution or invent one if he thought it would help him sell books.