Much Ado About Whose Fingerprints? Shakespeare’s Hand in the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy

Abstract

The summer of 2013 should surely be marked on the calendar as a hallmark year in the long-running tradition of Shakespeare authorship studies. For in the month of August, Douglas Bruster, a Shakespearean scholar working at the University of Austin (Texas), gained the front headlines of various newspapers across the globe announcing that he had found persuasive evidence of Shakespeare’s ‘fingerprints’ on the 1602 Additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Bruster, however, acknowledges his allegiance to previous scholarly work (he specifically mentions the work of Brian Vickers) pointing ahead towards this same direction. Along this essay, it is my purpose to review various methods of authorship attribution studies and to purvey further evidences pointing to Shakespeare as the most likely candidate for such Additions. As I would like to argue, whereas none of the methods under scrutiny has proven to be infallible per se, if taken together they can contribute to dispel the enigma of the Shakespearean canon.