Word: taylorism
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...world of literary scholarship arguing last week the merits of a young Kansan's claim that he had discovered in Oxford a long-buried poem by William Shakespeare. If authentic, the work would be the first notable addition to the canon in more than three centuries. Gary Lynn Taylor, 32, joint general editor of the Oxford University Press's forthcoming New Complete Shakespeare, reported that he first glimpsed the find while checking through the Bodleian Library's listing of first lines in the catalog of its vast manuscript collection. He came across an entry reading, "Shall I die? Shall...
...nine stanzas, the anonymous copyist had written the name of the author: William Shakespeare. Other scholars had seen this signature, but somehow nobody before Taylor had pursued the obvious question: What if. . .? "I tried not to think about it," Taylor recalls. "The chances of actually finding something like this are so grotesquely small that you don't want to get excited." Unexcited, Taylor began probing...
...Says Taylor, who studied at Kansas and Cambridge but never got his doctorate: "I'm a literary technician, like someone in a police morgue who is presented with a body and told to figure out how it died." The first step, which proved to be fairly easy, was to demonstrate that the manuscript had been in the Bodleian for centuries, that there was no possibility of its being a modern fake. No less important was the evidence that other works in the collection had been attributed without error to such poets as Robert Herrick and Ben Jonson. Then came...
Computerized concordances have by now recorded every use of every word in Shakespeare, and Taylor soon found interesting similarities between his discovery and Romeo and Juliet, written when Shakespeare was around 30. The poet writes that his lady's "star-like eyes win love's prize/ When they twinkle." Romeo says of Juliet's eyes that they are "two of the fairest stars in all the heaven" and that they "twinkle in their spheres." Oddly enough, though, Taylor was also pleased to find some words that Shakespeare used nowhere else. Scanty, for example, does not appear anywhere else...
Several scholars joined in praising Taylor. Says Samuel Schoenbaum, professor of Renaissance literature at the University of Maryland: "This discovery is no wild surmise. All scholars will have to take it seriously." And how has it lain so unnoticed for so long? "In modern times we explore outer space," says Schoenbaum. "But there is an inner space to be explored. An inner space of libraries, where there are wonders like this poem to be found...