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The Ordering and Establishing of Evidence 59
modern research. Malone and Tyrwhitt in the late eighteenth
century laid the ground, but since then controversy on details
has never ceased.
Questions of authenticity and attribution may be even more
important, and their solution may require elaborate stylistic and
historical investigations. 26 We are certain of the authorship of
most works in modern literature. But there is a large pseudonymous
and anonymous literature which sometimes yields its
secret, even if that secret is nothing else than a name unassociated
with any biographical information and hence no more
illuminating than the pseudonym or anonym itself.
With many authors the question of a canon of their work
arises. The eighteenth century discovered that a large part of
what had been included in printed editions of Chaucer's work
(such as The Testament of Creseld and The Flower and the
Leaf) cannot be Chaucer's authentic work. Even today the
canon of Shakespeare's work is far from settled. The pendulum
seems to have swung to the other extreme from the time when
August Wilhelm Schlegel argued with strange confidence that
all the apocrypha are Shakespeare's genuine work. 27 Recently,
M. Robertson has been the most outstanding proponent of
J.
the "disintegration of Shakespeare," a view which would leave
Shakespeare with little more than the authorship of a few scenes
in the best-known plays. According to this school of thought,
even Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice are supposed
to be nothing but a hotchpotch of passages by Marlowe, Greene,
Peele, Kyd, and several other playwrights of the time. 28 Robert-
son's method consists largely in tracing little verbal tags, dis-
covering inconsistencies and literary parallels. The method is
extremely uncertain and willful. It seems based on a false assumption
and a vicious circle: we know what is Shakespeare's
work from certain contemporary testimony (the inclusion in
the Folio, the entries under his name in the Stationer's Register,
etc.) ;
but Robertson, by an arbitrary act of aesthetic judgment,
selects only certain purple passages as Shakespeare's and denies
his authorship of anything that falls below that standard or
that shows similarities to the practice of contemporary drama-
tists. Yet there is no reason why Shakespeare could not have
written poorly or carelessly or why he could not have written