Theories of authorship.

The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories. Second Edition by Warren Hope and Kim Holston. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2009. This second edition of Hope and Holston's The Shakespeare Controversy expands and brings up to date their selective survey and analysis of the literature on the authorship issue over the past 280 years. Well-written and well-researched, this book is not only an entertaining, good read but also a valuable reference work. At the outset, the authors state that they are Oxfordians and "... what we track in this book are the efforts of a number of people which culminated in that recognition of Shakespeare's identity, and the consequences, thus far, of that recognition.... Our aim is to be critically selective, not exhaustive." To cover the years since their first edition, published in 1992, the authors have added three chapters and extended their "Chronological Annotated Bibliography" with selected books and articles published in the past seventeen years.

In the first of the new chapters, the authors expand on works treated briefly in their first edition. They devote five pages to an admiring review of Hamlet Himself (1997), Bronson Feldman's booklet published in 1977 that is out …