Shakespeare the Reviser

Shakespeare as a reviser of others' work is an area of growing scholarly interest. Marina Tarlinskaya draws a formal distinction between editing, revision, and rewriting. The poem A Lover's Complaint serves as an example of revision. Based on linguistic-statistical analysis, Tarlinskaya suggests that Shakespeare needed a poem to round off his 1609 sonnet sequence and, having neither the time nor the inclination to compose one from scratch, he revised an earlier work from the 1590s by a now-forgotten author, adding vocabulary characteristic of his later plays.