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 <i>A Lover's Complaint</i> 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.