Shakespeare's Queer Analytics

What led Shakespeare to write his most cryptic poem 'The Phoenix and Turtle'? Could the Phoenix represent Queen Elizabeth on the verge of death as Shakespeare wrote? Is the Earl of Essex recently executed for treason the Turtledove lover of the Phoenix? Questions such as these dominate scholarship of both Shakespeare's poem and the book in which it first appeared: Robert Chester's enigmatic collection of verse <i>Love's Martyr</i> (1601) where Shakespeare's allegory sits next to erotic love lyrics by Ben Jonson George Chapman and John Marston as well as work by the much lesser-known Chester.<br/> <br/> Don Rodrigues critiques and revises traditional computational attribution studies by integrating the insights of queer theory to a study of <i>Love's Martyr</i>. A book deeply engaged in current debates in computational literary studies it is particularly attuned to questions of non-normativity deviation and departures from style when assessing stylistic patterns. Gathering insights from decades of computational and traditional analyses it presents most radically data that supports the once-outlandish theory that Shakespeare may have had a significant hand in editing works signed by Chester. At the same time this book insists on the fundamentally collaborative nature of production in<i> Love's Martyr</i>.<br/> <br/> Developing a compelling account of how collaborative textual production could work among early modern writers <i> Shakespeare's Queer Analytics</i> is a much-needed methodological intervention in computational attribution studies. It articulates what Rodrigues describes as 'queer analytics': an approach to literary analysis that joins the non-normative close reading of queer theory to the distant attention of computational literary studies - highlighting patterns that traditional readings often overlook or ignore.