Penny McCarthy

Brian Vickers writes that he was disturbed by Barbara Everett’s scepticism about the validity of current methodologies for identifying ‘authorship, dating and text, style and subject’ in the study of Elizabethan drama, especially where Shakespeare is concerned. But his own certainty in such matters is equally disturbing. To assert of a play (Henry VI Part 1) that it was ‘written a year...

Blair Worden describes the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ as being by Sir Philip Sidney, adding that they were ‘acclaimed by a poem of Donne’ (LRB, 19 June). The Sidneian Psalms were translated by Mary Sidney and Philip Sidney, and Donne’s poem not only refers to both sister and brother in his title, but mentions them both throughout: ‘Two by their bloods, and by Thy Spirit one,/A brother and a sister’;...

Re Don Paterson and Ruth Padel’s discussion:The genitive of clitoris must be clitoreõs:any further remark would be otiose …(But was it really the grammar they were interested in?Or was it sin?)

It was standard practice in the 16th and 17th centuries to abjure responsibility for allowing one’s work to be published. So if Katherine Phillips did supply the printer with copy and pretend to be furious when it was published, as Margaret Anne Doody describes in her review of Germaine Greer’s Slip-Shod Sibyls (LRB, 14 December 1995), she would have been following the precedent of many male writers...