When readers of the Times Literary Supplement open the latest issue, they’re due something of a surprise. There, alongside the advertisements for bursaries and farmhouses to rent, is a small notice from an eminent Shakespeare scholar. After a career spanning more than 50 years, during which he has published more than 40 books, Professor Sir Brian Vickers finds himself in search of a publisher.

According to Vickers, a major reason he has not yet found a home for his complete edition of works by Thomas Kyd is that his “reputation as a scholar has been damaged by a string of hostile reviews by people associated with the New Oxford Shakespeare”.

“Three publishers have turned me down,” Vickers said, “Cambridge University Press, Manchester University Press, and Bloomsbury. The phrase which comes back from their referees is ‘controversial’.”

Vickers attributes the “controversial” label to disputes over attributions to Shakespeare that go back more than a decade. Alongside traditional analysis of vocabulary, style and syntax, Vickers had begun using anti-plagiarism software to detect repeated phrases, images and collocations that bear testament to the pressure on Elizabethan playwrights to produce new work. Using these methods, he came to the “bold” conclusion that Thomas Kyd, famous as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, was also the author of three anonymous plays.

As soon as he reported his findings in 2008, one of the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, Gary Taylor “published a paper describing my method as ‘useless’,” Vickers continued, “which he and his friends have been repeating ever since”.

“The New Oxford Shakespeare group … have repeated their disparaging remarks about my ‘method’ so often that other scholars, who know little about authorship attribution studies, know that I have been often attacked, and there’s ‘no smoke without fire’.”

As a consequence, Vickers continued, his essays, articles and editions have begun to be refused. “Other scholars have accepted my claims for a new and much larger Kyd canon, but the New Oxford Shakespeare have been doing their best to discredit them, and they seem to be succeeding. I do feel a bit desperate.”

According to Taylor, Vickers’ struggle to find a publisher has a much simpler explanation.

“It is ironic that Brian, who has been writing savage ad hominem reviews in the TLS for 30 years, is blaming his failure to find a publisher on other people’s reviewing,” Taylor said, claiming that Vickers’ attacks on the New Oxford Shakespeare began in 2010, before the team had even begun work. “I doubt that his conspiracy theories will convince anyone who isn’t already paranoid.”

Vickers’ latest book, The One King Lear, received negative reviews from scholars unconnected with the New Oxford Shakespeare, Taylor continued, including Stephen Greenblatt, Holger Syme, Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen and Peter Blayney. “I am sure an academic publisher could be found for a good scholarly edition of Thomas Kyd’s work. But the Vickers edition is based on his own massively inflated definition of what Kyd wrote. His Kyd canon is based on scholarly methods that have been widely discredited.”

As for Taylor’s New Oxford Shakespeare colleague Gabriel Egan, the “howlers” in Vickers’ recent work stem from his decision to take a “self-directed crash course in computational methods and in analytical bibliography”.

“He has not achieved competence in either,” Egan said. By publishing “amateurish articles and one recent book”, he added, Vickers is “in danger of tarnishing the substantial reputation he has earned over several decades for his publications in other fields … As one colleague recently remarked, it’s like watching King Lear in the storm tearing his clothes off: you just want those who love him to get him to stop.”

According to Taylor, the dispute is at heart about differing visions of Shakespeare, differing styles of scholarship.

“Brian’s approach to Shakespeare is that there is only one proper way to interpret him – Brian’s,” he said. “The New Oxford Shakespeare, by contrast, is a collaborative edition, and its critical introductions give readers many possible approaches: 1950s approaches such as Brian’s – who is quoted on a number of occasions – but also theatrical, historical, political, formalist, feminist, cinematic, psychological, and eco-critical interpretations.

“For Brian, Shakespeare is fuel for angry, narcissistic monologues. For us, Shakespeare inspires thousands of fascinating conversations.”

But Vickers rejects the idea that different approaches to Shakespeare are at stake, insisting that the issue “is one of scholarly judgment, but also of headline-seeking, power and prestige”.

“My position is that, as a great artist, Shakespeare should not be parcelled off to other writers,” he said, “or saddled with plays that he did not write, such as Arden of Faversham – especially not by such shoddy and bogus scholarly methods.”