The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  And then there was the Mechanical (Don Foster’s digital database) raised to virtual godhead and then proven to be an ass.

  But it wasn’t a pure comedy either. There were moments when it suggested something menacingly Macbeth-like—what happens when someone is driven by ambition to seek a crown, here, the virtual crown of a scholar’s lifetime, a “Shakespearean discovery.”

  I know I’ll never forget the moment when I first spoke with Don Foster on his purported Great Shakespeare Discovery. The moment when Don Foster cheerfully told me, “I could destroy you.”

  I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally, it was a pose; it was Don Foster at his most Don Corleone. It was Don Foster at the height of his fame as “Shakespeare super-sleuth” as the London Sunday Times would call him, “the world’s first literary detective” as the jacket cover for his book Author Unknown described him.

  It was the Don Foster who had been lifted by the wave of celebrity generated by his “Shakespeare discovery” from obscure Vassar professor of English to (as he describes his new celebrity life in Author Unknown) the sort of person who was lifted by helicopter from the Vassar campus to the network TV studios of Manhattan to explain his triumphant unveiling of the true identity of “Anonymous,” the author of Primary Colors in 1996—considered, back then, a coup to surpass even his Shakespearean “discovery.” A coup that appeared to validate the all-but-unquestioning acceptance (at least in the American media) of Foster’s Great Shakespeare Discovery.

  This was the Don Foster whose self-regard was fueled by adulatory profiles on Barbara Walters’s 20/20 and the BBC, which portrayed him as parlaying his Shakespearean discovery and his “literary sleuthing” into a career as a Sherlockian consultant in high-profile tabloid-headline criminal cases such as the JonBenét Ramsey murder, the investigation of the Unabomber, even the anthrax-letters case.

  Foster’s new career of fame and crime-fighting was founded upon the strength of his Great Shakespeare Discovery (or Rediscovery, or, as the scholars like to say, the attribution), the one front-paged by newspapers throughout the world in 1996. All hailing Foster’s declaration that a long-ignored, nearly six-hundred-line poem, authored by someone who signed it only “W.S.,” was in fact by William Shakespeare. The long, tediously pious, clumsily convoluted poem had been published in 1612 as “A FUNERALL Elegye In memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter of Whipton neere Excester. By W.S.” (from here on we’ll just call it the “Funeral Elegy”). If Foster was right, it was not a negligible discovery, like the dubious claim made a decade before on behalf of a doggerel-like piece of poetry called “Shall I Die? Shall I Fly?”, attributed to Shakespeare by Oxford University Press editors Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells. Ironically it was the same Don Foster who led the charge in denouncing that discovery as a non-Shakespearean impostor.

  No, if Shakespeare wrote the “Funeral Elegy” as Foster claimed, it would not only mean we had a new long poem by Shakespeare; it would mean Don Foster had given us in effect a new Shakespeare. The Elegy would have been his last known nondramatic work, his most personal poem, in a sense, the only poem that could be said to have been written “in his own voice,” one supposedly written in memory of a dear dead friend. Shakespeare’s most explicitly devotional and religious work. If Wordsworth claimed the Sonnets unlocked Shakespeare’s heart, this “new” poem about life, death, mortality, faith and fate written four years before his death might unlock Shakespeare’s secret soul. Might serve in a way as the closest thing to a Last Testament.

  If. By the time I first talked to Don Foster, he had succeeded in silencing most of his other critics, at least on this side of the Atlantic where few outside the academy seemed to care, and hardly anyone inside did.* Few seemed concerned that the Elegy would rewrite Shakespeare’s identity—perhaps even the interpretation of his work—almost as radically as the “anti-Stratfordians” who claimed “Shakespeare” wasn’t Shakespeare anyway. The Elegy attribution might be used to confirm or misattribute other disputed “Shakespearean” texts. It would forever skew our understanding of his intellectual evolution. Much was at stake it seemed to me.

  My strained conversation with Foster followed publication of my second skeptical essay on Foster’s “discovery” in The New York Observer. By that time I had read and reread the Elegy (a punishing task) several times and it seemed clear to me from a lifetime of reading and rereading Shakespeare that the Elegy was, in the sodden piety of its language and the stilted delivery of its language and of its themes, just not Shakespearean. Yes, this was “subjective,” speaking strictly, but I thought my informed subjectivity trumped the faux “objectivity” of Foster’s computer database. I predicted that the Elegy was destined for “the dust heap of literary history.”

  When Foster called me up, it was in the context of the reply letter to an anti-Elegy essay I’d written. The letter he was drafting, he magnanimously told me, could “destroy” me but wouldn’t.

  It was of course a magnanimity designed as much as a warning as a gesture of generosity. In his reply letter, which was, in parts, gracious, he nonetheless maintained:

  “My Funeral Elegy won’t be getting the funeral [Rosenbaum thinks] it deserves any time soon.” (He was right about that. It took five more years before Foster was forced to inter “his” “Funeral Elegy” himself.)

  Note that Foster was calling it “my Funeral Elegy.” In a sense it was his, certainly more than Shakespeare’s. In any case a couple of years later Foster felt secure enough in relation to me to shift from tough-guy talk to triumphalist condescension. There it is, prominently featured on of page 45 Author Unknown, Foster’s 2000 book, the one he subtitled “Tales of a Literary Detective.” Featured, as an epigraph to the opening section of his account of his “Shakespearean discovery,” was the following quotation from my critical attack on Foster’s attribution:

  The alleged “Shakespeare” elegy: Shall it die or shall it fly?… relentlessly sententious, mind-numbingly mediocre, destabilizingly dull-witted … a poem that I believe will eventually end up in the dust heap of literary history.…

  —RON ROSENBAUM, NEW YORK OBSERVER

  (24 FEBRUARY 1997) [caps in Foster’s original]

  There could be no doubt of its intent: secure and confident in his Great Discovery, Foster wanted to show “what fools these doubters be”—the ones who made fools of themselves by raising their voices against Foster’s purportedly crushing arguments for the Shakespearean attribution, which at the time seemed to have swept the field. It was a famous victory and he was singling me out as symbol of the vanquished. But then suddenly it all came tumbling down for Don Foster. It truly became his funeral, if not “his” “Funeral Elegy.”

  I could destroy you … I couldn’t help thinking of that line, five years later, when I read Don Foster’s astonishing admission that his Great Shakespeare Discovery had been a Great Big Mistake. When Don Foster, in effect, buried his “Funeral Elegy.”

  The whole tragicomic episode is an instructive tribute to the intoxicant power Shakespeare has over our imagination.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF PHONY SHAKESPEARE

  Of course, passions have always run high when alleged “New Shakespearean Works” are brought forth to the world. Even during Shakespeare’s lifetime some unscrupulous printers sought to cash in on his fame by putting his name or initials on plays such as A Yorkshire Tragedy that few scholars believe he wrote.

  The momentousness and the divisiveness of Shakespearean discoveries—and the question of how to define what was “Shakespearean”—first became evident a century and a half after Shakespeare’s death when a frenzy of bardolatry seized England and the first Great Shakespeare Discovery, or as it should more accurately be called, “The First Purely and Simply Fraudulent Shakespearean Discovery,” made headlines in 1796. The discovery or, more properly, the William Henry Ireland “discoveries,” included letters, poems and even an alleged “new play” by Shakespeare called Vortigern that actually had a debut in the Drur
y Lane Theater, temple of bardolatry.

  William Henry Ireland is a great character, almost a Shakespearean character (think Autolycus, the con man who peddles “famous” ballads in The Winter’s Tale), and there’s a wonderful book about the Ireland forgeries by Bernard Grebanier (The Great Shakespeare Forgery) which portrays the nineteen-year-old boy William Henry driven by a desperate desire to please his father, Samuel Ireland, one of those early mad bardolaters who gave bardolatry the bad name it has suffered from ever since. Samuel Ireland displayed virtually no interest in the subtleties and complexities of the plays (and their language) but was obsessed with accumulating mute relics of the “true cross” one might say, autographs, letters, deeds, laundry lists. While the explosion of fraud ruined the market for material remnants for the most part, the attempt to attach Shakespeare’s name to non-Shakespearean works continues, viz: the Elegy.

  Samuel Ireland’s son William Henry Ireland produced both relics and words enough to fulfill his father’s wildest dreams. His con consisted of claiming he’d been befriended by a “wealthy patron” who wished to remain anonymous, but who had in his possession an “oaken strong box bound in gold clasps” (recall the secret book, similarly bound “in clasps of gold” in Romeo and Juliet) from which he would tantalizingly produce Shakespearean relics and manuscripts, one bit at a time, to take home to his greedy father. Of course William Henry concocted all these false documents himself.

  Many of Ireland’s forgeries were targeted at, and provided convenient solutions to, such genuine questions as Shakespeare’s spiritual orientation, and such biographical cruxes as whether Shakespeare really did receive a gift of one thousand pounds from his patron the Earl of Southampton.

  Consider the amateurish effort at supplying an answer to this which Ireland produced, a supposed Shakespearean thank-you note:

  Copye of mye Letter toe hys grace offe Southampton Mye Lorde.

  Doe notte esteeme me a sluggarde nor tardye for thus havynge delayed to answerre or rather toe thank you for youre greate Bountye I doe assure you my graciouse ande good Lorde that thryce I have essayed toe wryte and thryce mye efforts have benne fruitlesse I knowe notte what toe saye Prose Verse alle all is naughte gratitude is all I have toe utter and that is tooe greate ande tooe sublyme a feeling for poore mortalls toe expresse O my Lord itte is a Budde which Bllossommes Bllooms butte never dyes itte cherishes sweete Nature ande lulls the calme Breaste toe softe softe repose Butte mye goode Lorde forgive thys mye departure fromme mye Subjecte which was toe retturne thankes and thankes I Doe retturne O excuse mee mye Lorde more at presente I cannotte

  Yours devotedlye and with due respecte

  Wm Shakspeare

  You have to love “itte is a Budde which Bllossommes Bllooms …” Double letters mean he’s Extra Poetic, that Shakespeare.

  Later there would come Shakespeare’s “spiritual confession” and a slew of phony documents which happened to solve many Shakespearean biographic mysteries.

  Why did so many fall for these pathetic frauds with their eccentrically antiquated spelling, supposedly found in a “secret chest”? It occurred to me it’s not so different from a phenomenon I found in Hitler studies: the belief that the real truth about Hitler’s psyche or his sexuality had been secreted away (and usually lost to the world) in some “lost safe deposit box.” The difference was that William Henry Ireland’s “safe deposit box,” his oaken casket, was ready and willing to deliver up on order whatever solutions to whatever mysteries bardolaters like his father demanded.

  It has been asserted, however—and I tend to agree—that it was the Ireland forgeries—and their refutation—that gave birth to a true Shakespearean scholarship, to a far more rational, systematic if not scientific scholarship, which developed out of the effort to make informed judgments about what was “Shakespearean” and what was not. One of the most definitive refutations of the Ireland forgeries, a daring act at the time, considering that the prince regent himself was an enthusiastic endorser of the documents’ legitimacy, was written by Edmond Malone, author of “An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments.” This modestly titled pamphlet pretty much settled the case (for all but poor William Henry’s father, who sadly maintained that his youngest son was too stupid to have written anything “Shakespearean,” so the forgeries must be real).

  Malone had made his reputation exposing a previous eighteenth-century forgery—the works of “Rowley,” an allegedly medieval “bard” invented by one Thomas Chatterton. Malone’s research for his never-finished Life of Shakespeare exposed numerous frauds and turned up a number of authentic Shakespearean documents, and Malone’s evaluations of what was claimed to be “Shakespearean” have held up well. Malone’s methods have been so successful, in fact, that he is regarded as one of the greatest, if not the first, serious Shakespeare scholar. It is not uncommon to say Malone created the Shakespeare we know or half-know.

  At this point, and indeed for another two centuries, the lively debate over Shakespearean apocrypha had not even made the “Funeral Elegy” an object of scrutiny and consideration, despite the fact it was signed in two places “W.S.” In 1984, at the time of Don Foster’s first fatal encounter with the “Funeral Elegy,” contestations over Shakespearean “dubia” (from the Latin dubium, or doubt), as Foster liked to call them (or “dubiosa,” as others did), were focused on a few disputed plays and poems.

  There was, for instance, the difficult matter of the inauspiciously titled play The Double Falsehood. An eighteenth-century Shakespearean editor, Lewis Theobald, the play’s “author,” said he’d based it on a manuscript in his possession of a seventeenth-century play called Cardenio, one which had been registered in 1612 as written by John Fletcher and Shakespeare.

  The problem here is that Theobald never showed the world his copy of Cardenio, never explained why he didn’t just produce it, rather than his adaptation (The Double Falsehood). And then, when pressed, Theobald claimed that the original Cardenio manuscript had been “destroyed by a fire” in his quarters. It was the Shakespearean dubia version of “The dog ate my homework.”

  Nonetheless many scholars have accepted Theobald’s claim and believe there are elements, at least, of the original Shakespeare in Theobald’s Double Falsehood. So many that at the time of Don Foster’s astonishing retraction of his claim for the “Funeral Elegy,” the Arden Shakespeare announced that it would bring out an edition of Cardenio in its Double Falsehood form.

  Two other plays have been hanging around the portals of the canon hoping for admission for some time, Edward III and Edmund Ironside. The first has already been accepted as partly Shakespearean by major scholarly editions such as the Riverside and Cambridge. The latter, Ironside, most vigorously championed by the late Eric Sams, has won less acceptance.

  In addition there has been a long-running contention over the three Henry VI plays, the earliest works Shakespeare wrote according to many. But how much of them did he actually write and in what order? Was Henry VI, Part 1 the first of a planned trilogy, or a “prequel” added later, after the success of what are now known as parts 2 and 3?

  And then there was the fragment known as “Hand D,” which has been stirring a lesser-known but far more important controversy than the Elegy since 1871, when Richard Simpson called attention to an unpublished manuscript of a play called Sir Thomas More from around Shakespeare’s time. Simpson and his followers argued that some three handwritten pages of Sir Thomas More, a 147-line-long scene, and possibly a 21-line soliloquy, were the work of Shakespeare, perhaps in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. If so it would be the only instance of Shakespeare captured in the process of composition, deletion and revision. I’ll address this important controversy in the next chapter.

  ENTER SHAXICON

  Until Don Foster made headlines with his claim that the “Funeral Elegy” was a “new,” that is, unrecognized, poem by Shakespeare, no one else had paid the Elegy much attention. Here are the opening 50 li
nes of the poem, just to give those who haven’t experienced its unique paralyzing effect on the mind an idea. Read them—I dare you—and imagine trying to read all 579 lines.

  A FUNERALL ELEGYE

  Since Time, and his predestinated end,

  Abridg’d the circuit of his hope-full dayes;

  Whiles both his Youth and Vertue did intend,

  The good indeuor’s, of deseruing praise:

  5 What memorable monument can last,

  Whereon to build his neuer blemisht name?

  But his owne worth, wherein his life was grac’t?

  Sith as [that] euer hee maintain’d the same.

  Obliuion in the darkest day to come,

  10 When sinne shall tread on merit in the dust;

  Cannot rase out the lamentable tombe

  Of his Short-liu’d desert’s: but still they must

  Euen in the hearts and memories of men,

  Claime fit Respect; that they, in euery lim,

  15 Remembring what he was, with comfort then

  May patterne out, One truly good by him.

  For hee was truly good; if honest care,

  Of harmlesse conuersation, may commend

  A life free from such staines, as follyes are;

  20 Ill recompenced onely in his end.

  Nor can the toung of him who lou’d him least,

  (If there can bee minority of loue,

  To one superlatiue aboue the rest,

  Of many men in steddy faith) reproue

  25 His constant temper, in the equall weight

  Of thankfulnesse, and kindnesse: Truth doth leaue

  Sufficient proofe, he was in euery right,

  As kinde to giue, as thankfull to receaue.

  The curious eye, of a quick-brain’d suruey,