The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

30 Could scantly find a mote amidst the sun,

  Of his too-shortned dayes: or make a prey

  Of any faulty errors he had done.

  Not that he was aboue the spleenful sence

  And spight of mallice; but for that he had

  35 Warrant enough in his owne innocence,

  Against the sting of some in nature bad.

  Yet who is hee so absolutely blest,

  That liues incompast in a mortall frame?

  Some-time in reputation not opprest?

  40 By some in nothing famous but defame?

  Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke

  That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence

  Of what they doe, to be a speciall worke,

  Of singlenesse, not tending to offence.

  45 Whose very vertues are not to detract,

  Whiles hope remaines of gaine (base fee of slaues)

  Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt,

  But death to such gives vnremembered graues.

  Now therein liu’d he happy, if to bee

  50 Free from detraction, happinesse it bee.

  Little surprise few found this “Shakespearean” until Foster came along. But Foster wheeled out an intimidating new weapon in support of his claim, one that impressed the media and silenced many academics: the computer. More specifically the great and mighty “SHAXICON,” as Foster dubbed his digitized database of Renaissance-era literature, a database he never quite got around to sharing with the world, and later mysteriously caused to disappear from his account of his Great Shakespeare Discovery. His digital Wizard of Oz remained the man behind the curtain, but at the time SHAXICON was credited with “proving” that Shakespeare wrote the Elegy, with the precision of “scientific objectivity” beyond mere fuzzily subjective judgment about “literary value.”

  That’s the heart of the matter: Can literary judgments be reduced to, improved upon by, digital and statistical methods? Is all the evocative power of language translatable into and out of numbers? Is there, in effect, an equation for Shakespearean language, or an algorithm that fits him and only him?

  But it was more than methodology at stake. Unlike “Shall I Die? Shall I Fly?”—which even supporters conceded was likely to be Shakespearean “juvenilia”—the “Funeral Elegy” was written in 1612, four years before Shakespeare’s death. If it was Shakespeare’s, it was Shakespeare meditating on profound questions of the meaning of life, meditations which could not help but lead future students to look at all his greatest earlier works through the lens of the Elegy. In deciding, for instance, whether Shakespeare was at some point a secret Catholic, whether he was or wasn’t being ironic or skeptical about salvation in his dramatic works, how to read Lear—the Elegy would inevitably have a bearing upon all these questions. The Elegy would, if accepted, become a master key to the culmination of the evolution and arc of Shakespeare’s work.

  So the rise and fall of the Elegy and the rise and fall of Don Foster along with the rise and mysterious exit of SHAXICON, the computerized database that was Foster’s secret weapon, are phenomena worth further study. Let’s begin with a compressed four-century-long time line, based upon Don Foster’s account.

  February 1612

  Following a day-long drinking binge and a slow-motion drunken pub crawl in Essex—one of the greatest strengths of Don Foster’s research (however flawed his conclusion) is the reconstruction of this incident—a man named William Peter, an Oxford-educated landowner, is stabbed to death with a sword that pierces his head (through the skull) by a drunken neighbor on horseback.

  March 1612

  A pamphlet is published by Thomas Thorpe, a printer who published Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609. The pamphlet contains a 579-line poem, a memorial poem for the dead man: “A Funeral Elegy [for] Master William Peter.” It is signed only with the initials “W.S.”

  There is no surviving evidence that contemporaries considered it a work of Shakespeare—or that they considered it at all.

  1612–1984

  Virtually everyone in the world continued to ignore the Elegy for 370 years and by the time Don Foster came upon it, only two copies were known to remain in existence, both of them in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. It is (to digress for a moment) one of the sad facts, indeed a tragedy not incommensurate with the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, that Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the key repository of literary materials from Shakespeare’s time, had disdained back then to acquire and preserve theatrical manuscripts of that era (with only a few exceptions) because the theater was considered a lower form, base popular entertainment. So who knows how many lost Shakespearean plays, perhaps at the very least the elusive Love’s Labor’s Wonne, a putative sequel to Love’s Labor’s Lost attributed to Shakespeare in three different seventeenth-century book-trade sources, would be there. Along perhaps with scores of plays by lesser-known brilliant but forgotten playwrights of the age. That’s all gone, but the “Funeral Elegy,” that black hole of pious tedium—because it was “poetic” and not dramatic—was preserved. This sense of loss may explain some of the animus I felt at the suspect “find.”

  1984

  This was the year that Oxford began making copies of its Bodleian collection available to other universities on microfilm. And this was the year that Don Foster, then a graduate student in English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, came face-to-face with the “Funeral Elegy” in the UCLA library microfilm room.

  As he describes the moment, he immediately felt he heard “frequent echoing of Shakespeare in the ‘Funeral Elegy.’ ” The only echo he mentions explicitly in Author Unknown is a line in the “Funeral Elegy” with the phrase “we will all go weeping to our beds.” There is a line in Richard II, “and send the hearers weeping to their beds.” For some reason the possibility that another poet might be consciously, ineptly, echoing (or stealing) a locution from Shakespeare—who was by that time quite famous—did not shoulder itself to the fore in Foster’s mind.

  No: this was Shakespeare himself, echoing himself, Foster instinctively felt. That Foster should take this position may be less a surprise if we consider the context in which he made his “wild surmise.”

  At the time Foster was working on a project, one of the most vexed Shakespearean biographical-bibliographical mysteries at that time: the identity of “Mr. W.H.” the “onlie begetter” of the Sonnets as the dedication of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets calls him. Entire library shelves have been filled with books speculating on the nature of “Mr. W.H.”: Was he Shakespeare’s patron (or lover), and was the dedication by Shakespeare to him, or was “Mr. W.H.” the person who procured (perhaps even illicitly, without Shakespeare’s express written consent) the poems for publication? Was he patron, poltroon or publisher, and what did the initials “W.H.” stand for?

  It’s another manifestation of the biographical obsession spinning its wheels furiously but fruitlessly. There’s no indication that certitude on this question will tell us anything valuable about the Sonnets themselves, but Donald Foster had a bee in his bonnet which he was later to let out in a scholarly article. A bee in his bonnet that there was no “Mr. W.H.” at all. That “Mr. W.H.” was just a misprint for “Mr. W.Sh.” Mr. William Shakespeare! The printer made a mistake and didn’t notice he’d got the initials of the author he’s celebrating wrong!

  Despite the fact that it’s hard to take this solution very seriously anymore, it is interesting in retrospect that here, too, Foster found Shakespeare lurking behind a pair of initials even if he had to change the initials as they appeared on the page to slip Shakespeare in. Interesting that some, initially—at least some American academics—bought it, even gave Foster a prize for his essay, even though it’s an unprovable conjecture.

  And this time, with the “Funeral Elegy by W.S.” in front of him on the microfilm screen, there was no need to posit a misprint. (As if somehow the printer of “Mr. W.H.” didn’t notice he got it wrong when it came off the pre
ss, and would not have corrected it the way scores of on-press corrections were made to Shakespeare’s dramatic texts in the printing shops. As if, in Foster’s theory, it would somehow have slipped the printer’s notice that he got the author’s initials wrong when the first sheet came off the press.)

  Nonetheless, the “Funeral Elegy” text had two sets of “W.S.” bylines. Under the title: “by W.S.” And at the bottom of the dedicatory epistle to the dead man’s brother: just plain “W.S.”

  It was this dedicatory epistle, even more than the poem’s alleged “echoes of Shakespeare,” that first convinced Foster that W.S. = William Shakespeare. The dedicatory epistle in the Elegy “echoed,” Foster believes, the dedicatory epistles Shakespeare wrote to patrons for his long narrative poems such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Apparently Foster did not consider the possibility that “W.S.” might have been influenced by Shakespeare’s style or the style of the times in penning “dedicatory epistles.” Rather Foster jumped to the conclusion that it was Shakespeare himself. That he had found that grail of all grails: a “new” poem by Shakespeare.

  1984–1989

  Don Foster devoted five years to producing first a Ph.D. thesis then a book, Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution, which came very close to declaring definitively that Shakespeare wrote the “Funeral Elegy,” but which held back, out of scholarly caution, from going all the way. And thus, when it was published by a respected academic press (University of Delaware, which specialized in Shakespeare studies) after having been rejected by Oxford and Harvard’s university presses, Foster’s book received very little attention outside the academy and mixed reviews within.

  In a way this was a shame because Foster’s Study in Attribution was a serious work of scholarship and he may have learned the wrong lesson from its reception: abandon all inhibitions ye who wish to make worldwide headlines and become a “Shakespeare super-sleuth.”

  But before getting further into Foster’s Fall, let us give Foster credit for some of his achievements in the course of coming to what turned out to be a Spectacularly Mistaken Conclusion.

  After his epiphany reading the “Funeral Elegy” on microfilm, Foster began years of research by going to England to study the original relic of the true cross, the version of the Elegy in Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

  But Foster did something remarkable in investigating the death mourned in the “Funeral Elegy.” There was no evidence in the poem itself, which was mainly composed of abstract pieties on the goodness of the dead man, that he had been killed in a drunken brawl. But Foster dug out the ancient records of the inquest into the death of William Peter in rural Essex and got all the gory drinking-binge details behind the sword-through-the-skull murder. It suggested either that the author who portrayed William Peter as a model of piety didn’t know the drunken lout he appeared to be or did know him, and suppressed what he knew.

  Stabbed to death though the skull. A horrible way to die. But when Don Foster examined the question of the Elegy for the dead man, it might be said that—behind the scrim of scholarly objectivity—he had blinded himself, or at least half-blinded himself by his initial predisposition to believe “W.S.” was William Shakespeare.

  There was a far greater (metaphorical) pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, a consideration that doesn’t seem to have escaped Foster, since he did something unusual in scholarly publishing when he finally submitted the manuscript of his Elegy book to Oxford: he made those who read his manuscript sign “confidentiality” agreements—that they wouldn’t speak of the Great Discovery to anyone else in the world, the better to ensure that Foster received all the credit and benefits that would accrue from being the “onlie begetter” of the Great Discovery. This is the sort of thing that has become standard practice for celebrity tell-all bios about the likes of Princess Di and Michael Jackson. And while the confidentiality clause may be understandable, it somewhat contravenes Foster’s portrait of himself as some cloistered naïf, a fawn in the forest tiptoeing into the limelight, all astonished at the media attention that picked him up on the placid Poughkeepsie campus and swept him away by copter into the spotlight of the massive publicity industrial complex.

  THE CLUE OF THE TOPLESS MAIDENS

  In the light of the tragicomic denouement it’s hard to resist noting the way Foster’s invective against Gary Taylor’s earlier Great Shakespeare Discovery applies to his own. As for instance, in Foster’s article “ ‘Shall I Die’ Post Mortem,” the way Foster sneers that the Oxford editors’ “decision to include the poem raises the spectre of a lyric that will not die after all, but that will return to haunt all future editions of Shakespeare.” Exactly what threatened to happen with Foster’s own Great Discovery.

  Gary Taylor first made his claim for “Shall I Die?” in 1985. Foster’s most sustained attack appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly. Going back and reading Foster’s assault on the other Shakespeare “discovery” is instructive now, since it reveals him using exactly the kind of qualitative, subjective language of literary judgment and value that he sniffed at disdainfully in the critiques of his own discovery.

  Foster’s discussion here of the key division in “attributional studies”—the one between “external” and “internal” evidence—is useful and illuminating: he admits the existence and validity of literary quality and literary judgment. “External evidence” means facts in the world outside the poem—such as the fact that the Elegy was signed “W.S.,” which are William Shakespeare’s initials. (“External evidence” to the contrary would also include the fact that printers eager to cash in on Shakespeare’s name had used the device of putting the initials “W.S.” on non-Shakespearean works before.)

  “Internal evidence,” Foster tells us, “includes such variables as diction, prosody, imagery, word frequencies, and authorial voice.”

  Wait: “authorial voice”? Doesn’t that sound a bit like a distinction to be made by much-despised “subjective literary judgment”? Then he asks, “If we could find in ‘Shall I Die?’ a single distinctive Shakespearean phrase …” (italics mine).

  Remarkable: an assertion that there is something “Shakespearean,” something distinctive about his particular authorial voice that can be securely discerned by human readers as opposed to silicon chips. And how do we decide what is “Shakespearean”? Here are words Foster wrote which one wishes (indeed one imagines Foster wishes) he had kept in mind:

  We must present our data responsibly, truthfully and with humility, that is, with a recognition under whose jurisdiction the verdict properly belongs: it belongs to all informed readers, to all those who have come to know William Shakespeare through the words he left behind. No one can add to the canon a single word, even by way of emendation, by personal fiat; for there is no individual, whether stationer, scribe, editor or scholar who can speak for that larger community of readers who will exercise their communal authority. The wise editor is therefore sensitive, not just to the integrity of the text, but to the integrity of shared opinion concerning what constitutes “Shakespeare.”

  “What constitutes ‘Shakespeare.’ ” Here he verges on suggesting something interesting: that the definition of what is Shakespearean should be a kind of vote of the cognoscenti. But he does admit the value of expertise, literary judgment and discernment by educated humans, something he seemed to abandon once he was seduced and betrayed by the computer.

  There is one other odd feature of Foster’s attack on Gary Taylor’s “Shall I Die?” attribution that deserves mention because it calls into question one facet that is at the heart of literary judgment—at the heart of the entire Elegy controversy: close reading. A talent for which is not one of Foster’s strengths, as demonstrated by his odd digression on bare-breasted fashions in his refutation of the Gary Taylor “discovery.”

  Foster introduces the topless issue as part of his argument against Gary Taylor’s dating of “Shall I Die?”: Taylor contended it was probably written before 1595 or earlier. The earlier the date, t
he easier its clumsy infelicities can be explained by Shakespeare’s youth, his experimentation with an unfamiliar form he never returned to.

  No, says Foster: “That ‘Shall I Die?’ was written later than 1595 and probably after 1610” is confirmed “by another clue that the Oxford editors overlooked or simply misunderstood.”

  Ah yes, a missing clue that only the future “super-sleuth” detects! But let’s see who misunderstood what. Foster claims that “the woman described in ‘Shall I Die?’ wears her breasts bare”—a fashion that only took hold after 1595 and especially “From about 1610 [when] naked breasts are a frequent concern of English ministers and moralists,” Foster says. He spends considerable time adducing denunciations (and descriptions) of bare-breasted fashions from that era.

  But wait, all that may be true, but what in the language of “Shall I Die?” indicates the “fair beloved” to whom it is addressed goes around bare-breasted in public?

  Foster’s evidence for this is stanza 8 of “Shall I Die?” (of the nine total), one that follows stanzas praising the beloved’s hair, her forehead, her eyebrows, her eyes, her cheeks, her lips, her chin, her neck. Clearly the catalog is heading downward to the breasts and the eighth stanza runs, in its hobbledehoy way:

  A pretty bare, past compare

  parts those plots (which besots)

  still asunder

  It is meet, nought but sweet

  Should come nere, that soe rarre

  tis a wonder

  No mishap, noe scape

  Inferior to nature’s perfection

  noe blot, noe spot

  She’s beawties queene in election.

  “The besotting plots mentioned here,” Foster declares, “are the woman’s nipples, exposed by a low-cut bodice.”