The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  WHY IT MATTERS

  Still, despite Foster’s own warning about the danger of a false attribution coming to “haunt” Shakespeare studies “forever,” this long tedious non-Shakespearean poem was worming its way into the canon.

  That’s why the controversy matters. The “Funeral Elegy” is a kind of “false bottom” to the bottomlessness of Shakespeare. If one has the slightest belief that Shakespeare’s body of work is an interesting phenomenon, one that repays attention and deeper study, one in which every part resonates with the whole, the acceptance or rejection of the “Funeral Elegy” makes a big difference. If the Elegy, and not The Tempest for instance, is construed as Shakespeare’s final vision, one gets a different picture of the entire Shakespearean phenomenon, the arc of his intellect. (The way Chaucer’s deathbed “retraction” of his best work can’t help but become a distorting lens through which to re-envision all that previous beauty and comedy.)

  In any case making generalizations about Shakespeare that derive from the Elegy is akin to making generalizations about the complexity of women based on the study of a plastic blow-up doll.

  And it matters, Foster’s claim, if one believes in the idea of an author, of the individual dignity of an artist, as opposed to thinking of an author as merely an “author function,” one that has no free will or creative autonomy, but whose identity and work are purely the deterministic product of the power relations of his moment in history (as the more stringent New Historicists have it). It matters if one believes that the body of work is as important to define as the body of the author. Even those who don’t believe Shakespeare (“the Stratford man” as the anti-Stratfordians dismissively call him) wrote Shakespeare’s works do believe there is something distinctive about the works, whether they were written by Bacon, Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford. Even they believe that any significant part of the canon defines, or at least irrevocably colors, the interpretation of the rest.

  But Don Foster and his “author function” computer database were riding high in the years following the front pages and the worldwide headlines. His Great Shakespeare Discovery was followed by his even greater media splash in the Primary Colors affair, and suddenly he was catapulted, not just to media fame but to the forefront of the criminal justice system, as law enforcement agencies sought to use the alleged science of “forensic linguistics” Foster had confected to crack crimes that involved disputed documents.

  Foster’s involvement in the JonBenét Ramsey case should have caused law enforcement people (and Shakespeareans) to have second thoughts about his methods and conclusions. I’d known something about it: the reports that Foster had first leapt in to declare in a letter to the mother of the murdered child, Mrs. Ramsey, that his scientific methods would clear her of any implication she had written the suspect “ransom note” herself. And then he reversed course and aligned himself on the opposite side. And in his book Author Unknown, he admits he “made a mistake.” But not until I’d read Brian Vickers’s book on Foster and the Elegy did I realize how intoxicated Foster had become with his reputation as “Shakespeare super-sleuth.”

  According to Vickers, Foster omits from his brief reference to his JonBenét case “mistake” the fact that “Donald Foster intervened in it twice, entirely on his own initiative, and that his authorship methodology twice produced an erroneous identification.” (The second Foster suspect turned out to be a housewife from North Carolina with no connection to the crime aside from having written about it on the Web, thus subjecting her text to Fosterian analysis.)

  It’s comic, yes, but perhaps tragic as well, considering that—despite all this, because of his supposed Shakespearean discovery—law enforcement authorities continued to consult the “Shakespeare super-sleuth” long after the JonBenét embarrassment, up to and including the anthrax letter scare in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. In fact the BBC did a documentary celebration of the “Shakespeare super-sleuth’s” involvement in the anthrax case that aired in 2002, just a few weeks before Foster was forced to make his big retraction—and in effect pull the rug out from under the crime-fighting career he’d built upon the Great Shakespeare Discovery. Recall, after all, that Foster himself proclaimed that “one mistake” would destroy his super-sleuth role forever. (Foster’s “anthrax suspect” has never been charged and, in fact, is suing the government for pursuing him.)

  What struck me most personally, though, was Vickers’s account of Foster’s treatment of those who disagreed with him. Foster told one opponent that he (the opponent) would “destroy” himself; specifically, according to one of Foster’s computer methodology critics, Foster told him that “any attempt to publish your findings or present them at conferences on ‘Funeral Elegy’ would destroy your reputation.…”

  But I think what set my teeth on edge from the beginning was not these tactics so much as the triumphalism about the computer and the reductivism about literature that accompanied Foster’s claim. Even though Foster later made SHAXICON disappear from his narrative like the Ghost in Hamlet at the crowing of the cock, the message that had been transmitted was clear: it was SHAXICON that had made him a literary superman, or at the very least “super-sleuth.” SHAXICON was his Frankenstein creation. Now all that wooly literary judgment stuff could be junked—number-crunching had arrived at a state of Fosterian sophistication. Literary value was to be defined by digitized statistics. And the only reason his opponents, mostly in the United Kingdom, couldn’t abide his claim was that they were—like fearful and ignorant primitives (bardolaters, idolaters)—primitives now forced to bow before the superior judgmental power of the number-crunching computer.

  Literary judgment, literary value was already under assault from the pseudo-science of Theory whose partisans believed their job was to demonstrate that literary judgment was always inherently incoherent, inconsistent, irredeemably subjective, the product of unacknowledged personal prejudice. Or that “literary value” was just a construct, a slavish reflection of the internalized values of the power relations of an oppressive hegemony. Now in Foster’s methodology literary judgment was shown to be reducible to nothing more than the zeroes and ones of a digital database far more qualified than any individual human sensibility to “hear” such things as “authorial voice.”

  The over-optimism of technology and the over-pessimism of Theory were squeezing literary judgment out of existence, or sending it to stand in the corner with a dunce cap for lacking the resources or the self-awareness to realize that an “author” was nothing more than an “author function.”

  Rereading the first column I did on the Elegy question in 1996 I can see I was initially torn on the question. But in reading over my initial column on the Elegy I also came upon something I’d forgotten: I’d had a phone conversation with Foster’s colleague Richard Abrams in which he made an intelligent-sounding case for the attribution (I had not yet read the poem).

  But Abrams said something else remarkable, another aspect of the Great Shakespeare Discovery when it first burst upon the world that had later been discarded by Don Foster, but had done a lot to sell it. Abrams told me that he and Foster “believe that Shakespeare wrote the Elegy to the memory of the same man to whom he wrote the early flattering homoerotic sonnets.”

  A little frisson that didn’t last much longer than its initial market-testing, but which showed up in the original New York Times front-page story (“A Literary Sleuth Finds His Man”). A little frisson that didn’t hurt the marketing campaign (sex never does). Back then Foster had called attention to a line in the Elegy referring to the “brand of some former shame.” And, Abrams told me, they both believed that this could be a reference to a Shakespearean scandal, perhaps over a homosexual liaison with the male subject of the Sonnets, the reality of whom, the nature of the relationship with whom, the historical identity (if real at all) of whom, has been the subject of inconclusive debate for four centuries.

  By suggesting the dead man might have been Shakespeare’s same-sex lover they were
implying that the Elegy was not only a new discovery in the Shakespeare poetic canon, but one that may well have solved one of the great biographical riddles of Shakespearean scholarship. It was beginning to seem too neat, the Elegy like Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies in Middlemarch.

  I must admit I began to see it in folktale terms as a kind of “John Henry versus the Steam Drill” battle, with myself playing the John Henry doomed-humanist role, against the silicon steam drill that SHAXICON represented. But I thought it would be a useful test: I wasn’t claiming to be the most well-versed and erudite Shakespeare scholar in the realm, but I thought my nearly three decades of reading and playgoing were more than a match for Foster’s number-crunching in making a judgment about the Elegy.

  “FABRIC” OR FABRICATION

  What kept irritating me about Foster was his dismissal of literary value, literary judgment as worthless in deciding whether an “authorial voice”—Shakespeare’s voice—can be or not be identified through reading rather than computing. The point he didn’t seem to get, or polemically misconstrued, about his critics was not merely that the poem was bad, but that it was bad in a non-Shakespearean way.

  I think what brought matters to a head between me and Foster was not my reporting on his exaggerated claims of “acceptance.” Rather, I believe, what prompted his cheerful “I could destroy you” imprecation was the “indistinguishable fabric” question I’d raised.

  It was a phrase I discovered at the very close of Foster’s PMLA article. The PMLA piece was filled with intimidating tables, all of which Foster employed to make the case that his statistical “tests” proved positively by number-crunch word counts that the Elegy could only have been written by Shakespeare.

  Or is that what he proved? What Foster actually said in his conclusion was this:

  The “Funeral Elegy” “belongs hereafter with Shakespeare’s poems and plays,” he declared, “not because there is incontrovertible proof that the man Shakespeare wrote it (there is not)”—this is not the message the “Shakespeare super-sleuth” and “world’s first literary detective” had conveyed to the press, when he proclaimed his Great Shakespeare Discovery. But wait, there’s more. “Not even because it is an esthetically satisfying poem (it is not), but rather because it is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare” (italics mine).

  This is a remarkable failure to make the claim the media thought he had made. And that he made his reputation on. Here he wouldn’t even say the terrible poem was by Shakespeare. Now it’s “formed”—whatever that means—“from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from Shakespeare.” Which is very different from saying it’s by Shakespeare. Two twins, to use a Shakespearean example, are “formed” from “fabric indistinguishable” from each other, one might say, but that doesn’t make them the same person.

  I was puzzled at first by Foster’s use of this “fabric indistinguishable” phrasing. First because I thought it was still wrong. And second because it suggested to me that beneath the bravado Foster might have some doubt.

  This is what I wrote at the time, five and a half years before Foster admitted his error:

  “I think the shabby ‘fabric’ (of the Elegy) is quite easily ‘distinguishable’: by a human if not a computer. It sounds almost as if Professor Foster would dearly love to retreat to his agnosticism [the hedging in his 1989 book], but realizes he’s got three publishers out there already flogging their new editions on the basis of the Elegy’s inclusion. He has to give them some cover. So he retreats to the extremely strained ‘linguistic fabric indistinguishable from canonical Shakespeare’ argument.”

  “Linguistic fabric”: you have to love the evasiveness of that. I called it “an argument that tells us exactly why we should reject the attribution.” I used the analogy of a freshly killed corpse: “one could just as easily say that a newly dead body is ‘formed from a fabric’ of flesh ‘indistinguishable’ from that of a living body: after all a computerized scan of all the chemical elements in a newly dead body would prove it ‘indistinguishable’ from a living one. The only difference—the difference that makes all the difference, the difference between a work by Shakespeare and the Elegy (a distinction that the tone-deaf, tin-eared SHAXICON can’t make) is that one is a living being. And the other is a corpse. Perhaps it’s time to give ‘A Funeral Elegy’ the funeral it deserves.”

  Well, those were strong words, I admit. And I reprint them not (merely) to gloat over being right. Because I was, I think, wrong about at least one thing: when I speculated that Foster really wanted to retreat with that “fabric indistinguishable” locution. It’s true he may have wanted to hedge his bets for the academy in the PMLA story, a hesitant caution that he displayed when he identified Primary Colors’ Anonymous. (In fact, as has been widely reported, in his original draft of his story for New York magazine he hedged his certainty that it was Joe Klein at the close of his story, and then-editor Kurt Andersen stepped in and rewrote Foster’s conclusion to say unequivocally—and correctly—it was Joe Klein. Foster might have preferred “fabric indistinguishable from Joe Klein.”)

  But with the Elegy, although he may have been initially hesitant and equivocal in the PMLA article, the attacks on it, not mine necessarily, but particularly from the mandarins of the British Shakespeare establishment such as Stanley Wells, may have galled Foster into convincing himself there was no doubt. At least that’s the way he began to act, dismissing his opponents as “fools” and “dopes”—words he used in referring to specific scholars in conversations with me. He took to using violent metaphors like “I blew her out of the water.”

  Still, by 2000, when Foster published Author Unknown, his self-congratulatory memoir, things had quieted down on the Elegy front. Foster’s pointed attempt, in citing my dissent (in Author Unknown), to make me seem one of the antiquated crowd that foolishly still believed in human literary judgment, and persisted in resisting the triumph of his computerized “scientific methods,” was written from the perspective of someone serenely certain he had decisively won the battle.

  THE FALL

  And there the matter stood between us: Foster bestriding the “forensic” and academic world like a colossus, and poor uncredentialed me continuing at every opportunity to denounce the Elegy attribution. Until the beginning of the end. The beginning of the Fall for Don Foster was signaled (to those of us who noticed it) by a brief paragraph at the close of a review in the TLS: Brian Vickers’s April 2001 review of Foster’s Author Unknown, when it came out in the United Kingdom.

  It was interesting that, in that review, Vickers also noted the Don Corleone vibe that I had picked up in the triumphant Don Foster’s polemic style: “He comes across as a combative person, very tough about his professional reputation and slow to forgive offense.”

  Vickers cites the way that in going after Joe Klein in the Primary Colors affair, “Foster confess[es] to a little bit of harmless mischief”—this being the suggestion that “Anonymous” could be gay, thus “poking fun at the author’s evident sore spot, his masculine anxiety.”

  Vickers is briskly dismissive of Foster’s altered narrative of his Elegy discovery (which omits SHAXICON’s importance, even existence): “Foster’s summary of the arguments for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funeral Elegy can be shown to be wrong in every detail” (italics mine).

  Then in the final paragraph came the bombshell:

  “Happily three independent studies [of the Elegy] to be published shortly will identify it as the work of John Ford. As Don Foster puts it ‘in the end truth usually prevails.’ ”

  Rarely has a single paragraph given me such pleasure, and in a matter of hours I was on the phone to Vickers in Zurich, where he was teaching at the Institute of Renaissance Studies. It was exciting to think not only that three more scholars had joined the struggle against the Elegy attribution, but that they had named John Ford as the author, which I had done four years earlier—prompted by a 1997 let
ter to the TLS from Vickers himself suggesting Ford as a candidate. (The very first person to have suggested Ford appears to be the independent scholar Richard Kennedy, who posted it on the SHAKSPER electronic discussion list in 1996.)

  When I reached Vickers in Zurich and asked him what the three studies were, he mentioned a forthcoming study in the Review of English Studies, a widely respected academic journal, by someone named Monsarrat; a new study of Foster’s computer methodology mistakes by members of the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic; and Vickers’s own Cambridge University Press book Counterfeiting Shakespeare, due out the following year.

  But it was more than a year until Foster felt forced to make his retraction. It’s hard to think of a bigger reversal, and everything about it—the timing, the manner, the venue and the explanation he gave for it—is intriguing.

  Foster says that he decided to make his retraction after he and Richard Abrams both read G. D. Monsarrat’s article in the Review of English Studies May 2002 issue. It’s a devastating analysis of Foster’s methods and conclusions which names John Ford as the true author of the awful Elegy.

  Some speculated that, since Foster knew Vickers’s five-hundred-page book on the Elegy was soon to appear (an announcement had been made in Cambridge University Press’s catalog), Foster rushed to concede defeat to a relatively obscure scholar, Monsarrat, rather than to Vickers with whom he’d been dueling publicly, sometimes bitterly in print, for six years.

  When Foster made the announcement of his retraction, he made it to a small-circulation (approximately 1,200 scholars) electronic discussion list on the Web called SHAKSPER, on June 12, after most scholars had departed from their campuses, many leaving behind summer protocol instructions to hold off on delivery of their daily dozen or so e-mail posts from SHAKSPER. In other words he wasn’t advertising it on the front page of The New York Times, as he had his original claim.