A FORD, NOT A SHAKESPEARE You remember the headlines back at the end of 1995? “New Work by Shakespeare,” “Literary Sleuth Uncovers Lost Poem by the Bard,” “Did the Swan of Avon Write It?” It all started when a Vassar professor named Donald Foster claimed to have demonstrated that Shakespeare was the author of a minor Renaissance poem called “A Funerall Elegye.” Published in 1612–“in memory of the late vertuous Maister William Peeter”–the poem was signed with the initials “W.S.” Those initials may have stood for William Stradling, the subject’s cousin, or they may have stood for someone else, lost in the mists of history. They might even represent a blatant attempt to ride on the playwright’s fame and make readers at the time believe Shakespeare had written the verse. But it seemed impossible that the mature William Shakespeare–only a few years before his death in 1616–could have written anything quite this bad. But then along came Donald Foster to say that a combination of scholarly considerations–but particularly computer analysis of the language using the Renaissance database “Shaxicon”–proved that Shakespeare had indeed written “A Funerall Elegye.” A front-page story in the New York Times followed. The textbook publishers Riverside, Norton, and Addison-Wesley, all added the poem to their new editions of Shakespeare. America sank to its knees in awe, while Britain huffed and puffed in outrage. WELL, it turns out at last that the Brits were right: Shakespeare isn’t the author. In a June 12 posting to a Shakespeare e-mail discussion list, Foster declared that he’d changed his mind. A professor from the University of Burgundy named G.D. Monsarrat had been assigned the 578-line poem by the main French publisher of Shakespeare, and he became convinced, while working on his translation, that it reflected all the philosophical prejudices and stylistic tricks of the playwright John Ford, most famous as the author of “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.” Monsarrat published the result in the May issue of the Review of English Studies, and that–combined with news of the British writer Brian Vickers’s forthcoming book “Counterfeiting Shakespeare,” which similarly concludes that Ford was the author–proved too much for Foster. “No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes,” he explained in his e-mail, “deserves to be called a scholar.” That’s a good line, of a sort, and it’s been quoted in all the news reports about Foster’s recantation. In the New York Observer Ron Rosenbaum–who had been among the few Americans to reject the original attribution to Shakespeare–cheered: “It’s a line that should win him more admirers than any so-called discovery, and it’s a line more scholars should take to heart. It’s a line about the way truth is often discovered through the dialectical process of making claims, recognizing error and often thereby discovering new truths.” BUT THERE’S SOMETHING BETTER than rejoicing at one’s errors–and much better than the pseudo-Hegelianism of using error to discover truth. That may be, in fact, the way the mind, or at least the scholarly mind, needs to work. But the Shakespeare error by which the Ford truth was discovered didn’t happen in the privacy of Foster’s mind. It happened in public, in the glare of the front page of the New York Times–and part of the reason it happened was precisely because there’s front-page material in a new poem by Shakespeare. The alleged discovery of bad poetry by John Ford just doesn’t rate the space, and Donald Foster was seduced. You can see why. In the years since he got it wrong, Foster has gone from strength to strength. His first tentative work on the subject, “Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution, “was published in 1989 by the small University of Delaware Press, while his recent memoir, “Author Unknown,” was issued by the mainstream publisher Henry Holt with dust-jacket publicity that called him “the world’s first literary detective.” He’s been asked for literary analysis of notes in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case, the Unabomber manifesto, and the post-September 11 anthrax letters. (“F.B.I. Agents Take Lessons in Detection From Shakespeare Super-Sleuth,” read one newspaper headline.) More successful were his stylistic conclusions that Joe Klein was the “Anonymous” behind the bestselling novel “Primary Colors,” and that Thomas Pynchon was not the author of the curious 1996 literary production entitled “The Letters of Wanda Tinasky” that some had ascribed to him. Like the claim for Shakespeare’s authorship of the elegy, all these deductions played out in the public eye. Foster deserves credit for admitting his mistake about “A Funerall Elegye,” but if his fame, book advances, invitations to appear on television, and academic stardom are the result of being wrong, who wouldn’t embrace the dialectical uses of error? First publish your most outrageous thought, reap the reward, and then settle down to decide what’s actually the truth. IN HIS OTHERWISE GRACIOUS e-mail admitting that he’s changed his mind, Foster takes a swipe at the “Bardolators” whose worship of Shakespeare prevented them from even considering the possibility that he had written anything as inferior as “A Funerall Elegye.” And Foster’s right, of course, that some of Shakespeare’s admirers can be a little hard to bear (although they are to be preferred to the academics for whom writing about the playwright is primarily an excuse to demonstrate their mastery of post-colonialism, queer studies, or deconstructive theory). The truth is that Shakespeare was capable from time to time of an unclarity so palpable that one feels as though one were moving through a fog of words. Take this speech from “King Lear” (II.2, lines 116-124): It pleased the king his master very late To strike at me, upon his misconstruction; When he, conjunct and flattering his displeasure, Tripp’d me behind; being down, insulted, rail’d, And put upon him such a deal of man, That worthied him, got praises of the king For him attempting who was self- subdued; And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit, Drew on me here again. But set that beside this, from “A Funerall Elegye” (lines 29-36): The curious eye of a quick-brain’d survey Could scantly find a mote amidst the sun Of his too-short’ned days, or make a prey Of any faulty errors he had done– Not that he was above the spleenful sense And spite of malice, but for that he had Warrant enough in his own innocence Against the sting of some in nature bad. Foster has a point about Bardolatry, if we find it too-much easier to attribute these words to Ford rather than Shakespeare, for Ford was a great dramatist who even at his worst is rarely this bad. But it’s the way in which it’s bad that’s interesting. The passage from “King Lear” seems a muddy expression of a complex thought about human motivation–if anything, too complex a thought for Oswald to have when he explains to Cornwall about why Kent has set about him. The passage from “A Funerall Elegye,” on the other hand, is a muddied expression of something very simple: “The late vertuous Maister William Peeter” never got angry without just cause. And to express this minor thought, we have a “curious eye of a quick-brain’d survey” (and what’s that when it’s at home?), which is supposed simultaneously to be able to “find a mote” and “make a prey.” Errors aren’t just errors, but “faulty errors.” The meter is uneasy in “Not that he was above,” and the sense has gone astray in “Against the sting of some in nature bad.” Shakespeare has his share of faulty errors, but these just aren’t his sort of errors. The early Shakespeare, in “Romeo and Juliet,” could write: The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels which sounds like poetry about how poets write, rather than poetry about its subject. The late Shakespeare could say, in “The Tempest,” All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come To answer thy best plea
sure; be’t to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl’d clouds: to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality where Ariel gives us the hackneyed fusing of “curl’d clouds.” But even in the these passages, Shakespeare is always saying something. Even when he’s writing just for the joy of watching himself write, there’s a core of thought. That’s why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, of course–and why it was worth all the news when Donald Foster ascribed to him the rather thoughtless “Funerall Elegye.” But it’s also why Foster should have known better in the first place. –J. Bottum
