From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 30 Jan 1996 23:57:08 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0048 Re: "A Funeral Elegy" Foster says of the "Funeral Elegy" that he would be "happy to see any criticism of any kind, including even the less sophisticated "ohh, it's yucky," variety...." But how else can we judge a poem but by it's poetic worth -- a judgement of whether it is "yucky" or not? The FE is a third rate poem, at best, and is an amateur effort I would guess. It lacks all depth of thought, originality, or excellence of language. It's like a long babbling stream that is shallow the whole length There is not an arresting image or memorable line in the whole of it. If I am wrong about this, let someone pluck something out of it that is worthy of Shakespeare or any second rate Elizabethan poet. The thing is 579 lines long, and I find nothing in it above the level of a Hallmark verse. As to my "less sophisticated" opinion -- less sophisticated than what? Is Foster speaking about a computer, some program perhaps that dices poems? I only suppose he is, but I don't know. But supposing that he is, and some computer has pronounced the FE to be by Shakespeare, let one thing be remembered. A computer is entirely devoid of human experience, and cannot tell the difference between "The Owl and the Pussycat" or one of Shakespeare's sonnets, whether to weep, or laugh, or to be stunned by some understanding of the human condition. No computer will ever be able to help us in this. That's the profound difference between humans and computers, and the reason I consider my judgement (or anyone's judgement who has read much poetry), to be sufficient to say that if Shakespeare wrote the FE he had grown feeble in his mind, wasteful of words, forgetful of his genius, and dottering in his wisdom to write such a tiresome farewell to a friend. --------------------------------------------------- From: John Boni Date: Thursday, 1 Feb 1996 16:45:39 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0089 Re: FE Richard J. Kennedy's remarks on a computer's esthetic taste (judgment?) in regards to the quality of *A Funeral Elegy*, remind me of an incident of a few years ago. I was a member of an English Department at a university other the one where I currently serve. We had a lively department colloquium series. On one presentation a colleague did a computers and poetry presentation in which he showed rather proudly how he had pro- grammed a computer to write a program arrayed as an E. E. Cummings poem would appear. This achievement told us something about Cummings' work, and given the state of "computer literacy" at the time, was no small feat. However, a colleague in the audience attacked the mechanistic nature of the proposal, concluding that the computer would be unable to comment on the difference between "after many a summer dies the swan," [I hope I've recalled it accurately] and "after many a winter dies the duck." He had (and still has) a point. Once we acknowledge our subjectivity, we can then compare judg- ments. Wasn't is Pope who wrote, "Wits, like watches, go no two alike." (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Terry Ross Date: Friday, 2 Feb 1996 13:22:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: Funeral Elegy by W.S. (long) I'm disappointed that, despite Foster's request, there hasn't been more discussion of the Funeral Elegy attributed to Shakespeare. Most of what I've seen has been either blanket dismissal or qualified approval. I posted some remarks about the elegy to the Shakespeare newsgroup, but there was no response to speak of, so I'll reply to the recent attack in this forum. I apologize to those who have already seen much of this. I don't know whether the elegy is by Shakespeare. I don't find the evidence some have seen in the apparently autobiographical nuggets in the poem (see lines 137-148, 205-244, 539-572), but then I haven't found attempts to mine the sonnets for Shakespearean autobiography very persuasive either. I haven't reviewed the stylistic evidence for Shakespeare's authorship, but my own impression is that if it's Shakespeare it must, judging by prosody alone, come quite late. Yet I find myself coming around on the question of the elegy's quality. At first I found it flat and uninspired, and certainly it has passages that are quite weak: "Now therein lived he happy, if to be / Free from detraction happiness it be" (49-50). However, as I read the elegy again, I find passages of considerable power. Consider these lines (463-74): Birth, blood, and ancestors, are none of ours, Nor can we make a proper challenge to them But virtues and perfections in our powers Proceed most truly from us, if we do them. Respective titles or a gracious style With all what men in eminence possess, Are, without ornaments to praise them, vile: The beauty of the mind is nobleness. And such as have that beauty, well deserve Eternal characters, that after death Remembrance of their worth we may preserve, So that their glory die not with their breath. This is certainly not pedestrian. My first time through, I thought "if we do them" a clumsy anticlimax (we don't "do" virtue the way one might "do" windows), but now it seems quite skillful. The placement of "do them" makes a moral imperative out of what might otherwise be an easy sententiousness. Even stronger is the placement of the word "vile"--the disgust expressed is certainly of a kind we are familiar with in late Shakespeare (or in Ben Jonson, though had he written this Elegy, it would have been better). Yet the best line in this passage is surely the last. There has been comment in SHAKSPER on the remarkable enjambment in the poem. One of the most powerful examples is in these lines (483-86): Look hither then, you that enjoy the youth Of your best days, and see how unexpected Death can betray your jollity to ruth When death you think is least to be respected! There is always at least a slight expectation that a line of poetry is a syntactical unit--a phrase, a clause, a sentence. When we read verse, even enjambed verse, we often insert a pause even if there is no punctuation at the end of a line. There is no punctuation after the word "unexpected" in the passage above, and the first word of the next line, "Death," comes as a surprise, just as (so the poet warns us) it may in life. There are many other passages worthy of an excellent poet: Not in the outside of disgraceful folly, Courting opinion with unfit disguise, (91-92) those weak houses of our brittle flesh (189) low-leveled in a narrow grave (194) the current of besotted passion (274) time's strict flinty hand (552) Or consider this wonderful, almost Miltonic description of Christ (367-70): he, who to the universal lapse Gave sweet redemption, offering up his blood To conquer death by death, and loose the traps Of hell In short, this poem, though admittedly uneven, is not the work of a hack or a bumbler. I believe this poem would be worthy of our attention even if we knew it were not by Shakespeare. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Saturday, 03 Feb 1996 14:07:33 -0400 (EDT) Subject: "A Funeral Elegy" Thanks to Richard Kennedy for his example of the "ooh it's yucky" school of criticism. For a similar response, SHAKSPERians are directed to the piece by Stanley Wells in the current issue of TLS (which will be answered by Prof. Rick Abrams in a forthcoming issue [Feb. 9?]). It is a always a good idea, of course, to make sure that one knows what one is talking about before going on record. Illuminating are Mr. Kennedy's remarks, "I would guess.... If I am wrong about this,...I find nothing in it above the level of a Hallmark verse....Is Foster speaking about a computer, some program perhaps that dices poems? I only suppose he is, but I don't know. But supposing that he is,...I consider my judgement (or anyone's judgement who has read much poetry), to be sufficient..." Those who have already done their homework, or who attended either the SAA or MLA sessions, are aware that our problem is not, "Why doesn't Richard Kennedy LIKE this poem?" but rather, why didn't Shakespeare write it more in keeping with Richard Kennedy's (and, indeed, my own) sense of aesthetic value? A question to be asked. Stay tuned. Don Foster (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bernard Frischer Date: Saturday, 03 Feb 1996 Subject: Conference on 'A Funeral Elegy' CONFERENCE ON 'A FUNERAL ELEGY' Friday, February 9, 1996 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. in 121 Dodd Hall, UCLA (Admission is free) You are cordially invited to attend the first conference to be held on Prof. Donald Foster's important discovery of a new 578- line elegy published in 1612 by W.S., whom scholars generally agree was William Shakespeare. Prof. Foster found the poem among UCLA's microfilm copies of the holdings of the Bodleian Library. Conference Schedule: 2:00-2:10 Prof. Robert Watson (UCLA), Welcome 2:10-2:30 Prof. David Holmes (University of the West of England), "Authorship Studies Today" 2:30-3:00 Prof. Donald Foster (Vassar), "'A Funeral Elegy' by W.S.: The Argument for Attributing the Poem to William Shakespeare" (with a reading of highlights of the poem) 3:00-3:20 Prof. Lars Engle (University of Oklahoma), "The Signifi- cance of 'A Funeral Elegy' for Our Understanding of Shakespeare's Life and Works" 3:20-3:30 Prof. Stephen Booth (University of California, Berkeley), "Where Will We Go from Here?" 3:30-4:00 DISCUSSION This conference has been organized by Prof. Bernard Frischer (UCLA) and is co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies, the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies, the UCLA Department of Classics, the UCLA Department of English, the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility, the UCLA Office of the Education Abroad Program, and the Dept. of English of Loyola Marymount University. For further information please call: (310) 825-1867. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Friday, 2 Feb 1996 11:35:15 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0089 Re: Funeral Elegy I heartily agree with Richard Kennedy's opinion of The Funeral Elegy. I am stunned that leading Shakespeareans are promoting it as Shakespeare's work. However "impeccable" the scholarship, it won't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or convince your ordinary reader that day is night. The Times article used scornful terms for the idea that either Shall I Die, Shall I Fly or The Birth of Merlin are Shakespeare's, but either one is far more eligible than this interminable, unscannable, unreadable piece; Shall I Fly, since it is obviously a song lyric, where standards are much different than other kinds of poetry, and Merlin because whatever the difficulties, it SOUNDS like early Shakespeare, which this Funeral Elegy does not. As for machines, they must be asked the right questions to give worthwhile answers, and in any case, no machine can ever replace the human ear, mind and heart. The deaf use a machine to approximate what they have lost in nature. I can only surmise that these "experts" have somehow lost these func- tions. The emperor appears to be naked folks. I think I'll have another look at Venus and Adonis. Stephanie Hughes (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 02 Feb 1996 16:00:52 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0089 Re: FE Richard Kennedy comments: > It lacks all depth of thought, originality, or >excellence of language. It's like a long babbling stream that is shallow the >whole length There is not an arresting image or memorable line in the whole of >it. If I am wrong about this, let someone pluck something out of it that is >worthy of Shakespeare or any second rate Elizabethan poet. The thing is 579 >lines long, and I find nothing in it above the level of a Hallmark verse. I recently reread the "Elegy" -- encouraged by Don Foster's enthusiasm. I first read it several years ago because of Don's enthusiasm. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Richard's evalua- tion of the poem. It seems to be totally forgettable. After wading through it -- in Don's edition -- I am not convinced that the poem is in a recognizable Shakespearean style. The "plain style" argument doesn't diminish that impression -- and admittedly it is an impression. And I am not convinced that this poem will be readily accepted into the canon. If George Eld -- the printer and apparently the publisher (no publisher is named on the titlepage) -- knew that the poem was by Shakespeare, wouldn't he have placed Shakespeare's name on the titlepage? He certainly did so when he printed the sonnets and *Troilus and Cressida*. Apparently S.s name sold books. What kept Eld from using his name? I realize that this question is almost impossible to answer -- successfully. Yours, Bill Godshalk From: William Proctor Williams Date: Thursday, 08 Feb 96 16:29 CST Subject: Re: SHK 7.0092 Re: Funeral Elegy by W.S. Look, both the "Funeral Elegy" and "Shall I Die. . . ." are probably by W.S. If one reads them one can easily see why a 'good' poet wouldn't want them associated with his name. This is not the 'Holy Grail,' the 'Holy Grail' is any bit of lit 'use your own definition of what that means' in WS's 'own hand.' One only has to look to the Donne Variorum to see into how many forms an author's works may be transmuted without his hand ever coming near the paper. Interesting as it all may be, what we need to find is something that WS inscribed himself, not what other did for him. Sorry for the tone of this, but I find both Taylor's and Foster's claims both compelling and uninteresting. (6)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Hardy M. Cook Date: Friday, February 9, 1996 Subject: FE I don't really have the time right now to get into this discussion, but I liked the "Elegy," finding interesting turns of phrase and totally weird passages that bear further scrutiny. At some point, I would also like to offer some of my reasons for my fondness for *Venus and Adonis* -- a poem I find very sexy and very funny and a poem I believe has many resemblances to the *Sonnets*. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 09 Feb 1996 08:27:33 -0500 (EST) Subject: Funeral Elegy Terry Ross is correct when he suggests that *A Funeral Elegy* is stylistically very Shakespearean, and Rick Abrams will be summariz- ing those stylistic similarities in a forthcoming issue of the TLS. The enjambment is very Shakespearean in quantity and dexterity. And much of the vocabulary and word usage is Shakespearean -- no doubt. Just looking at the first lines, I find verbs like "rase out" (11) and "pattern out" (16) are used by Shakespeare. Of course, he hadn't used "short-lived" (12) since LLL -- if I'm reading the concordance correctly. But the line "Sith as that ever he maintained the same?" (8) troubles me. If this line is Shakespeare's, this is the first time in his undoubted writing that he's used "Sith as that." (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Abbott notes the "as that" construction (para. 108), but quotes Spenser rather than Shakespeare as an example. All in all, line 8 seems lame -- to my ear. Of course, the ascription of the poem to Shakespeare will not rest on one line or, indeed, on a series of separate lines. But there is the bad Hemingway contest in which writers who admire Hemingway, and know his style well attempt to imitate his style. "Sith as that ever he maintained the same?" doesn't sound like a very successful attempt to imitate Shakespeare's style -- even if it was Shake- speare at the pen! Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Saturday, 10 Feb 1996 00:41:48 +0100 Subject: Funeral Elegy If I may, I'd like to contribute my two cents to the discussion on the Funeral Elegy. Unfortunately, many people seem to be getting their information from news reports, which are necessarily sketchy and almost invariably include omissions and distortions. To someone who has only read the New York Times article and similar accounts, Don Foster's confidence may seem excessive, and his latest SHAKSPER post ("our problem is not, 'Why doesn't Richard Kennedy LIKE this poem?' but rather, why didn't Shakespeare write it more in keeping with Richard Kennedy's (and, indeed, my own) sense of aesthetic value?") may seem like hubris. I don't think anybody, least of all Don, is claiming that this is a great poem, and the reaction many people have upon first reading the poem ("*Shakespeare* wrote *this*?!?) is entirely reasonable. Neverthe- less, the evidence that Shakespeare did in fact write this poem is surprisingly broad and surprisingly persuasive -- the Elegy closely matches Shakespeare's late work in many, many ways and differs from the work of other contemporary poets in equally many ways; numerous rhetorical and grammatical quirks which are virtually unique to Shakespeare among English poets are found in the Elegy; the author of the Elegy knew Shakespeare's works inside and out and borrowed heavily from them; and so on. I won't go into all this evidence here -- much of it can be found in Don Foster's book, *Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution*, though some of the most compelling evidence, including that of SHAXICON, have come to light since the book was written. In the spirit of debate, I thought I'd give my reaction to some of the criticisms I've seen, and mention some factors that should at least be part of the discussion. * The Elegy, whoever the author may have been, was written quickly. William Peter was murdered on January 25, 1612, and the Elegy was entered in the Stationer's Register by Thomas Thorpe on February 13, just nineteen days later. Even without allowing time for news of the murder to reach the poet and/or for the manuscript to reach London, that's pretty quick for a 579-line poem, especially one as complex as the Funeral Elegy. Terry Ross points out some of the poem's good points, and Don Foster makes a very good case in his book that the Elegy is more complex, both rhetorically and stylistically, than it might appear at first glance. * Most Elizabethan and Jacobean elegies, even those written by accomplished poets, tended to be unmemorable and filled with cliches; in this context, the Funeral Elegy is actually pretty good and unusually complex. I hope Don Foster doesn't mind if I quote from his book: "As an elegaic poet W.S. has few competitors for the laurel. John Donne is perhaps the only contemporary who can boast to have surpassed W.S.'s achievement in an elegaic poem of more than two hundred lines. The verse of W.S. seems almost effortless beside the funereal labors of such noted poets as George Chapman, John Davies, or Thomas Heywood, and beyond comparison with the doggerel of such hacks as George Wither and Joshua Sylvester. With the possible exception of Shakespeare and one or two others, W.S.'s Elegy would add to the reputation of any Jacobean poet able to claim it as his own." I'm not saying this proves anything, but the literary context in which the Elegy was written is at least a relevant factor to be considered in any discussion of its author- ship. * Bill Godshalk wonders why, if Shakespeare was the author, his full name didn't appear on the title page as a selling point. But as Don Foster points out, the quarto of the Elegy has all the hallmarks of being privately printed, financed probably by the author and not intended for public sale. The subject was an untitled provincial gentleman of no apparent interest to London bookbuyers (other published elegies were virtually without exception written for knights or earls who were famous and/or whose families were likely patrons); the name of the publisher (Thorpe) does not appear on the title page or elsewhere; neither is there the address of a bookseller, as in virtually all books offered for public sale. * The news stories have tended to emphasize the computer aspect, and have sometimes given the impression that a "computer study" is the basis of Foster's claim for Shakespeare's authorship of the Elegy. This spin is not too surprising given the media's general fascination with computers, especially when they're used in the humanities, but in fact the bulk of the evidence and arguments have nothing to do with computers; unless I'm mistaken, all the counting, word lists, etc. for Don's book were done manually (it was published in 1989 but written a few years earlier). It's true that SHAXICON has supplemented this evidence in important ways, but it's just one part of a complex web of evidence. Several people have reminded us that computers have no emotions and cannot judge beauty. This is true, of course, but nobody is trying to use a computer for that. People's esthetic judgements of a poem are valuable and useful, and always have to be considered in a case like this. Such judgements are obviously subjective, though, and other kinds of evidence, both internal and external, also have to be looked at in any attribution study. In the case of the Funeral Elegy, the other evidence is pretty persuasive, and there are a number of factors -- haste, the general dreariness (even among good poets) of the genre to which the Elegy belongs, plus what Richard Abrams argues is a deliberately anti-imaginative quality to the poem -- which you have to take into account when reading it. Anyone is free to believe or not believe that Shakespeare wrote the Elegy, but I don't think you can just dismiss the case for his authorship as casually as some people have been doing. I hope people will look at all the evidence in all its astonishing detail, and get an idea of the literary context in which the poem was written, before treating the Elegy too harshly. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 12 Feb 1996 15:55:55 -0800 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0107 Re: Funeral Elegy David Kathman likes the Funeral Elegy to be by Shakespeare. He finds Don Foster's evidence to be "surprisingly broad and surpris- ingly persuasive," and credits Shaxicon for providing"some of the most compelling evidence" for the case. Kathman thinks the long poem is a smooth piece of work, "almost effortless" beside the funereal labors George Chapman, Sir John Davies, or Thomas Heywood. Let's take a look at Chapman first. I have very little reference at hand, and I'll use only The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse to draw comparisons. Here is Chapman speaking of death, Umbra's elegy on the killing of Bussy D'Ambois, Act V, Scene 4 (1607). "Farewell, brave relics of a complete man, Look up and see thy spirit made a star; Join flames with Hercules, and when thou sett'st Thy radiant forehead in the firmament, Make the vast crystal crack with thy receipt; Spread to the world of fire, and the aged sky Cheer with new sparks of old humanity." That's a fine farewell, second-rate only to Horatio's send off of Hamlet, and in the Funeral Elegy we are to believe that Shakespeare wrote this earth-bound dud. What can we leave behind us but a name, Which, by a life well led, may honor have? Such honor, O thou youth untimely lost, Thou didst deserve and hast; for though thy soul Hath took her flight to a diviner coast, Yet here on earth thy fame lives ever whole, In every heart sealed up, in every tongue Fit matter to discourse, no day prevented That pities not thy sad and sudden wrong, Of all alike beloved and lamented." (195-204) My guess is that the poet was asleep when he wrote this. David Kathman also offers Sir John Davies as a lesser poet than the unknown W.S. in these matters. Let's compare these lines of Davies, written in 1599: "For though the Soul do seem her grave to bear, And in this world is almost buried quick, We have no cause the body's death to fear, For when the Shell is broke, out comes a chick." This is a bit too barnyardy and light-hearted for my own taste, but the poet has at least risked a metaphore, which W.S. never does. Here's the Elegy on the same theme of rebirth: "So henceforth all (great glory to his blood) Shall be but seconds to him, being good. The wicked end their honor with their sin In death, which only then the good begin." (345-348) The above is a good example of the boggling abstraction of the Elegy. There is never a fresh image or bright idea in the whole of it. Kathman suggests that there's a loss of heart which saps the strength of one's language when writing a poem about a dear friend departed, but I doubt that. Evidently he supports Richard Abrams theory that there's a deliberate "anti-imaginative quality to the poem." That's rather a quaint notion, the shutting down of your poetic powers to show your grief at a friend's death, sort of like cutting a finger off, but not as neat. As for Thomas Heywood, I found no elegy in the Penquin Book, but here's a sample of the man's work: "The nimble Fairies, taking hand in hand, Will skip like rather lambkins in the downs The tender grass unbended still shall stand, Cool Zephyrus still flaring up their gowns; And every shephard's swain will tune his ode, And more than these, to welcome thy abode." A lovely little piece, and the cool critical wind that blows up the skirts of the Elegy will find Chapman, Davies, and Heywood to be easy masters of this unknown W.S. After half a thousand lines, the author of the Elegy has tired even himself with the dead weight of his verse, and re-evaluates the situation: "But since the sum of all that can be said Can be but said that "He was good"......(531-532 I'm ready to believe it, and wish that he had said that right off, and quit while he was ahead. But you must read the poem for yourself and make your own opinion. Kathman allows for that: "People's esthetic judgements of a poem are valuable and use- ful..." That is, second only to Shaxicon. Well, God rest poor John Peter. The bad news is that he was killed, but the good news is that he didn't have to read his own Elegy. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Monday, 12 Feb 1996 22:11:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0102 Re: Funeral Elegy The discussion of the Funeral Elegy, with mention of "surprisingly persuasive" evidence reminds me of the scene in the Emperor's New Clothes where the tailors are describing the clothes to visitors, pointing out the delicacy of the lace, the intricate patterns on the buttons, the richness of the fabrics. If someone could point out one poem we can be sure that's Shake- speare that's even HALF as bad as this one, I'll begin to pay attention to the "surprisingly persuasive" evidence. Stephanie Hughes Are you guys all right? I'm worried about you. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Monday, 12 Feb 1996 23:25:20 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0107 Re: Funeral Elegy Bill Godshalk has questioned Don Foster's inference that the Elegy quarto was privately printed and not meant for public sale, and he makes some points that are definitely worth considering. While I have no particular attachment to the "privately printed" scenario and don't see it as crucial or even particularly important for the question of whether Shakespeare wrote the Elegy, I'd like to respond to some of Bill's points, in the spirit of scholarly give-and-take. * First of all, we need to make clear that publisher, printer, and bookseller were distinct roles in Elizabethan England. The publisher owned the copyright and bore the financial burden (and reaped any profits); the printer did the actual printing; and the bookseller sold the finished product. Sometimes all three roles were filled by the same person, but more often than not there were two, and sometimes three or more, people involved. Most publishers were also printers or booksellers, or both; thus George Eld was a printer who was also a publisher, in that he owned the rights to some (but not all) of the works he printed. Thomas Thorpe, though, was neither a printer nor a bookseller; he had to hire a printer for each of the works he published, and he also had to get somebody to sell them. Thus *Shakespeare's Sonnets*, published by Thorpe, was printed by George Eld and sold by John Wright and William Aspley. * Bill points out that the title-page of *The Puritan* is identical to that of the *Funeral Elegy*, in that it only lists Eld's name and the date. However, one significant difference is that Eld was not only the printer of *The Puritan*, but also the publisher; he entered it in the Stationer's Register on August 6, 1607, and thus owned the copyright. The *Funeral Elegy*, though, was entered in the Register by Thorpe, and the unusual thing about it is that Thorpe's name or initials appear nowhere in the volume. When a publisher hired out the printing of a book, he almost always put his name or initials either on the title page or on a dedicatory epistle. Thorpe did so on all the books he published in a 25-year career with only two exceptions: the *Elegy* and John Taylor's *Eighth Wonder of the World* (1613), which Foster speculated was "one of many such projects financed by Taylor himself". Looking at the title page alone can be misleading. Thorpe's first independent publication, Marlowe's translation of Lucan (1600) lacks his name on the title page (it was printed by Peter Short and sold by Walter Burre), but he signed a dedicatory epistle to Edward Blount; and at least one of Bill's list of books bearing only Eld's name on the title page (*St. Augustine, of the Citie of God*) also has a dedicatory epistle by Thorpe. I haven't checked, but I suspect that many of the other books in Bill's list were either published by Eld (and thus required no other name on the t.p.) or had dedicatory epistles by the publisher. (I don't find very tenable Bill's suggestion that Eld may have "assumed the role of publisher" for the Elegy; he may have sold it, but the Stationer's company was pretty strict about who held the rights to works, and the Register definitely says Thorpe held the rights to this one.) * Bill also wonders why W.S. had the Elegy printed rather than just circulating it in manuscript. One reason is that print is more permanent than manuscript, and W.S. tells us that he wanted to set the record straight about Peter for posterity. A 1610 agreement between Thomas Bodley and the Stationer's Company stipulated that the Bodleian Library at Oxford would receive a copy of every book published in England, and in fact one of the two surviving copies of the Elegy is in the Bodleian; I find plausible Foster's speculation that W.S. knew that his Elegy would at least be preserved in the Bodleian if it was committed to print. Just some thoughts to be considered. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Simon Morgan-Russell Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 1996 15:05:12 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0112 Re: Funeral Elegy I'd like to ask those most involved in the debate about the poem's authorship: "why does this matter?" I don't mean to deliberately obtuse or provocative, but what is at stake for those for and against the inclusion of this text in Shakespeare's canon? Simon Morgan-Russell Department of English Bowling Green State University (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 13 Feb 1996 21:41:59 -0500 (EST) Subject: FE I want to thank Dave Kathman for his great response to my initial comments on Eld's printing. Yes, Dave is absolutely correct. Thorp or Thorpe entered FE in the Stationers Register and had the rights to the book. I was simply speculating that Eld may have an informal agreement with Thorpe to assume his rights -- and thus leave Thorpe's name from the title page. But Thorpe's role in the process, I think, needs to be considered. (I have yet to generate a copy of Thorpe's bibliography.) Since Eld's name does appear on the title page, he may have sold the book -- assuming that it was sold -- and not distributed gratis. Manuscripts -- bound manuscripts -- are no less permanent than books. Middleton manuscripts are still extant -- as are mss. by many 16th-17th century authors. The ink and the paper are still quite fine. Finally, I'd like some truly solid evidence that FE was privately printed and paid for by Shakespeare. If Dave's scenario is correct, the printing was paid for by Thorpe. If Thorpe didn't sell books, how did he make his money? Commissions? On what? If Thorpe was not a printer, and assuming FE was privately printed, by didn't Shakespeare go directly to Eld -- the printer who had printed the Sonnets? Why go through Thorpe, the middle man? In *Some Aspects of London Publishin*, Greg discusses anomalous title pages -- "about 150 in fact" (85). He suggests several ways to account for these title pages. He says, "it might happen . . . that a bookseller who had purchased a copy would not at the moment find it convenient to pay for an edition, but might know of a printer willing . . . to bear the risk and take the profit of an edition, allowing him the benefit of distribution and retention of the copy" (88). Let me emphasize that Greg is here merely speculat- ing, but the speculation MAY in the case of FE be correct. Anyway, Dave, in the spirit of scholarly research, let's keep looking. I looked Thorpe up in R. B. McKerrow's Dictionary this evening, and found less information than you have. Where have you been looking? Yours, Bill Godshalk (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Wednesday, 14 Feb 1996 22:05:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0116 Re: Funeral Elegy Regarding my conversations with Dave Kathman about the printing and publication of *A Funeral Elegy,* I found today that Eld used only his name on STC 21028 (*art of iugling*) which had been entered by T. Bushell on Jan. 16, 1612, and on STC 19823 (*petite palace*) which had been entered by F. Burton on March 11, 1605. I suspect -- only suspect -- that Eld got the rights to these books, but the transfer is not recorded in the Stationers Register (to my knowledge -- and I did check). When Thorpe entered *A funerall Elegye* on 13 February 1612, it was entered as "A booke to be printed when it is further aucthorised" (Arber 3.477). As Kenneth Palmer commented about a similar entry for Shakespeare's *T&C*, "It is not clear whose authority might have been required" (Arden ed. 1). Greg (*Some Aspects*) thinks the word "authorized" refers to "an ecclesiastical imprimatur" (41), but that seems odd in the two contexts cited. Why would *T&C* need ecclesiatical approval? It should have been approved by the Master of the Revels. If Thorpe were acting as Shakespeare's agent, why would he need further authorization? And who was to do the authorizing? Why is this argument important to our knowledge of Shakespeare? Well, if we conclude that Thorpe did act as Shakespeare's agent in the case of the FE, then it seems likely that he was acting as his agent in the case of the sonnets. If this is true, then Eld's printing of the sonnets was authorized by Shakespeare -- and we can assume that Shakespeare had the chance to proofread them. And if this is true, then what we now take for mistakes in the text, did not appear so to Shakespeare -- or he was a perfectly lousy proofreader -- or out of town while the sonnets were aprinting -- or he needed new glasses. Take your choice. Obviously, there are other issues at stake. But I leave those for others to clarify. Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Thursday, 15 Feb 1996 00:27:01 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0116 Re: Funeral Elegy No time for a full reply, but here are a few of my reactions in the Funeral Elegy discussion: To Richard Kennedy: First of all, in the passage Mr. Kennedy responded to I was quoting Don Foster, who has read many more Elizabethan funeral elegies than I have and knows much more about the subject. That being said, I should clarify that when I spoke of the "literary context" of the Elegy, I was talking about published funeral elegies for real people who had died (and so was Don Foster in the quoted passage). Such elegies tended to be rather somber and repetitive affairs, abounding in cliches, and even poets who were elsewhere capable of beautiful poetry tended to drone on excessively when memorializing a dead celebrity in print. None of Mr. Kennedy's examples are from elegies for real people, and so aren't directly relevant to the point I was making. That excerpt from Bussy D'Ambois is nice, I agree, but I have Chapman's elegy for Prince Henry in front of me, and it's rough sledding in comparison. It opens: If ever adverse influence envied The glory of our Lands, or took a pride To trample on our height; or in the eye Struck all the pomp of Principality, Now it hath done so; oh, if ever Heaven, Made with the earth his angry reckoning even, Now it hath done so. Ever, ever be Admired, and fear'd that Triple Majesty... It goes on at great and repetitive length for 656 lines, longer than W.S.'s Elegy. My point is that the Elegy was not written in a literary vacuum, and the tendency for elegies of this type to be somber and dreary is one factor that should at least be considered when we're discussing the poem. 2) To Stephanie Hughes: Ms. Hughes asks for a poem undoubtedly by Shakespeare that is half as bad as the Funeral Elegy. One problem here is that many critics have tended to doubt Shakespeare's authorship of works which they deem not "good enough" to be by him -- A Lover's Complaint, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Titus Andronicus, the Henry VI plays, etc. Ms. Hughes earlier said that even the best scholarship can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, the implication being that Shakespeare only wrote silk purses. I don't want to get into a big discussion of this right now (maybe later), but one question here is whether Shakespeare was capable of being mediocre. I think anyone would agree that everything Shakespeare wrote was not of equal quality; not everything can be Hamlet or the Sonnets. Most people find the Funeral Elegy mediocre on first (or second or third) reading, and it's not an easy poem under any circumstances. One of the points I've been trying to make is that given the circumstances of publication and the literary and historical context, the Elegy is not necessarily as bad as it might first seem. Some people may still be unwilling to accept it as Shakespeare's, and that's certainly their right. But I think that context is at least worth considering here. 3) To Simon Morgan-Russell, who asks "what does it matter?": I'll leave to others discussion of this question in terms of attribution studies in general. In this specific case, the Funeral Elegy is a very personal poem, and if Shakespeare did write it, that fact has enormous biographical significance. 4) To Bill Godshalk: a) Bill's speculation that Eld had an informal agreement with Thorpe to assume the rights to the poem is just speculation, of course; there's no evidence for it, and I'm not aware of any evidence that this was done in other cases. If such evidence exists, I'd be interested in seeing it. b) When I said that printed books are more permanent than manuscripts, what I meant was that books are more likely to be preserved (in libraries, whether personal or institutional), on top of the greater number of copies of a printed book. Yes, there are manuscripts from that era, but there are many more printed texts. c) Absent personal papers and financial records of printers like Thomas Thorpe, we can't know for sure how their finances worked. But I think it would be reasonable to assume that Thorpe paid a fee to his printers, and also that he paid some sort of rent to the booksellers who sold his books, with the revenue from those books going into his pocket. If a book were privately printed and paid for by the author, as Foster argues the Elegy probably was, that means the author would pay the fee to the printer, plus maybe any distribution costs. Thorpe would not make any money (unless the author paid him something for his troubles), but he would retain the rights to reprint the work in the future. d) Bill asks why Shakespeare wouldn't go directly to Eld. Well, maybe he didn't know him personally; the two Shakespeare works Eld printed were both for other publishers (Troilus and Cressida for Richard Bonion and Henry Walley, the Sonnets for Thorpe). Thorpe, on the other hand, was apparently well-connected to the London theater world: he printed numerous works by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston, for most of which there is evidence of close authorial involvement. Though Thorpe was just a "middle-man", sometimes middle-men can be very useful. e) As for where I'm getting my info on Thorpe, some is from Don Foster's book, and some more is from Don's 1987 PMLA article "Master W.H., R.I.P." and Katherine Duncan-Jones' 1983 article in the Review of English Studies, "Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?", all of which I happened to have lying around. I see this post has turned longer than I expected. Ah well. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Schalkwyk Date: Thursday, 15 Feb 1996 13:42:01 SAST-2 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0112 Re: Funeral Elegy In the light of the unfavourable comparison between FE and similar poems by Chapman and Davies, could it be that, in contrast to the stirring rhetoric of the Chapmamn, the poem by "WS" enacts the disparagement of such rhetoric by the poet of the Sonnets? If the latter laments the enfeeblement of his own style -- the "poverty" that his "muse brings forth" -- by "proud full sail" of the rival poet's "great verse", then is it not possible that the style and tone of FE puts into practice the revulsion from rhetorical show expressed, but paradoxically not enacted, in the Sonnets? It may be for the intriguing light that FE might cast on the Sonnets, as Lars Engle has suggested, that we might like to believe that `WS' is William Shakespeare. But what the controversy has certainly shown is how powerful a symbol of aesthetic perfection Shakespeare remains: how readily we will refuse even to entertain the possibility of the attribution purely on the grounds that it is, to some of us, a very bad poem. It's bad, so it can't possibly be Shakespeare's. But why not? That refusal tells us a lot about the `discipline' and its deepest assumptions. Could the debate about FE not reveal more fully the irony of the following lines: Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost tell my name Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? Why, indeed? David Schalkwyk University of Cape Town (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Friday, 16 Feb 1996 09:05:50 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0120 Re: Funeral Elegy David Kathman; I think we all know places in the plays where Shakespeare isn't at his best; the interminable and flowery speeches of lords, comic passages that no longer mean anything, and so forth, but there is an electrical energy that never goes long without surfacing, a verve, a sense of life, that marks his works as his, beyond any measurable indices of style or language. To explain the lifeless- ness and dullness of this piece by the fact that elegies in general were dull just won't do. What it does explain perhaps is that although he wrote in just about every poetic form, at least once, he never wrote an elegy. The man that did write this poem no doubt had read a great deal of Shakespeare and did his best to imitate him, but the magic in poetry doesn't come from using certain words, syntax, or forms, but from passion. Ultimately it may be passion that makes the difference between what is merely good and what is great. This poem isn't even good. Many lines don't scan. Show me one thing we know to be Shakespeare's that doesn't scan. I see a poor fool wearing his master's clothes. We may take him for his master at a distance, but on closer view the only ones who are fooled are those who see, not the man, but the clothes. Stephanie Hughes (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Friday, 16 Feb 1996 10:16:52 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy David Kathman asks us to consider that snatch of Chapman's elegy for Prince Henry, which is almost as bad as the Elegy by W.S. But I would guess that it was bought and paid for. I haven't heard that Chapman was a chum of Prince Henry, or even knew the man. The lack of heart and plodding verse of Elegies for hire is more likely to come from indifference than grief. On the other hand, W.S. had in John Peter a "fast friend, soon lost". The poet confesses to the deceased that "I was thine", and that "my love was too remiss/ That had not made thee know how much I prized thee." W.S. was not merely employed for the job, "not hired, as heaven can witness in my soul," but was calling this Elegy from his heart, and in his verse he says, "I offer up to memory/ The value of my talent." In other words, he did the best he could, which is third-rate. I think that other poems might be called up to prove Foster's case that the Elegy is by Shakespeare, and the poem itself has certain turns of phrase that suggest Shakespeare, but that can be said of many other poems of the early 17th century, as Sir Edmund Chambers "The Shakspere Allusion Book" can witness. Those scholars who are lining up behind Foster and Shaxicon must somehow get it past their good sense that the man himself, Shakespeare, could write such bad stuff even in a daze, even to comply with some tradition of dreary elegies, and that he would willingly bind his imagination and tie his tongue to please the mourners and condone bad poetry out of respect for the dead. Shakespearean scholars are not expected to be judges of poetry, of course. They may be, but it is not required. Those who agree with a computer that the Elegy is by Shakespeare will be at some risk. The much-touted Shaxicon program is a thin branch to crawl upon, no matter how stout and strong Foster et al may praise it to be. Another computer program will say differently, and then where do you jump? For those who have but a slight poetic ear, let them ask someone who knows better of these things. Shaxicon hasn't the foggiest. The case seems to be this: W.S. loved his friend, John Peter, but because of the tradition that elegiac poetry must be dreary and without life, he took to metaphore and gave us a choice example of a poem in rigormortis. Other than the Shaxicon program, this seems to be Foster's argument. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 16 Feb 1996 18:28:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0120 Re: Funeral Elegy David Schalkwyk suggests an interesting answer to the problem of FE, one that has also been suggested by Richard Abrams in several (as yet unpublished) essays. FE is written in the plain style, and so we shouldn't search for a certain kind of imagery in its lines. So, in brief, the argument goes. But what about the "style" of FE? The "style" that we are talking about in FE is, if you will, micro-style, e.g., the way W.S. uses enjambement; the way W.S. uses "who" and "whom"; the way W.S. uses certain words; the way W.S. uses hendiadys. We aren't (necessari- ly) talking about "image clusters" or similarity to *Hamlet.* >From the observation that FE (apparently) exhibits Shakespeare's micro-style comes a further question: May a poet uses this micro-style and yet write a not very interesting poem? The answer seems to be "yes." A great poem depends on something more than "style." (Use any definition you want of "great poem.") If Don Foster, using style analysis, has correctly identified the author of *Pimary Colors* (Joe Klein?), his identification of W.S. as William Shakespeare will receive a boost. I can't wait to see who steps forward as the author! Perhaps we will have to kidnap the literary agent to find out! To some of Dave Kathman's questions, I have already indicated answers. About Thorpe's relationship to Shakespeare, we can only speculate, but we should make sure that our speculations are supported by as much evidence as possible. From the evidence of the STC and Arber's transcript of the Stationers Register, Thorpe was not a major player -- not as active as Eld was. Thorpe seems to have been connected to several other stationers (e.g., William Aspley), and it's possible that he owned shares in several book stores. At one point early in his career (1604-1610), he seems to have been interested in publishing plays -- and entered plays by Chapman, Jonson, et al. But we do not know who he was representing when he entered these plays: the authors? the players? himself? When Thorpe entered FE provisionally -- waiting for authorization to print -- who was he representing? Let me suggest this scenario. Thorpe somehow got a copy of FE. Perhaps he bought the copy because he decided that he could make some money publishing it. He entered it provisionally because he felt that, for some reason, he needed "further" authorization. We will probably never know why he felt he had to wait, but he found that he could not obtain the authoriza- tion needed. He sold his rights in the book to Eld (in a deal not recorded in SR -- which isn't unusual), and Eld printed and published the poem -- with or without authorization. Eld wasn't afraid of paying fines; he had paid them before for printing what he should not have printed. (In this, Eld was not unusual; most of the better known printers were fined now and again for such things as illegally printing ballads.) It has been argued that no publisher or printer could have expected to make money from selling FE. But a cruise through the STC and the SR convinces me that publishers, booksellers, and printers seemed, in the late 16th century and early 17th century, to have expected to make money from the most unlikely printing ventures. Why not FE? Yours, Bill Godshalk University of Cincinnati (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Tuesday, 20 Feb 1996 22:36:06 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0130 Re: Funeral Elegy Gabriel Egan notes that the Funeral Elegy has 67 lines with feminine endings (i.e. lines where the last syllable is not stressed), or 11.5 percent; he claims that this conflicts with a figure of 30 percent for the late plays. But that 30 percent figure refers to *all* kinds of verse, both blank and rhymed; to make a valid comparison, you have to separate blank verse from rhymed verse, since the nature of rhyme (with its emphasis on the end of the line) tends to discourage feminine endings (with their unstressed final syllable). Actually, that 11.5 figure is quite consistent with Shakespeare's practice in his rhymed verse; "Venus and Adonis", "Lucrece", "The Phoenix and the Turtle", the Sonnets, and "A Lover's Complaint" have a combined incidence of 10.5 percent feminine endings. In "The Tempest", the last Shakespeare play before the Elegy, there are 23 feminine endings out of 142 rhymed lines (16.2 percent); if we exclude the 12-line trochaic song of Juno and Ceres at 4.1.106-117, in which every line is deliberately feminine for effect, we get 11 of 130 feminine endings, or 8.5 percent. The percentage of feminine endings in the Elegy is right about what we should expect if it was written by Shakespeare. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 1996 11:50:03 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy David Kathman, sorry, I didn't know that Prince Henry was a patron of Chapman, but I still wonder why his elegy is very like that of W.S. That is to say, how can a good poet commit such a rape on his reputation? Except that maybe it was understood about elegies. Maybe elegies were taken to be all poof and poop, something for the ages, not to be taken seriously. How could Chapman have spent over 600 lines of low-grade rhyme on the man? And more than that, stick in a dedication wherein he claims that the death of the man (and a good man, no doubt) "hath so stricken all my spirits to the earth, that I will never more dare to look up to any greatness; but resolving the little rest of my poor life to obscurity, and the shadow of his death, prepare ever hereafter for the light of heaven." Lord, are we to take that seriously. The death of my mother is not going to bring me down that much. I'm quite serious, do you suppose there were professional Elegy writers? Maybe they got paid by the line, and maybe Chapman, being busy with high-class poetry, hired one to do 600 lines for Prince Henry. Or maybe the King hired someone to write this awful thing and put Chapman's name on it. Or maybe it was worse than that. Maybe someone kept a stable of elegy writers, dreary fellows who knew the drill whether the deceased be common or royal that he should be blazed forth with such radiant glories as would make a saint blush. And these Fagin-like minions were all chained below stairs, kept in weeping loss and the promise of heavenly recom- pense, who daily churned out this drivel in hope to please their master that they should one day breath again in the sunshine, and look into the blue sky. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Thursday, 22 Feb 1996 21:14:59 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Because the Funeral Elegy was signed W.S., it doesn't mean we can conclude that the author's name was Wilber Samson, Walter Smith, or William Shakespeare, or any name that accounts for the W.S. initials. We've been fooled by that before. The STC gives us John Fletcher to be A.D., Thomas Dekker to be P., Claude Desainliens to be Mr. C.H., J. Price to be J.S., Matthew Sutcliffe to be O.E., William Wright to be W.G., and many more of the same, making no match between the name of a writer and the initials given on the book. Maybe someone with different initials wrote the Elegy. Or maybe the initials W.S. match the name of someone we don't know about, someone who paid to have the elegy written. We don't know yet, and it seems prudent to doubt that this third-rate poetry is by Shakespeare, and to be very, very slow about accepting the word of Shaxicon that it's so. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. Russell Mayes Date: Friday, 23 Feb 1996 09:23:45 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0135 Re: Funeral Elegy Richard Kennedy writes: > I'm quite serious, do you suppose there were professional Elegy writers? Maybe > they got paid by the line, and maybe Chapman, being busy with high-class > poetry, hired one to do 600 lines for Prince Henry. Or maybe the King hired > someone to write this awful thing and put Chapman's name on it. Or maybe it > was worse than that. I don't know if there were "professional elegy writers" (the "dreary fellows" of Kennedy's next paragraph), but I do know that there are many competent, if not excellent, elegies written in the 17th century. Carew's elegy on Donne, comes to mind, as do many of Jonson's elegaic poems, ranging from the brief epigraph on the death of his first son to the longer "Cary-Morrison Ode." Of course, none of these are nearly as long as Chapman's or WS's, but they are examples of elegaic poems that wouldn't hurt the poet's reputation. W. Russell Mayes, Jr. Department of Literature and Language University of North Carolina at Asheville (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Porter Jamison Date: Monday, 26 Feb 1996 21:32:20 -0800 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy What is known of the man who died? Was he married in 1603? Did he have children? If the answer to either of these is "no", then the poem wasn't written in 1612 about this particular man... I haven't had the chance to study and dissect the piece yet (which, I know, makes me a johnny-come-lately among SHAKSPERians), but upon skimming the poem lightly, it seems a number of words are used in ways Shakespeare doesn't use them. Has anyone else noticed this and done a study? (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Sunday, 25 Feb 1996 13:37:38 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Don Foster says we shouldn't expect too much poetry out of the Funeral Elegy, nothing fancy like interesting imagery, original and well-wrought lines, for the reason that the FE is written in "plain style." The trouble is, there IS no such thing as "plain style." Foster made up the word to excuse the poem for being such a drag. Bill Godshalk says that it's worse than that. He says what we're really into is "micro-style", and we will discover thereby the Shakespearean lilt and genius of the thing. Micro-style is a brand new word also, coined to cover a multitude of faults. I take it to be essentially the Shaxicon program, which is something like a carrot-grater that judges poetry. There is "plain song", but it always needs some verse to be sung. The Funeral Elegy cannot be sung and can hardly be spoken aloud, according to the testimony reported here of a group who has tried it out. Micro-style we will have to learn more about. I'm told that it will make the Funeral Elegy more like Shakespeare's other poems, which reminds me of Mark Twain's comment on Wagner's music: "They tell me it's much better than it sounds." (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: G. I. Egan Date: Sunday, 25 Feb 1996 17:50:58 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0135 Re: Funeral Elegy David Kathman argues that in order to make a valid comparison between the 11.5 per cent of lines in Funeral Elegy which have feminine endings and the 30 per cent of late Shakespearean verse which has feminine endings > you have to separate blank verse from > rhymed verse, since the nature of rhyme (with its emphasis on the end of the > line) tends to discourage feminine endings (with their unstressed final > syllable). This requires a model of the creative process in which some features are more intended than others. What evidence is there that the decision to use rhyme makes a poet less likely to use feminine endings? If you mean that it is harder to find rhymes for feminine endings, so the poet avoids them, you are making an assumption about the effort put into the creation. Every feminine ending in the Elegy is rhymed, and all but one of these rhymes (line 507 with line 509) is also a feminine rhyme, ie where the final two syllables rhyme (eg 'ambition' with 'commission'). Kathman goes on to examine the proportion of feminine endings in the rhymed verse in The Tempest: > there are 23 feminine endings out of 142 rhymed lines (16.2 >percent); if we exclude the 12-line trochaic song of Juno and Ceres at >4.1.106-117, in which every line is deliberately feminine for effect,we get 11 >of 130 feminine endings, or 8.5 percent. If certain parts are excluded because "every line is deliberately feminine for effect" you need to state your criteria for deciding what is not deliberate, what is not 'an effect'. These unstated criteria define the limits of stylometric analysis, do they not? Gabriel Egan (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 27 Feb 1996 09:59:20 -0500 (EST) Subject: FE If I haven't missed anything, no one has yet mentioned Richard Abrams' "In Defense of W.S." in TLS 9 Feb. 1996, 25-26, and Stanley Wells' response in TLS 16 Feb. 1996, 17. Abrams basically argues for Shakespeare's authorship, and Wells points out some problems with that ascription. Wells believes that "a common feature of Shakespeare's late verse is the presence of the elided forms 'i'th' ' and 'o'th.' '" He claims to have found "not a single one in the poem." Further, Wells indicates that Shakespeare's use of feminine endings dramatically increases to over 30 per cent in the late plays, and it's only 11.6 per cent in FE. Egan has already made that point here, but Kathman agues that we should look only at non-dramatic poetry in this context. But what context shall we accept? I think it may be bad procedure to use Shakespeare's late dramatic style for statistics on, say, enjambement, and Shakespeare's (basically early) non-dramatic style for statistics on, say, feminine endings and elision. In which of Shakespeare's "styles" is FE written? I don't think we should use a different standard to judge each stylistic particularity in FE. Wells, following Foster, points out that Shakespeare's brother Gilbert "died and was buried in Stratford during the period in which the elegy has to have been written" (17). Did Shakespeare neglect his brother and concentrate his energies on a "friend"? Maybe so. Yours, Bill Godshalk (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Wednesday, 28 Feb 1996 21:04:15 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0138 Re: Funeral Elegy Just a few comments on the Funeral Elegy. Richard Kennedy points out that there is no guarantee that the initials W.S. represent the actual initials of the author. True enough. But the fact that these initials occur twice -- on the title page and after the dedication -- makes it unlikely that they were a misprint, and the nature of the publication (especially if you accept Don Foster's scenario of private publication) makes it unclear why the author or publisher would want to be deliberately deceptive. The initials are just one piece of evidence, and the other evidence of Shakespeare's hand would not change if the Elegy were totally anonymous. It's also theoretically possible, as Kennedy suggests, that the initials stand for some hitherto unknown W.S. who wrote just this one thing, but I don't think it's likely. Whoever wrote the Elegy was an accomplished poet, and almost certainly part of the London dramatic scene, as various kinds of internal and external evidence indicates. All other published elegies of 200 or more lines between 1570 and 1630 were written by professional poets, men who made their living with a pen. One point I think we can all agree on, though, is the need to be prudent in accepting any new work as Shakespeare's. Don Foster stated it very well, I think, in the concluding paragraph of his book on the Elegy: "Under no circumstances should the Elegy be admitted to the Shakespeare canon, or be included in forthcoming editions of his collected works, without having first been subjected to the most rigorous cross-examination. Many talented scholars will find it quite preposterous that Shakespeare should be credited with such a poem. Their voice needs to be heard." The arguments for Shakespeare's authorship of the Elegy are indeed undergoing rigorous cross-examination, both here on SHAKSPER and elsewhere, and only time will tell what the outcome will be. I should emphasize that I've mainly been clearing up misunderstand- ings and defending the Elegy in general terms here on SHAKSPER, and have not really dealt with any of the positive evidence for Shakespeare's authorship. Much of that can be found in Don Foster's book and Richard Abrams' recent pieces in TLS and The Shakespeare Newsletter. This attribution is no idle whim; Foster has been studying this poem for 13 years, and only recently became confident enough to say publicly that he thinks Shakespeare did indeed write it. As I've said before, I hope people will look at the actual arguments and evidence and keep an open mind as the cross-examination continues. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Harry Hill Date: Thursday, 29 Feb 1996 07:25:29 +0000 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy There is less here than meets the ear. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Judy Kennedy Date: Thursday, 29 Feb 1996 11:41:06 AST Subject: Re: SHK 7.0138 Re: Funeral Elegy There is no such thing as an elegaic poem. Judy Kennedy St.Thomas University (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Moray McConnachie Date: Friday, 1 Mar 1996 11:31:15 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0147 Re: Funeral Elegy > There is no such thing as an elegaic poem. > > Judy Kennedy > St.Thomas University Why ever not? It is a tautology, but elegaic has a distinct meaning now. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Friday, 1 Mar 1996 07:15:04 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Don Foster compares John Ford's CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT (1613) to the W.S. FUNERAL ELEGY of 1612. He says that the SWEAT "is the first of many texts in which John Ford borrows from both Shakespeare and W.S., and the most insistant." Foster gives a score of examples of this "extensive borrowing," but never questions that John Ford might himself have written the ELEGY. Why is that, for it's certainly not a farfetched theory? John Ford was an acquaintance of William Peter, both Don Foster and Richard Abrams say it is difficult to doubt that. They had mutual friends in the theater, and Abrams tells us that Ford was a Devonshire neighbor of the Peter family, and that Ford's cousin ("and virtual stepbrother") attended Oxford with William Peter, the deceased. And yet Don Foster does not tumble. Why not consider Ford as the author of the ELEGY. He was in the right place at the right time and had the right sort of talent for it. He also wrote FAMES MEMORIAL, on the Earle of Devonshire deceased. 1606. So he was active in the Devonshire elegy trade. What's to prevent him being the author of the ELEGY? The initials, W.S.? If that is all, that's not much. Ford was a dramatist as well, which fits in well with Foster's line, "In his role as elegist, W.S. invites us to believe that his usual mode is that of writing for the public theater." Don Foster says that "only three writers can be shown to have read W.S.'s ELEGY: William Shakespeare, John Ford, and Simon Wastrell." As to Shakespeare, that's to be proved or disproved. As to Ford, being a family friend, I grant that he read the thing. As to Simon Wastrell, I've not yet read anything by the man, but Foster says he stole lines from the ELEGY. Of these three, John Ford seems an obvious suspect as the author of the ELEGY. Don Foster gives the proof himself: here are some comparisons, the ELEGY with John Ford's CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT. Elegy: by seeming reason underpropped CBS: which life, death underprops Elegy: Now runs the method of this doleful song CBS: Set then the tenor of thy doleful song Elegy: A rock of friendship figured in his name. CBS: A rock of torment, which affliction bears Elegy: That lives encompassed in a mortal frame CBS: For whiles encompassed in a fleshly frame Elegy: Unhappy matter of a mourning style CBS: The happy matter of a moving style Elegy: So in his mischiefs is the world accurs'd:/ It picks out matter to inform the worst. CBS: For so is prone mortality accursed/ As still it strives to plot and work the worst Elegy: But tasted of the sour-bitter scourge/ Of torture and affliction CBS: Drew comfort from the sour-bitter gall/ Of his afflictions But I need not afflict ourselves with more of this. Don Foster gives some twenty examples, some of them not too well- chosen, but the mediocrity is very similiar, I agree with him, neither one of the poets had much to say. Foster presents these examples to help his case, to explain how John Ford borrowed from the ELEGY when he wrote CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT a year later. It would seem to me that John Ford wasn't so much borrowing, but wrote the ELEGY himself, and was stuck somewhat in the same rut when he wrote CHRIST'S BLOODY SWEAT. I say it's a very reasonable theory, Ford being a friend of the Peter family. Has the Shaxicon program been run against John Ford? It seems obvious that it must be done before going any further with theories more removed from Devonshire. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Saturday, 2 Mar 1996 02:59:57 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0142 Re: Funeral Elegy There's been a little crossing of messages in cyberspace, so let me respond to some of the comments on the Funeral Elegy from a couple of days ago. Porter Jamison asks: >What is known of the man who died? Was he married in 1603? Did he have >children? If the answer to either of these is "no", then the poem wasn't >written in 1612 about this particular man... I'm not quite sure what Mr. Jamison is getting at here, but to answer his questions: Will Peter was a student at Oxford off and on from 1599 to 1608, with several extended leaves of absence. In the fall of 1608 he withdrew from the University, and on January 9, 1609, he married Margaret Brewton. They had two daughters, named Rose and Margaret, before Will was murdered on January 25, 1612. As for Mr. Jamison's query about the poem's vocabulary, Don Foster has studied this in great detail, both in his book (pp. 93-105) and in soon-to-be-published SHAXICON work. To make a long story short, the Elegy has a very high correlation with Shakespeare's vocabu- lary, including numerous words rarely used by other contemporary writers and unusual uses of more common words. Now, as to the feminine endings. Gabriel Egan is skeptical of my explanation of differences between rhymed and blank verse in this regard, and asks, "What evidence is there that the decision to use rhyme makes a poet less likely to use feminine endings?" Well, for one thing, if you take a bunch of rhymed verse and a bunch of blank verse by any given Elizabethan poet, you will in virtually every case find that the rhymed verse has a much lower percentage of feminine endings than the blank verse. This is especially true of the type of rather formal rhymed verse typically found in elegies. Let me give some concrete examples. George Chapman, in his (primarily blank verse) play *Bussy D'Ambois* (1608), had over 20 percent feminine endings; yet his (rhymed) Funeral Song for Prince Henry (1612) had only 6.3 percent feminine endings. Francis Beaumont, in *The Knight of the Burning Pestle* (1608) (also blank verse), also had over 20 percent feminine endings, yet in his (rhymed) elegies for Lady Rutland and Lady Penelope Clifton (1612), he did not have a single feminine ending in 180 lines. All the published English elegaic verse between 1610 and 1613 has a total of 5.4 percent feminine-ending lines, according to the figures in Foster's book; plays written during the same period typically had 20-30 percent feminine endings, according to the figures from Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza's Shakespeare Clinic. Now, whatever the reason might have been, it's clear that rhymed verse had significantly fewer feminine endings than blank verse; comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Shakespea- re's use of rhyme in his plays declined steadily throughout his career, and so there is little rhymed verse in the late plays for comparison; what there is, though, is comparable to the Elegy in terms of feminine endings. As I noted before, the 11.6 percent feminine endings in the Elegy fits in fairly well with Shakespeare- 's non-dramatic (rhymed) verse, which has a total of 10.5 percent feminine endings. This is broken down as follows: Venus and Adonis 15.7 Lucrece 10.7 Phoenix & Turtle 9.0 Sonnets 7.7 Lover's Complaint 8.8 Bill Godshalk asserts that this non-dramatic poetry is all "basically early", and that we should thus be cautious about using these numbers for comparison with the Elegy. Maybe so, but there's much room to doubt the traditional view that this poetry is all early; in particular, I've become convinced that the Sonnets were primarily written around the turn of the century or later, and that *A Lover's Complaint* was mostly written c.1608, right before the publication of the Sonnets (cf., e.g., John Kerrigan's Penguin edition of the Sonnets, and the article by Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson in Notes & Queries, June 1987, p.219). If anything, Shakespeare's use of feminine endings in rhymed verse seems to have decreased, rather than increased, over time. But even if you believe that this poetry was all relatively early, I don't see any reason to think that the Elegy should differ from it in feminine endings. The use of feminine endings in blank verse increased steadily among English poets in general between the 1580s and the 1620s, just as the use of enjambment increased steadily in the same period; Shakespeare followed both of these trends. However, there was no corresponding increase in feminine endings in rhymed verse; recall the figures I cited earlier for elegaic verse between 1610 and 1613, which are generally low. The rhymed verse in Shakespeare's late plays has many fewer feminine endings than the blank verse in the same plays, though in the earlier plays rhymed and blank verse had similar amounts of feminine endings. Ideally we would like to have an example of undisputedly late rhymed verse by Shakespeare to compare with the Elegy; since we don't, we have to do the best we can with what we have. For the reasons outlined above, Shakespeare's nondramatic rhymed verse, though not ideal, is a much better standard for comparing feminine endings than is the blank verse of his later plays. Whew. I'd better stop now, though more could be said. Comments welcome. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Saturday, 02 Mar 1996 23:01:41 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0152 Re: Funeral Elegy > Venus and Adonis 15.7 (1592-93) > Lucrece 10.7 (1593-94) > Phoenix & Turtle 9.0 (1601) > Sonnets 7.7 (1593-1603) > Lover's Complaint 8.8 (1603-4) > >Bill Godshalk asserts that this non-dramatic poetry is all "basically early", >and that we should thus be cautious about using these numbers for comparison >with the Elegy. Maybe so, but there's much room to doubt the traditional view >that this poetry is all early; in particular, I've become convinced that the >Sonnets were primarily written around the turn of the century or later, and >that *A Lover's Complaint* was mostly written c.1608, right before the >publication of the Sonnets (cf., e.g., John Kerrigan's Penguin edition of the >Sonnets, and the article by Hieatt, Bishop, and Nicholson in Notes & Queries, >June 1987, p.219). If anything, Shakespeare's use of feminine endings in >rhymed verse seems to have decreased, rather than increased, over time. I've added some dates (from the Oxford Textual Companion and Bevington) to Dave Kathman's list of poems. The first two long poems have to be early because they were printed and published early. We can argue about the dating of the sonnets -- and why not? But the sonnets seem to have a direct relationship to the early plays. *The Phoenix and Turtle* had to have been written before it was published in 1601, and that leaves the *Lover's Complaint.* The Oxford editors obviously want to place Shakespear- e's non-dramatic poetry in a ten year period (1593-1603). If Shakespeare's career is divided into two parts with 1600 as the dividing line, then, if we accept the Oxford dating, the poems are basically early. But my major point is that we should not mix our criteria of judgment in ascribing FE to Shakespeare or anyone else. Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Saturday, 2 Mar 1996 15:32:08 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy David Kathman defends a point not brought into question: No one has suggested that the W.S. initials on the Funeral Elegy are mis- prints. The question is, is W.S. William Shakespeare? He adds that "The initials are just one piece of evidence, and the other evidence of Shakespeare's hand would not change if the elegy were totally anonymous." I entirely agree. If the thing were signed "William Shakespeare, Sweet Swan of Avon," I still wouldn't believe the bard wrote it. As Kathman says, it wouldn't change the poem, wouldn't help it a bit, and I agree. That's the trouble and the fundamental question. David Kathman calls the writer of the Elegy an "accomplished poet." No one else has dared to say so much for the unknown W.S.. I'll agree that the writer was an accomplished "rhymer," or an accomplished "versifi- er," but hardly an accomplished poet. It's a third-rate piece of work. The Shaxicon program is the solitary voice singing over this barren poem, this wilderness of rhyme and versification What Don Foster needs is for some first-rate poets to champion the Elegy, but none have thrown their reputations that way yet. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan Date: Sunday, 3 Mar 1996 17:51:15 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 7.0152 Re: Funeral Elegy David Kathman has shifted his ground significantly: >Gabriel Egan is skeptical of my explanation >of differences between rhymed and blank verse in this regard, and asks, "What >evidence is there that the decision to use rhyme makes a poet less likely to >use feminine endings?" Well, for one thing, if you take a bunch of rhymed >verse and a bunch of blank verse by any given Elizabethan poet, you will in >virtually every case find that the rhymed verse has a much lower percentage of >feminine endings than the blank verse. Kathman formerly offered an explanation for the relative rarity of feminine endings in rhymed verse: > the nature of rhyme (with its emphasis on the end of the line) tends to > discourage feminine endings (with their unstressed final syllable) [Posting of 20 Feb] But now Kathman merely asserts that: >whatever the reason might have been, it's clear that rhymed verse had >significantly fewer feminine endings than blank verse; comparing the two is >like comparing apples and oranges. [Posting of 2 March] I suggest that an explanation for the different frequencies of feminine endings is vitally important and that without it stylomet- rics cannot be of use on the subject. Kathman's explanation in terms of rhyme alone seems quite invalid to me. I suspect he dropped it because he saw that rhyming feminine endings is not too difficult, and that in any case an argument based on the difficulty of finding such rhymes would be objectionable on the grounds that a particular piece of text might simply have taken greater effort to produce. Surely the significance of feminine endings is that they are necessarily extra-metrical. Might not some determinant other than rhyme be responsible for the relatively high correlation of blank verse and feminine endings? A poetic context which makes a poet choose to use rhyme might be one which also (but not therefore) discourages extra-metrical effects. In such a conjecture, in which Kathman's causal relation between rhyme and feminine endings is rejected, the averages used by him are invalid. An analysis of the different poetic contexts, the 'pears' to his 'apples and oranges', would be called for. I do not understand why Kathman considers the 12 line song of Juno and Ceres in The Tempest (4.1.106) to have "every line...deliberately feminine". It is trochaic tetrameter through- out, with no extra-metrical lines. Gabriel Egan (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Harry Hill Date: Sunday, 03 Mar 1996 15:40:34 +0000 (HELP) Subject: re elegy The CD containing my reading of the Elegy will be ready by the end of this month. In rehearsing it, my director Paul Hawkins of Concordia has brought me to realize that there may well be two authors, as the first hundred lines or so are much less accom- plished than the rest. I have grown to like the poem very much through greater familiarity with its methods and spots of really fine concreteness. Ed Pechter at my university will be taking some of the disks to the Shakespeare Congress in April. More later... Harry Hill Montreal (5)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Monday, 04 Mar 1996 10:34 ET Subject: SHK 7.0142 Re: Funeral Elegy I'm so glad Richard J. Kennedy has identified himself to the rest of us as the infallible arbiter of poetic excellence in our time; it is so comforting to know that when we have a question about quality we need only send him a few samples of the text, disbur- dened of any of those tedious questions about context and audience and so on, and he will return us an absolutely reliable evaluation by return email. And I am so glad to learn from him that Don Foster invented the term "plain style," just in order to defend his tentative attribu- tion of "A Funeral Elegy" to Shakespeare. Foster must, indeed, have done it a while ago, for I find this paragraph in _Stylists on Style_, by my colleague and friend Louis T. Milic, Jr., published in 1969: "there have long been two tendencies, one of which is called the Plain Style; its opposite has no standard name, though Cyril Connolly . . . has called it the _Mandarin_ style. . . . In a sense, the Plain Style is a way of distrusting the artifice of language" (344.) I had, indeed, thought to find the phrase in Yvor Winters' essays on Elizabethan lyric poetry (_Poetry_, 53:258-72, 320-25; 59:35-51 (1939), reprinted in Paul J. Alpers, ed., _Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism_ [N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1967], 93-125), and was a little surprised to find that the phrase "plain style" does not actually appear in his text, through the adjective, applied to work by Gascoigne, Wyatt, Ralegh, and others, appears repeatedly." Nor could I find it in a quick search of such C16 rhetorical texts as I could quickly lay my hand on, though to be sure George Puttenham does say, in the section of _The Arte of English Poesie_ (1589) called "Of Stile", "therefore there be that haue called stile, the image of man. . . for man is but his minde, and as his minde is tempered and qualified, so are all his speeches and language at large, and his inward conceits be the mettall of his minde, and his manner of vtterance the very warp and woofe of his conceits, more plaine, or busie and intricate, or otherwise affected after the rate." Which indeed struck me as a plausible English way to translate Scaliger's distinction between _puritas_ or _simplicitas_ and _floridum_ or _splendor_. Something, perhaps, rather like what George Herbert wrote in "Jordan II," reprehending "fictions only, and false hair," and concluding--with an eye perhaps to issues such as the probable state of a dead man's soul, and the moral lessons his survivors might learn from his life, "Nor let them punish me with losse of rhyme, / Who plainly say, _My God, My King_." So, to repeat, it's a great relief to have Kennedy assure us that it's all Don Foster's invention. Finally, I am so glad that Kennedy has demonstrated to all of us who thought that scholarly discourse ought ideally to be carried on in terms of courtesy and some finesse, that it can be even more enlightening when it is intemperate, rude, vulgar, ignorant, arrogant, and coarse. Plainly, Dave Evett (6)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Judy Kennedy Date: Monday, 4 Mar 1996 15:04:27 AST Subject: Re: SHK 7.0152 Re: Funeral Elegy > There is no such thing as an elegaic poem. >Why ever not? >It is a tautology, but elegaic has a distinct meaning now.> Perhaps the point would have been clearer if I had said there is no such word as elegaic. Consult the OED for the derivation, meaning, and usage of elegIAC. Judy Kennedy St.Thomas University (7)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Monday, 04 Mar 1996 14:52 ET Subject: SHK 7.0142 Re: Funeral Elegy Addendum to the material on "the plain style" in my earlier posting. Richard A. Lanham, in his _Handlist of Rhetorical Terms_ (U. of California P., 1968), after noting the widely familar 3-level model of low, middle, and high, goes on to summarize a four-fold division made by the Greek rhetorician Demetrius, into "Plain," "Grand," "Elegant," and "Forceful." On the same page, less historically, he comments in an interesting way on "Two further categories. . : the style (plain or ornate) which acknowl- edges that it is a style, a rhetoric, an effort at persuasion, and the style (plain or ornate) which does not. He also quotes Kenneth Burke's paraphrase of Cicero: "the plain style is best for teaching, the tempered style for pleasing, kland the ornate (grandiloquent) style for moving" (114-15). All of this handsomely substantiates Richard J. Kennedy's assertion that Don Foster invented the plain style. I might add, as somebody who writes a good many occasional poems, that the knowledge that a piece will be read or heard by Aunt Jane and neighbor John is a strong inducement to throttle back the rhetorical engines: they always like best those works that are most straightforward, and whose images and allusions are well-worn, familiar, comfortable. More plainly yet, Dave Evett ------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 4 Mar 1996 19:32:41 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy I really don't mean to whip the Funeral Elegy, and I say let the unknown W.S. rest in peace and say things in heaven to his friend William Peter that he didn't get down too well in a poem, but all the while we must remind outselves of Shakespeare, his excellent fancy in recommending his love and his poetry to the ages. Here is Sonnet 55. "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime; But you shall shine more bright in these contents, Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivi- ous enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room, Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgement that you yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes." If Shakespeare wrote the Funeral Elegy, you've got to wonder what happened to him between sonnet 55, a poem which has truely purchased immortal life for the memory of his man (or woman) and, the half-hearted lease on time that W.S. takes out for poor William Peter. (FE, Lines 195-204.) "What can we leave behind us but a name, Which, by a life well led, may honor have? Such honor, O thou youth untimely lost, Thou didst deserve and hast; for though thy soul Hath took her flight to a diviner coast, Yet here on earth thy fame lives ever whole, In every heart sealed up, in every tongue Fit matter for discourse, no day prevented That pities not thy sad and sudden wrong, Of all alike beloved and lamented." Anyone who would charge both sonnet 55 and these several lines of the Elegy to the same man is in danger of being discarded and forgotten within a year's time, "fit matter for discourse" only in derision. (1)------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Wednesday, 06 Mar 1996 09:00:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy I have thought it best to stay out of SHAKSPER discussion of the Funeral Elegy (hereafter "FE"), but perhaps I'll jump in here to offer a few thoughts. As will be clear to everyone, various ideological issues have come into play in recent discussion. Richard J. Kennedy and his fellow anti-Stratfordians have a huge stake in dismissing the Elegy: the earl of Oxford in Feb. 1612 was too dead to have written it. In England, a couple of prominent Shakespeareans have dismissed the attribution as an American thing: if Shakespeare had penned a funeral elegy in his latter years, even a lame one, it wouldn't have been sitting unnoticed in an Oxford library for nearly 400 years. Then, too, what are we to *say* about such a strange text? Sparing in its imagery, lacking in the verbal flourishes that we usually find in Shakespeare, focused almost entirely on biographical matters, the text does not lend much fuel to our critical enterprise, whether formalist, feminist, material- ist, or poststructuralist. Actors have been among the first to embrace the Elegy because its highly enjambed verse does, after all, roll off the tongue rather nicely, affording considerable range to a talented actor--from its fairly conventional opening, to the unexpected talk of personal shame in 137 ff., to the angry denunciation of lines 399-412, and on to the poet's weary sorrow in the close. At least two widely acclaimed actors--Harry Hill and F. Murray Abraham--have recorded the Elegy; and though I have not yet heard either performance, I've got a hunch that their oral readings will do more for me than the words on the printed page. These considerations, both for and against the Elegy's value as *poetry*, are not unimportant; but they have no direct bearing upon the question of authorship. I would rather not quarrel with Mr. Kennedy. That he has gotten his hands on some of my unpublished work, a conference handout, and used it without my permission--without, indeed having been present at the talk and without having understood the first thing about John Ford's relations with Will Peter and William Shakespeare--- cannot in the long run do any harm either to me or to Shakespeare studies. Having already studied the Ford-Peter-Shakespeare connection, I can happily give Mr. Kennedy extra ammunition, which he may then shoot in my direction at his leisure. For example: here are a dozen words from the Elegy that appear at least once in John Ford's verse but *nowhere* (not once--zilch!-zippo!) in Shakespearean texts: desertful (ad.), ensnaring (ad.), ignorantly (adv.), invitement (n.), irrefragable (ad.), partage (n.), rarely (adv., meaning infrequently), superlative (ad.), unremembered (ad.), ever-empty (ad.), and sour-bitter (ad.). But Mr. Kennedy is mistaken: John Ford cannot have written "A Funeral Elegy." The mere suggestion that the death of John Peter's brother provided Ford with the occasion for a quick money-making hoax is foolish: whom does Kennedy think Ford is fooling with the initials "W.S."? John Peter, to whom the poem is dedicated? and who, then, is the WS, the speaking "I" of this poem, implied to be--if not William Shakespeare? --and if not only John Peter but the uninformed reader is supposed to think that W.S. is Shakespeare, we're back at square one: why should readers in 1612 think that the speaking "I" in this largely autobiographical poem is Shakespeare? But even if we had cause to hunt for a conspiracy, Mr. Kennedy's attribution has nothing to sustain it. Ford never comes close to FE's high rate of enjambment; Ford's rate of feminine endings is too high for FE; WS's use of you/ye matches Shakespeare, not Ford; Shakespearean nondramatic texts have a hugely higher lexical correlation with FE than do Ford's nondramatic texts, even though Ford *borrows* in 1613-16 from FE; and Ford himself in 1613 makes pretty clear that he thinks FE is by Shakespeare. Mr. Kennedy writes me to say, "I keep waiting for new proofs to turn up that would support the Stratford man...and since your studies touch on such discoveries, I am, as you say, vigorous in response as my understanding directs me....For those who have EARS, let them read, and the Funeral Elegy will be seen as a bag of bones, wasted of any poetic flesh, and will at last be shrouded from our care, enjambed in the grave with poor William Peter." But then, ears (as Bottom reminds us) come in various sizes. We will all hear better, and more clearly, when the shrill tone of Mr. Kennedy subsides long enough for intelligent and thoughtful skepticism to weigh the evidence for Shakespeare's hand in this odd poem. Don Foster (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Tuesday, 5 Mar 1996 20:34:07 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0159 Re: Funeral Elegy A couple of replies on the Elegy. To Bill Godshalk: >> Venus and Adonis 15.7 (1592-93) >> Lucrece 10.7 (1593-94) >> Phoenix & Turtle 9.0 (1601) >> Sonnets 7.7 (1593-1603) >> Lover's Complaint 8.8 (1603-4) >> >I've added some dates (from the Oxford Textual Companion and Bevington) to Dave >Kathman's list of poems. The first two long poems have to be early because they >were printed and published early. We can argue about the dating of the sonnets >-- and why not? But the sonnets seem to have a direct relationship to the >early plays. *The Phoenix and Turtle* had to have been written before it was >published in 1601, and that leaves the *Lover's Complaint.* The Oxford editors >obviously want to place Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry in a ten year period >(1593-1603). If Shakespeare's career is divided into two parts with 1600 as >the dividing line, then, if we accept the Oxford dating, the poems are >basically early. If we accept the Oxford dating. I don't really have time to get into an extended discussion of this point, but I'm inclined to date the sonnets later than is generally supposed. >But my major point is that we should not mix our criteria of judgment in >ascribing FE to Shakespeare or anyone else. Ideally, yes, but we should also use the best criteria we can under the circumstances. The point I was trying to make was that it makes more sense to compare the feminine endings in FE with Shakespeare's (rhymed) nondramatic verse than with the blank verse of his later plays. In this particular case, the differences between rhymed and blank verse in feminine endings are more important than any possible time differences within rhymed verse, which for reasons I gave I wouldn't expect to be significant. Gabriel Egan finds that I have shifted my ground significantly. I don't think I've changed my actual views, just the way I expressed them, and I'm sorry if that caused any confusion. The point I was trying to make was simply that there tend to be sigificantly fewer feminine endings in Elizabethan rhymed verse than in Elizabethan blank verse, and that we should take this into account when evaluating the Elegy. I gave some examples of playwrights who wrote Elegies the same year as W.S.'s with few feminine endings, yet who wrote plays a few years earlier, primarily in blank verse, which had far more feminine endings. I don't know why this is; I have no particular attachment to the speculative explanation I gave in my first post on the subject. There may or may not be a causal relationship involved, and I'm certainly not going to deny that there may be other forces at work besides rhyme. The type of poem may well be a factor, but that's why I specifically used elegies vs. plays in my examples, to make the context as similar as possible. I honestly don't see why rejecting a causal relationship between rhyme and feminine endings would make my averages "inval- id", as Egan claims. Whatever the ultimate reason may be, the fact remains that there are many fewer feminine endings in rhymed elegiac verse written around the time of W.S.'s Elegy than there are in blank verse plays written around the same time by the same authors. That seems like a relevant thing to know in this discussion. >I do not understand why Kathman considers the 12 line song of Juno and Ceres in >The Tempest (4.1.106) to have "every line...deliberately feminine". It is >trochaic tetrameter through- out, with no extra-metrical lines. Yeah, you're right. I got those numbers for The Tempest from Don Foster's book (p.246, note 7), and I misinterpreted a badly worded note without checking carefully enough and then expressed myself poorly. It's true that the song in question is in regular trochaic tetrameter, and thus that it has no feminine endings according to the usual use of the term (i.e. an extrametrical syllable at line's end, usually unstressed). What I should have said was that you can't really compare trochaic verse with iambic verse when you're discussing feminine endings, and so that song should not be included in an average with the rhymed iambic verse in The Tempest. The end of a regular line of trochaic verse looks like a feminine ending of a line of iambic verse (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in "blessing" or "empty"), and the same words can be used in both contexts. To get a "feminine" ending for a line of trochaic verse, you'd have to use a dactylic word or phrase (e.g. "Pericles"), which are rare at the end of a line, much rarer than iambic words or phrases. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Thursday, 07 Mar 1996 21:10:14 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0172 Re: Funeral Elegy Today while I was looking for something in the STC microfilms, I found another candidate (I think) for W.S.. In Charles Butler's *The Feminine Monarchie* (London: Printed by Iohn Haviland, 1623), STC 4193, there is dedicatory poem "Ad Carolum Butler" in Latin signed Warnervs Sovth. This is the only edition of this work that I have had a chance to examine so far. There is a period after "Sovth." so the name may be an abbrevia- tion. The subtitle of Butler's work is *The Historie of Bees,* and Edmund Southerne wrote a treatise on bees in 1593 (STC 22942). Is it possible that the name of the poet is Warner Southerne? I've looked in Don Foster's index and find no reference to Warnervs Sovth or to Charles Butler. So, Don has either rejected Warnervs Sovth as a possible W.S., or he has not considered Sovth's -- admittedly -- minor claim. Warnervs Sovth was probably an Oxford man (Charles Butler was) -- and thus may have met William Peter at Oxford. Of course, his dedicatory poem comes eleven years after the *Funeral Elegy,* and further investigation may prove that Warnervs Sovth was only ten years old in 1612! Or, that his name was Southwell Warner! But I throw this W.S. into the ring -- cum grano salis. Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Friday, 8 Mar 1996 08:53:34 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0172 Re: Funeral Elegy In response to Don Foster's recent post on the Funeral Elegy: The main arguments against this poem have probably all been presented, so there seems little point in repeating them. As for some political reason for the anti-Stratfordians to denigrate the poem, the opposite could also be said, that the Stratfordians have the exact same reason for promoting the poem, i.e., that its acceptance (including the authorship, reason for writing, and date of composition) as Shakespeare's will silence those who would like to see this kind of scholarly diligence directed toward the much more interesting question of who really wrote the works of Shakespeare. Since Shakespeare professionals have been accepting far greater anomalies for some four hundred years, their acceptance of this poem will make no difference to those who cannot marry the biography of Shakespeare of Stratford with the reality of the works. The weakness of the poem, the uncertainty of its authorship, time of writing, and reason for writing, can only raise again the question, why is there no biography for Shakespeare when a writer like Ben Jonson is fully documented? I will say no more on this subject since we have agreed to stay away from the authorship issue on this list, but since Don Foster was allowed to have his say regarding the anti-Stratfordians reasons for disliking the poem, I should have the right to respond. Those who wish to take the matter further are welcome to post to me directly. Stephanie Hughes (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 6 Mar 1996 19:47:03 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Don Foster objects that I used 3 short quotes from a handout he wrote. This was in regard to the John Ford question--might he have written the Funeral Elegy? But that 6-page handout was a "publica- tion" and so is defined by the United State Copyright Office. If you don't want it spread around, don't pass it out. Your copyright is protected of course (it's copyrighted when you write it), but reviewers, disenters, orators, scholars and laymen may take quotations from it within a certain rather liberal limit, if they choose to address the subject. I did not make a breach of professional etiquette in using Foster's own words, which I did in moderation, and I stayed close upon his argument so far as I knew what it was from the material he had passed out, which, not to press on it too much, constitutes publication. As to my motive in all this. Foster makes it to be sinister, and yet I think he sincerely believes that Shakespeare wrote the Funeral Elegy. I'd like to believe it, too. I'd like to find out if Shakespeare had anything to do with the writing of the King James Bible as well, published in 1611, Oxford being almost as dead as he was in 1612. I'd like to see some good scholarly research on that. My sincere effort to know more about the Funeral Elegy and John Ford's friendliness with the William Peter family is put aside by Foster. He says that I am "on a hunt for conspiracy." This has come to mean that you're rather a coo-coo case, an ad hominem sort of comment we'd want less of. However, some 20% of all Elizabethan poetry and plays is of doubtful authorship. The quest for attribution is always going on. The Funeral Elegy is just another, but has received the great haloo because it's about Shakespeare. The whole world wants some- thing new from Shakespeare. But to me, the Funeral Elegy seems such a shame and insult to the man, all that self- rightousness set off in bad poetry. So I'm sorry, I do get over- excited a bit, and I mean to insult no one, but only to let Shakespeare escape such an insult. At last, Don Foster quotes some of my words to him out of a private letter in order to make an ass of me. That's all right, I won't sue, but it's certainly a breach of professional etiquette. Private letters are not like hand-outs. But let it pass. My skepticism has been, I believe, "intelligent and thoughtful," as Foster suggests, and I wish for more of it without any defining of my motives or sincerity in the quest to find anything at any date that Shakespeare might have written. To end, you may use anything I've ever published, you may quote me freely from all public sources, you may jump on anything I've ever said about anything. You need not have my permission, it's all public property. Of course, my opinion might be different now about a lot of things. I've been wrong in the past, and I'd like to be wrong about the Funeral Elegy, but I say it just isn't close to Shakespeare. I've let my attorney know that if I make a deathbed retraction about that he can publish it. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Thursday, 07 Mar 1996 16:16:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0172 Re: Funeral Elegy Regarding Dave Kathman's comments on criteria and my vague response, let me clarify briefly. It seems to me that the figures used for enjambement in FE (by those who would ascribe the play to Shakespeare) are geared to the figures for enjambement in the last plays. Shakespeare enjambed more and more as he got older. So the figures used for feminine endings should be taken from the same source -- the last plays. To take one set of figures from the last plays, and another set of figures from the non-dramatic poetry seems bad form -- to me. Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan Date: Thursday, 7 Mar 1996 18:13:53 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 7.0172 Re: Funeral Elegy David Kathman has backed away from an assertion he originally offered as refutation of the discrepancy between the 11.6 % of lines in FE having feminine endings and the 30+% of lines having feminine endings in late Shakespearean verse. Kathman's response was that only examples of rhymed verse were comparable with FE, and these also give a figure of around 10%. As justification for excluding the blank verse Kathman writes: > Whatever the ultimate reason may >be, the fact remains that there are many fewer feminine endings in rhymed >elegiac verse written around the time of W.S.'s Elegy than there are in blank >verse plays written around the same time by the same authors. That seems like >a relevant thing to know in this discussion. It may be a relevant thing to know, but it won't support the weight Kathman puts on it. Suppose there is a convention that you rein back your use of feminine endings when writing an elegy; this would fit all the facts cited in Kathman's posting of 2 March. Kathman's assertion that you can compare FE with early Shakespeare verse and draw useful conclusions from correspondences has not yet been supported by any evidence. Selective sampling of correspondences is not going to make a lasting case for Shakespeare's authorship of FE. Possibly this discussion should end now; I quote from a couple of comments on a different thread: >Heated discussions back and forth between two opposing members on >some obscure topic are generally not of interest to the masses; the >members in question should relegate their argument to private e-mail. and >Will John Drakakis' witty, left of center attacks on empiricism or >essentialism be deemed less worthy than, say, the less exciting, more >conventionally scholarly discussions of feminine endings in the FE? Unless someone else joins in I shall hold my peace on the FE's in FE. Gabriel Egan (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Saturday, 9 Mar 1996 00:26:20 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0181 Re: Funeral Elegy Just a couple of brief comments. Bill Godshalk writes: >Regarding Dave Kathman's comments on criteria and my vague response, let me >clarify briefly. It seems to me that the figures used for enjambement in FE >(by those who would ascribe the play to Shakespeare) are geared to the figures >for enjambement in the last plays. Shakespeare enjambed more and more as he >got older. So the figures used for feminine endings should be taken from the >same source -- the last plays. To take one set of figures from the last plays, >and another set of figures from the non-dramatic poetry seems bad form -- to >me. Yes, it's true that Shakespeare enjambed more often as he got older, and that Foster compares the enjambment in FE with that in the late plays. But it's a non sequitur to say that therefore you should also compare the feminine endings in FE with those in the late plays; they're separate issues which need to be evaluated separately. Shakespeare's use of enjambment increased over time in both his plays and in his non-dramatic poetry, involving similar percentages, and there is no reason not to compare FE with the late plays. With feminine endings, though, the plays and the non-drama- tic verse differ, as I've been arguing: feminine endings increased steadily in Shakespeare's plays, as they did in Elizabethan plays in general, but they held steady or arguably decreased in his nondramatic verse, much as they did in Elizabethan rhymed verse in general. Given a choice between comparing the feminine endings in FE with the blank verse of the late plays or with the nondramatic poems, I've been arguing that the nondramatic poems are a better choice, even though neither choice is ideal. The nondramatic poems differ from FE in terms of date, but I've argued that that doesn't appear to be a very significant factor in rhymed verse; the late plays differ from FE in being almost entirely blank verse, which I've argued is a very significant factor since blank verse tends to have more feminine endings than rhymed verse. I am still puzzled by many of Gabriel Egan's statements, but I agree that there's no need to continue the feminine endings discussions here unless there's a groundswell of support from other quarters. I've tried to articulate my positions as clearly as I can, and people are free to judge what's been said in this discussion as they see fit. Bill Godshalk writes: >Today while I was looking for something in the STC microfilms, I found another >candidate (I think) for W.S.. In Charles Butler's *The Feminine Monarchie* >(London: Printed by Iohn Haviland, 1623), STC 4193, there is dedicatory poem >"Ad Carolum Butler" in Latin signed Warnervs Sovth. This is the only edition >of this work that I have had a chance to examine so far. > >There is a period after "Sovth." so the name may be an abbreviation. The >subtitle of Butler's work is *The Historie of Bees,* and Edmund Southerne wrote >a treatise on bees in 1593 (STC 22942). Is it possible that the name of the >poet is Warner Southerne? > >I've looked in Don Foster's index and find no reference to Warnervs Sovth or to >Charles Butler. So, Don has either rejected Warnervs Sovth as a possible W.S., >or he has not considered Sovth's -- admittedly -- minor claim. > >Warnervs Sovth was probably an Oxford man (Charles Butler was) -- and thus may >have met William Peter at Oxford. > >Of course, his dedicatory poem comes eleven years after the *Funeral Elegy,* >and further investigation may prove that Warnervs Sovth was only ten years old >in 1612! Or, that his name was Southwell Warner! > >But I throw this W.S. into the ring -- cum grano salis. Actually, Don Foster did cite Warner South in his list of all works by people with the initials W.S. between 1570 and 1630. The first edition of Butler's *The Feminine Monarchie* (STC 4192) was in 1609, so it was closer to FE than you thought. South also had a Latin poem in Thomas Vicars' *Cheiragogia*, the third edition of which was in 1628. According to the list, Warner South (or "Warnerus South, Jurista Novi Collegii Socius") was born in 1586 and was Canon of Wells. Since both of his known works are in Latin, there's not much basis for comparison with the Elegy. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Saturday, 09 Mar 1996 12:00:55 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0185 Re: Funeral Elegy (a) Yesterday, in the 1609 edition of *The Feminine Monarchie* (Oxford, Printed by Ioseph Barnes, 1609), I found the following signature to the commendatory poem "Ad Authorem" (a4v): Warnervs Sovth, Iurista Novi Collegij Socius. So Warnerus Sovth was writing Latin poetry in 1609. But I must also record that, in Charles Butler's *The English Grammar* (Oxford, Printed by Willimam Turner, for the Authour: 1633), there is an "Ad Authorem* signed S.W. The poem is NOT the same as the poem in the 1609 *Feminine Monarchie.* My point is NOT that Warnervs Sovth wrote *The Funeral Elegy,* but that there may have been another W.S. who was a poet, and who needs to be added to the list of possible authors. (b) Notice that *The English Grammar* (above) was printed "for the Authour" and this is so stated on the title page. I would suggest that this is good evidence that *The English Grammar* was privately printed. Also notice that *The Funeral Elegy* contains no such designation. Why is this an important issue? Those who would ascribe FE to Shakespeare can NOT prove that FE was privately printed. (Take that assertion as a challenge!) It may have been, but there's no hard evidence (as far as I know). And they need FE to have been privately printed with no, or limited, circulation. Otherwise, how can they account for its being unknown as Shakespeare's for almost 400 years? I would like to see Don Foster's evidence that Ford acknowledged the FE as Shakespeare's. Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Saturday, 9 Mar 1996 19:03:03 -0800 Subject: Dr. Dodypoll If I were to discover a new poem or play by Shakespeare, I'd discover these few lines and say that Shakespeare wrote them. "T'was I that led you through the painted meads, Where the light fairies danced upon the flowers, Hanging on every leaf an orient pearl, Which, struck together with the silken wind Of their loose mantles, made a silver chime. T'was I that, winding my shrill bugle horn, Made a gilt palace break out of the hill, Filled suddenly with troops of knights and dames, Who danced and revelled; whilst we sweetly slept Upon a bed of roses, wrapt all in gold." But that's not Shakespeare. The author of the above is entirely unknown. But we know that in the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare wrote this: "Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music creep in our ears. Soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold. There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins: Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it." There seems to be a poetic touch between those two poems much more than any clutch of lines that would make us think that Shakespeare wrote the Funeral Elegy. And that's what wanted, I believe, some certain poetic expression that approves to our poetic souls that we are reading words written by the man himself, which recognition seems not to happen between the Funeral Elegy and any other Shake- speare poem. That's the problem entirely. W.S. of the Funeral Elegy gives us no satisfaction at all, if we are looking to read some beautiful poetry. The above anonymous quotation that harkens so much to those sweet lines from the Merchant of Venice was published in 1600. The play is called "The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll", and I hope to acquaint the unknowers of it (which is almost everyone I think) with some more of the comedy, "As it hath bene sundrie times Acted by the Children of Powles." (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Sunday, 10 Mar 1996 14:02:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy I'm sorry to have upset Richard J. Kennedy. As I already said in my earlier post, he did me no harm by taking what he could glean from my unpublished handout, nor have I felt any injury. But if Mr. Kennedy wants members of this list to take seriously his view that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, then he should get his facts straight before he speaks--or remain silent. By borrowing from my handout without having attended my talk, Mr. Kennedy first confused himself, then readers of this list: he has simply misstated the facts with respect to John Ford. We all know, by now, that Mr. Kennedy thinks "A Funeral Elegy" to be the single most wretched piece of rhyming drivel that he ever laid eyes on, which is certainly an okay thing for him to say. But aesthetic impressions have scarcely any evidentiary value. Various posts subscribed with Mr. Kennedy's name have been distributed to SHAKSPERians in recent weeks. If one or two readers of this list find his posts badly written, shrill in tone, and factually inaccurate, it would not be wise--on those grounds alone--for us to conclude that Mr. Kennedy did not actually write them. Mr. Kennedy's co-religionist, Joseph Sobran, has published an article saying that Will Peter was married just eight days at the time of his murder; that "A Funeral Elegy" was written years before the murder; that it was not written for Peter, but for someone else; and much more nonsense having no point of contact with the real world. Such perverse disregard for the facts only muddies our discussion, making it harder for an intelligent and well-informed skepticism--as per that of Godschalk, Egan, and others--to be heard over the anti-Stratfordian static. One virtue of David Kathman's recent posts is that he has taken care to present simple facts, without relying on conjecture or unsupported assertion. I haven't seen all of the recent posts, so pardon me if I repeat what's been said by someone else. While Shakespeare's feminine endings in blank verse steadily increases over the years, feminine endings in his nondramatic verse steadily *decrease* from *Ven* (1593, 15.7%) to *Luc* (1594, 10.7%) to *PhT* (1601, 9.0%) to *Son* (1599-1608 [by the latest evidence], 7.7%) to *LC* (1608 [see MacD. Jackson], 8.8%). At 11.6%, FE is rather too *high*, than too low, for a Shakespeare poem written in 1612. For more info, see *Elegy by W.S.*, pp. 86-9. I, not Kathman, am to blame for the odd wording with respect to *Tmp* and the point about regular trochaic verse vs. iambic verse with feminine endings (see n.7, p.246). But something tells me that we won't get very far with a discussion of how many feminine endings would appear in a rhymed poem of 578 lines written by Shakespeare in February 1612. In the light of other evidence, it appears now that we'd have a poem with 67 feminine endings (11.6%)--or, if we count the unelided participles at lines 396/8, 69 feminine endings (11.9%). I have always found Gabriel Egan's SHAKSPER posts to be thoughtful, informative, and attentive to the facts--but on this issue, he is simply mistaken. I'm doubtful that even one Jacobean poet can be produced whose rhymed and unrhymed verse have a comparable frequency of feminine endings--but it is demonstrably not so with Shakespeare or with most of his contempo- raries who wrote both rhymed and unrhymed verse. For those who are still looking for evidence that Shakespeare didn't write FE, let them look elsewhere than to feminine endings. For example, FE has a very high incidence of *as* and *which* relative to most Shakespearean texts. I will gladly assist any fellow scholar who hopes at this late juncture to build a case against Shakespeare's authorship of the elegy. Foster (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Roger D. Gross Date: Monday, 11 Mar 1996 12:29:14 -0600 (CST) Subject: Funeral Elegy Gabriel Egan suggests that we have exhausted the FE discussion. I hope he doesn't convince us to drop it. Despite the tedium of the unsubstantiated damnings of the Elegy, there has been much of interest here and I feel we may be closer to finding the best of all uses of the list with this conversation. Rather than feeling that we have exhausted the discussion, I am inclined to think that we have gotten the knee-jerk stuff out of the way and are now ready for a serious and worthy scholarly examination of FE. It's much too early for me to have an opinion. But...here is something I noticed. It hardly qualifies as serious stuff but it jumped out at me. Richard Kennedy pointed out a parallel between W.S.'s "sour-bitter" line and the same term in a line by Ford. Both W.S. and Ford give "sour" two syllables. Shakespeare uses the word "sour" 36 times; he also uses "sour'd", "sour-ey'd", and "sour-fac'd" once each. In each case but one he gives "sour" one syllable. In COE, 5.1.45, he gives it two. I don't know what this implies but it does jump out. I'm now looking at a few other words which might show something similar. Please continue. It is important work. Roger Gross U. of Arkansas (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Monday, 11 Mar 1996 13:26:22 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy >Dave Kathman writes: > >Actually, Don Foster did cite Warner South in his list of all works by people >with the initials W.S. between 1570 and 1630. The first edition of Butler's >*The Feminine Monarchie* (STC 4192) was in 1609, so it was closer to FE than >you thought. South also had a Latin poem in Thomas Vicars' *Cheiragog- ia*, the >third edition of which was in 1628. According to the list, Warner South (or >"Warnerus South, Jurista Novi Collegii Socius") was born in 1586 and was Canon >of Wells. Since both of his known works are in Latin, there's not much basis >for compari- son with the Elegy. I stand corrected. I was reacting quickly, and checked only Don Foster's Index -- in which South is not mentioned. But as Dave notes, Don does list him on page 273. Sorry about dragging up an already dragged up W.S. Mea culpa. >Dave Kathman summarizes his argument thus: > Shakespeare's use of enjambment increased over time in >both his plays and in his non-dramatic poetry, involving similar percentag- es, >and there is no reason not to compare FE with the late plays. With feminine >endings, though, the plays and the non-dramatic verse differ, as I've been >arguing: feminine endings increased steadily in Shakespeare's plays, as they >did in Elizabethan plays in general, but they held steady or arguably decreased >in his nondramatic verse, much as they did in Elizabethan rhymed verse in >general. Given a choice between comparing the feminine endings in FE with the >blank verse of the late plays or with the nondramatic poems, I've been arguing >that the nondramatic poems are a better choice, even though neither choice is >ideal. The nondramatic poems differ from FE in terms of date, but I've argued >that that doesn't appear to be a very significant factor in rhymed verse; the >late plays differ from FE in being almost entirely blank verse, which I've >argued is a very significant factor since blank verse tends to have more >feminine endings than rhymed verse. All this seems rational and well-reasoned, but I still feel a certain amount of circularity in the statement. Dave wants to use the standard that works best for his argument, and, by gum! it does work best for his argument! Dave has also sided with the scholars who want to date the sonnets in the seventeenth century, shortly before they were printed and published in 1609. For the sake of debate (the sonnets don't FEEL late to me because they seem related to plays like LLL and R&J), let's grant Dave a late dating of the sonnets -- circa 1609. The sonnets are then the closest non-dramatic poetry to FE (1612). Only three or four years separates them, and they are both basically written in quatrains. As you recall, Shakespeare likes the three quatrain and a couplet structure for the sonnet, and FE is basically in quatrains. And some scholars want to llink FE to the first 126 sonnets. So let's compare FE to the sonnets. Let's use the sonnets as a rational standard, and see how close they are in terms of style -- feminine endings, enjambement, elisions, and so on. I have no idea what the statistics are, but wouldn't this comparison make sense? Yours, Bill Godshalk (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Sunday, 10 Mar 1996 21:35:41 -0800 Subject: Doctor Dodypoll "The Wisdom of Doctor Dodipoll" was entered Oct 7, 1600, and was published as: "The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll. As it has bene sundrie times Acted by the Children of Powles. London. Printed by Thomas Creede, for Richard Olive, dwelling in Long Lane. 1600." At the moment I know little else but the short notice given by E.K. Chambers, "The Elizabethan Stage" Vol IV, p. 54. "Fleay, ii.155, assigned the play to Peele, chiefly on the ground that a snatch of song is from his "Hunting of Cupid". But Peele died in 1596, and Koeppel points out that the phrase (Bullen, p. 129), "Then reason's fled to animals, I see", presupposes the existence of Julius Caesar (1599), III.ii.109: "O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts/ And men have lost their reason." But the anonymous writer of Dr. Dodypoll has much more in common expression with Shakespeare. A cursory investigation yields these comparisons: DD: Well, I am glad we are haunted so with Fairies. Cymbeline: What fairies haunt this ground? ditto: With female fairies will his tomb be haunted. DD: For his behavior, for his sweet discourse. ] T.G. of Ver: ...hear sweet discourse. L.L.Lost: So sweet and voluble in his discourse. Rich III: Vows of love and ample interchange of sweet discourse. Rom. and Juliet: All these woes shall serve for sweet discourse. DD: Why being (of late) with such importunate suit. Othello: By their own importunate suit. DD: See what a lively piercing eye is here. Coriolanus: Able to pierce a corslet with his eye. Lear: How far your eyes may pierce I cannot tell. 3 Hen IV: These eyes...have been as piercing as the mid-day sun. DD: Ass that I was, dull, senseless, gross brained fool. Hen V: In gross brain little wots what watch the king keeps... DD: Of their close dealings, winkings, becks and touches... 2 Hen VI: This is close dealing. DD: But not a rag of money. Com. of Er: But surely, master, not a rag of money. DD: With nothing true, but what our labouring souls... Hamlet: We shall jointly labour with your soul... Not wishing to weary the reader, the rest I have gleaned will be appended to the end of this post. Most of all, I find the poetry in Doctor Dodypoll to be of the highest order, quite happily suggesting Shakespeare, or so it sounds to me. Here are a couple of examples. In the first, a painter is by way of the Almighty praising his employment in the art "...why the world With all her beauty was by painting made. Look on the heavens colour'd with golden stars, The firmamental ground of it, all blue. Look on the air, where with a hundred changes The watry Rain-bow doth embrace the earth. ...Look on that little world, the twofold man, Whose fairer parcel is the weaker still. And see what azure veins in stream-like form Divide the Rosie beauty of his skin." And again the painter, regretting that he cannot paint his fair love as she comes to his eye. "...Then might'st thou justly wonder at mine art, And devout people would from far repair. Like Pilgrims, with their duteous sacrifice, Adorning thee as Regent of their loves; Here, in the center of this Mary-gold, Like a bright Diamond I enchast thine eye. Here, underneath this little Rosie bush Thy crimson cheeks peer forth more fair than it. Here, Cupid (hanging down his wings) doth sit, Comparing Cherries to thy Ruby lips." This much in the first scene only, and much more throughout the play. But also the roughness of Shakespeare, that crude, scoffing throw away attitude, the smooth vulgarity of the man, challenging poetry even in the latrine: "Indeed M. Doctor your commodities are rare, A guard of Urinals in the morning; A plaguie fellow at midnight; A fustie Pothecary, ever at hand with his fustian drugges, attending your pispot worship." The comedy is sprinkled throughout with bright and original phrases, and I give but a few: "Curious pencil of your tongue; triumphing from corner to corner; color-fading cheeks; nuptial fire; nuptial appetite; absolute man; stealth of love; feeds on melancholie; jealous stomach; fresh stars; swords in thy tongue; perilous wit; amourous lunacy..." and much more of course. Then there is the story, very Shakespearean, and the play needs a couple of readings to get the drift, very like Shakespeare in that. I'll not attempt to tell it faithfully in an outline. It's five acts, 58 pages. It's about a couple of marriages, a Duke with an ugly daughter (but fine), disguises, a love potion, cross-dressed misunderstandings, an Earl posing as a poor painter who loves below his station, an embassy from abroad, confusions, our hero gone mad, and there are dumb puns, music and song, and the ridiculous Dr. Dodypoll who spends his mastery of English in this manner: Doct: I by garr: heere be de powdra, you give de halfe at once. Flor: But are you sure it will work the effect? Doct: Me be sure? By garr she no sooner drinke but shee hang your neck about; she stroake your beard; she nippe your cheeke, she busse your lippe, by garr. I suppose you might call Doctor Dodypoll low comedy, but its blessed with some high poetry and merry folk all falling over themselves for the sake of love and a happy ending. I'd love to see it played, and that might be the first time in 400 years, so far as I know. And no doubt I know very little, and I'd appreciate if anyone could tell me more of the play. Not by the way at all, for those who might be interested, it is STC 6991, and the U. Mich microfilm is Reel 289. Perhaps it hasn't been printed since 1600, but I'd be pleased to learn differently. Here are the remaining comparisons with Shakespeare: DD: You offer an intollerable wrong. T. Andron: Despiteful and intolerable wrongs! DD: Aye me, what Demon was it gulled me thus. Hen V: The same demon that hath gull'd thee thus. DD: You that are bodies made of light air... Othello: Trifles light as air... DD: No sleep will seize on my suspicious eyes. 1 Hen IV: Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes. DD: O brave free hearted slave... T. of Athens: I am bound to your free heart. Macbeth: Let us speak our free hearts each to other. DD: His life and wits, should ransom worlds for me. Rich II: The world's ransom, blessed Mary's son. 2 Hen VI: The world shall not be ransom for thy life. W. Tale: They looked as they had heard of a world ransomed. DD: Yet since my mind beats on it mightily... Tempest: For still 'tis beating in my mind... ditto: A turn or two I'll walk, to still my beating mind. ditto: Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business. DD: Ere I'll offend your grace or breed suspicion... 2 Hen VI: Because in York this breeds suspicion... Hen VIII: I am sorry my integrity should breed...so deep suspicion. My deep suspicion is, of course, that Shakespeare wrote the play and escaped to the world without even his initials to mark it. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Joseph Kathman Date: Monday, 11 Mar 1996 22:44:56 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0193 Re: Funeral Elegy Bill Godshalk writes: >Dave has also sided with the scholars who want to date the sonnets in the >seventeenth century, shortly before they were printed and published in 1609. >For the sake of debate (the sonnets don't FEEL late to me because they seem >related to plays like LLL and R&J), let's grant Dave a late dating of the >sonnets -- circa 1609. Well, this isn't quite accurate. I don't think there's anybody out there who believes that the Sonnets were all written in 1608 or 1609. The position I incline toward is that the Sonnets were written over a period of years, largely around the turn of the century and a few years after, and that Shakespeare may have written or revised some of them in preparation for the 1609 Quarto. The Sonnets as a whole have more vocabulary in common with *H5* and *Hamlet* than with any of the early plays, despite the very different subject matter. And the all the "Shakespeare-roles" identified by SHAXICON up to Adam in *As You Like It* influence the vocabulary of the Sonnets. >The sonnets are then the closest non-dramatic poetry to FE (1612). Only three >or four years separates them, and they are both basically written in quatrains. > As you recall, Shakespeare likes the three quatrain and a couplet structure >for the sonnet, and FE is basically in quatrains. And some scholars want to >llink FE to the first 126 sonnets. > >So let's compare FE to the sonnets. Let's use the sonnets as a rational >standard, and see how close they are in terms of style -- feminine endings, >enjambement, elisions, and so on. I have no idea what the statistics are, but >wouldn't this comparison make sense? As I've just said, I wouldn't put the Sonnets as close to FE as you say -- more like ten years than three or four. I don't have all the numbers here, but in feminine endings, as has been noted, the Sonnets overall are 7.7%, FE is 11.6%. In run-on lines (enjamb- ment), the Sonnets are about 17% (I don't have the exact number), FE is 46% --- but Shakespeare increased his enjambment markedly in the late plays (from 19% in *Ado* to 31% in *Lear* to 46% in *Tempest*). Both the Sonnets and FE have the same number of relative clauses, roughly 13 per 1000 words. FE has more hyphenat- ed compound words than the Sonnets (101 per 20,000 words vs. 75), but both are well within Shakespeare's normal limits. In terms of vocabulary, I believe that the Sonnets have more vocabulary in common with FE, percentagewise, than any other text in Don Foster's considerable text archive. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu PS: (Actually, upon checking I find that *A Lover's Complaint* has slightly more vocabulary overlap with the Sonnets than does FE, but it's very close -- less than one word per 1000 difference.) And on glancing through Don Foster's list of English elegies, I see there was an "Elegy upon His Honoured Friend Mr. James Herrewyn", written by "J. Godschalck" (p.309). A relative, perhaps, Bill? (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 11 Mar 1996 21:35:18 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Don Foster says that his 6-page comment on his Funeral Elegy talks was an "unpublished handout", and I was at fault for quoting from his remarks. But there IS no such thing as an "unpublished handout". The multiple reproduction and distribution of such material is fully copyright, published, and you'll find that to be so by asking it of the U.S. Copyright Office, Washington D.C. The laws on this will be sent free explaining all. Such handouts are fully copyrighted, and are free to those who would quote from such material. Contrarywise, it is perhaps not unlawful, but it is certainly a breach of professional etiquette to quote in a public forum from a private letter, and Don Foster has done this, snatching a few lines of mine meant for his eyes only, not for public display. So much for that. As to John Ford, I believe I respectfully asked if Shaxicon had been checked against that poet. I ask again--has it, and what are the results? Might Ford have written the Funeral Elegy? He was a close friend of the Peter family, and is the question out of the way? No evasion is needed, nor should I be scoured for asking. Has Shaxicon worked the problem? I am surprised to hear that "aesthetic impressions (as to FE) have scarcely any evidential value". I had always thought that it was so. How does a poet last for 400 years except for such impres- sions? There was never any machine that told us Shakespeare was good. A machine wouldn't know, and we have all this while been depending on our aesthetic impressions. Would Foster call this luck? Who's going to judge a poem but a human being? Is that opinion worth nothing? Does Don Foster really want to say this? And then onward to the ad hominen comments and belittling talk. I am a "co-religionist", joined in "nonsense" and "perverse disre- gard" for facts (no examples given), and shrill besides, having nothing to offer the group but "anti-Stratfordian static". Is this civil discourse, consideration of another's opinion, the sort of comment we'd expect from a scholar and a gentleman? I'll give Don Foster such respect and be happy to do so, if he'll be so kind as to do the same for me. Let us set aside our beliefs of the other's stupidity, and suspicions of private motives, and set our study to the subject at hand, fairly distributing our proofs, be they even subjective or aesthetic. And I thank Don Foster not to disparage me further in this regard. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 11 Mar 1996 22:31:52 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Bill Godshalk invites us to compare the Funeral Elegy with the Sonnets of Shakespeare. The word "of" is a weak word, very useful, butr not much for poetic expression, lacking tension, emphasis, and so forth. Worse yet, you wouldn't want to begin a line with the feeble thing. In the Funeral Elegy, 30 lines begin with "of". In the first 578 lines of the Sonnets, 2 lines begin with "of". I'm as sorry about it as Shakespeare probably was, but statistics are statistics. (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Wednesday, 13 Mar 1996 00:08:01 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Funeral Elegy I share the disappointment of many readers with respect to the unembellished literary style of "A Funeral Elegy." We can all recognize that the elegy lacks the poetic exuberance of *Venus and Adonis,* or of the Sonnets, or of *The Tempest*. Many readers besides Mr. Kennedy have wished that Shakespeare had written a different kind of poem, or had written this one "better." But it will take more than bold assertion or idle speculation for the attribution to go away. Given the pervasive evidence of Shakespear- e's hand in the poem, "A Funeral Elegy" will have a place hereafter in the canon--though probably never as a well-loved or greatly admired text. Forthcoming essays by Prof. Abrams and myself make clear how decisively the case for Shakespeare's authorship has changed since 1989; it will be better if I sign off on the SHAKSPER discussion of FE until both of those essays are in print. I am loath to quarrel with a fellow SHAKSPERian, and regret having complained of Mr. Kennedy's recent posts. At least we can agree that it was not Edward de Vere who wrote "A Funeral Elegy" in 1612. Nothing here worth a quarrel. Don Foster (1)---------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Wednesday, 13 Mar 1996 19:42:05 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Funeral Elegy (and the Sonnets) Just when I say that I'll try to avoid arguing with Richard Kennedy, he again bites his own foot. He writes: >The word "of" is a weak word, very useful, but not much for poetic >expression, lacking tension, emphasis, and so forth. Worse yet, >you >wouldn't want to begin a line with the feeble thing. In the >Funeral Elegy, 30 >lines begin with "Of". In the first 578 lines of >the Sonnets, 2 lines begin >with "Of". I'm as sorry about it as >Shakespeare probably was, but statistics >are statistics. The reason that FE has a high percentage of "Of" (1 per 20 lines) will be perfectly obvious to most SHAKSPERians: The verse is highly enjambed. Only a few English poets living in 1612--all London playwrights--sustain a rate of enjambment as high as that found in FE--and ALL of those poets have a high percentage of lines beginning with "Of." As Shakespeare's rate of enjambment rockets upward from 1606 to 1613, so does his frequency of lines beginning with "Of." If there were not about 30 lines beginning with "Of" in the Elegy, it would constitute evidence *against* Shakespeare's authorship. For example: of the first 250 lines of Henry VIII (from I.i.1 to I.ii.25, which everyone agrees are by Shakespeare), 11 begin with "Of" (1 per 23 lines); of the first 250 pentameter lines of TNK (from I.i.26 to II.i.42), 10 begin with "Of" (1 per 25 lines). And yet both of these are conversational texts, with discontinuous speeches--so that many more lines must begin a new sentence than in the continuous quatrains of a poem like FE. Adjusted for differences between dramatic and nondramatic texts, or between blank verse and continuous quatrains, we should expect to find about 1 line out of 30 beginning with "Of" in Sh's portion of H8 and TNK, 1 line out of 20 beginning with "Of" in a poem by Shakespeare written in 1612. Lines beginning with "Of" are somewhat *more* frequent than expected in the opening scenes of H8 and TNK, right on the money for FE. Once again, Mr. Kennedy has spoken without first checking his facts. This is, however, the last time that I will respond to his posts. It is good for Shakespeare studies, and for critical reception of the Funeral Elegy, when Mr. Kennedy performs the role of gadfly, but I have no wish to continue swinging at him. I wish Mr. Kennedy all deserved success in the months ahead as he seeks to gain an audience for his views. Don Foster (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 13 Mar 1996 14:37:24 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy The comparison of the Funeral Elegy with the Sonnets seems to be a good idea. To make the chore a bit easier, I've been toting up some items using the whole 578 lines of the Elegy and the first 578 lines of the Sonnets -- which goes 2 lines into sonnet 42. That seems as representative a chunk as any, and fair enough to the task, seeing as I have no computer program to sic on these selections. My counting may be off 2 or 3 either way, but the counting was done by hand and the tally differences are large enough that a small error might be excused. Lines ending with a colon: Elegy 10, Sonnets 55 Words with 4 or more syllables: Elegy 73, Sonnets 15 The use of ellipses: Elegy 8, Sonnets NONE Total of full-stopped sentences: Elegy 79, Sonnets 107 Lines carried over w/o punctuation: Elegy 289, Sonnets 77 Lines beginning with "of": Elegy 30, Sonnets 2 Lines with punctuation within: Elegy 212, Sonnets 108 Use of question marks: Elegy 6, Sonnets 19 Of course you might take 578 lines of the Sonnets from back to front, or select from the middle, but this seems a good sample, and the differences are quite easy to see, as well as it is obvious that Richard Abrams is wrong when he writes in the Shakespeare Newsletter: "Judged by his largely unconscious linguistic prefer- ences, W.S.'s style seems virtually indistinguishable from Shakespeare's." (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Skovmand Date: Thursday, 14 Mar 1996 09:39:47 MET Subject: Re: SHK 7.0202 Re: Funeral Elegy (and the Sonnets) I must take issue with the Kathman/Godshalk *radicality* of uncertainty as to the dating of the sonnets : sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in the miscellany *The Passionate Pilgrim* in 1599, with only a few insignificant variations in spelling! And these two, IMHO, are among his most sophisticated and *mature* sonnets, thematically and stylistically. Shakespeare, in other words, was fully developed as a sonneteer by 1599. Doesn't this make any dating game involving FE and the sonnets highly problematic? Michael Skovmand U. of Aarhus Denmark (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Velz Date: Thursday, 14 Mar 1996 14:31:32 +0200 Subject: Funeral Elegy (and Sonnets) Some at least of the Sonnets were in circulation in ms. before 1598 when Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's "sugar'd sonnets among his private friends" comparing them favorably with Catullus' poems about Lesbia if memory serves. John (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Thursday, 14 Mar 1996 18:45:02 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Lines beginning with "and": Elegy 28, Sonnets 66 Common nouns in caps: Elegy 33, Sonnets 57 The writer of the Funeral Elegy liked to use the word "Whiles" in place of "While" or "Whildst". In 578 lines he used the word 8 times. In 2,150 lines of the Sonnets, 1,850 of Lucrece, and 1,194 lines of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare never uses the word once. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Velz Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 13:12:46 +0200 Subject: Whiles Anent Richard Kennedy's comment that the word *whiles* does not appear in Sh's nondramatic poetry: It certainly does in appear in the plays, however. My old Bartlett's Shakespeare Concordance shows 13 instances of this word from 11 plays. John Velz (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 08:51:05 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy I dreamed of Shaxicon the other night, All copper-plated as he was bright, Striding like a giant out of Goya To seat himself upon a wondrous hill, His height above the world in poetry. A pilgrimage from far and wide advanced, Lovers all of Shakespeare, humble folk among, Gathering at the monster's sanctioned feet, Listening for the monster's brazen tongue To tell the terrible tale of Shakespeare's Later verse, so lusterless and stale. "Enjambment makes the world go round," Declared that polished giant of my dream. "The data base is sound, all dependent clauses Have been counted, hendiadys and permutatio Satisfy and prove that Shakespeare wrote the Elegy." And then the monster read, O, woe betide, The worse poem ever recited on a high hillside. It was the Funeral Elegy by W.S., And not a righteous eye but wept for the lad, Poor William Peter, stabbed to death on horse, Who enjoyed in all his life no other sin But tavern-hoppi- ng in the mid-day sun. Shaxicon was merciless, and for our doubt All half the thousand lines were wrung out For our weeping, and when the dirge was done, I found myself alone, and no birds sung. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 18:41:29 -0500 Subject: Syntactical Examinations of Elegie I have only just joined the list. It's possible I may be duplicat- ing prior inquiries. If Don Foster's book has been released I have not been able to locate it. I have not tried requesting the book yet, hoping one of several bookstores I visit might have it. My question concerns SHAXICON. Specifically, is it capable of differentiating between parts of speech -- sytactical usage? What I have in mind is an examination of the Elegie such as John Porter Houston "Shakespearean Sentences" might have allowed it. How often, for example, does the author of the FE invert the normal SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) order? If Mr. Houston's work is to be trusted, Shakespeare, among other idiosyncracies, inverted this order to a greater degree than any of his rivals. Having followed the discussion thus far, it seems the program has tallied such information as word and image clusters, enjambment, the number of feminine endings, etc.? Patrick Gillespie [Editor's Note: You would be better served looking for Don Foster's book in your library rather than your bookstore. Here's the citation: Foster, Donald W. *Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribu- tion. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1989. As for SAXICON, there has been much discussion in the past on SHAKSPER, but because we currently do not have the DATABASE FUNCTION under Unix I cannot give you the easy way to locate those discussion. However, you should consult the Summer 1995 edition of *The Shakespeare Newsletter* (54.5, No. 225) for a reprinting of Don Foster's description of the program from his July 4, 1995, posting to SHAKSPER. --HMC] (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 22:32:01 -0500 (EST) Subject: Subject: Re: SHK 7.0202 Re: Funeral Elegy (and the Sonnets) >Dave Kathman writes: > >As I've just said, I wouldn't put the Sonnets as close to FE as you say -- >more like ten years {circa 1602?} than three or four. I don't have all the >numbers here, but in feminine endings, as has been noted, the Sonnets overall >are 7.7%, FE is 11.6%. In run-on lines (enjambment), the Sonnets are about 17% >(I don't have the exact number), FE is 46% --- but Shakespeare increased his >enjambment markedly in the late plays (from 19% in *Ado* to 31% in *Lear* to >46% in *Tempest*). Both the Sonnets and FE have the same number of relative >clauses, roughly 13 per 1000 words. FE has more hyphenated compound words >than the Sonnets (101 per 20,000 words vs. 75), but both are well within >Shakespeare's normal limits. In terms of vocabulary, I believe that the >Sonnets have more vocabulary in common with FE, percenta- gewise, than any >other text in Don Foster's considerable text archive. Okay, it looks as if we have a starting point. Comparing one text with another seems more fruitful (to me) than comparing all the Shakespeare texts without discrimination. Unfortunately for me, I have too much grading to pursue this argument right now, but, undoubtedly, I'll have more to say later! >And on glancing through Don Foster's list of English elegies, I see there was >an "Elegy upon His Honoured Friend Mr. James Herrewyn", written by "J. >Godschalck" (p.309). A relative, perhaps, Bill? I hope not. My family is supposed to have come here from Germany in the late 17th century. I hope we didn't leave Uncle Julius in England! Yours, Bill Godshalk (5)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 23:05:48 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0211 Re: Funeral Elegy (and Sonnets) Richard J Kennedy writes: >The writer of the Funeral Elegy liked to use the word "Whiles" in place of >"While" or "Whildst". In 578 lines he used the word 8 times. In 2,150 lines of >the Sonnets, 1,850 of Lucrece, and 1,194 lines of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare >never uses the word once. I assume that "Whildst" is a misprint for "Whilest" -- which Shakespeare used eleven times. But according to the Spevack Concordance, Shakespeare used "Whiles" 82 times, most often in the history plays, but once in *LUC* line 1135: "whiles against a thorn." "While" is obviously the preferred form for Shakespeare; he used it (in this form) 339 times. Yours, Bill Godshalk (6)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 15 Mar 1996 23:11:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0205 Re: Funeral Elegy (and the Sonnets) Michael Skovmand writes: >I must take issue with the Kathman/Godshalk *radicality* of uncertainty as to >the dating of the sonnets : sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in the miscellany *The >Passionate Pilgrim* in 1599, with only a few insignificant variations in >spelling! Yes, I agree. Remember that my original point was that the sonnets are "early." Dave Kathman disagrees, but to give us a battleground, I (tentatively) accepted his late dating. But if Katherine Duncan-Jones is correct, and Shakespeare organized the sonnets as he wished them to appear in 1609, and IF we also assume (and perhaps we have no right to make this assumption) that the sonnets were written in a fairly chronological order (i.e., 1 to 154), then the series was essentially completed by 1599. John Velz is also correct that Meres had read or had heard of Shakespeare's sonnets in the 90s. (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: David Evett Date: Saturday, 16 March 1996 5:17pm ET Subject: SHK 7.0214 Re: Funeral Elegy (a Is the matter of while/whiles/whilst/whilest a potential authorial signature, or is the record too contaminated by scribal and compositorial variation to be useful in this connection? I note that all 4 variants are monosyllabic, so the choice has no metrical significance; the additional consonants would affect the flow of the sound a bit. At a quick glance, I can't discern any obvious patterns, such as the use of one or another form before a word starting with a consonant (though all 11 of the instances of whilest in Spevack precede pronominal forms). As so often, a few minutes with the concordance and the complexities begin to multiply; for example Spevack does not discriminate between "while" by itself, "a while," and "the while," and lists "awhile" as a separate form. Nor does Spevak more generally try to discriminate among substantive, adverbial, and conjunctive uses. Tracing the relationships among these forms and trying to sort out the effects of regional and social variations would be an onerous task. All these complexities help explain why the spellings in and of themselves won't do the kind of work Richard J. Kennedy puts them to. Just whiling (whilesing, whilsting, whilesting) away the time, Dave Evett (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Sunday, 17 Mar 1996 17:38:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0214 Re: Funeral Elegy (and Sonnets) Regarding "whiles," Don Foster sends me the following which supplements my former posting: "Note that "whiles" appears in all or most of those texts that are thought to have been prepared from Shakespeare's own papers--and in the only extant MS in Shakespeare's own hand (Hand D, STM), neither *while* nor *whilest* nor *whilst* appears--only *whiles*." Spevack does note the *Sir Thomas More* line: "whiles they are o'er the bank of their obedience." So Don hints that Shakespeare may have preferred "whiles" in his manuscripts, a usage modernized by scribes and compositors. And all the evidence seems to suggest that this modernization process was not unusual in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joseph M Green Date: Tuesday, 19 Mar 1996 16:57:30 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0222 Re: Funeral Elegy I hope that I am not the first to point out that the elegy is obviously a forgery committed by the Dark Lady of the Sonnets that was understood by its understanders as Shakespeare's lament over his failed sexual powers. The title gives it away and the Dark Lady would be just cunning enough to have this forgery printed. Life ran high in those days. And, although I feel that Richard Kennedy's poem is vastly superior to the elegy and that the only way Shakespeare could have written the elegy is to have initiated a new type of "plain style" which required writing as if you had recently suffered a cerebral accident, I must side with those who attribute that poem to Will because I have just learned that Stephen Greenblatt himself (so careful of the type) will include it in the NORTON. (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 19 Mar 1996 17:52:06 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy In comparing the Funeral Elegy with the first 578 lines of the Sonnets, I noticed that Shakespeare only twice began a line with "of". W.S. did it 30 times. Don Foster answered (13 March) that this difference is because the Elegy is highly enjambed, many more lines carried over than is normal for Shakespeare. I understand. A line carried over must begin with > something<, and most often a little word serves. And so, says Foster, that explains this huge difference -- Elegy 30, Sonnets 2. I also noticed that the word "and" was skewed in its use It's another of those little words that help to carry over a line. According to Foster's theory, the Elegy should use "and" to initiate a carry over line considerably more often than Shake- speare, such as the case for "of". But it doesn't. The Elegy only uses "and" in this place 28 times, and the Sonnets 66. That's retrograde to Foster's argument. Foster's rule of enjambment holds up for "of", but fails for "and" in comparison with the first 578 lines of the Sonnets. The outcome seems to be that the unknown W.S. was fond of carrying over a line with "in", but Shakespeare shunned that word, favoring "and" for the use. The Funeral Elegy and the Sonnets are parted by several other stylistic differences as well, which have been noticed but not explained. For example, why such a great difference between the use of 4 syllable words? Elegy 75, Sonnets (first 578 lines) 15. That seems an excellent word-print. I might add to that: 4 syllable words Funeral Elegy 578 lines. 75 Venus and Adonis 578 lines 11 The Rape of Lucrece 578 lines 19 The LAST 578 lines of the Sonnets 14 (5)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 19 Mar 1996 22:23:01 -0800 Subject: Dr. Dodypoll Sydney Kasten brings up a good point about The Wisdome of Doctor Dodypoll. It's anonymous and I say it's very like Shakespeare. I agree with Kasten that we've got to be very careful when we're examining Elizabethan poetry and plays. Ben Jonson thought so, too. He prefaced the quarto edition of The Alchemist with this: "TO THE READER -- if thou beest more, thou art an understander, and then I trust thee. If thou art one that tak'st up, and but a pretender, beware at what hands thou receiv'st thy commodity's, for thou wert never more fair in the way to be coz'ned than in this age of poetry, especial- ly in plays...." That's either a warning not to meddle too much, or an invitation to a masquerade party. Doctor Dodypoll is one of the literary puzzles quite common back then. Evidently it played well. I say it's Shakespeare. Please answer personal if someone would be willing to type it up, possibly we could post it. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Sharpston Date: Thursday, 21 Mar 1996 13:24:30 +0000 (GMT) Subject: Funeral Elegy I have been lurking during the Funeral Elegy discussions. There are angles to do with printers, publishers etc., but a significant combat seems to be Shaxicon versus The Aesthetes. We shall be back there in a moment, but first I need a paragraph in 1996 Philadel- phia. As I read about Shaxicon etc, in the back of my mind was Kasparov versus Deep Blue, where I was lucky enough to be able to attend one game, and subsequently hear from both Kasparov and Deep Blue's human 'minders'. It was Man versus Machine -- or was it? Grandmasters had helped program Deep Blue, and Kasparov made use of computerized databases in his preparation and training. The IBM people were quite annoyed when I asked whether Deep Blue thought about positional considerations: of course they had tried to program for that, but how did you specify the finer points?... We were into what the Swedish call "tacit knowledge" -- what you know but cannot express how you know. That, and apparently superior complex learning ability in Kasparov as against Deep Blue, probably explain why Kasparov was pulling away from Deep Blue at the end of the series of games, as against his nasty surprise at the begin- ning. Why Deep Blue could take on arguably the best chess player ever, and initially win, is probably explained by the narrow and explicit 'domain', chess, with its very explicit rules and scoring system. Poetry seems a good deal about intuition, and the domain is much less heavily structured and closely confined than chess. I love Richard Kennedy's February 13 piece on the comparative aesthetic qualities of W.S. versus Name Players. The only thing I objected to there was the idea that Shakespeare would write (dare I say it?) 'mechanical' verse in his sleep, when we all tend to do rather creative elisions of the links between reality and symbol. At the same time, I do feel some need to defend (a) the quantitative approach (b) poor old Shaxicon. The quantitative approach was going strong, of course, long before computers made it easier (too easy??). From the Preface, written in 1905, of the Oxford Clarendon, "M. Tulli Ciceronis orationes, Pro Sex. Roscio etc." (with many subsequent reprints), we have 'Albertus Curtis Clark' writing "Inventus est Thaddaeus Zielinksi, vir acutissims et ferrea quadam patientia praeditus, qui, omnibus clausulis quotquot in orationibus inveniuntur numeratis et digestis, doceret..." Briefly, with his 'iron' patience he went over every single sentence ending in Cicero to work out which was the preferred 'blank verse' pattern, troche, dactyl or whatever (he found more diversity than some people expected).... Moving back to the computer age, I know I would rather (if in fact innocent) face a computer check of my finger-prints than someone's intuitive impressions. People can be all too impressionable at line-ups, and 'recognize' the person they in some sense 'should'...with the possible result of wrongful imprisonment, at least until DNA comes to the rescue. All the discussions of the meaning of feminine endings, and in what exact context, seem to me most appropriate; but perhaps we also need a broader structure for determining the appropriate role for both Shaxicon AND The Aesthetes, and a more integrative approach to the use of both qualitative and quantitative information. Humbly, Michael Sharpston msharpston@worldbank.org (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Nick Clary Date: Friday, 22 Mar 1996 11:38:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Funeral Elegy, Hamlet, and Spevack's Concordance While collating *Hamlet*, I did a quick check and discovered a number of curiosities. "While" appears 16 times in both Q2 and F1. "While" also appears in three Q2-only lines, and once more in a place where F1 has "whiles." "Whiles" appears once in both Q2 and F1, once in Q2 only, and once in F1 only. "Whilst" appears twice in both Q2 and F1. "Whil'st" once in both. Q2 also has "whiles" where F1 has "while." And then there's the odd few instances: Q2 has "whiles" and F1 has "whiles like," Q2 has "awhile" and F1 has "aside," and in one case Q2 has "whiles," F1 has "whil'st," and F2-F4 have "whilst." Spevack's Concordance, as the editor notes, "utilizes the modern-spelling text of *The Riverside Shakespeare*, published by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1974." While Spevack asserts that this edition exemplifies "the latest thinking on what may be called the `true text' of Shakespeare," the reliability of the Concordance's counts is anchored in a conflated. This edition, unlike a variorum edition, not only uses modern-spellings but chooses between variants when Q2 and F1 deviate from one another. Only the chosen variant can be counted. In this Concordance there are 19 entries for "while" in *Hamlet*. There are 3 entries for "whiles" and 3 for "whilst." These counts might differ from mine, based on the cursory check above. The Bertram/Kliman *Three-Text Hamlet* illuminates such nuances, as the Riverside and other editions with textual notes do not. By providing complete parallel tests of Q1, Q2, and F1, such editions as this one cause this reader to wonder about the reliability of authorial determination based on comparison that are dependent on the counting of specif- ics. Someone as already made the point about compositorial errors. There is, of course, more to consider. Nick Clary (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jim Helfers Date: Monday, 25 Mar 1996 14:07:31 -0700 (MST) Subject: The Funeral Elegy I've been following with interest the ongoing discussion concerning _The Funeral Elegy_. Although I begin to believe that whatever else needs to be said should be said in careful scholarly studies, I have my crumb to add to the discussion. I especially find interesting Professors Kennedy and Godshalk's comments on stylistic questions, specifically the general quantification of function words and feminine line endings. Having just waded painfully through the swamp of stylometry for a presentation, however, I'd like to inject a cautionary note concerning modes of proof which use quantitative study (statistical descriptions of linguistic items and patterns in texts). First a bit of background. In 1978, Andrew Q. Morton, a classical and biblical scholar, published the book _Literary Detection: How to prove authorship and fraud in literature and documents_. In it he proposed a new approach to studies of attribution. Instead of examining texts for special terms and deducing authorship from their use, as has been done in biblical studies since the nine- teenth century (and which Donald Foster is doing with SHAXICON, in part), Morton asserted that the statistical description of universally occurring characteristics of text (such as sentence length, or the rate of occurrence and collocation of syntactic function words like articles, conjunctions and prepositions) would show patterns of usage which would be unique to a particular author. One would, theoretically, using multiple samples of different function words or collocations of words, be able to come up with a unique statistical description of a given author's style, using such statistical measures as mean, median, mode, standard devia- tion, and other calculations. One needs statistical measures to assure that differences between samples result from something other than random variation. This theory is immediately attractive. It indicates that one could identify unique features of styles in the same way that one distinguishes fingerprints, by looking for discrete patterns at particular points. Unfortunately, a number of scholars, notably M. W. A. Smith and Barbara Stevenson (Smith, _Language and The Law_ 374-413, Stevenso- n, _Literary Computing and Literary Criticism_ 61-74), have pointed out grave difficulties with Morton's methodology and reporting. Their critiques center on three areas: Morton's initial framing of his hypotheses, his questionable assumptions, and his handling and analysis of the data. Among the several assumptions they question, the most important involves Morton's methodology. Morton uses statistical tools which assume the independence of the variables that they statistically graph. The linguistic elements that Morton graphs are not, in fact, independent of each other. A question arises: Is Morton's stylometric method a valid way to analyze texts, in light of Smith's and Stevenson's criticisms? Morton himself has proposed several modifications of his proce- dures, but his new methodologies seem to be under attack for the same reasons as his original ones (Smith (1994) 412-413). However, both Stevenson and Smith set out further parameters which could conceivably validate stylometry. Stevenson suggests a simulation study, specifically, resampling. However, this resampling "requires hundreds of complicated chi-square manipulations, not just one simple test" (Stevenson 71). Smith suggests a revised frequency test, in which certain words are chosen for analysis based both on their syntactic function and their frequency of occurrence in authors' texts. The sampled words and collocations are then manipulated in a variety of complex ways, to achieve a valid result (411-12). This discussion probably, in Barbara Stevenson's words, "portrays perfectly the current status of computational stylistics: the experts cannot agree on the ways statistics should be adapted to literary criticism, and statistical novices are unable to under- stand the jargon of the experts" (61). In any case, stylometry is a method of adducing internal evidence, and internal evidence is only a single factor in an overall effort to identify an author. This effort is a complex one involving both internal and external evidence. It is also true that, for many reasons, some kind of stylometric analysis will remain a factor in overall efforts to identify authors of medieval and Renaissance texts. One of the most interesting recent projects, which makes use of both "traditional" stylometric methods and some new techniques is The Shakespeare Clinic, a project undertaken by undergraduates and professors since 1988 at the Claremont Colleges (Elliott, "Touchstone" 199). The project is unique in two ways: first, some of the major professorial contributors are not literary scholars. Second, Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza (two of the professorial leaders of the project) have pioneered a further refinement of statistical measurement for stylometric analysis, which they call modal analysis. Finding that another method the clinic used was strongly sensitive to genre, and required quite large sample sizes for statistical validity, Elliott and Valenza took a new tack. They used a technique called the Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) "to determine the principal modes by which an author deviates from his or her average usage of selected keywords. These modes do not directly represent keyword occurrences, but instead measure complex patterns of deviation from the average rates" ("Touchstone" 201). This they found to be an effective way to discriminate between the style of two compared poets. The preceding information impacts the _Elegy_ discussion in two ways: first, it strongly suggests that the simple comparison of word occurrence numbers, or even numbers of feminine-ending lines, is a potentially flawed way to argue for or against authorship. Second, it leads me to ask a question: Is any member of the Shakespeare Clinic out there? I'd be interested in reading the results of the Clinic's analysis of the _Funeral Elegy_, which, I hear, cast doubt on a Shakespearean authorship from a stylometric perspective. For anyone who is interested in stylometrics as a tool for resolving authorship disputes, I've appended a short list of references on stylometry in general, and Shakespearean stylometry in particular. Elliott, Ward E. Y. "Glass Houses and Glass Slippers: The Shakespeare Clinic and Its Critics." _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 40.4 (1990 Winter): 59. Elliott, Ward E. Y. and Robert J. Valenza. "A Touchstone for the Bard." _Computers and the Humanities_ 25 (1991): 199-209. Elliott, Ward E. Y. and Robert J. Valenza. "Was the Earl of Oxford the True Shakespeare? A Computer-Aided Analysis." _Notes and Queries_ December 1991: 501-506. Foster, Donald W. _Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution_. Newark: U of Delaware, 1989. _______________. "Reconstructing Shakespeare 1: The Roles that Shakespeare Performed." _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 41.1-2 (1991 Spring/Summer): 16-17. _______________. "Reconstructing Shakespeare Part 2: The Sonnets." _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 41.3 (1991 Fall): 26-27. _______________. "Reconstructing Shakespeare Part 3 of 3: New Directions in Textual Analysis and Stage History." _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 41.4 (1991 Winter): 58-59. _______________. "Re: SHAXICON." The Shakespeare Electronic Conference (SHAKSPER@WS.BOWIESTATE.EDU) 6.0533 (Thursday 6 July 1995). _______________. "Re: SHK 6.0874, Re: Julius Caesar, Re: SHAXICON- ." The Shakespeare Electronic Conference (SHAKSPER@WS.BOWIES- TATE.EDU) 6.0891 (Thursday 10 November 1995). _______________. "Stylometry and Quantitative Stylistic Analysis." The Shakespeare Electronic Conference (SHAKSPER@WS.BOWIESTATE- .EDU) 7.0031 (Friday 12 January 1996). Morton, Andrew Q. _Literary Detection: How to prove authorship and fraud in literature and documents_. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1978. Smith, M. W. A. "Computers, Statistics and Disputed Authorship." In John Gibbons, ed. _Language and the Law_. London : Longman, 1994. 374-413. _______________. "Counting Wilkins In: Stylometry Reveals Who Wrote Acts I and II of 'Pericles.'" _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 40.4 (1990 Winter): 60. _______________. "An Investigation of the Basis of Morton's Method for the Determination of Authorship." _Style_ 19.3 (1985 Fall): 341-368. _______________. "Stylometry: Will the Computer Finally End Authorship Controversies?" _The Shakespeare Newsletter_ 41.1-2 (1991 Spring/Summer): 14-17. Stevenson, Barbara. "Adapting Hypothesis Testing to a Literary Problem." In Rosanne G. Potter, ed. _Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric_. Philadelphia : U of Pennsylvania P, 1989. 61-74. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 25 Mar 1996 11:54:27 -0800 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy I have found that Doctor Dodypoll (1600) was printed in Robert Dodsley's "A select collection of Old English Plays", which was first published in 1744. A.H. Bullen edited a 4 vol. edition of Dodsley's selections, published in 1964. He has this to say of Dodypoll: "The writer, whoever he was, scatters his gold with a lavish hand. In the fine panegyric on painting, there is a freedom of fancy that lifts us into the higher regions of poetry..." However, Bullen finds that "In the conduct of the complicated plot no great dexterity is shown. There is a want of fusion and coherence." It's too true, the plot is difficult to follow, but that's very like Shakespeare. Bullen passes over this fault to recommend the poetry in the play. He directs us to a love scene, and says: "The beauty of that scene is beyond the reach of any ordinary poet. And what shall be said of that exquisite descrip- tion of the cameo in ii,I?:" FLORES: See then (my Lord) this aggat that contains The image of that Goddesse and her sonne, Whom auncients held the Soveraignes of Love; See, naturally wrought out of the stone (Besides the perfect shape of every limme, Besides the wondrous life of her bright haire) A waving mantle of celestial blew Imbroydering it selfe with flaming Starres. ALBER: Most excellent: and see besides (my Lords) How Cupids wings do spring out of the stone As if they needed not the help of Art. Bullen comments: "Is there in the whole Greek Anthology anything so absolutely flawless?" But Bullen will not dare to say Dodypoll might have been written by Shakespeare. "As to the authorship of Dr. Dodypoll I am unable to form a conjecture." And so once again we are reminded to check a too hasty attribution of a poem or a play to Shakespeare, and I may well be wrong in thinking that Shakespeare wrote Doctor Dodypoll. No doubt it has been looked at many times since Dodsley's 1744 printing. No doubt many scholars have looked at the Funeral Elegy, enticed towards some great treasure by the W.S. initials. But the chances that Shakespeare wrote such poor poetry are small indeed. The chances are a good deal better that Shakespeare wrote those several beautiful passages in Dodypoll. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Roger D. Gross Date: Tuesday, 26 Mar 1996 13:01:05 -0600 (CST) Subject: Funeral Elegy Re. 4-syllable words in FE: I get somewhat different numbers from R. Kennedy: he finds 75 four-syllable words in FE. I count 62. I can guess that he may have counted "oblivion", "experience", "melodious", as four-syllab- le words but they are here (and normally in Shakespeare) given three syllables. Also, he may have counted "contemplation" as four syllables but it is here (and usually is when in the last position in a verse line) a five-syllable word. But these possibilities don't account for the difference in our numbers. I do note one interesting thing: of the 62 four-syllable words in FE, 17 appear nowhere else in Shakespeare. I draw no infer- ence...yet. Also, "thank" appears in FE as a noun. Odd. Shakespeare's standard works have 309 uses of the word, always as a verb. Perhaps this is a typographical error; might it be "thanks"? Onward. Roger Gross U. of Arkansas (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Wednesday, 27 Mar 1996 08:35:09 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0237 Re: Funeral Elegy Michael Sharpston calls for a partnership between the intuitive and the, for want of a better word, scientific approaches to determin- ing authorship, but his comparisons, chess and fingerprinting, fall far out of the range of the problems involved in recognizing an individual voice in an area of purest subjectivity, particularly when that voice belonged not only to one of the greatest creative geniuses the world has known, but one who funtioned for the most part in the realm of theatre, so that unlike other poets and writers of "fiction", he was tuned from the outset to change his voice as completely as was humanly possible (in his case perhaps, superhumanly possible) to suit the need of the moment. In addition, he was writing at a very unique time in the history of the English language, when writers were basically creating modern English out of medieval English, French and Latin, to meet the demands of the fledgling publishing industry and commercial theater. Whatever the actual number of words used first by him (one more thing we can never know for sure, since lost works of his forbears may well contain some things he is credited with, and he may have used new words for the first time in works now lost, that are credited to a later writer) he is far and away the greatest source of words, phrases and pithy quotations that have lasted in the language, from his time, and perhaps from all time. So that we have a mind that not only was superb at shifting from one voice to another, but a mind that was constantly developing new ways of expressing itself ("build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul"), and, no doubt, discarding outworn ones in this unending and ongoing process. So that scientistic word counts that might be appropriate with a nineteenth century writer of novels, using his or her same voice throughout, indeed wishing to use the same voice, to have a recognizable style, and using an inherited vocabulary, are not appropriate with this writer. Living as he did at a time of great creativity in language, and near anarchy, his usage of words was to create a new norm, not conform to an old one, thus he is next to impossible to track in this manner. As for words such as "while", if he uses "whiles" or "whilst", one must ask what that particular sound does to the ripple of sound as it passes from pure sound into sense. As a poet, this would be of profound importance to him, and what may not sound "good" to us, may have been the very effect he was seeking. Certainly many writers and critics we have great respect for have missed the point with Shakespeare, over and over. One point regarding Shaxicon, and its proclaimed ability to show what roles the actor Shakespeare played; doesn't it seem more likely that in these peripheral characters we hear, to some extent, the ordinary voice of the author, since in these roles he was not constrained to create a complex persona, complete with his or her own style of self-expression, but was content to slide by with, more or less, his own everyday voice. Stephanie Hughes (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 27 Mar 1996 08:23:21 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Consider these few lines as to their likeness, both sets from long elegies. For a moment, let this first set go without the name of the author. It begins like this. "Swift Time, the speedy pursuivant of heaven, Summons to glorious virtue's canonis'd, The lasting volume where worth roves uneven, In brazen characters immortalis'- d; Where merit lives embrac'd, base scorn despis'd: Link'd to untainted truth, sprung from the same, Begets his eaglet-towering daughter Fame." And this next, which we all know by now to be W.S. getting underway on William Peter in the Funeral Elegy "Since Time, and his predestinated end, Abridg'd the circuit of his hopeful days, Whiles both his Youth and Virtue did intend The good endeavors of deserving praise, What memorable monument can last Whereon to build his never-blemish'd name But his own worth, wherein his life was grac'd Sith as ever he maintain'd the same? The last set is from the Funeral Elegy, as mentioned. The first set is from Time's Memorial, an elegy written for the Earl of Devonshire. It was written by John Ford in 1606 when he was 20 years old. The Funeral Elegy was written in 1612, and is of unknown authorship. The sets are so closely imagined we might suspect the several lines to be by the same writer. We know that W.S. was a Devonshire man, as was Ford, and several other examples have been given by Don Foster to show the similiar use of language of the two men. These sentiments might be added. TM: "...his fair, unblemish'd soul and spotless mind..." "The quintessence of ripe perfection..." To sanctimonious, taintless purity..." "Who died? a man; nay, more, a perfect saint.... FE: "Of true perfection, in a perfect breast..." "In his pure life...." "His taintless goodness...." It is one thing to say that the deceased was a good man and had friends who grieve, but quite another thing to compare the subject of the elegy with the saints. Other elegies may do so as well, but take the opening lines as quoted above, and take these closures below. Ford gives nine epitaphs after his long elegy (896 lines) on the Earl of Devonshire, the first of them ending-- "Betwixt the gods and men doubly divided, His soul with them, his fame with us abided; In this his life and death was countervail'd, He justly liv'd belov'd, he died bewail'd." The last lines of the Funeral Elegy are these-- "Long may thy worthiness thy name advance Amongst the virtuous and deserving most, Who herein hast forever happy prov'd: In life thou liv'dst, in death thou died'st belov'd." Remembering that John Ford was a friend of the Peter family, I think we'd want to consider that he also wrote the Funeral Elegy 6 years after the Earl of Devonshire elegy. Don Foster says it is out of the question. He says that "Ford himself in 1613 makes pretty clear that he thinks FE is by Shakespeare." Bill Godshalk has asked where indeed did Ford say this, and I second the the question. (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 02 Apr 1996 17:47:57 -0500 (EST) Subject: FE in the TLS A report for those who do not read the TLS: Rick Abrams in his recent letter to the TLS (March 22, 1996) takes Vickers to task for supposing that SHAXICON generally analyzes style. So we really should distinguish between SHAXICON's function (i.e., to search for words) and our search for stylistic parallels between Shakespeare's plays and poems, and FE (e.g., enjambement, hendiadys, "incongruent who/m," word formation, and hyphenation). Abrams generally rebuts Vickers's argument -- pointing out inconsistencies and misinterpretations. In the March 29 issue (TLS), 17, Don Foster calls Vickers' response "An entertainment," and goes on to point on Vickers' mistakes (and unacknowledged borrowings). But in the same issue, Katherine Duncan-Jones (who provides the scholars who argue for Shakespeare's authorship of FE with some of their ammunition) makes three points against the ascription: (1) the prefatory epistle seems to indicate that the writer of FE is not a practising poet; (2) the writer of FE is too modest to be Shakespeare; and (3) George Eld possibly attribute FE to W.S. in hopes that readers would think the poem by Shakespeare, but a "few minutes' perusal of the volume surely revealed the deception." Duncan-Jones thinks the poem is a Devonshire poem, and thinks that one of the Stukeleys or Sir William Strode may be the author. (Don Foster has considered his son, also William Strode {1600-1645}.) (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 1 Apr 1996 18:56:00 -0800 Subject: Funeral Elegy Here are three conclusions about deceased men done up in verse, the likeness of the lines speaking for itself. 1) "Sleep in peace: thus happy hast thou prov'd Thou mightst have died more known, not more belov'd." 2) "Who herein hast forever happy prov'd: In life thou livdst, in death thou died belov'd." 3) "In this his life and death was countervail'd, He justly liv'd belov'd, he died bewail'd." Number One is by John Ford, a Memorial on Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613. Number Three is by John Ford, an Elegy for the Earle of Devonshire, 1606. Number Two is by the unknown W.S., the Funeral Elegy for William Peter, 1612. If the Funeral Elegy was not written by John Ford, and some strong evidence for that has been published on this line, then coincidence has got the upper hand of us and we may quit the human study of comparative literature and roll over for Shaxicon and happily receive his tickling and harness that would yoke Shakespeare to the pitiful sonambulistic work of the unknown W.S. An epitaph on Shaxicon: "He was belov'd by some, for that he prov'd, Shakespeare could write verse, even when he snoozed." (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 2 Apr 1996 18:23:07 -0800 Subject: Remedies In 1568 (?) was published "The Seconde parte of the Secrets of Maister Alexis of Piemont...", translated by William Warde. For what it was worth to Shakespeare, and to us, here are some of the secrets. "Remedie to cure the tooth ache: Boyle frogges with water and vinegar, and wash your mouth with the decoction...." "To make hair grow: Take three quicke frogges, and burne them alive in a potte, and mingle the ashes that you make of them with honey or with tarre, which is far better, and rubbe the place with it where you see there groweth no hair, and in short space it will grow abundantly." "To take wartes from the hands: Take earth and knead it with dogs pisse, and lay it upon the wartes, and they will dry up and consume away." A lead comb will also make the hair grow. Frogs and dog's urine may not be too difficult to come by, except that you might need a lot of frogs if you have rotting teeth and bad breath: "Take a hundred frogs, and dry them all night in an oven, so that they may be made into a powder...." Or perhaps you would wish to look younger, and dye your gray hair black: "Take leeches or blood suckers, and let them rot the space of three score days in red wine...." The ladies, of course, would like to lose a little weight, and there is an easy secret to take the appetite away. "Take a little green basil, and when men bring the dishes to the table, put it underneath them, that the woman perceive it not: for men say that she will eat of none of that which is in the dish where under the basil lyeth." Do you live in a place where you fear violence in the streets? This might be better than pepper spray: "For to make that wilde beastes shall not hurt you For to be assured and safe from wild beastes, as Wolves, Beares, and such other like, take the grease of a Lion, and anoynt your self therewith over and over, and go hardly where you will, and no beast shall hurt you, but as soon as they smell the savor of the grease, they will run away. And if by chance you meet with a Wolf, or other wilde beast, run not away, but with a good courage go even to him, that he may smell the grease that you are anoynted withal, and he will flee." Ah if life were so easy -- simply render a lion into grease and smear yourself with it. Other dangers are not so easily avoided, the ingrediants not to be bought at the pharmacy. "Take a great foul called a Vultur, and take the skin of her right heel...." "Take the heart of an Ape, and lay it under your head, when you go to bed...." "Take the tooth or the left leg of a Badger..." "Take a blacke Dogge, and plucke out one of his eyes, and hold it in your left hand...." "Take the gall of a he Goat, or of a she Goat, but the he Goat is better, and doeth it sooner, and rubbe your eyebrows...." "Take great green Lizards or sea Frogs, and cut off their heads and their tails, and dry the rest in an oven." I don't think we can use any of the above, the SPCA would be all over us. However, the first secret in the book is the best, and if Shakespeare plucked and sharpened his own quills, perhaps he had need to make his own ink, and here's one way it might be done. "To make blacke Inke very good. Take a pound and a half of rain water, with three ounces of the weightiest Galls you can find, bruise them into small pieces, and pour them into the said water, and let it stand two days in the sun. Then put to it two ounces of Romaine vitriol well coloured and beaten small, and mire all well together with a stick of a fig tree, and leave it again two days more in the sun. Finally put to it an ounce of gum Arabic, that is clear and bright, and beaten to powder, and an ounce of the pill of Pomgranades, and then boil it a little with a slow fire: that done strain it, and keep it in a vessel of Lead or glass, and it will be very blacke and perfect good." To think of it -- Shakespeare shopping about for weighty gall bladders, needing a supply of black ink. "Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter...." T. Night iii, 2, 52 "I'll drink the words you send, Though ink be made of gall...." Cymbeline i, 1, 101 (1)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Leo Daugherty Date: Wednesday, 3 Apr 1996 23:42:34 GMT Subject: Funeral Elegy (and Sonnets) I've been following the FUNERAL ELEGY discussion on SHAKSPER for the past three months with a particularly high level of interest -- for reasons I'll make clear. In deciding to join the discussion now, I'm mindful of the fact that I have too much to say -- especially about my own history of working with the poem, but also about the the response to the Shakespeare attribution since the mainstream media got interested -- to say all of it in one long posting. Boring people blind with such a posting -- both figuratively and (because of the discom- fort/tediousness of reading long texts on computer screens) LITERALLY as well, would be discourteous and unhelpful to my purposes. Instead, I'm going to make three or four separate responsive postings in the next few days, of which this is the first. What I'll include today is (a.) this preface, and (b.) the text of my brief Respondent's paper, given this past December at the MLA session ("Another Shakespeare") at which Shakespeare's authorship of the poem was first "officially" claimed. I'll then follow up with more FE-related postings on some other topics recently dealt with here: Stylometry/Shaxicon, other possible authors (Ford, Strode, Wastell, and so forth), the "aesthetic quality" of the poem, the funeral elegy genre, etc.). I first read FUNERAL ELEGY in 1978 at the Bodleian, and suspected that Shakespeare was its poet, while on sabbatical leave to Oxford, where I had gone with the main intent of studying British statisti- cal methods of authorship determination -- e.g., the methods of Andrew Morton, the late Sidney Michaelson, Anthony Kenny, Tom Merriam, and so on, some "Stylometric" and some not. (Like many SHAKSPEReans, I teach Shakespeare and related topics in college. My main research/critical interest is the nondramatic poetry.) I subsequently examined and researched the poem further while there again on sabbatical in 1983, and then once more in 1989 (this time just on vacation). Knowing of my long involvement with the poem (because we'd been corresponding for years), Don Foster asked me in early 1995 to serve as Respondent for the then-upcoming MLA session on FUNERAL ELEGY. Our Moderator was Stephen Booth, and the paper-presenters were Don, Lars Engle, and Rick Abrams. As of now, these papers await publication; and, as SHAKSPEReans know, Don has sworn off further participation in the Hyperspace Tilts until his new work on the attribution gets into print. (A little of it has indirectely gone into print already, however, via Rick Abrams' letters-to-the-- editor exchanges in the TLS with Stanley Wells and Brian Vickers in the past couple of months -- exchanges which Abrams has decidedly "won," having the evidence on his side and being able to argue from it clearly and cogently. But there is a good bit more to come.) On the day of the MLA session, a longish front-page feature story appeared on it in the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES. About two weeks later, another story on it appeared in the LA TIMES. Then came the front-page coverage in the NEW YORK TIMES, which in turn seems to have generated all the subsequent stories -- AP, Reuters, the major TV network and cable news programs, the PBS "News Hour," NPR, AP Network News (radio), PEOPLE magazine, and so on. Today, three months after the panel, "mainstream" interest has of course subsided, and the scholars/critics are beginning to go to work seriously on the evidence underlying the authorship claim. We have seen the beginnings of this here on SHAKSPER, and I hope the discussion continues and stays lively. (This is something I'll say more about in another posting -- as it relates to the FUNERAL ELEGY discussion's connection to the question of "splitting the list," which I oppose.) Meanwhile, I frankly see myself as being in the enviable position of having already done that work -- having already spent 18 years with the poem off and on (including the now-familiar questions of statistical methodology, John Ford, the poem's "aesthetic quality," and so on -- and thus of not being forced to play catch-up now. As those of you now seriously engaged in that catch-up work will understand all too well (because the issues are tough and some of the prerequisite backgrounding unspeakably tedious), I am very glad of this. Anyway, as a radical skeptic (and a "Schoenbaumian" one, in terms of Shakespeare studies), I strongly believe the following three things to be true: 1. The evidence that Shakespeare wrote FUNERAL ELEGY is overwhelming. 2. Good evidence that anyone else wrote it (John Ford, Simon Wastell, or whoever) is nonexistent. (It once seemed that William Strachey might be a fair long shot bet -- a possibility Don dealt with in great detail in his late-'80s book ELEGY BY W.S., itself a revised version of his doctoral dissertation -- but subsequent work has strengthened the Shakespeare claim and weakened the Strachey claim, itself already weak to begin with.) 3. Those who have thus far written in opposition to Don's claim -- including the (few) reviewers of his book, the British TLS letter writers, and the energetic folk here on SHAKSPER -- have simply not engaged the evidence. (This includes the most recent entrant into the lists, the estimable K. Duncan-Jones.) When they do -- and it will admittedly take them a lot of time and labor, not all of it pleasurable (see above) -- my best guess is that they'll come to support the attribution. (This will of course not be the case for those whose ideological investments -- e.g., Oxfordianism, Baconianism, Marlovianism, or whatever, just to use the example of "rival-claimantism" -- prevent them from seeing, in Schoenbaum's always timely words, "what is there.") I'm appending the text of my MLA Respondent's paper. Thanks for reading, Leo Daugherty "Another Shakespeare": Respondent's Paper 1. My response to what we have heard will be short -- and, as it happens, sweet. I'm guessing that you would rather have some time yourselves, here at theend, to respond to the presenters -- and to this extraordinary claim itself -- than listen to me say in words bound to be redundant (albeit "varying to other words," in the language of Sonnet 105) why I think they're right. 2. I have been interested in the possible attribution of this poem to Shakespeare since first coming upon it in the Bodleian in 1978, now over seventeen years ago. When Don Foster's book appeared in the late '80s, with its massive presentation of the evidence to date, I became nearly convinced and told him so. His later three conference papers, one at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America and two (including this one) at MLA, along with his pieces in THE SHAKESPEARE NEWSLETTER, have only strength- ened my conviction that Shakespeare wrote this funeral elegy for his recently murdered young friend Will Peter. 3. Don's work on this poem -- his book and subsequent papers -- appeared at a particularly inopportune time. The 1980s and early '90s saw several other whole-work attributions to Shakespeare -- by Merriam, Levi, Sams, Charles Hamilton, and (most infamously) Taylor -- none of which seemed convincing on the basis of the evidence produced. And Don's work suffered because of its inevitable association with those other claims. But the case of this elegy by one W.S. is an altogether different and that is because of the extremely high quality of the evidence brought forth for its attribution -- and, in a lesser but still compelling way, by the absence of any good evidence at all to the contrary. In fact, the evidence I speak of, including what we have heard here today, is by now overwhelming. I think I have examined all of it, and I think I have done so skeptically -- and, to use an old-fashioned and justifiably suspicious-sounding word, "disinter- estedly." You will of course not want to take my word for this, and I thus make a point of inviting you to read Don's book, to seek out the few papers presented and published since on this attribution by Don and others, and to think hard about what you've heard here. 3. As to the papers themselves: I agree with Stephen Booth about the tough issues which this poem, when taken as by Shakespeare, presents to us; but I disagree with him, and side rather with Rick Abrams, about the poem's quality. It has been argued by Mac Jackson that the poem's language is "un-Shakespearean," particularly in its lack of "poetic imagery"; and I think Steven Booth, although he does not quarrel with the attribution, agrees that this is not poetic language of the kind we expect from Shakespeare. But W.S.is here constrained not only by the funeral elegy conventions of his day (the linguistic effects of which do not much please us now), but also by the (typically flattening) attempt at High Seriousness itself. In fact, what we see here is the very language of another poem few people today like much, itself constrained by just such presently unfashionable conventions and just such High Seriousness -- THE RAPE OF LUCRECE. Lars Engle is certainly right in making his linkage between this elegy and the Sonnets. And he usefully brings the perceptual problems posed by Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit to bear on the experience of reading the elegy at this moment as Shakespeare's -- noting that the poem flickers back and forth as Shakespearean/non-- Shakespearean before our eyes as we read it. But so do LUCRECE and and A Lover's Complaint -- or would, rather, if we were not so sure that Shakespeare wrote them. (And bear in mind, too, that most of the faith we now place in Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover's Complaint comes from a source to which many of us have been for too long averse -- quantitative methods, i.e., counting.) 4. In the end, the shocking and amazing fact is that Shakespeare, in early 1612, soon to turn 48, wrote this very conventional, yet very personal, poem -- and that he had it published soon afterward in London by Thomas Thorpe, the man who had published his Sonnets three years earlier -- and that we are just now finding out that he did so as we near the year 2000. This is a fact which, to say the least, will take some getting used to. But get used to it we eventually will. (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J. Kennedy Date: Monday, 8 Apr 1996 08:36:35 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy Possibly there will never be any proof of who wrote the Funeral Elegy, but it seems nearly impossible that Shakespeare wrote it, and a close certainty that John Ford did. The proofs that SHAXICON offers for Shakespeare is disputed by the Claremont McKenna College program commanded by Ward Elliott to search the Elegy for those certain wordprints that would lead us to suspect Shakespeare as the author. It doesn't. But aside from that, there is no connection at all between Shakespeare and Devonshire and the William Peter family, and we have full knowlege that John Ford was a Devonshire man and a friend of the William Peter family. More than that, he was an aspiring poet who was adept and eager for the writing of memorials, such as those for the Earle of Devonshire and Sir Thomas Overbury, those poems offering nearly identical lines to the Funeral Elegy. More than that, the psychological profile of the author that Don Foster and Richard Abrams draw up fits very well with what is known of John Ford's life, his deep strain of melancholy, his piety, and his singular life. His poems also mirror that almost obsessive touchiness about Honor and Name that we find in the Elegy, his guard and warding off of spite, slander, and malice suffered by the deceased, bequeathing his poetry in defense of the utterless dead, who were in fact innocent of all fault or blame, closer to saints than to common humanity. John Ford, like the writer of the Funeral Elegy, was a moralistic owl and something of a preacher, thumping his text like he's in the pulpit, bad poetry all of it, giving out his dozing and godawful long sermons, self-serving himself in the company of deceased Earls and Knights, basking under the halo he patches up for the misused dead, taking their abuse to illustrate his own abuse. But God will at last sort it all out, and put all right, and at last it will be prov'd that anyone John Ford touches with his pen died belov'd -- although greviously misunderstood. That's the theme of John Ford and the writer of the Funeral Elegy. The excitement in the first place was the finding of the initials W.S. on the title page of the Elegy, which initials were no doubt noticed many times before and tested with a reading of the. Elegy to discover if Shakespeare had anything to do with it. As Katherine Duncan-Jones says, it would need but a "few minutes' perusal" of the Elegy to set aside all doubt that Shakespeare was not in the neighborhood. But who was W.S.? Possibly the man for whom John Ford wrote the elegy. Or possibly, as has been suggested, it was a deception to cash in on Shakespeare's name. That would have been nothing new. John Taylor (1580-1653), the "Water Poet", was a Thames boatman, who must many times have ferried Shakespeare across the river. As a poet, he was of the second water, but was popular and wrote a good amount of verse and satire. In his "Taylor's Pastorall", 1624, he writes an "Epistle to the Reader", and amongst other notes for the record, he also says this, (understanding that "I" and "J" were interchangeable): "And this Advertisement more I give the Reader, that there are many things Imprinted under the name of two Letters, I.T. for some of which I have beene taxed to be the Author: I assure the world that I had never any thing imprinted of my writing, that I was either afraid or ashamed to set my name at large to it; and therefore if you see any Authors name I.T. I utterly disclaime it: for I am as I have bin, both I. and T. which with additions of Letters, is yours to be commanded in any laudable endevour- s, IOHN TAYLOR" The shame of the Funeral Elegy is that the marketplace may have been glanced at when putting William Peter to rest. And the greater shame is that Shakespeare will not be let to rest, but must be tumbling in his grave to know that some reasonable people otherwise, and lovers of his poetry, are willing to let a machine direct their judgement in this matter. And so it seems that John Ford wrote the Funeral Elegy. I say let him have full credit. He deserves it. His reputation will not be harmed by it, in fact somewhat boosted. It's his kind of thing, and it is no kind of thing that Shakespeare would have written. When it happens that some poets throw away their ears, cut their own noses, and embrace SHAXICON, then we might truely worry that the Elegy could invade the canon, but I have searched the land- scape, and it is as barren and empty of poets bringing their reputations to support Don Foster and Richard Abrams as the Elegy is barren of poetry. (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Michael Sharpston Date: Wednesday, 10 Apr 1996 08:08:04 +0000 (GMT) Subject Did the Unabomber Write the Funeral Elegy? Clearly my title, "Did the Unabomber Write the Funeral Elegy?" is a conflation, as in "1066 And All That" recollections or those of a, like totally challenged high school student of Shakespeare. But there are more serious questions behind it. (a) How does the FBI evidence that Theodore Kaczynski wrote the Unabomber Manifesto compare to the evidence that William Shakespeare wrote the Funeral Elegy? (b) Are the FBI on a better tack in confronting their issue than Foster and Shaxicon? (c) Is the standard of proof being used radically different in the two cases? Presumably "beyond a reasonable doubt" or some such for the FBI case, but what in the case of the Funeral Elegy? I do get the impression that some SHAKSPER participants feel that William Shakespeare is potentially facing charges along the lines of "reckless versifying while in proven possession of better faculties", but perhaps that could be reduced from felony to a misdemeanor. Michael Sharpston msharpston@worldbank.org (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Stephanie Hughes Date: Wednesday, 10 Apr 1996 09:56:49 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0269 Re: Funeral Elegy In response to Leo Daugherty's comment that his "overwhelming evidence" garnered in eighteen years of research will still fail to convince those who hold some preconception such as Oxfordianism, etc.; in the deathless words of the erstwhile mayor of New York City (Wagner) "I reiterate once again what I said before," no "ism" is required to grasp immediately the overwhelming evidence AGAINST Shakespeare's authorship of this poem, which is the profound boredom that assails the reader after the first few stanzas. If with these volumes of evidence, the good professors succeed in leading ALL their colleagues over the cliffs of common sense like so many ivy-clad lemmings, all I can say is I hope they're enjoying themselves. Stephanie Hughes (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Gabriel Egan Date: Thursday, 11 Apr 1996 14:48:57 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0269 Re: Funeral Elegy Leo Daugherty wrote >1. The evidence that Shakespeare wrote FUNERAL ELEGY is over- whelming. This has been said many times, but without giving us the new evidence. Foster's book cannot be offered in lieu of the new evidence, since it concludes that the authorship is uncertain. What was the point of all the hoo-haa of going public on a claim so long before publication of the evidence? We have been led into the trap of raking over all the old inconclusive evidence and, naturally enough, no consensus has emerged. I disagree with Daugherty that Abrams "won" the TLS exchange, it seemed rather a stalemate. Shouldn't the new evidence have been made available BEFORE victory was claimed? Is there some advantage in doing things the other way round which I have overlooked? Gabriel Egan (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Harry Hill Date: Monday, 15 Apr 1996 12:03:13 +0000 (HELP) Subject: [Funeral Elegy Broadcast] Members of the list may be interested to know that excerpts from my recording of the Elegy were broadcast across Canada on Monday April 8th., receiving a good and convinced response from those CBC spots. Delegates who heard it at the Book Exhibit at the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles and who spontaneously commented on it were pretty unanimous in their commendations as well. I shall be very pleased if this recording does a little to assist the authentica- tion of the strange and moving poem. One sign of the shifting opinion -unrelated to the recording- is that both Harper Collins and the new Riverside are including it, although the Norton as not yet deifinite; I hope that the CD will convince Norton further. Harry Hill and Paul Hawkins [director] (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Date: Monday, 15 Apr 1996 12:22:18 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Kennedy's Elegy Authentication Richard Kennedy observes that Foster provides little in the way of external evidence such as the typewriters and paraphernalia found in the Unibomber's wooded hut. Hovever, there is further authenti- cation readily available for him if he were to listen to the CD or audiocassette made at Concordia University. The rhythms and textures he would hear, with the shifts in mood and tone and the extraordinary emotional closeness, might bring him nearer to acknowledging that he is listening to Shakespeare's voice in *A Funeral Elegy*, albeit from a set of 1996 vocal cords. Of course I have been given luncheon for making this comment. (3)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Margaret Brockland-Nease Date: Monday, 15 Apr 96 12:42:54 EST Subject: [Funeral Elegy] In light of the recent similarities noted between the Funeral Elegy arguments and the Unibomber manifesto, is it too facetious to note the Renaissance-like character of the spellings put forth for the "name" of the manifesto's author? I've seen in print Unibomber, Unabomber, and, as the three-inch Newsweek headline proclaimed, Unabomer (planter of unaboms). I can't help but think of the various spellings Sir Walter Ralegh used in his signature. Margaret Brockland-Nease Department of Humanities Brunswick College (4)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 16 Apr 1996 16:49:44 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [Funeral Elegy] Again for those who don't read the TLS, I'd like to report that Brian Vickers (April 12, 1996) gives a rather long and detailed response to the criticisms of Abrams and Foster (17). Much of what he details has been shifted through before by other scholars, but Vickers, of course, offers his own interpretations. He feels that the differences between Shakespeare's undoubted work and FE are "so gross as to defeat computerized statistics . . . . it only needs a normal reader with some powers of judgment to tell the difference" (17). He ends by claiming that Abrams has played Svengali to Foster! Yours, Bill Godshalk (5)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Kay Pilzer Date: Tuesday, 16 Apr 1996 17:29:35 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Fun Elegy, Reprised Having just returned (OK, so I'm gloating a little!) from the ISA/SAA in LA, where I was privileged to hear Don Foster take on His Honor Stanley Wells (and others) in an eloquent and scholarly presentation, I open my SHAKSPER messages to confront -- a little wearily (Hughes onto the lemmings, presumably in invisible fur, to conflate her earlier metaphors), and others ("Give us new evi- dence!") -- the ongoing deathless pseudo-debate in this list over attribution of the deathless Funeral Elegy. Foster DOES have a new article forthcoming (perhaps he'll tell us where; I didn't get that part) with a summary of the evidence he's uncovered since publication of his book. So watch for it. But in the meantime, I think it's time we did our own homework, or accept that (Occam-ish? Holmesian?) conclusion: when everything plausible has been omitted (i.e.: this is a Bad Poem, so Our Hero couldn't have written it), then one must admit the implausible (i.e.: that Our Hero wrote this Really Bad Poem!) And, less authoritatively than Foster, but no less urgently, I suggest that a scholar with strong opinions either keep them to her/himself, or spend the time and study necessary to find something to add more useful than strong opinion to this debate. In fact, I find myself moving to the side of the line now occupied by Foster and even His Honor David Bevington (who includes the Elegy in his forthcoming updated *Works* edition): it's time we accept Shakespeare's authorship of this Bad Poem and move to considering the, at least, biographical implications of this discovery. -- for which we owe Foster a debt of gratitude, even if for a gift that NONE of us, including Foster himself, ever wanted. Yours for responsible, polite, (and safe) scholarship, Kay Campbell Pilzer Vanderbilt University < PILZERKL@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu > From hmcook@boe00.minc.umd.eduThu Apr 18 12:05:15 1996 From: "Hardy M. Cook" Reply to: The Shakespeare Electronic Conference To: Multiple recipients of list SHAKSPER Subject: SHK 7.0292 Funeral Elegy; Internet Scholarly Editions of Shakespeare (1)-------------------------------------------------------------- From: Marcello Cappuzzo Date: Wednesday, 17 Apr 1996 13:42:41 +0200 Subject: Re: Fun Elegy, Reprised On Tuesday, 16 Apr 1996, Kay Campbell Pilzer wrote: [material omitted] > I think it's time we did our own homework, or accept that >(Occam-ish? Holmesian?) conclusion: when everything plausible has been >omitted (i.e.: this is a Bad Poem, so Our Hero couldn't have written it), >then one must admit the implausible (i.e.: that Our Hero wrote this Really >Bad Poem!) I'm afraid this is not a case of *nihil est tertium*--I'm sure I've heard someone say "This Bad Poem was written by Our Hero, so it can't be but a Really Good Bad Poem!" Cheers, Marcello Cappuzzo University of Palermo (2)--------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jimmy Jung Date: Wednesday, 17 Apr 1996 2:05pm Subject: RE: Internet Scholarly Editions of Shakespeare; Michael Best announced an internet/shakespeare effort. I was under the impression that the Folger was already doing something similar? (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joseph M Green Date: Thursday, 18 Apr 1996 15:20:17 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0292 Funeral Elegy The really good bad poem seems to be what is anticipated/hinted by recent descriptions of the poem by its supporters. A reply to Vickers characterizes the poem as "strange and challenging" and Harry Hill has recently described the poem as strange and something else. "Strange" seems to be the key -- not what we would expect as the wily Bard creates another new genre. Even Kenneth Muir would be pleased. I think we will soon be treated to a version of the poem as "Unpoem" (like the "Uncola") as we are shown how our very banal expectations are defeated so that they might be questioned/suspended/ subverted/ mis en abymed all to hell. The Bard takes us to Plutonian depths of ummeaning where nothing is but what is not: the enjambments so cunning that they are made to seem like what a more innocent age was to describe as "run-on sentences" enforce a vision of funeral ribands in an idiot wind, slashed into meaningless lengths and fluttering over the tomb of poetry which no-one visits except our Bard who, due to his recent cerebral accident, isn't even sure why he is there but remembers an injury (O Fortunatus!) done to him and makes moan no longer motley to the view but free at last to tu-whit the Parson's saw as was his wont when at home dandling (NOT) little Hamnet (dead as a doornail -- no, too poetic) but clutching this or that writ which he will have served against his neighbor or dreaming of exterminating the rough rug-headed kern. He lugs the Muse's guts up Helicon and Helicon is transformed into a funeral mound -- death, death, death but at least William Peter cannot, like him, be slandered and damn it if he could he would bring him back! Yes, write that down. What could be more banal? And, I'll be a youth -- which I am not -- and that is the point -- in this poem that is not a poem. In this strange poem "Shakespeare," while, ostensibly, hyperbolizing and problematizing the "project" of poetry by miming transactions with the corpse of William Peter and, thereby, clearing a space, precisely by presenting the monologic voice as overdetermined, for the sort of poetry heretofore thought possible only after the atrocities of this century and the apocalyptic vision of Tammy Faye Baker and Joyce Carol Oates coming to judge the living in the dead in fact elides the category of difference by usurping subject positions such as the maternal by evacuating meaning from the metaphysics of substance while, at the same time, constructing the death-driven interiority of his class, race, gender and sex as the only possible non-intersection of textual surfaces. Indeed, the very illusion of identification with nothingness marks a moment of crises that is, certainly, constituative of readings that, unlike mine, necessarily engage the text in this way through their acceptance of identification with nothingness as deconstructed by the patriarchal, misogynist, kern-hating bard and so act to deny a revisionary praxis that would open this text to a consideration of what is really at stake for cultural workers. This, itself, is, of course, a grand a vulnerable claim but it is only in this way that the critical process postulated by those whose jobs I want can be satisfactorily tested and, perhaps, experimentally reproduced. As Walter Benjamin remarks: "late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our hours." This creme brulee, so unlike that intoned and ventroliquized by WS on William Peter is, in fact, an argument ex silentio directed against the banalization of art for it is precisely in the fact that what is called "highart" is, in fact, banal that the necessary insight -- that no death driven person of Shakespeares class, sex, gender, race and, especially, nationality should tell us that -- that a politics can begin to be built on the ruins of th banal so that persons in milltowns gobbling Prozac while creating a space for banality can construe this poem not as issuing simply from l'homme meme but, precisely, as what should be turned away from (this mise au point of the danse de vertige of the mission civilitrice which seeks always to claim that les jeux sont faits). "Finita la commedia" must always be given a deferred significance. What moment exactly are we talking about? And, yet, in denying such a notion are we not, precisely, denying politics? (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Don Foster Date: Thursday, 18 Apr 1996 18:09:09 -0400 (EDT) Subject: FE; use of statistics I have been content to stay out of the SHAKSPER discussion of "A Funeral Elegy," eavesdropping now and then as I have had time, but jumping in only when asked to do so: and this is one such instance. Two SHAKSPERians have asked me to respond to Mr. Kennedy's remarks about the Claremont-McKenna "Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable," headed Prof. Ward Elliott, a political scientist and quondam anti-Stratfordian who seems to have been convinced by his research that Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare. Mr. Kennedy has gleefully reported that FE *fails* five of Elliott's tests for Shakespearean authorship. But Mr. Kennedy seems either not to have read, or not to have understood, Prof. Elliott's study, for the five "rejections" for FE are *precisely* those tests for which FE *should* get rejections: Elliott has not in every instance understood the implications of his own research (as I will show in a moment), but his work fully supports a Shakespearean attribution for FE as a text written by the Bard, in 1612, in continuous verse. Because Prof. Elliott has had trouble getting his study published except as a privately distributed Xerox, few members of SHAKSPER will be familiar with his work. Elliott takes the dramatic works as his norm, with three batteries of statistical tests, some more reliable than others: "Round 1," 17 tests; "Round 2," 24 tests; "Round 3," 15 tests. Of these 56 tests, *ALL* of Shakespeare's nondramatic generate numerous "rejections," not just FE. But in a special appendix, Elliott has culled out 17 tests (from a total of 56 tests) that generate no more than 1 "rejection" for just *Ven*, *Luc*, and *Son*. He then supplies data for those 17 tests only, and compares them with other canonical and noncanonical poems. Even under these extraordinarily limited circumstances, FE generates only 5 "rejections," fewer than for LC or PhT, and fewer rejections than for *Ven*, *Luc*, and *Son* in the 3-battery section. The first "rejection" for FE is that of "grade level": Elliott has used a word processor's "Grade-Level" tester to evaluate selections from all of Shakespeare's dramatic and nondramatic works, and from dozens of plays and poems by other poets. ("Grade level" is determined by sentence length, from capital-letter to end-puncutation, and has no direct relation to the poet's education.) Elliott finds that Shakespeare's dramatic dialogue (the plays) ranges in average sentence-length from Grade Level 5 to GL 7. The poems have a higher GL because they are written in stanzaic form without the frequent breaks of dramatic dialogue: they vary thus from GL 10 to GL 22. PhT, having a four-line stanza, has a GL of 8. Elliott's *Ven* samples, written in a six-line stanza, have a median GL of 10; the *Luc* and *LC* samples, written in a seven-line stanza, both have a median GL of 11; the *Son* samples, written in a fourteen-line stanza, have a median GL of 13; and FE, written in continuous verse without any stanzaic breaks, has a GL of 22. The only other text tested by Elliott with a GL higher than 19 is Heywood's *Troia Britannica*, also in continuous verse without stanzaic breaks; while other non-Shakespearean texts in continuous verse tend to hover around 16-18. When adjusted for stanzaic form, FE should register a GL between 19 and 24 if written by Shakespeare. At GL 22, it's right on the money. Elliott works from my 1989 text of FE, which is more lightly pointed than the original, and somewhat more lightly pointed than the *Riverside* text that serves as the basis for his canonical sample; but it is impossible to punctuate FE in any sensible fashion so that it falls outside the expected range for continuous verse by Shakespeare. By "rejection" of a 22 Grade Level, Elliott's shows only that FE is in a different stanzaic form than Shakespeare's other works (which might be taken as evidence against his authorship); but given its form, the GL figures suggest that Shakespeare wrote it. Mr. Kennedy, if he has even *looked* at Elliott's study, has confusedly taken GL--a generic marker--to be an attributional marker, perhaps having been misled by Prof. Elliott's own confusion on this point. Those SHAKSPERians who would like more information on the remaining four "rejections" for FE, or for the six rejections for LC, may write me directly. These are "No / (No + Not); "Enclitics"; "Proclitics"; and "BoB5"; additional "rejections" (not mentioned by Elliott because *Ven* and *Luc* likewise get "rejections") include various colloquialisms and oaths ("i'faith") and interjections ("hark"). The Elliott tests for which FE gets a "pass" are "hyphenated compounds/20k," "relative clauses/20k," "feminine endings," "enjambment," "*with*," "modal distance block," "modal distance corpus"; FE also gets additional passes (not mentioned by Ellott because *Ven* and *Luc* get two or more "rejections") for multiple other tests, including "periphrastic do," "prefixes," "suffixes," "rare words," "new words, "and various of Elliott's "BoB" tests other than "BoB5"). In other words, Mr. Kennedy has (once again, unwittingly) been trumpeting evidence that demolishes his own thesis (though not, of course, his confidence). Hope this helps. Foster (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Chris J. Fassler Date: Friday, 19 Apr 1996 11:16:14 -0400 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy Perhaps, as a public service--akin to the warnings broadcast immediately before TV shows with violent and/or sexual content--a warning statement of some kind ought to be prefixed to Joseph Green's posts. I'm thankful, for the sake of the list and for its editor, that the Exxon bill is currently in abeyance, and yet I also hope that no minors have been exposed to the Funeral Elegy track. Feeling violated, --Chris Fassler (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Friday, 19 Apr 1996 10:53:21 -0700 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0297 Re: Funeral Elegy Don Foster is mistaken: Ward Elliott's McKenna Claremont program is a much better test for authorship than Shaxicon, brilliant in comparison with Shaxicon, treating of dramatic verse and poetry with a delicacy and balance of judgment that makes Shaxicon look like a middle-school exercise to test and sort verbs apart from nouns. Don Foster, of course, is a beginner in the field and, it would seem, ignorant of the more advanced literature on the subject of stylometrics. May I advise him to read Jim Helfers excellent post of March 25th that he may study the work of Elliott and his colleague Robert Valenza, who have "pioneered" some stratistical refinements that a novice -- I mean Foster -- would do well to understand before he tries to march Shaxicon any farther, for he does but trample where a discreet and sure-footed step is needed. (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Daniel M Larner Date: Friday, 19 Apr 1996 14:29:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0297 Re: Funeral Elegy SHAKSPERians-- With regard to Joseph Green's "revisionary praxis" of a "possible non- intersection of textual surfaces,"--this "creme brulee," as he puts it, with scarcely disguised wit, is not, as he alleges, a "denial of politics" at all. It is, on the contrary--simply wonderful! Thanks. Dan Larner (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Friday, 19 Apr 1996 21:33:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy Don Foster writes: "FE, written in continuous verse without any stanzaic breaks, has a GL of 22. The only other text tested by Elliott with a GL higher than 19 is Heywood's *Troia Britannica*, also in continuous verse without stanzaic breaks; while other non-Shakespearean textsin continuous verse tend to hover around 16-18. When adjusted for stanzaic form, FE should register a GL between 19 and 24 if written by Shakespeare. At GL 22, it's right on the money." I think I understand most of this, but the phrase "When adjusted for stanzaic form" puzzles me. Obviously FE is not in stanzaic form, and so the phrase must be a negative: when adjusted for not being in stanzaic form. But how is such an adjustment made? I think a crucial calculation or series of caluclations has been dropped out of the explanation. Earlier Don tells us: "The poems have a higher GL because they are written in stanzaic form without the frequent breaks of dramatic dialogue: they vary thus from GL 10 to GL 22. PhT, having a four-line stanza, has a GL of 8. " I don't understand this comment. (I assume that "The poems" means "Shakespeare's poems." Am I correct?) Given that PhT has a GL of 8, shouldn't the poems vary from GL 8 to the top number? And where does GL 22 come from? Only in FE does the GL rise to 22 -- in the samples given in the posting at any rate, where the Sonnets are highest with a median of GL 13. Shouldn't Shakespeare's known GL in non-dramatic verse range from 8 to 13? Am I missing something here? Yours, Bill Godshalk (5)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Saturday, 20 Apr 1996 16:59:38 -0700 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy Shaxicon has compared John Ford's early verse with that of W.S., unknown writer of the Funeral Elegy. It can find no similarity between the two poets. Here is the beginning line of John Ford's major elegy and the beginning line of the Funeral Elegy: Ford: "Swift Time, the speedy pursuivant of heaven...." W.S.: "Since Time, and his predestined end...." Shaxicon doesn't see the likeness. And then here are the concluding lines of another John Ford elegy and the Funeral Elegy: Ford: "Sleep in peace: thus happy hast thou prov'd Thou mightst have died more known, not more belov'd." W.S.: "Who herein hast forever happy prov'd: In life thou livdst, in death thou died belov'd." Shaxicon doesn't see the likeness, and cannot really be blamed for that. All Shaxicon can really do is count things; it has no notion of meaning. Well, then, here is a count of 4-syllable words in 578 lines, John Ford's major poem, the Funeral Elegy, and the Sonnets. Ford: 69 W.S.: 62 Sonnets: 15. Now this is something that Shaxicon can understand, but it takes no notice of this 300% difference between the Sonnets and the Funeral Elegy.. It was not programmed to notice long words, evidently. However, that's an important stylistic disparity, a significant mismatch between Shakespeare's non- dramatic poetry and the Funeral Elegy. Then there is the quality of the poetry itself. Shaxicon cannot answer for that, not knowing poetry from shinola, something which Don Foster admits, and he should know.because he created Shaxicon. Those who believe the Funeral Elegy to be written by Shakespeare must answer for themselves how Shakespeare could have written that miserable poem (Foster admits it) in the same year he wrote the Tempest. It's an outstanding descent, a monumental failure, such a fall from grace not recorded of any poet in all the world since the beginning of time. Shaxicon doesn't know a thing about that, and Don Foster tells us that it's a mere detail. On the other hand, John Ford could write such a piece of bootpolish as the Funeral Elegy with his eyes closed, or filled with tears in reverence and inward weeping for the mismanagement of Fate, all the world treating the subject of the memorial (and himself) with such malice as one would not expect to be attached to such saints. One of Ford's editors describes his early verse as so much "whining", and that matches well with the Funeral Elegy. Does Don Foster, et al, really think that the Funeral Elegy has not been seen before? Do they think that Chambers didn't read it, or Schoenbaum, or Halliwell-Phillips, Rouse, Spurgeon, Hotson, Langbaine, Malone, Chalmers, Steevens, Dowden, Harrison, Lee.....? The list of exhalted Shakespearean scholars who must have read and put aside the Funeral Elegy would fill pages. Can we believe they actually overlooked a poem by "W.S.". leaving Shaxicon to make the discovery that the Funeral Elegy was written by Shakespeare? Not bloody likely. I understand that the poem is going to be read by "four voices" soon in Maine. It might be a good show. A weeping violin would fit in nicely, and certainly Shaxicon will be trotted out, perhaps in a cage, a "beast that wants discourse of reason". I can't make it. If there might be jugglers and acrobats I would reconsider. But, no. The bathos of the thing can't be endured. (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jeff Powers-Beck Date: Monday, 22 Apr 96 11:55:27 EDT Subject: Funeral Elegy Project PROJECT W.S. Did he or didn't he? That was the question taken up by English 4957/5957, a course on literature and computers at East Tennessee State University. The special topics course, entitled "Poetry, Print, and Hypertext," participated in the Internet debate as to whether William Shakespeare wrote "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Recently, Professor Donald Foster of Vassar College made national headlines for using a computer database called Shaxicon to attribute the poem to Shakespeare. The seven ETSU students in the course studied the 1612 poem, corresponded with Foster via e-mail, and then answered three questions in a World Wide Web project: Was the elegist W.S. the dramatist William Shakespeare? Is "A Funeral Elegy" a significant or interesting poem? And, if Shakespeare wrote the elegy, what does it say about his life and work? In addition to answers to these questions, Project W.S. offers the complete text of the 578-line poem, the students' commentary on some fifty lines of the poem, photographs of the students, other graphics, and a thorough bibliography. The student Internet project is located at http://www.east-tenn-st.edu/~english/projws.htm. Dr. Jeffrey Powers-Beck, Assistant Professor of English and the instructor of English 4957/5957, serves as Project W.S. Editor. For the students and Dr. Powers-Beck, Project W.S. was certainly not _Much Ado About Nothing_ or one of _Love's Labour's Lost_. E-mail responses to Project W.S. may be addressed to powersbj@etsu.east-tenn-st.edu. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Monday, 22 Apr 1996 09:40:16 -0700 Subject: Re: Funeral Elegy Someone informs me that Don Foster has more experience with computer programs than Ward Elliott. In that case, I don't know what excuse can be made for Shaxicon, and I am sorry I called it inexperience, but you will understand that it looks so much like inexperience that I was fooled. My apologies to Don Foster. There must be some other reason that Shaxicon is so stupid about the Funeral Elegy. (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 24 Apr 1996 08:08:30 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy Brian Vickers (Centre for Renaissance Studies, Zurich) wrote a long letter to the New York Times defending Shakespeare against the Funeral Elegy (TLS April 12). Vickers finds a likeness between W.S. and Simon Wastell, who wrote an elegy called "The Muses Thankfulness", 1627. My notion is that John Ford wrote the "Funeral Elegy" six years after writing "Time's Memorial", 1606, and we both give our reasons for thinking these choices are better than believing that Shakespeare wrote it. Shaxicon has compared neither of these poems with the Funeral Elegy. It examined elegies only between the years 1610-1613. So it seems to be two to one against Don Foster and Richard Abrams, insofar as investigation of evidence goes. Vickers and myself don't believe Shakespeare wrote the FE, and we have read Shakespeare and presented alternative poets. Shaxicon is ignorant of both these poets. We would hope that some other obscure elegies might be brought to light to compare with the Funeral Elegy. Someone wrote it, after all, and if Vickers and myself are mistaken in our choices, continued searching is sure to find out the author. I would suggest that Foster-Abrams extend their search; 4 years is a database that is nearly insignificant, a very small window to look through. Therefore welcome to the quest. If some sensible scholars with an ear for poetry (this seems to be the dividing line) can uncover some other possible writers of the Elegy, let them speak out. Foster-Abrams may be pressed to look about a bit more, and open up that database. Shaxicon is in a tight corner and not much light is coming through the window. (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jim Helfers Date: Thursday, 25 Apr 1996 13:28:26 -0700 (MST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0301 Re: Funeral Elegy RE: Funeral Elegy Sorry for the belated answer to Richard Kennedy's post of April 19th (SHAKSPER 7.0301, 21 April). Having had my name taken in vain, so to speak, I was struck with the irony of Mr. Kennedy's comments, since Donald Foster and David Kathman had initially pointed out the work of the Shakespeare Clinic to me. I sense wheels within wheels in the Kennedy/Foster exchanges, so, with some trepidation I enter this contested arena with some small scraps. First, I believe that Elliott's program and SHAXICON really do very different things. The Shakespeare Clinic program concentrates on what I (perhaps idio- syncratically) think of as "classical stylometry," the measurement of regular- ly occurring stylistic features common to all writers. As far as the Clinic's conclusions about the Funeral Elegy are concerned, they strike me as ambig- uous. Their tests essentially specify a statistical range within an author's style. If stylistic markers in a tested sample fall outside the range of a particular author, then the presumption is an alternate authorship. Foster's post on the tests and methods of the Clinic was, it seems to me, clear. He questioned the validity of applying some of the stylistic tests; with the questioned tests omitted, the FE falls statistically into the range of Shakespeare's samples. SHAXICON works in a different way. Admittedly, the conclusions to be drawn from manipulating this database rest on some assumptions: the main one is that the person who wrote the plays also acted some parts in them (or at least knew these parts better than the others, for whatever reason); another may be that the Shakespeare who is listed as a sharer and player in the company is the one who wrote the plays. Even if those assumptions are not granted, there's still the question of the statistically significant patterns of rare words revealed by the data. Notice that this is an entirely different tack from classical stylometry, which surveys universal stylistic aspects instead of rare words. On a further stylometric note: on April 4 of this year, I heard a lecture by Jonathan Hope of Middlesex University, entitled "'New' Works by Shakespeare? Non-Lunatic Approaches to Authorship." Initially, I was skeptical of his use of traditional statistics, but I soon found that he has an interesting spin on stylometry; he combines it with assumptions about patterns of historical linguistic change to pick his contrastive pairs of syntactic items. His sociolinguistic approach charts changes in syntactic usages. It so happens that a number of syntactic markers were undergoing rapid and significant changes during the period of Shakespeare's career. Such items as the use of forms of the word "do" as an auxiliary, along with other items (doth vs. does, Hath vs. has, ye vs. you) can be measured and charted on graphs of historical language change. Someone educated at a particular time would have the syntactic habits peculiar to his generation. (I'm not doing his analysis justice for several reasons: first, my notes on the talk are a bit sparse after three weeks; second, he's publishing on this soon, and I promised not to let out too much information). To be brief -- Hope tested Shakespeare's use of auxiliary "do" in his plays and verse, then checked the FE. The pattern of auxiliary "do" usage in FE falls within Shakespeare's range. Look for (I believe) an article-length publication from him soon on this. He has already written _The Authorship of Shakespeare's Plays: A Socio- Linguistic Study_. Cambridge U., 1994. Anyway, enough. It's back to some feverish finals-week grading. --Jim Helfers Grand Canyon University Phoenix, AZ (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Thursday, 25 Apr 1996 20:52:02 -0500 (EST) Subject: As in FE Sometime ago Don Foster suggested that anyone who doubted Shakespeare's authorship of FE should look at W.S.'s use of "as." As far as I can remember, no one commented on that challenge on SHAKSPER. Well, I thought I'd poke around and see what I could find in my spare time. Acording to my count, FE the poem has 4577 words, 47 of which are ases. That's a relative frequency of 10.26 ases per thousand words. *The Tempest* has according to the Oxford *Textual Companion* 12,812 words and 109 ases, or a relative frequency 8.50 ases per thousand words. *Cymbeline* has 22,878 words and 257 ases, or a relative frequency of 11.23 ases per thousand words. The Sonnets contain 17, 520 words and 120 ases, or a relative frequency of 6.84 ases per thousand words. Marvin Spevack in *The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare* records a relative frequency of 6.88 ases per thousand words for the whole canon. (I counted the "ases" at several websites.) However, in terms of frequency, 10.26 seems a trifle high, but, taking *Cymbeline* into account, I don't think it's extraordinarily out of line. So I gather that Don was not talking about the relative frequency of ases in FE. Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter L. Groves Date: Friday, 26 Apr 1996 15:01:56 GMT+1000 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0318 Re: Funeral Elegy Richard Kennedy writes of the Funeral Elegy: > If some sensible scholars with an ear for poetry > (this seems to be the dividing line) can uncover some other possible > writers of the Elegy, let them speak out. Yes: this really *does* seem to be the dividing line, and it suggests a connection between the Elegy discussion and the current controversy about the quality and provenance of the Bad Quarto of *Hamlet*. I suspect that a reader who is happy to attribute the tedious flatulence of the *Elegy* to Shakespeare might indeed not baulk at ascribing to him stuff like the following: To be, or not to be, I there's the point. To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes, For in that dreame of death, when wee awake, And borne before an euerlasting Iudge, From whence no passenger euer retur'nd, The vndiscouered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd. But for this, the ioyfull hope of this, Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world, Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore? (Q1 815-25) O imperious death! How many Princes Has thou at one draft bloudily shot to death? (Q1 2125-26) Content your selues, Ile shew to all, the ground, The first beginning of this Tragedy: Let there a scaffold be rearde vp in the market place, And let the State of the world be there: Where you shall heare such a sad story tolde, That neuer mortall man could more vnfolde. (Q1 2130-35) Presumably it is no co-incidence that these improbable ascriptions have become academically respectable at a time when the very idea of specifically *literary* value--the notion, for example, that in some objective sense 'Lycidas' is a better poem than FE--is widely regarded as a kind of ideological swindle, a covert attempt to foist bourgeois humanist values onto unsuspecting students. If all texts are now democratically equal, then there is indeed no reason why Shakespeare should not be held responsible for FE *and* the 1603 *Hamlet*, but as the Duke of Wellington said to a stranger who accosted him with "Mr Jones, I believe": "If you believe that, you'll believe anything". Peter Groves, Department of English, Monash University, (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Saturday, 27 Apr 1996 22:00:08 -0500 (EST) Subject: Harry Hill reading FE: A Soliloquy Yesterday I got the tape of Harry Hill reading *The Funeral Elegy*, and I am happily impressed. Harry does an excellent interpretation. I followed the text as he read, and it occurred to me that perhaps the poem is meant to be performed. Read as a dramatic meditation on death, the Elegy gains in power and meaning. Harry treats the poem as a kind of long soliloquy, moving from public to private voice. I was quite taken by the dramatic qualities of the poem as read by Harry, and if Shakespeare did write this poem, we might expect it to have dramatic qualities that are essential unrealized in the study. (I am, of course, not putting this comment forward as an argument for attributing the poem to Shakespeare.) In any case, I strongly recommend Harry Hill's reading. And after listening to it, I have a new respect for the Elegy. Yours, Bill (5)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Charles Boyle Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 1996 11:21:05 -0500 (EST) Subject: elegy The Funeral Elegy has invited discussion on the still vexed issue of authorship and that's always a healthy sign. In regard to the current problem, I find parts of the Elegy that actually flow like good writing. And the fact that the initials W.S. are attached to it may prove significant. An earlier post touched on the same thing I had noticed after reading it. There seem to be two voices. Sections, particularly towards the middle, read much better than, for instance, the turgid opening. Still I can't help finding the attempt to ascribe this verse, in its totality, to the author who was already capable of writing the Sonnets, odd in its insistence. So much work is still to be done. Has anyone yet compared this elegy with The Phoenix and Turtle? How is the vast difference between the two to be reconciled? How could the mature Shakespeare pass over the Elegy lines, even as an editor, without correction? It's too far a fall. Consider, however, that Thomas Thorpe published Shake-speares Sonnets (why can't he ever get the name right?) - and again apparently without the author's participation. Then the theoretical possibility that parts of this elegy might represent the work of a very young Shakespeare, other parts added by a second hand - John Ford? - for this occasion, becomes at least plausible. We have seen two hands before in Shakespeare. Perhaps Don Foster is on to something. Has Shaxicon examined the other published writings of W.S.? The letters of William Stanley? And when will it visit our old friend Edward De Vere? There are lines in the Funeral Elegy almost as good as his early poetry. Curiously, Charles Boyle (6)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard Kennedy Date: Thursday, 25 Apr 1996 20:30:23 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy The Funeral Elegy isn't such a bad poem, as elegies go. I am getting over my first shock that it might be included with Shakespeare's works, and can look at it less passionately now. It's faults are the faults of youth, the sincerity and righteousness, the gathering of philosophy from books, and the cliches, simply show a young man learning his trade. He has not yet learned to frame his mind with words, but he shows promise. He has a flair, and courage, and like a brave subaltern ventures out on sentences from which he has little hope of returning from the lines unscarred. But that's youth, and he's all right. I guess you could say his heart is in the right place. What else might be known of W.S. is not a lot.. He was evidently a friend of William Peter. He was young (147-148), and of independent means (230-231), and he wrote "in disguise" (208), and had himself suffered slander. Much more can't be known. What can possibly be known of William Peter goes to this list: He evidently had degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge (301-302), and might have been a Catholic (320). He had a private fortune (305-308), and his father was dead (68). He was a "youth" (197) and a gentleman (430), and died where he was born (131). He was a writer (238), and you might suppose that he was famous (200-203; 227, 243, 429-430), but suffered scandal and malice in his days (much of this). Some of these items above might be debateable. Those who have read the Funeral Elegy will want to correct me, and I will be glad to know more of W.S. and William Peter insofar as we can puzzle some information out of the poem. (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jonathan Hope Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 1996 18:29:46 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 7.0323 Re: Funeral Elegy Thanks to Jim Halford for his account of my lecture (SHK7.0323), but- before people get too excited, I'd like to make a couple of things clear: my work on FE is at a very early stage - I've tested the poem using my methodology, but only against Shakespeare's dramatic verse, NOT against the poetry - so an obvious problem there. Furthermore, the fact that FE 'passes' the test doesn't mean anything more than Shakespeare *could* have written it: i.e. he could have been ruled out but wasn't. What I do certainly isn't like fingerprinting or DNA analysis, and I feel uncomfortable with claims for authorship studies that such positive identification is possible. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 1996 22:49:54 -0500 (EST) Subject: FE and As This evening I found Don Foster's comments on "as" in *Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribuition.* "The poem does have a higher frequency of 'as' and 'which' than might be expected given Shakespeare's practice elsewhere, but the discrepancy is too small to be of mathematical importance" (147), and in a footnote he observes that "Shakespeare's use of both 'as' and 'which' increases in the last years of his career" (252, n. 54). So, basically, Don's conclusion is the same as mine -- though he reached his (I suppose) about ten years ago! Also, it may be noted that frequency tests -- especially relative frequency tests -- are a bit misleading. We can find individual sonnets, for example, where no "as" is used, and we find others where, say, four or five are used. So, to arrive at a relative frequency per thousand lines, we have to, as it were, take the sonnets as one long poem, rather than a series of individual poems. A more interesting question might be: does Shakespeare tend to cluster "ases"? And when does he cluster them? Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 1996 15:44:19 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy Here's what Jim Helfers said in his March 25th post: "This discussion [about the FE] probably, in Barbara Stevenson's words, "portrays perfectly the current status of computational stylistics: the experts cannot agree on the ways statistics should be adapted to literary criticism...." And certainly never will, for, as Helfers says, "internal evidence is only a single factor in an overall effort to identify an author." I agree with both Stevenson and Helfers, and then Helfers directs us to Ward Elliott and Robert Valenze, who "have pioneered a further refinement of statistical measurement for stylometric analysis...." I was not looking for an argument, but only agreeing with the man. Item: Experts cannot agree. Item: Internal evidence (the count) is only a single factor. Item: Ward Elliott has made "refinements" in stylometrics. (4)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Wednesday, 01 May 1996 23:56:07 -0500 (EST) Subject: FE: Shakespeare Parallels Today I was reviewing Don Foster's parallels between FE and Shakespeare's undoubted work. I found this part of his "Case for William Shakespeare" rather unsatisfactory. For example, "Fair lovely branch too soon cut off" (FE 234) is possibly a reference to the Epilogue of *Doctor Faustus* -- "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight." The passages cited by Don (160) from R2 1.2.15-20 are also possible echoes of Marlowe. How can we be sure that FE is referring to R2? Don (161) quotes "Feeds on the bread of rest" (FE 444) and finds a parallel in "the bitter bread of banishment" (R2 3.1.21). There is quite a difference here between "bitter bread" and "bread of rest." When Shakespeare gives "bread" an emotional valence, it's often negative. For example, Hamlet's father dies "grossly, full of bread" (HAM 3.3.80), and compare "cramm'd with distressful bread" (H5 4.1.270). In MM, Lucio links the smell of "brown bread" to the smell of garlic, as in bad breath (3.2.184). As far as I can see, Shakespeare does not link "bread" and "rest" as does W.S. The parallel between the fall of the "seeled dove" (FE 454-56, which Don on page 196 links to Sidney's *Arcadia*) and the fall of Lucifer (H8 3.2.368-72) seems forced (Foster 165). "But whether doth the stream of my mischance/Drive me beyond my self" (FE 573-74, Foster 164) is said to be an image "derived from hunting" (Foster 165). It seems to me to be a water image -- and I find a parallel in Hooker's *Laws*. So the parallel with H8 1.1.141-43 seems incorrect. I realize that these few examples are hardly a full-scale attack, but they do suggest my hesitation. I find the argument from style much more compelling than the section called "Thematic and Verbal Affinities" (Foster 154ff). Yours, Bill Godshalk (5)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Tuesday, 30 Apr 1996 15:15:04 -0700 Subject: Hamlet Q1 The so-called "bad" quarto is bad enough. Peter L. Groves quotes from it at length, and it sounds to me very much like the Duke in Huckleberry Finn, reciting the same soliloquy the best that he can piece it out from memory. "To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnm Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause...." An so forth, Chapter 21, and which is ridiculous onward and through, such as the bad quarto, it's rummaging in the memory banks: "To be, or not to be, I there's the point. To Die, to sleepe, is that all?" "No, no, there's much more, it went on and on..." "Oh, yes, let's see. Ah, I have it! No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes..." "Look, we've got to get this published. Try again." "For in that dreame of death, when wee awake, And borne before an everlasting Judge, >From whence no passenger ever retur'nd, The undiscovered country...." "Good, good...." "...The undiscovered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and...." "The 'happy smile'?! "I think it was the 'happy smile'." "Well, go on." "...happy smile and the accursed damn'd. But for this, the joyfull hope of this, Whol'd bear the scornes and flattery of the world, Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?" "That's it?" "If I could think on it overnight..." "All right, fine, do that. Good, good, now send in the kid. Ophelia, I mean." "It might not have been 'happy smile' in that place, you know there are so many words...." "Right, if you remember let me know. Work on it. Send in Ophelia...." "She could shave more, you know." "I'll mention it. Thanks." "Adieu." (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Thursday, 02 May 1996 17:08:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0329 Re: Funeral Elegy I was very interested in Jonathan Hope's comments about FE. He writes finally: >What I do certainly isn't like fingerprinting or DNA analysis, and I feel >uncomfortable with claims for authorship studies that such positive >identification is possible. I hope he won't take this as a hostile question, but I wonder why is feels uncomfortable with authorship studies that claim an absolute identification. I would genuinely like to know the sources of his skepticism. Yours, Bill Godshalk (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J. Kennedy Date: Sunday, 5 May 1996 22:29:02 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy The writer of the Funeral Elegy goes on at some length about the "goodness" of his man, as these few quotations will show. "...Rememb'ring what he was, with comfort then May pattern out one truly good, by him." "...To progress out his life, I could display A good man in each part exact and force.... "...Such harmony of goodness did preserv As nature never built in better kind...." "And as much glory is it to be good For private persons, in their private home...." "So henceforth, all (great glory to his blood) Shall be but seconds to him, being good." "...his taintless goodness, his desertful merit." "...since the happiness Depends upon the goodness of theman." "But since the sum of all that can be said Can be but said that "He was good"...." Of course we must speak only the good of the dead, but the writer of the Elegy seems to be onto a theme, and if the writer was John Ford, which I believe from other evidence as well, we might expect the man to follow along these lines with some other more fully developed essay on the subject of the "good man". And so it is. In 1620, eight years after the Elegy was published, John Ford wrote "A Line of Life". It's prose, about 34 pages long, wherein the "good man" is brought from his bud into full blossom, as these quotations will show. "For to be truly good is to be great." "A public man hath not more need to be bonus civis, a good statist, than bonus vir, good in himself." "Great men are by great men--not good men by good men-- narrowly sifted...." "A good man is the last brance of resolution...." "...interposes himself to set at unity the disorders of others not so inclined to goodness...." "...then he cannot but consider that any pains which a good man undergoes for reconciliation...he may make all like unto himself, that is, good men." "This very word "good" implies a description in itself more pithy, more pathetical, than by any familiar exemplification can be made manifest: such a man...." "...yet still, as he is a good man, injuries can no more discourage him than applause can overween him." "Flattery and envy...these two miscreant monsters are against a good man...." "The good man here personated...." "In this respect even kings...justly lay a claim to the style of good men...." "...a good man, so well deserving from all grateful memory service and honour...." Truly, a "good man" is not hard to find in "A Line of Life." If anything, there's a few too many of him. In his next to last paragraph of the piece, the "good man" is mentioned 8 times. Then comes the "Corallary" to the piece. Ford mentions those who may have lost eminence, but he assures us that a "good man" will be redeemed, for honors are "but instrumental causes of virtuous effects in action." As is usual, and as is mentioned by his editors, Ford often jumps onto ideas that he never quite wrestles to the ground, such as his last words in "A Line of Life" about the good man. "To all such as do so--and all should so do that are worthy to be such--a service not to be neglected is a proper debt, especially from inferior ministers, to those whose creation hath not more given them the prerrogation of being men, than the virtuous resolution leading them by a Line of Life, hath adorned them with the just, known, and glorious titles of being good men." Well, whatever it might mean, it surely means that John Ford was much taken with the notion of the "good man", the same as the writer of the Funeral Elegy. Add this to the other several reasons that John Ford might have written the Elegy. (1)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Leo Daugherty Date: Thursday, 9 May 1996 00:07:23 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 7.0352 Re: Texts; Funeral Elegy Speaking as someone who believes (and who has said here on SHAKSPER) that Shakespeare wrote FUNERAL ELEGY, and also as someone who has studied Ford's LINE OF LIFE (and funeral elegy on Charles Blount/Mountjoy), I would caution Richard Kennedy about concluding too much from the Shakespearean allusions/ echoes in Ford's work. For example, using Mr. Kennedy's logic, we should probably conclude the Ford also wrote Shakespeare's Sonnet 16 ("So should the lines of life that life repair . . ."), giving the phrase a spin not even brought out by Empson's famous polysemic analysis (in SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY). The truth is that John Ford knew Will Peter and was (self-evidently, judging from his work as a whole) one of the first great Shakespeare fans. It is also true that we have yet more to learn from Ford about Shakespeare, and some of it from THE LINE OF LIFE, which has been barely studied at all. (I'm working on it, but it's slow work.) Leo Daugherty (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 8 May 1996 19:20:48 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy One of Ford's biographers, M. Joan Sargeant ("John Ford" NY, (1966) doesn't much care for "Fame's Memorial" (1606), finding it "very wearisome", and in a "highly artificial style". Such a critical judgment applies very well to the "Funeral Elegy"(1612), if we take John Ford to be the poet of that as well. Sargeant also says that Ford's "Christ's Bloody Sweat" (1613), "is of no great value, but it is better than "Fames Memorial", though partly in the same style." All three poems are of a bunch, I think, John Ford when he was 20 (FM), then 26 (FE) and a year later (CBS). The last poem matches many lines with the Elegy, and in all three there is a posing style, a lack of poetry, and the attitude of John Ford quipped upon by a contemporary: "Deep in a dump John Forde alone was got, With folded arms and melancholy hat...." (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jonathan Hope Date: Friday, 10 May 1996 15:46:57 GMT Subject: Re: SHK 7.0335 Funeral Elegy Bill Godshalk asked me to be a bit more explicit about my reasons for being sceptical of 'absolute' claims for authorship studies. I'm very happy to do this - and I don't in the least take it as a hostile question. One of the reasons authorship work on Shakespeare has such a dismal record is a failure to engage with methodology, and an obsession with headline-grabbing results. I wish people cared less about who wrote what, and more about how to find out who wrote what (I think Foster's book is exemplary on this level). To put it simply, I think that it is possible, for some texts, to prove that author X could not have written the text. I do not, however, think that it is ever possible to prove that author Y *DID* write the text. This follows from my understanding of how hypotheses are tested in science (and as far as I am concerned, authorship studies are, or ought to be, science). In science you never prove that a hypothesis is 'true' by experiment: you either show that it is false; or show that your results would not falsify it. In other words, hypotheses are either falsified, or they live to be tested another day - when they could possibly be falsified, or replaced by another more robust hypothesis. To transfer this to authorship: Edward III is an anonymous text. I hypothesise that the text was written by Shakespeare. I test this hypothesis by comparing Shakespeare's use of the auxiliary verb 'do' in his uncontested works with the usage of the author(s) of Edward III. There are two possible outcomes: 1. The usage of auxiliary 'do' in Edward III is unlike that found in any play by Shakespeare. The hypothesis is falsified and I conclude that Shakespeare did not write Edward III. 2. The usage of auxiliary 'do' in Edward III is like that found in Shakespeare's plays. In this case the hypothesis is not falsified, and I conclude that Shakespeare *could* have written Edward III. It seems to me that much stylometry slides over the modals that ought to accompany unfalsified hypotheses. Of course, if we test lots of hypotheses about different linguistic features, and none are falsified, then we may conclude that, of the names we know about, Shakespeare is the *best* candidate for authorship - but this in not the same thing as *proving* that Shakespeare did, in fact, write a play. I may be misrepresenting science and stylometry here, but these are the principles I use in my own work. Jonathan Hope Middlesex University (3)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 15 May 1996 18:07:10 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy Here are some curious lines out of the Funeral Elegy: "And here to thy memorable worth, In this last act of friendship, sacrifice My love to thee, which I could not set forth In any other habit of disguise." The writer seems to say that he is writing the Elegy as a "last act of friendship", that seems clear. And then that odd phrase "sacrifice my love". What does that mean? How do you sacrifice your love directed towards another? Or is that what he means? But the most puzzling is the last part: "I could not set forth in any other habit of disguise". A disguise to what, the Elegy, his friendship, his sacrifice, himself? Well, it isn't clear. But you've got to consider this "disguise" word. My theory, anyway, is that "W.S." was not Shakespeare, but John Ford in disguise. The trouble with the writer of the Elegy was of the same trouble Ford had with rambling syntax. They seem to offer some information, but not at all, the writer being undone by trick language. There's much of this in the Elegy. You might argue, for example, that Shakespeare was young when he wrote it, or was only in a poetical muse for a time, thinking he was young. But John Ford _was_ young, and known to be an elegist. But besides all, I hope you'll only have to read a few lines of the Funeral Elegy to see that "W.S." was much ado of piety, and much a loss for poetry, nor was the writer our man, our darling of language, our great unknown, our "Sweet Willie". (1)------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Harry Hill Date: Tuesday, 16 Jul 1996 08:38:52 +0000 (HELP) Subject: Re: SHK 7.0520 Re: Funeral Elegy in Complete Works Naturally I am very pleased that the "Elegie" has found its sometimes thumping, usually fluid and amazingly personal way into the Complete Works. As I have said before, when Paul Hawkins and I began the process of recording our Concordia CD of the poem, we constantly discovered great beauties of phrase and rhythm that come to the lips -- their intended recipients, surely -- with novelty and ease. Neither of us liked the poem on the first two quiet readings, of course; I don't imagine anyone does, it *seems* so plain, even perhaps less than ordinary. It seems to us that quite a lot of this is precisely what the pet sets out to do, to praise from his place as a living ordinary man and friend. The poem is evidently, I would say, pretty anti-clerical and makes totally clear at the end that Peter is not in heaven but in the dusty ground and lives only in the memory of love. A common Marlovian and Shakespearean position indeed, and not a wholly unusual one for artists of the time to take. I continue to thank those who have sent me notes telling me how much the recording has opened their ears to the work, whoever wrote it. Harry Hill Montreal (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: W. L. Godshalk Date: Tuesday, 16 Jul 1996 14:31:34 -0400 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0520 Re: Funeral Elegy in Complete Works Doug Bruster gently points out to me (offline) that I have misspelled Gwynne Evans's name. I suppose I should stick to G. Blakemore Evans! My apologies to Evans. Yours, Bill Godshalk (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Richard J Kennedy Date: Wednesday, 31 Jul 1996 19:41:32 -0700 Subject: Funeral Elegy Not at all to slight Harry Hill, his ability to read and attempt to glean some sense out of the more strangled lines of the Funeral Elegy, and I love a fine voice and a grand style, and all credit to Harry for his work with this most common piece of verse. (for this ad I should receive a free cd, yes?) Nothing hostile there, but Lord how can a man keep his systalic down when the Shakespeare teachers and professors on the planet say nothing and let this spectacular failure be lent this while as if Shakespeare wrote it? Every publisher who puts this thing in the works whould be given strong objections, and you have the addresses. If you don't, I do, and how can you let this go by? Where is conscience after so much mute acceptance? Where is poetry? Read the Funeral Elegy out of our archives. Lord, it was more sad than anyone could have conceived, such a death upon academia and our good sense and proper ears. (2)---------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Bob Evans Date: Thursday, 1 Aug 1996 12:35:24 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Funeral Elegy Am I correct in remembering that Don Foster, using his computer program, was quoted on SHAKSPER as determining that Joe Klein was the author of _Primary Colors_? Has there been any comment on SHAKSPER since this analysis was subsequently confirmed by Klein's confession? Does this news affect anyone's position in the debate? Just curious. From: Phyllis Gorfain Date: Friday, 02 Aug 1996 13:29:08 -0400 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0590 Re: Funeral Elegy Last week's NEWSWEEK magazine ran more than story on the Joe Klein flap, including a column by Klein himself; as a columnist for Newsweek, he had some aplogizing to do since Newsweek had more than once been led to portray him as emphatically not "Anonymous." Printed in more than one of these stories was the information that New York magazine hired Don Foster to do a computer analysis of Primary Colors, and that when he did so, he identified Joe Klein as the author; at that time, Klein denied authorship. I think it would be fascinating to hear from Don Foster, if he is willing to comment, about how Shaxicon's findings in the Primary Colors question indicates anything more about Shaxicon as an instrument for determining authorship. Don, are you willing to comment? Thanks, if so! From: David J. Kathman Date: Tuesday, 6 Aug 1996 18:49:29 +0100 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0595 Re: Funeral Elegy (Joe Klein and SHAXICON) I tried sending this a few days ago, but it seems to have become lost in cyberspace, so I'll try again. Bob Evans asked: >Am I correct in remembering that Don Foster, using his computer program, was >quoted on SHAKSPER as determining that Joe Klein was the author of _Primary >Colors_? Has there been any comment on SHAKSPER since this analysis was >subsequently confirmed by Klein's confession? Does this news affect anyone's >position in the debate? Just curious. Don Foster was not quoted on SHAKSPER as saying that Klein wrote *Primary Colors*; rather, he wrote an article to that effect for New York magazine back in February. In light of the publicity surrounding the Funeral Elegy, New York had commissioned Don to use his methods to compare *Primary Colors* with writing samples of major suspects, to see whether any of them matched. What he did was compare vocabulary overlap, using search-and-retrieval software; each writer tends to use a distinctive vocabulary, and while this method can't by itself determine authorship, it will at least give strong clues and point in the right direction. None of the writers in the first batch they sent him, which included all the leading suspects at the time, stood out as matching *Primary Colors'* vocabulary more than the others. So they sent him text from more candidates, and when he tried Klein, there was more than twice as much vocabulary overlap as with any other candidate. When he looked at Klein's prose more closely, he found many distinctive characteristics -- words, phrases, constructions -- shared by Klein and Anonymous, but not by any other candidates, and the ideas and themes found in the novel, particularly on race, closely matched those expressed by Klein in his Newsweek column. When the article came out, Klein vehemently denied being the author and publicly insulted Don, but of course a couple of weeks ago he admitted that he had been lying (though he still seems to hate Don's guts). As for the significance of the whole thing, I think it gives a big boost to the credibility of Foster's attribution methods --- it turns out he was right, even when the person identified as the author vehemently and repeatedly denied it. Since the same vocabulary overlap method used to help identify Klein points strongly to Shakespeare as the author of the Funeral Elegy (and does so from many different directions), Klein's confession should be seen as significant in the Elegy debate. Dave Kathman djk1@midway.uchicago.edu From: Patrick Gillespie Date: Wednesday, 07 Aug 1996 13:51:21 -0400 Subject: Re: SHK 7.0601 Re: Funeral Elegy (Joe Klein and SHAXICON) >Bob Evans asked: >When he looked at Klein's prose >more closely, he found many distinctive characteristics -- words, phrases, >constructions -- shared by Klein and Anonymous, but not by any other >candidates, and the ideas and themes found in the novel, particularly on race, >closely matched those expressed by Klein in his Newsweek column. >I think it gives a big boost to the credibility of Foster's attribution methods I *does* give a significant boost to Mr. Foster's methods. I find it interesting however, that Mr. Foster felt compelled to not only use word overlap (which seems to be Shaxicon's sole criteria (?)) but also to compare phrases, constructions, ideas and themes! It seems Mr. Foster feels that Shaxicon's criteria, is only *part* of the overall process. I understand that he has attempted to prove FE as Shakespeare's by means other than the sole use of Shaxicon. However, it is freely accepted (isn't it?) that FE's use of phrases, contructions, ideas and themes are emphatically *not* typical or unique to Shakespeare. (There is an extreme paucity of figurative language, for example.) Does this not cast the FE attribution into doubt? If *the* primary feature of an author's "style" is missing, despite word overlap, isn't this pause for reconsideration? Word overlap *is* statistically significant, but I'm not sure it can be universally interpreted. In other words, just because there is word overlap should not, in itself, signify a common author. Is it not possible to interpret the word overlap in FE as, possibly, the influence of Shakespeare on the author of FE? (I wish I had Foster's book, which I understand is out of print.) Does the word overlap , for example, stem from one play of Shakespeare's, the entire corpus, or from one character's vocabulary? Foster, for instance, has been able to trace which characters Shakespeare might have played using this technique. If the rare word overlap stems from one play, isn't an equally good interpretation suggested in the idea that the author of FE was familiar with that play by Shakespeare? Was that play printed in the author's lifetime, for instance? Is word overlap the sole criteria for attributing FE to Shakespeare? As an aside, I have been doing some of my own stastical analysis, for instance: The following are words from the first 150 lines of FE that were *never* used by Shakespeare (according to my collected works on CD): predestinated bypath ridgeway unremembered overswayed ensnaring innated offenseless miscontruction unblushing defame only used once by Shakespeare, not including "defamed". Using *only* Ford's other Funeral Elegies we find: unremembered Fame's Memorial l. 736 innated Fame's Memorial l. 503 defame Used three times in FM Unfortunately, I do not have Ford's plays in any database and so I cannot discover if the other words are present in Ford's works without carefully reading them. However, given the small sampling I have of Ford, compared to the entirety of Shakespeare, I cannot help but feel it is statistically significant that two of the ten words Shakespeare never used (again, according to my CD), appear in such a small sampling of Ford. Consider also "defame", which appears only once in the entirety of Shakespeare's works as compared to three times in Fame's Memorial alone. If anyone knows if Ford's works have been put into electronic media, I would be grateful for the knowledge and would be better able to make an accurate comparison. We need a FORDICON! Yours, Patrick Gillespie *end*