"Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye

Brian Vickers. "Counterfeiting" Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xxviii + 568 pp. index. tbls. bibl. $75. ISBN: 0-521-77243-5.

By now, the scholarly world and a sizable reading public are well aware that Donald Foster has recanted his claim, originally put forth in 1989, that Shakespeare was the likely author of the Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter. He did so (SHAKSPER, the online discussion group, 13 June 2002), in response to an article appearing in The Review of English Studies in its May 2002 issue by Gilles D. Monsarrat, Professor of Languages at the University of Burgundy, in Dijon, France, arguing successfully that the Elegy bore marked resemblances to John Ford Christ's Bloody Sweat and The Golden Mean, both published in 1613. Yet Monsarrat was not the first to stake out a claim for Ford; Richard J. Kennedy, a well-known writer of children's books and something of an amateur scholar, had proposed the Ford connection (on SHAKSPER, between 1 March and 13 May 1996; see also Patrick Gillespie's contributions on 10 July and 9 August, w.w.w.shaksper.net), and so had Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, applying their computerized stylometry to material supplied them by Brian Vickers ("Smoking Guns and Silver Bullets. Could John Ford Have Written the Funeral Elegye?," LLC, 16:205-32). Vickers announced the imminent publication of their essay, and that of Monsarrat, in a letter to the TLS.

After a series of impressive successes with his Shaxicon, and his much-publicized identification of Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors when that author was still denying his having written it, Foster thus admitted defeat on this occasion. He had dared the scholarly world to answer him in his own method, using the technical means available through computer-driven analysis rather than simply assert that the poem didn't "sound" like Shakespeare. He pointed his finger at some British scholars particularly when he said this, and perhaps justifiably so; some objections to Foster's claim were based on subjective criteria. There matters stood for a while, pitting British literary sensibilities against American technological know-how. No one thought much of the poem, but Foster's point remained to be answered: is there a flaw in his analytical method? The implications for further research in determination of authorship by electronic means were plain for all to see, and applied also to the poem "Shall I die?" for which Gary Taylor advanced the claim of Shakespeare's authorship in preparing, with Stanley Wells, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, The Complete Works for the Oxford Shakespeare in 1986.

Into the fray stepped the Elliott/Valenza team and then Brian Vickers, a scholar brilliantly suited in intellectual acumen and feisty temperament for such a controversy. His book is dauntingly long and laden with tables; it is not for the weak of heart. His chapter 9 on verbal parallels between the Funeral Elegy and Ford's works turns out to have been anticipated by Gilles Monsarrat; and there were other anticipations, as noted above. Nevertheless, the book as a whole presents considerably more argumentation and evidence. It is a very valuable study, and one that justifies its length and attention to technical detail by its threefold statement of purpose: "to disprove Shakespeare's authorship of 'Shall I die?' and A Funerall Elegye; to prove Ford's authorship of the latter; and to give a full demonstration of the methodology used in modern authorship studies" (xviii).

All three tasks require acute attention to textual matters and to critical interpretation. Vickers's argument goes into considerably more detail than does Monsarrat's, and is also considerably more intemperate. Both Monsarrat and Vickers had worked independently on Ford for some time (Monsarrat having suspected Ford's authorship as early as 1989), and Vickers's achievement should not be discounted because it had the unlucky timing to appear shortly after Monsarrat's Review of English Studies article. Instead, their joint achievement confirms a seeming truth with strength in numbers. To an impressive extent, the conclusions of these two scholars concur and are based on similar kinds of argument and evidence. Perhaps it is this concurrence of critical opinion that persuaded Foster that the jig was up; he did not have Vickers's book in hand when he conceded defeat, but he evidently sensed what was coming.

Vickers's taste for the acerbic and his manifest dismay at the work of Taylor and Foster (not to mention the editors like myself who included one or both of these poems in recent editions of the Complete Works) is evident, for example, in the title of Vickers's substantial prologue, "Gary Taylor finds a poem." The tone is dryly ironic, but Vickers is right, of course. Most of us who saw the London Sunday Times trumpeting the "discovery" of a new Shakespeare poem by Gary Taylor in 1985 were aware that the poem "Shall I die?" had long been known to Shakespeare scholars, who had nonetheless discounted the attribution of the poem to "William Shakespeare" in Rawlinson poet. MS. 160 by the unknown scribe who had compiled this miscellany. Taylor, we thought, hadn't much going for him other than a nose for publicity and the chutzpah to assert Shakespeare's authorship with a certainty bordering on contempt for those who thought otherwise: "this poem belongs to Shakespeare's canon and, unless somebody can dislodge it, it will stay there" (New York Times, 25 December 1985, A 40, quoted by Vickers, 3). Still, who had the tenacity and the know-how to do the dislodging?

Now Brian Vickers has bravely volunteered to do so, in a bravura philippic that chiefly consists in an attack on Taylor. Vickers reviews and supports the contentions of Muriel Bradbrook, Peter Beal, and others who complained of the poem's notable lack of thematic unity. He makes good use of George Wright's metrical analysis of the poem's asymptomatic choice of an English stress-equivalent of the Latin cretic measure, and of Tom Pendleton's demonstration of the poem's profoundly un-Shakespearean language. He takes Taylor to task for deploring aesthetic standards and then using them for his own purposes. He argues that Taylor's attempts to resuscitate the poem by emendation betray a failure to understand the poem's poetic idiom. Vickers's language is frankly polemical. "Taylor's ability to ignore all the opposite evidence is breathtaking." "This is an extraordinarily specious sequence of argument." "Taylor's response to his critics was deeply unsatisfactory" (48-49). Vickers deplores the uses of the Oxford publishing name to legitimate "Shall I die?" under the category of "Various Poems" without even conceding that they might be assigned as "Doubtful Ascriptions." He is, if anything, even more unhappy with the decision of the Norton editors and publishing company to perpetuate Taylor's attribution "without any apparent attempt at an independent, critical evaluation" (52). "The whole misguided identification of this mediocre Petrarchan poem as a work of Shakespeare reaches its lowest point here" (53).

Having shown that he is not a man to pull his punches, if any of us doubted that fact, Vickers wades into the Elegye controversy with manifest relish, and, be it said, with remarkable success. In this major portion of the book, Vickers capitalizes on the advantage of a stronger argument than with "Shall I die?" There he refutes Taylor, with verve and polemical skill, but it is mostly a negative argument (though positively he does show how the poem belongs to a kind of Petrarchan genre that dates it 1610-20, thus refuting Taylor's mid-1590s date). In the larger portion of the book, Vickers has the stronger positive argument that he has found another, more persuasive candidate for author. This stratagem gives added conviction to his polemic, for he is able to argue how Foster's deficiency in the use of statistics arises from the inadequate scope of his comparison. The daunting statistics in Foster's 1989 monograph, claiming to be advanced with a consideration of "all possible contrary evidence," and thus arriving at factors in the Elegy that "are found nowhere but in Shakespeare" (Foster, Elegy by W.S. A Study in Attribution, 1989, 80, quoted by Vickers, 189) are vulnerable to a demonstration that the factors in question are indeed to be found in the writings of John Ford.

Vickers also takes Foster to task on literary and stylistic grounds. He shows, for example, how Foster bases part of his argument on the presence in the Elegy of the rhetorical figure of hendiadys. Foster identifies ten certain instances and seven others that "at least verge on hendiadys" (Foster, 129), and argues for this as characteristically Shakespearean. Apart from the fact that hendiadys is a figure widely dispersed in early modern texts, Vickers asserts that in the Elegy we find at most two or three, "depending on the reader's charity" (191). One suspects that he is right to regard hendiadys as hardly a useful distinguishing marker. This is, at any rate, only one of a considerable number of telling objections to Foster's method. A more glaring instance is in Foster's analysis of compound words (194). The point here is that Vickers attacks Foster on his own ground, rather than deploring the Elegy's uninspired language or its focus on the consolations of the Christian afterlife. Vickers is not afraid to advance critical appraisals also: like others, he finds the repetitions in the poem un-Shakespearean, and dismisses as sheer fantasy Foster's attempt to see in the poem any biographical connection to Shakespeare. Vickers finds the religiosity of the poem decidedly un-Shakespearean in its pious moralizing about violent death as no proof of a wasted life (218-19). Like MacDonald Jackson, Vickers points to the highly abstract diction of the Elegy. He bolsters his point with tables of Latinate words, showing how the frequency of such diction in the poem is substantially greater than in Shakespeare's late plays. So, too, with four-syllable words like "apprehension" or "executioner." He compares pleonastic "do" forms in the Elegy with Shakespeare's texts, finding a marked preference for such locutions in the poem. Vickers has taken the fight to the enemy, then, by tabulating matters like those on which Foster's case had rested.

The structure of Vickers's argument is indeed brilliant as it moves from refutation to confirmation. The innovative historian of rhetoric displays how masterfully he can put the methodology of rhetorical persuasion to his own use. The book is thus a tour de force of considerable beauty. It is also a very useful guide for those wishing to do studies in attribution. Vickers's epilogue makes for disturbing reading to anyone who cares about the ethics of scholarship and authorial attribution. Warning: one has to work very hard at this. One has to be very learned and smart. Vickers is both, and thereby earns his right to be dismissive of the work of some other researchers. P.S.: I have taken the Elegy out of the fifth edition of the Complete Works. I was skeptical all along, and tried to say so, but I included it as a subject of what seemed a fruitful controversy of authorship. That controversy now appears to be settled.

DAVID BEVINGTON

University of Chicago