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The Funeral Elegy Scandal
By Dr. Daniel Wright
It was with much satisfaction that I recently read, on SHAKSPER (the Electronic Shakespeare Conference), Don Foster's capitulation to an analysis published in the most recent edition of the Review of English Studies-an analysis supplied by Prof. Gilles Monsarrat of the University of Burgundy-conclusively demonstrating the insubstantiability of Foster's claim- first advanced in his 1989 book Elegy by W.S.- that the poem commonly known as A Funeral Elegy (and theretofore regarded as of uncertain authorship by more discerning scholars) was a work composed by Shakespeare. The implication of Foster's long-overdue
surrender to reason is, for Oxfordians, significant.
Prior to Foster's promotion of his discredited thesis, mainstream Stratfordian legend told us that Stratford Will, at the zenith of his art, forewent his profitable London playwriting career, abandoned his friends and colleagues, and retired to Warwickshire, where he never again put pen to paper except to scrawl some all-but-illegible signatures on his will in 1616. Foster, however, in his Elegy by W.S., attempted to flesh out Shakspere's less than skeletal biography by suggesting that Shakspere interrupted this resignation of his supposed literary life to write and hurriedly publish, in 1612, a poem eulogizing a young Devonshire friend after learning that the young man had been murdered. In promoting this notion, Foster realized that his assertion, if vindicated, would overturn the Oxfordian authorship thesis. Simply put-given its late January/early February 1612 composition date-if A Funeral Elegy was by Shakespeare, then, sine dubio, Oxford wasn't Shakespeare.
Many Stratfordians, anxious to find some post-1604 argument for Shakespeare's literary life, rushed to board Foster's new, but doomed, ship. Foster himself acknowledged, with the promotion of his thesis, that "anti-Stratfordians have a huge stake in dismissing the Elegy," and he mocked Oxfordian opponent Richard Kennedy (whose pioneering work on the Elegy contributed to Monsarrat's determination that John Ford was its author), by sneering that "Kennedy's attribution has nothing to sustain it," and he impudently boasted that Kennedy "cannot in the long run do any harm to me or to Shakespearean studies . . . ." David Kathman, a champion of Foster's work, cheered on SHAKSPER that "the evidence that Shakespeare did in fact write this poem is surprisingly broad and surprisingly persuasive." Kathman's colleague, Terry Ross, announced that Foster's "book on the Funeral Elegy could be a model for attribution studies." He even followed that declaration with the cheeky proclamation that, according to his own calculations, there was no more than a "3 in 1000 chance that it [the Elegy] was not written by William Shakespeare of Stratford."
So much for Foster, Kathman and Ross, their authority and their statistical certainties.
Most Oxfordians-and, indeed, many Stratfordians-long have recognized that A Funeral Elegy could not possibly have proceeded from the hand of the writer who called himself Shakespeare. However, even apart from the stylometric analysis offered by Prof. Monserrat (the persuasiveness and likely finality of which even Foster concedes), we can be pretty sure that Shakspere of Stratford-even assuming he could write such verse (a proposition that Stratfordians never have been able to demonstrate)-could not have authored this poem.
William Peter was a commoner, "a private man in rank," hardly the kind of candidate for the conventional Elizabethan or Jacobean eulogy; he was no neighbor or colleague of Shakspere's, yet the poet tells us that Peter is a man of his long and intimate acquaintance. Apart from this poem, there isn't a word from Shakspere, William Peter, or anyone else, to suggest that these men even knew each other, let alone-in the words of the elegy-experienced life together in such a way as to be "belov'd" of one another and "fast friend[s]." Why Shakspere of Stratford would confer on him, above all others, a tribute in death he never had bestowed on another, is puzzling-especially given that composing an elegy was a commemorative act he didn't provide even for his own brother, Gilbert, who died on or near the same day as the obscure William Peter!
Shakspere's composition of this poem, and the expression of its intimate knowledge of the fellow eulogized, seems bizarre under such circumstances. After all, within the period of time when Shakspere would have needed to write this poem, he presumably would have been preoccupied with details attending his brother's death, funeral and burial. One wonders therefore not only why but how, within a period of 19 days of the murder of William Peter on 25 January, he would have learned of this fatal attack (the murder was committed in a remote West Country village almost two hundred miles from Stratford), been commissioned by (or sought the commission from) the family of the deceased to write the elegy, composed it, sent it to Bowhay in Devon for the family's approval, received it again in Stratford (presumably with the approval of at least John Peter, to whom he dedicated it), and then conveyed it to London in order to present it to-of all people-Thomas Thorpe (the same man who ostensibly had pirated and published Shakspere's Sonnets less than three years earlier!) who would promptly register it for publication. All other curiosities aside, absent a postal service, faxes, telephones, good roads, automobiles and trains, a rational being can only be astonished at the pace with which these events took place-so astonished, perhaps, as not to believe them possible.
The assumption by some Stratfordians that the primacy Shakspere's placement of this young man's death in his renewed literary attentions over that of his own brother might be explained by the poet's intimate friendship with William Peter-an intimacy of such degree that, as one Stratfordian has suggested, he may have been among the first persons away from the murder scene to be informed of William Peter's death. Such a rationalization to account for the rapidity of the composition, transmission and registration of A Funeral Elegy beggars belief. After all, in the Funeral Elegy, the poet praises William Peter as a man who, among his many virtues, has been a husband of "firm affection" for nine years and a father of "careful providence." William Peter, however, at the time of his murder, had only been married for three years and had no children at all! How intimate could the relationship between Shakspere and Peter have been?
Of course, there are dozens of other reasons, much written of elsewhere, to discredit the fanciful notion of Shakespeare as author of this miserable poem. A Funeral Elegy not only very poorly compares with Shakespeare's mature style (coming, according to Stratfordian chronology, only a handful of years after his composition of the inimitable Sonnets and during the same year that some Stratfordians suggest he wrote The Tempest). Equally damning of the claim that Shakespeare wrote it, in my appraisal, is the poet's celebration of the expectations for his own youth in this wretched doggerel. This is a strange and inexplicable attitude to strike many years after having mourned in the Sonnets, written perhaps more than ten years earlier, that even then one could see in him "[t]hat time of year . . . when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang," the "twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west" and "the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie."
In any case, the attitude toward the authorship of texts that precludes Stratfordian fundamentalists from considering that the works of Shakespeare just might be by someone other than Stratford Will ("Shakespeare's name is on the title page, I believe it, and that settles it") was exploded by Donald Foster himself in his concession on 20 June to The New York Times that Shakespeare was not the writer of the Elegy. In acknowledging that superficial assumptions don't guide us very reliably when it comes to identifying Elizabethan / Jacobean manuscripts, Foster conceded that there is a limit to what someone can assume about a text's origins. He stated that scholars in the future must more carefully consider "how important a close look at language can be in establishing authorship, rather than depending on title page attributions."
Finally, of course, we don't know why Ford (or, more likely, Thorpe) appended the initials "W.S." to this poem. Many manuscripts of dubious origin from the era carry these initials, and some even bear the name of "William Shakespeare." We know that all of these texts are unlikely to be-in whole or in part-the work of the writer who called himself Shakespeare. Maybe now some Stratfordians will be less willing to leap in and say these works are Shakespearean merely because a title page or someone like Donald Foster says so.
Now we await the embarrassed rush by those editors of Shakespeare's works who subscribed to this ludicrous notion regarding the Elegy to disavow their earlier enthusiasm as they scramble to jettison the Elegy from their publications and get into lifeboats to avoid being sucked down with the plunge of this ill-fated vessel, a ship captained by Don Foster that was destined to sink the moment it left harbor.