University of Virginia Library

The Question of Authorship

Donald Foster's book is packed with detail of the sort that literary scholars
and attribution studies have traditionally used to investigate authorship
of anonymous literary texts: namely, external evidence, where it exists, and
internal evidence involving tables of massive statistical data, vocabulary
counts, the construction by Foster of his special "Shaxicon" based on Spevack's
concordances to Shakespeare's plays, and verbal parallels of specific
lines and allusions from the plays. With all these approaches to attribution,
the literary mind is familiar. Sifting through and understanding such extensive
detail requires focussed concentration, and is a task capable of being
undertaken mainly by professionals who are in a position to weigh the
evidence.

Even then, the use of numerical methods, especially when a computer is
used, remains for many scholars a suspect intrusion into the traditional literary
world: witness the remark by poet Peter Levi that "such [computerassisted]
analysis is almost always complete rubbish", an attitude described
by Stanley Wells in a review of Foster's book as "an extreme point of view".[11]
Nevertheless, it is one which is also widespread: one of Vickers's objections
to Foster's conclusions in his book was his "too great reliance on computerized
statistics" (my italics), a method he found served "an atomistic notion of

style".[12] A Foster supporter, though, saw Foster's study as a statistically unimpeachable
example of "Shakespeare's late style".[13] The point to note here
is that each critic, whether for or against, assumed that Foster's investigation
made claims about literary style. This point will be crucially important as
elucidation of cusum analysis proceeds.

However, the first observation to make when coming to negative conclusions
regarding Shakespeare as possible author of the Funerall Elegye,
by the use of a quantitative method very different from Foster's, is to note
the satisfaction which may arise in the hearts of all those hostile to the use
of computers in literary studies. O joy! The "computing experts" cannot
agree!