In 1989, Donald W. Foster published his book Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution,
[1] an examination of the authorship of A Funerall Elegye In Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter of Whipton near Exeter; by W.S., printed for Thomas Thorpe, 1612. A work of investigative literary scholarship, it received widespread interest for both its scope and methodology. Some who read it were persuaded that the initials "W.S." could well have belonged to William Shakespeare; in fact, so persuaded that the poem has been included in more than one edition of Shakespeare's collected works.[2] No doubt confidence in Foster's scholarship was enhanced when he was able to identify correctly the anonymous author of Primary Colors (Joe Klein), and went on to be engaged in legal cases as a forensic expert, including that of the Unabomber. Such popular fame made him a widely known and admired "expert" in attribution.
However, not everyone was persuaded. Debate over the Elegye's authorship continued in literary circles, though "debate" is a polite word for what has been described as a "battle" which raged in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement.
[3] Academics took sides. Vituperation and venom and sarcasm flew right and left ("Has he read it?"). Foster's own riposte to his most powerful critic, the Shakespearean scholar and editor Brian Vickers, asserted "an inattention to facts that would not be tolerated in an undergraduate".[4] At the same time, one of Foster's supporters wrote that "Vickers should probably try to keep his foot out of his mouth".[5]
Now it seems that the "battle" is over. In the light of new work suggesting that the Elegye's author was John Ford, Shakespeare's near-contemporary, Foster has conceded that he was mistaken: he, too, now believes Ford to be the likely author,[6] and joins what seems likely to become a literary consensus. Is there any more to be said?
Well, yes. This is a classic case where recourse to an objective method could have made a major contribution to such an acrimonious debate. It is somewhat unseemly (if fun for some readers) for professional academics to hurl brickbats at each other in public, particularly when arguments over attributing an obscure seventeenth-century poem can seem to some modern readers like the mediaeval debates over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The purpose of this article, therefore, is not merely to confirm the consensus that now appears to be emerging (although it is worth noting, en passant, that authorship questions are rarely finally settled by consensus: Freud went to his grave believing that the plays of Shakespeare were written by the Earl of Oxford). Its purpose is to suggest that where literary debate exists, a non-literary technique of language analysis has the virtue of avoiding the pitfalls of serious error which, in this case, led to publishing mistakes that must be an embarrassment to the editors of the Shakespeare editions now including a poem likely to be by John Ford.
Furthermore, a comment expressed since Foster's recantation pinpoints the difficulty for the non-specialist who must rely on the opinion of "experts" in these terms: such attributions can come to seem only pointless exercises (or "games") by which anyone can "show" anything which may be later disproved by another game-player. Thus, the new consensus may seem mired at the personal level: "And how joyfully the anti-Don-Fosterites dance around it".[7] This sense of disillusion underscores the urgent need for independent witness.
For it really does not matter how strong or weak a case critics and scholars may make in terms of cogent literary analysis: these will be irrelevant where an objective procedure exists which does not depend on literary judgments, however well-argued and compelling those may be to fellow-academics. What has always been needed is an independent method, one which is capable of delivering a statistical probability in matters of attributing human utterance in general and which can then be applied to particular cases like this one. This would by-pass any need for the development of a statistical "Shaxicon" (Foster), or reliance on rhetorical figures of speech like, say, anadiplosis or polyptoton (Vickers).
This article proposes that use of the scientific technique of authorship attribution called "cusum analysis" made it possible, as long ago as 1997, to show that the poem is certainly by one writer (i.e. it is homogeneous), but that
it is distinguishable from the writing of William Shakespeare. Further, it can be shown that the short Dedication
[8] to the
Funerall Elegye is also homogeneous, but can be distinguished from samples of the writing of Shakespeare, including his own two Dedications to his poems
Venus and Adonis and
The Rape of Lucrece, usefully signed "William Shakespeare".
[9] There is, however, a new and surprising finding: the Dedication signed "W.S." can be distinguished from samples of the
Elegye which it prefaces, indicating that the author of the one is unlikely to be the author of the other.
In other words, this analysis proposes that the ascription "by W.S." on the title page and the Dedication signed "W.S." were never reliable indicators of authorship either of poem or of Dedication. In his book, Don Foster began by asking that same crucial question: "the first thing we must ask is whether the initials are not simply wrong."[10] He went on "The answer is almost certainly no". The answer of cusum analysis was and remains: almost certainly, yes.
Before proceeding to outline the results of analysis, it will be necessary to elucidate this technique, which is not as well known as it should be.
