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!
