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New Literary History 33.2 (2002) 375-396



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Commentary:
In the Name of the Author

Donald W. Foster


Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

William Shakespeare 1

IS IT POSSIBLE? Deep in the woods of academe, a few New Historicists have not yet heard of it, that Foucault is dead!

What matter who's speaking? quoth the graduate student, quoting, say, Stephen Orgel, quoting Foucault quoting Beckett. 2 The implied answer—No matter at all—takes for granted that writers, texts, and specific author functions (Homer, Ovid, Mohammed, Shakespeare, Ignoto, Freud, Beckett, or Foucault himself) are merely symptomatic of the discourses that produced them. Decades after the publication of "What is an Author?" it remains a familiar critical move to represent the privileged literary (as opposed to scientific) writers of a given historical moment or social milieu as a choir of voices all singing, though sometimes discordantly, sometimes namelessly, to the same tune and key. In my own neck of the literary woods—a period of study once known, all-too-humanistically, as "the English Renaissance," lately corrected to "Early Modern," by a dominant discourser—our critical vision has become so overclouded by our Foucauldian goggles that we have mistaken our discursive forestry for the trees. As seen through those well-worn lenses, the literary landscape from smallest shrub to mightiest oak looks more or less the same. The particular name by which each plant is called hardly matters—except, of course, as a signifier of relative market value. Anonymous texts—unidentified greenery, mostly weeds—may be of critical interest as well, but only to illustrate discursive practices, whether in early modern Britain or on the Internet.

Reality check: In actual practice, the questions "Who wrote it?" and "Who said it?" are no less important to literary scholars than to respondents taking the SAT subject test or the TV game-show quizzes where such queries are most likely to be encountered. Foucault's question begs a thoughtful answer at each stage in the development of a [End Page 375] culturally significant text, from the moment of its composition (How shall the I of this narrative be constructed?), to publication (How is the I of the text to be identified, if at all?), to exegesis (How are the writerly I/we of the text, and the speaking I/we/he/she/they of the narrative, pertinent to the work of criticism?).

To pretend otherwise is to be less than candid. Take, for example, W. S.'s February 1612 Funerall Elegye for Mr. William Peter, a competent though unembellished poem that landed me on the front page of the New York Times on 13 January 1996. 3 The "William Shakespeare" attribution doesn't just offer to enhance the meaning or value of a poem, it threatens to change the meaning of Shakespeare. If it were now perfectly and safely obvious that "W.S." (the elegy's writer and first-person speaker) is Shakespeare, then the attributional consensus would, by this time, have facilitated critical discussion. And if it were obvious "W.S." is not Shakespeare, but only a poet who alludes to Shakespeare, or an ephebe who has imitated Shakespeare, or an impostor who wishes to pass for Shakespeare, then that information would be grist for another kind of academic commentary. But so long as the authorship of "A Funeral Elegy" is contested, professional criticism will stand at an impasse: one cannot safely construct a reading of the elegy without a coherent, relatively stable, and widely shared notion of the "W.S." whose "I" is referenced on the title-page and dedication, as well as in the first-person text. 4 As a result, eighteen years after the discovery of W.S.'s elegy and seven years after its sudden notoriety, the text sits in the stomach of Shakespeare studies like an indigestible English breakfast.

It matters who's speaking.

"What matter who?" has not always seemed to me a theoretically...

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