'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's Funerall Elegye (review)

This is a long book on what might at first appear a rather slight subject—the authorship of a verse elegy for William Peter, killed near Exeter in 1612 after a quarrel. The length is justified, however, by what seems increasingly like a most peculiar episode in late-twentieth-century scholarship: the campaign to havethis same Funerall Elegye in Memory of . . . William Peeter added to the Shakespeare canon. The venture succeeded to the extent that the poem is printed in the latest Norton, Addison-Wesley, and Riverside Shakespeares. Generally these editions of the collected works have disclaimers prefacing the text, but their inclusion of the poem makes for a strong presumption that our notion of Shakespeare should be modified to accommodate these five hundred lines of drab and slow-moving verse.

There are untold other cases of disputed authorship in the period, many of greater literary interest than the Elegye. Yet as a notable example of the methods and (as Vickers justifiably calls them) the politics of attribution, there is a great deal to be learned from this episode. There was nothing in the external evidence that linked the writing of the poem or its subject to Shakespeare. The attribution, by Donald W. Foster, rested primarily on quantitative evidence. Resistance to the attribution relied largely on readers' impressions that this was not in any sustained sense like Shakespeare's known work. The debate therefore focused on internal evidence and on the results of numerical tests: the frequencies of certain words, figures of speech, and metrical features. The controversy reached the mass media, had a transatlantic dimension (it was American Shakespeare editions that included the poem, and British Shakespeare scholars who were loudest in rejecting it), and challenged a number of assumptions about authors and canons. Foster first proposed Shakespeare as the author of the Elegye, rather diffidently, in his 1989 book but was more assertive in publications in the late 1990s. Once the attribution began to receive international media coverage, scholarly publications and institutions gave Foster exceptionally favorable opportunities to answer objections to his arguments, as Vickers details in his epilogue, "The Politics of Attribution."

Vickers is able to show that Foster's evidence was in fact weak. Foster represented "trivial collocation[s]" (534n) as important authorial links, ignored contrary evidence, and relied on an inadequate sample of comparable seventeenth-century texts to test his putative Shakespeare resemblances. He emerges from Vickers's account as a poor reader of dramatic verse and as an illustration of the principle that "[T]he desire to prove a thesis can blind one to everything else" (279). Vickers presents the evidence for a better candidate than Shakespeare, John Ford, whose work has so many parallels to the Elegye at all levels of style that there is now little room for doubt that he is the author. Ford's name had been put forward quite early in the debate, by the author Richard J. Kennedy, but a 2002 article by Gilles D. Monsarrat clinched the attribution and caused Foster to capitulate.

Foster is certainly revealed as deficient in statistical method. Yet I don't agree, as Vickers sometimes argues in this book, that the Elegye case also shows that statistical counts are necessarily inadequate in establishing or discounting an attribution. "One of the vices of authorship studies as currently practised," Vickers suggests, "is that words become treated as neutral units in computational processes that take no account of their history, or specific subject-connotations" (285). His assertion that "counting must be supplemented by reading" (233) sounds like a truism, but lying behind it is the more serious argument that quantitative measures are invariably insufficient without other support. Foster may have been a poor user of statistics, but this should not lead to the conclusion that statistics are themselves flawed tools for attribution. MacDonald P. Jackson, for instance, a doyen of...