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‘COUNTERFEITING’ SHAKESPEARE Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare addresses the fundamental issue of what Shakespeare actually wrote, and how this is determined. In recent years his authorship has been claimed for two poems, the lyric ‘Shall I die?’ and A Funerall Elegye. These attributions have been accepted into certain major editions of Shakespeare’s works but Brian Vickers argues that both attributions rest on superficial verbal parallels, isolated words and phrases which were merely commonplace expressions; both use too small a sample, ignore negative evidence, and violate basic principles in authorship studies. Through a fresh examination of the evidence, Professor Vickers shows that neither poem has the stylistic and imaginative qualities we associate with Shakespeare. In other words, they are ‘counterfeits’, in the sense of anonymously authored works wrongly presented as Shakespeare’s. He argues that the poet and dramatist John Ford wrote the Elegye: its poetical language (vocabulary, syntax, prosody) is indistinguishable from Ford’s, and it contains several hundred close parallels with his work. By combining linguistic and statistical analysis this book makes an important contribution to authorship studies. is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Renaissance Studies at the Eidgen¨ossische Technische Hochschule, Z¨urich. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His publications on Shakespeare include The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (, ); a six-volume collection of early Shakespeare criticism, Shakespeare: the Critical Heritage, – (–, ); Returning to Shakespeare (); Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (); and Shakespeare, Co-author. A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (). Professor Vickers is also a specialist in rhetoric and stylistics, his publications including Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, ), Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (, ), and In Defence of Rhetoric ().
‘COUNTERFEITING’ SHAKESPEARE Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye
‘COUNTERFEITING’ SHAKESPEARE Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford’s Funerall Elegye
BRIAN VICKERS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521772433 © Brian Vickers 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2002 - isbn-13 978-0-511-06671-9 eBook (NetLibrary) - isbn-10 0-511-06671-6 eBook (NetLibrary) - isbn-13 978-0-521-77243-3 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-77243-5 hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Gwen
Contents
Preface List of tables List of abbreviations and note on references Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
page xi xxii xxiv
. ’ ‘’ . ‘W. S.’ and the Elegye for William Peter
. Parallels? Plagiarisms?
. Vocabulary and diction
. Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
. Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
. Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
. Statistics and inference
. A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
. ’ ‘ ’ . Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
. Ford and the Elegye’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
. The Funerall Elegye in its Fordian context
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
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Contents
I. The text of A Funerall Elegye II. Verbal parallels between A Funerall Elegye and Ford’s poems
III. Establishing Ford’s canon
Notes Bibliography Index
Preface
A fundamental issue in humanistic enquiry concerns the authenticity of the documents we study. In history, philosophy, and many other disciplines, it is essential to know that the texts we use have been properly authenticated. If scholars base theories and interpretations on texts which turn out to be forgeries, or erroneously attributed, their work loses all validity. Arguably, the importance of properly identifying authorship is even greater in literature, since our engagement with the detail of language in poetry, drama, or fiction is far more intense than that of the philosopher or historian. In literary texts the direct confrontation with language is the primary experience, to which we constantly return. We take it for granted that even the most humble writers deserve to have their work correctly identified, an expectation which becomes more exigent the more eminent the author. With a dramatist as universally admired as Shakespeare, the discovery of a so far unknown play or poem would be a cause for great rejoicing. Conversely, the inclusion in his canon of work erroneously attributed to him would be deeply depressing, almost tragic. Such an unhappy state of affairs has indeed come about recently, largely as a result of the work of Gary Taylor, who has caused an undated, anonymous short lyric, ‘Shall I die?’, to be included in both the Oxford and Norton Shakespeare editions, and Donald Foster, whose advocacy of Shakespeare’s authorship of A Funerall Elegye in Memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter of Whipton Neere Excester, published in as the work of one ‘W. S.’, caused it to be included in the Norton Shakespeare, quickly copied by the Riverside and Longman editions. The last two editions maintain a cautious neutrality, with a token reference to arguments for and against the ascription, but to many readers the very presence of these poems in the four most widely used one-volume editions of Shakespeare, which sell thousands of copies every year, may be taken as proof that they have been accepted into the canon. Was this xi
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an enlightened step forward, or a dreadful mistake? This book addresses that issue, the ‘counterfeiting’ of Shakespeare. I use that word not with its primary meaning, the forging of a document with fraudulent intent, but in the metaphorical sense of presenting anonymously authored work as Shakespeare’s. The highly publicized ‘discoveries’ made by Taylor and Foster are, I suggest, ‘counterfeits’ of the authentic work. I believe that neither poem has any claim to be included in the canon, and that the arguments by which Taylor and Foster have managed to get them accepted fail to meet correct procedures in authorship studies. The Prologue, ‘Gary Taylor Finds a Poem’, besides describing the instant controversy surrounding ‘Shall I die?’, is intended as a brief introduction to the methodology used in attribution studies. (I have discussed this topic more fully in a forthcoming book on Shakespeare’s five collaborative plays, called Shakespeare, Co-author.) When Taylor first claimed for Shakespeare this anonymous lyric, which he had found in a manuscript collection in the Bodleian Library, many critics objected that he had not used correct scholarly methods. Taylor had compiled a list of words and phrases in the poem for which he cited parallels in Shakespeare, but he made at least three major errors: he failed to check the claimed parallels against the work of other poets working between and , and so never tested his claim against negative evidence; he worked with atomistic verbal units, instead of comparing longer sequences of language and thought; and he failed to notice that even where the anonymous poet used words that Shakespeare had also used, he did so with quite different connotations. As the controversy continued, several scholars made constructive suggestions concerning the poem’s probable date and genre, strengthening the by now unanimous disbelief that Shakespeare had written it. Taylor scaled down some of his claims, but clung to the attribution, and – with the support of his senior editor, Stanley Wells – printed ‘Shall I die?’ in the Oxford Complete Works under the heading ‘Various Poems’, from which it migrated to the Norton edition, which bought in the Oxford text. This episode, besides illustrating some of the basic principles of authorship studies, also brings out the important role played in modern discussions by institutions and the media, issues to which I return in the Epilogue. Gary Taylor’s claims for ‘Shall I die?’ aroused instant controversy by the dogmatic terms in which they were formulated: ‘this poem belongs to Shakespeare’s canon and, unless somebody can dislodge it, it will stay there’. When Donald Foster first published his claim that William Shakespeare wrote the Funerall Elegye, in a revised doctoral
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dissertation (Foster ), it was accompanied by occasional prudent statements disclaiming a positive identification. Anyone who read the book soon discovered that the claims did not represent the real argument, which used a copious repertoire of tests designed to identify the ‘W. S.’ with Shakespeare, and to disqualify all other candidates. The less dogmatic tone had the disadvantage that Foster’s claim excited less interest than Taylor’s, a sad comment on the way that media attention is only attracted by extreme positions. But a few years later, apparently urged on by Richard Abrams, Foster restated his case in far more intransigent terms, consciously echoing Taylor’s statement: ‘A Funeral Elegy belongs hereafter with Shakespeare’s poems and plays . . . because it is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (Foster a, p. ). A gratifying media buzz responded to these newly emphatic assertions, a wave of attention that brought the poem into those three college editions, and even caused the makers of a tote-bag sold by the Folger Shakespeare Library, on which were printed the titles of all Shakespeare’s works, to add A Funeral Elegy. The dogmatic tone so successful then has never been dropped, and – despite many detailed criticisms of his work – Foster still maintains that he is right, his critics completely wrong. Since Foster used many more different approaches than Taylor, I have had to devote correspondingly more space to evaluating his methodology and results. The first seven chapters in Part I discuss the external and internal evidence for his claims, in a systematic and painstaking manner. The results are extremely damaging to Foster’s argument. He never presented any evidence that Shakespeare knew William Peter, a young and obscure Devonshire gentleman killed in a drunken quarrel over a horse. Foster concluded that the initials ‘W. S.’ faithfully represented those of the Elegye’s actual author, while failing to note abundant evidence that in the early modern period signing works with initials alone was often an act of misattribution, whether for self-protection or deliberate fraud. Foster passed by that and related issues, such as the honesty of Elizabethan publishers, although it is clear that their notion of acceptable business practices was quite different from our own (see chapter ). These over-simplifications allowed Foster to present as unproblematic the identification of a writer from initials. In other areas he simply misread texts. He cited an Elizabethan play as evidence that Shakespeare was regularly described as a plagiarist: in fact, it proves the opposite, that he was often plagiarized. He quoted Charles Barber to support his claim that Shakespeare was unusual in using the personal pronoun
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who to refer to antecedent inanimates (‘the knees who’), but Barber had actually pointed out that what is, by modern standards, an anomaly, was common usage in the seventeenth century. Foster was so convinced that the use of who for inanimate antecedents, also found in the Elegye, established Shakespeare’s authorship of this poem, that he christened it ‘the Shakespearean who’. An embarrassing number of scholars believed him, but historians of the English language have long known that the anomalous who continued well into the eighteenth century, and was used by Dryden, Swift, and Addison (see chapter ). Foster’s whole enterprise rested on finding unique verbal quirks in the Elegye, shared by ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare alone, as if those two writers represented a closed linguistic category. Here he fell into the same error as Gary Taylor, if on a larger scale: his sample was too small, and he failed to look for contrary evidence. Foster compiled an impressive ‘Checklist of English Memorial Verse, –’, which might have constituted a viable database, but his comparative analyses were based on a much smaller ‘Cross-Sample’ of elegies published between and , totalling forty poems of varying lengths, amounting to , lines. But obviously ‘W. S.’ might have written another elegy between and , or might have produced other forms of verse. Foster’s sample was far too small to justify the absolute claims he made, having identified linguistic habits shared by ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare. It was not just the sample that was too small: Foster’s own reference-base was too narrow, relying as he did on the few concordances then available for Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Despite this limitation, Foster made categorical but erroneous pronouncements about Shakespeare’s linguistic practices, such as that he was unusual in using the word ‘comfortable’ to mean ‘comforting’, or that he used ‘opinion’ in a special sense. But a less narrow reading experience of English drama, or the Bible, would have prevented both errors (see chapter ). Foster seems to have considered only evidence supporting his claim. He made a special point about the nine most frequently recurring words in Shakespeare’s vocabulary (and, but, not, so, that, to, with, by, in), but only subjected the first four to statistical analysis, which produced a favourable correlation between the Elegye and Shakespeare. He did not discuss the results for the remaining five words, which show huge differences. Foster claimed that the high frequency of run-on lines in the Elegye correlated with that of Shakespeare’s late plays: but this figure relied on his modernization of the poem’s punctuation. His figures for the
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poem’s sentence-lengths were also based on his modernized text, and are equally invalid. Elsewhere Foster shifted his point of comparison. When comparing the Elegye’s use of verses having an extra or hypermetric syllable (so-called ‘feminine endings’), he no longer cited the late plays – where the difference between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare is glaring – but moved back to Shakespeare’s much earlier poems. Foster did not cite other available evidence from the poem’s prosody – its use of hexameter lines; its placing of mid-verse pauses; its use of enclitic and proclitic phrases – all of which would have shown that the Elegye differs markedly from Shakespeare’s verse-style at the end of his career (see chapter ). All these, and other failings, are documented in the following chapters. Foster’s energetic assertiveness clearly persuaded many readers that a genuine scholarly case had been made. Having been led to accept the existence of ‘the Shakespearean who’, they were equally ready to accept his identification of ‘the Shakespearean hendiadys’. Foster took over the case made by previous writers that Shakespeare was unusually fond of this rhetorical figure, but in claiming to have found seventeen instances of it in the Elegye he showed that he had not understood its function and internal dynamic. Most of those instances are mere noundoublets, lacking the specifically Shakespearian qualities by which the terms become interfused (see chapter ). Foster subjected this linguistic detail, like all the others, to statistical analysis, but literary statistics need to be based on a correct identification of the relevant verbal feature. A closer look at the inferences Foster drew from his statistics shows that these are faulty in many respects (see chapter ). Those are the main conclusions of my examination of Donald Foster’s claims. Just like Gary Taylor’s, his methodology was based on far too narrow a sample, and he failed to deal properly with contrary evidence. Replying to further objections from critics, Foster stated that his Shakespeare attribution ‘now rests on a broad and substantial foundation. What’s required to dislodge it is not just the overthrow of a few minor points (though I do not see where even that has happened) but a systematical rebuttal’ (Foster , p. ). I trust that I have provided this. If one reads the Funerall Elegye without preconceptions, as I do in chapter , its unresemblance to Shakespeare’s work stands out clearly. Unlike his two long narrative poems, it lacks any overall design, falling into two halves, the second of which repeats much of the first. It uses a few standard topics from the consolatory tradition in a vague and abstract manner, giving no sense of the deceased’s individuality, and getting some biographical details wrong. Unlike any of Shakespeare’s
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writings, it includes a long theological discussion of Christ’s life and death. The poem’s diction is highly abstract, Latinate, polysyllabic, far more so than anything Shakespeare wrote between and . A remarkable number of verse lines begin with low-content function-words (of, as, which, in), or with gerunds, an uninventive formulaic style quite unlike Shakespeare’s. It uses many pleonasms, especially in order to provide rhyming words; its syntactical inversions are clumsy, often for the sake of the rhyme; and its rhetoric is dysfunctional in a way that Shakespeare’s never was. These and other features allow us to dismiss it as unShakespearian. Who, then, wrote the Elegye? In Part II I present the case, in three stages, for John Ford’s authorship. In chapter I first review the biographical evidence, much of it collected by Donald Foster, who failed to see its implications. Ford was born in a Devonshire village not far from William Peter’s birthplace. Peter was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, just like John Ford and Ford’s cousin William. William Peter and William Ford were at Exeter together from to , sharing the same tutor, and although John Ford left Oxford in , he must have known Peter well. The two families even owned adjoining estates. The biographical context provides a likelihood for Ford having been in a position to write the poem, where nothing similar can be shown for Shakespeare. I then discuss Ford’s writing career, much of which will be unfamiliar to nonspecialists, particularly his poems and prose works, produced between and . Ford’s poetry includes two memorial poems to the Earl of Devonshire, Fames Memoriall () and a shorter poem, ‘In honorable memory’; Christes Bloodie Sweat (), a long meditative poem in memory of Christ’s suffering; a memorial poem on the death of Sir Thomas Overbury; another on the death of Ben Jonson; and yet another (discovered by the late Jeremy Maule) on the death of John Fletcher. In fact, nearly all of Ford’s verse consists of memorial poems, which celebrate the deceased’s virtues and untimely death, while denouncing his enemies and asserting his lasting fame – exactly the scheme of the Funerall Elegye. Ford’s poem on Christ reveals an impressive knowledge of the Bible, and a confidence in discussing theological topics, that he shares with ‘W. S.’. The other tradition represented in the Elegye, with its emphasis on the word ‘steady’, is Stoicism, a philosophy which celebrated the virtue of constantia. Ford contributed substantially to English Neo-Stoicism with his two prose works, The Golden Meane (; revised ), and A Line of Life (), both of which contain further celebrations of virtue under
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duress. Ford’s competence in this vein would have assured him a firm place in the Christian–classical moralizing tradition, had he not decided in about to become a dramatist. The plays that he produced over the next two decades range through many emotional states, often sensational, but they retain a strong concern with the link between virtue and constancy in the face of misfortune, William Peter’s prime characteristic, according to ‘W. S.’. In chapter I analyse Ford’s diction, using the same categories by which Donald Foster pronounced that of the Elegye to be ‘indistinguishable’ from Shakespeare’s. I show that for every feature that Foster picked out – words beginning un–, or ending with -ful and -less; very as a restrictive adjective; a preference for whiles rather than while; the use of such old-fashioned forms as wert, hath, doth, and so forth – Ford’s diction is actually closer to that of ‘W. S.’. I then analyse the Elegye’s ‘distinctive vocabulary’, as Foster termed it, which turns out to be very like Ford’s. Foster claimed that ‘W. S.’ resembled Shakespeare more than any other poet, but he used concordances of poets a generation or more older than ‘W. S.’: the same set of words shows a far higher correlation with Ford. I then analyse Ford’s vocabulary, showing it to be just as Latinate and polysyllabic as that favoured by ‘W. S.’, with exactly the same fondness for creating past participles from nouns (‘possibilited’, ‘nobilitated’, ‘monumented’, ‘conundrumed’). I show that Ford used function-words, especially the preposition of, with a frequency and in specific syntactical constructions, in exactly the same way as ‘W. S.’ did. Both writers were unusually prone to using nouns ending –ness, formed from epithets; both liked to begin verse lines with gerunds; both liked syntactical constructions of the kind If . . . then. Ford’s verse-style in his poems (, ) was very similar to that of the Elegye (), showing comparable frequencies in the use of run-on lines, feminine endings, and pleonastic do forms. Ford’s fondness for noun-doublets, resembling but never quite achieving the true hendiadys, is exactly like that of ‘W. S.’, and their use of rhetoric is dysfunctional in the same way. The cumulative result of these analyses is to show that Ford’s use of language, at whatever level one tests it, is indistinguishable from that found in the Elegye. Finally, in chapter , honouring the old principle that ‘La fin couronne les œuvres’, I present a list of more than eighty passages in the Elegye for which I have found close parallels in Ford’s work. Well aware of the methodological dangers involved, I have only cited individual words where I could show them to be rare or even unique to Ford, and not used by Shakespeare. Otherwise I have limited my claims to longer
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units of discourse, verbal sequences that also show recurring thoughtpatterns. Furthermore, I treat these thought-parallels in a way never done in the statistical methods favoured in recent authorship studies, by drawing on my analysis of Ford’s poems and prose works, with their fusion of Christian and Stoic ethics. A word such as ‘steadiness’ is not simply a linguistic counter that can be found in a concordance or with an electronic search function, but a term having specific connotations within a philosophical system. Its significance is contextual, provided that one recognizes the correct context. By compiling this list, which includes several hundred parallels between the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays, I hope to provide the final, clinching evidence that the Elegye was written by Ford. Some open-minded readers may object that I could have presented the evidence for Ford’s authorship more briefly. But my aim has been to provide as complete a demonstration as possible, within reasonable limits. I have had three goals in writing this book: to disprove Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘Shall I die?’ and A Funerall Elegye; to prove Ford’s authorship of the latter; and to give a full demonstration of the methodology used in modern authorship studies. To achieve all three goals I have had to quote both primary texts and critical interpretation in some detail. In normal literary critical discourse an interpretative argument is illustrated by quotations; but in authorship studies the quotations are the argument, the primary evidence around which everything revolves. It is inevitable, then, that enquiries such as these depend on full quotation, rather than giving a series of page-references. I want readers to be in possession of the words themselves, so that they can judge whether or not Shakespeare could have written these two poems. The case for Ford’s authorship of the Elegye seems to me so strong that I cannot think of any other explanation for the multitude of verbal details linking his writing to that poem. I hope that the editors of the three American college editions will now reconsider whether to include ‘Shall I die?’ and A Funerall Elegye in future editions. That the two poems got into those editions in the first place shows how the acceptance of authorship ascriptions depends not on the individual scholar alone but on a wider community, academic and commercial. This process involves both politics – the behaviour of the polis, here the scholarly community – and ethics, as political activity invariably does. In the Epilogue I investigate some reasons for Taylor’s and Foster’s success: their confident use of the media, which in the English-speaking world quickly express frenzied excitement whenever any new work is
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attributed to Shakespeare, setting up interviews and photo-calls at the right moment; the institutional support they received for their theories (from publishers and journal editors); and the way they sustained their claims in the face of criticism. As I point out, authorship studies, almost more than other branches of literary criticism, is prone to two temptations. One is the pursuit of scholarly disagreement in a personal manner, as if the goal of such disputes was not to establish truth, or probability, but to protect scholarly reputation. The other is the belief that one’s own interpretation of the evidence is the only one possible, refusing to consider properly other scholars’ arguments. Neither Taylor nor Foster escaped these temptations. This book ends with a reminder that authorship studies, like all forms of research, is best performed with an open mind and a constant readiness to reconsider the evidence for and against an attribution. It especially needs to adopt what C. S. Peirce called a ‘contrite fallibilism’, the recognition that we are all liable to error, and should extend to other scholars the charity which we may well need ourselves. Over the five years on which I have worked on this project, with interruptions, I have contracted many debts. Anthony Mortimer (University of Fribourg) and Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London University) answered several appeals for help with the Prologue, concerning ‘Shall I die?’. The first version of Part I, analysing Foster’s methodology, was read by Tom Clayton (University of Minnesota), Katherine Duncan-Jones (Somerville College, Oxford), Ward Elliott (ClaremontMcKenna College), Gwynne B. Evans (Harvard University), A. Kent Hieatt (Emeritus, University of Western Ontario), Jonathan Hope (University of Strathclyde), MacDonald P. Jackson (University of Auckland), Thomas Pendleton (Iona College), and John Tobin (University of Massachusetts). They all encouraged me to continue, and helped improve both my arguments and their presentation. Tom Clayton kindly read the whole typescript for me in its penultimate version, making several acute suggestions and providing me with a sub-title. Jonathan Hope read the same version for the publisher and persuaded me to rearrange the material into its present form, omitting two further chapters. As for Part II, my case for John Ford’s authorship of the Elegye, I have four people to thank. Ironically enough, Donald Foster himself first drew attention to several parallels between the Elegye and Ford’s poems, but used them to present Ford as a plagiarist, never considering that he might be the poem’s author. This possibility was first raised by Richard J. Kennedy in a new forum for Shakespeare studies, the ‘Shakespeare
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Electronic Conference’ (‘S’), an online discussion group, where a vigorous controversy took place between January and February concerning Foster’s ascription of A Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare. Anyone wishing to read this material can still do so by accessing the website at www.shaksper.net. It was among the postings of S that I came across the fruitful suggestion of Ford’s authorship made by Mr Kennedy, a distinguished author of children’s books and short stories. His novel Amy’s Eyes () won the International Rattenf¨anger prize for children’s literature in ; other work appears in both The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories and The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales. Mr Kennedy became involved in this controversy out of a general interest in Shakespeare, and I salute his courage, as a non-academic, in entering an arena sometimes too fiercely conscious of the guild status of professional Shakespearians. As I developed my case for Ford I decided to consult Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, co-authors of several important statistical studies of the Shakespeare authorship problem. I supplied them with electronic texts of Ford’s two major poems, which they subjected to rigorously quantitative linguistic analysis, producing the happy result that the odds on the Elegye having arisen by chance from one corpus or the other were at least , times better for Ford than they are for Shakespeare (see chapter ). (Their essay was published in in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing.) Finally, in the closing stages of completing the typescript, by a remarkable coincidence, the editor of Review of English Studies asked me to referee an essay entitled ‘A Funeral Elegy: Ford, W. S., and Shakespeare’. To my great surprise, it proved to be a pithily argued presentation of the case for Ford’s authorship, citing dozens of parallels between the Elegye and Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays, echoing the material which I had collected for my chapter , but adding many parallels that I had missed. I warmly recommended the essay for publication, and then discovered that the author was Professor Gilles D. Monsarrat (Universit´e de Dijon), a noted Ford specialist who had produced an excellent treatment of Ford’s Stoicism, two valuable essays on his religious poems, and an outstanding edition of his prose treatises in L. E. Stock (ed.), The Nondramatic Works of John Ford. Professor Monsarrat is the co-editor of a new French translation of Shakespeare, and had decided to include the Elegye, since it had been accepted by the three leading American college editions. While preparing a modernized English text, however, he was struck by the copious parallels with Ford’s work which occurred to him in every line. (Needless to say, the French edition will not include this poem.) In authorship studies, as in other forms of intellectual enquiry, it is extremely valuable to receive independent
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confirmations of one’s findings. The fact that three separately conceived studies converge on Ford’s authorship of the Elegye must now put that issue beyond dispute. At Cambridge University Press I should like to thank my editor, Sarah Stanton, who patiently encouraged the book’s various metamorphoses; Margaret Berrill for her meticulous and constructive copy-editing; and Clive Liddiard for some last-minute proof correcting. That I have been able to include so much detail is due to a generous subsidy towards the publishing costs granted me by my university, the Eidgen¨ossische Technische Hochschule Z¨urich. I wish to thank Professor Albert Waldvogel, Vice President for research programmes, and Dr Maryvonne Landolt for their good services. I owe a great deal to the three assistants who worked with me while I was writing this book. Margrit Soland, both during her time with me and since her retirement, has proved a penetrating critic, applying her wide knowledge to several philological problems. Katherine Hahn has developed unexpected skills in using electronic databases, and has typed the many intermediate versions cheerfully and efficiently. Annette Baertschi, while sharing the typing, successfully obtained and catalogued a great deal of secondary literature, and compiled the index. Finally, to my wife, Sabine K¨ollmann, and our children Helen and Philip, I owe gratitude for their love and support, and apologies for appearing so often preoccupied with research problems. They will be especially pleased that this book is finished. I dedicate it to my second-born, Gwen, who has had to wait an unduly long time. April Note. Two significant documents appeared in the electronic media as this book went into production. The online journal Early Modern Literary Studies (May ) brought an essay by Professor Hugh Craig, ‘Common-words frequencies, Shakespeare’s style, and the Elegy by W. S.’,
, which demolished the Shakespeare attribution. Craig re-ran Foster’s tests with a new set of data, revealing ‘some damaging inconsistencies’ in the way they had been conducted (para. ). A month later on the SHAKSPER website Abrams and Foster – independently, and within hours of each other – having read Monsarrat’s essay, recanted their Shakespearian claims, acknowledging Ford’s authorship (SHK ., June ). Conceding that he ‘ought to have attended more closely’ to Ford’s language and style, Foster reported: ‘I have [not] yet determined where I went wrong with the statistical evidence’. This book may help. June
Tables
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Function-words in A Funerall Elegye and in Shakespeare page Feminine endings in Shakespeare’s late plays Hexameters in Shakespeare’s late plays Percentage pauses in Shakespeare’s blank-verse line Pause patterns in the Funerall Elegye Pause patterns in the Elegye and in Shakespeare: raw figures Pause patterns in the Elegye and in Shakespeare: percentages Proclitic and enclitic phrases in Shakespeare and other dramatists Proclitic and enclitic phrases in Shakespeare and A Funerall Elegye UnShakespearian word choices in the Elegye Latinate words in the Elegye and in late Shakespeare Polysyllabic words in the Elegye and in late Shakespeare Pleonastic do forms in the Elegye The function-word of in Shakespeare’s poems and in the Elegye The function-word of in Shakespeare’s late plays and in the Elegye Function-words beginning lines in A Funerall Elegye ‘Shakespearian’ diction in the Elegye and in Ford Adjectival suffixes in Ford Compound words in Ford’s poems Verb forms in seven plays by Ford Distinctive vocabulary: ‘W. S.’, Shakespeare, and Ford Words in A Funerall Elegye not found in Shakespeare Function-words in the Elegye, Ford’s poems, and Shakespeare The function-word of in Ford’s sole-authored plays xxii
List of tables . The function-word of in the Elegye, in Ford’s poems and prose works . Nouns ending in –ness in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems and sole-authored plays . The Elliott–Valenza tests of the Elegye . Run-on lines in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems . Feminine endings in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems . Pleonastic do forms in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems Ford’s linguistic preferences The function-word of in Ford’s collaborative plays Nouns ending in –ness in Ford’s co-authored plays
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Abbreviations and note on references
The titles of books and journal articles cited for the first time are given in full in the text or notes. Those referred to more often are listed in the Bibliography ( pp. ff ), and are cited in the short form, e.g., ‘Greg ’. Journal titles are always abbreviated, as are some books, as follows. . CahiersE CHum ELN ELR EMV ES JCS LLC MLR NDW NOWELE NQ NYT NYTBR PBA PMLA RES RQ SAB SB SEL ShJB
Cahiers Elisab´ethains Computers and the Humanities English Language Notes English Literary Renaissance English Madrigal Verse: see Fellowes et al., English Studies Jacobean and Caroline Stage: see Bentley – Literary and Linguistic Computing Modern Language Review The Nondramatic Works of John Ford: see Stock et al., North-Western European Language Evolution Notes and Queries New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Proceedings of the British Academy Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Review of English Studies Renaissance Quarterly Shakespeare Association Bulletin Studies in Bibliography Studies in English Literature, – Shakespeare Jahrbuch xxiv
List of abbreviations and note on references ShN ShQ ShS ShStud SP TxC TLS TNSS WSB
The Shakespeare Electronic Conference: www.shaksper.net Shakespeare Newsletter, The Shakespeare Quarterly Shakespeare Survey Shakespeare Studies Studies in Philology William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion: see Wells et al., Times Literary Supplement Transactions of the New Shakspere Society World Shakespeare Bibliography: see Harner .
Ado Ant. AWW AYLI Cor. Cym. Err. Ham. H H H H H H H JC John LLL Lear Luc. Mac. MM MND MV Oth.
Much Ado About Nothing Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It Coriolanus Cymbeline The Comedy of Errors Hamlet The First Part of King Henry the Fourth The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth King Henry the Fifth The First Part of King Henry the Sixth The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth King Henry the Eighth Julius Caesar King John Love’s Labour’s Lost King Lear The Rape of Lucrece Macbeth Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice Othello
xxv
xxvi Per. PP R R Rom. Shr. Son. STM Temp. TGV Tim. Tit. TN TNK Tro. Ven. Wiv. WT
List of abbreviations and note on references Pericles The Passionate Pilgrim King Richard the Second King Richard the Third Romeo and Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Sonnets Sir Thomas More The Tempest The Two Gentlemen of Verona Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Twelfth Night The Two Noble Kinsmen Troilus and Cressida Venus and Adonis The Merry Wives of Windsor The Winter’s Tale .
BH BJ CBS FCN FE FM FMI GM HT JF LC LL LM LS LT
The Broken Heart ‘On the best of English Poets, Ben: Jonson, Deceased’ (NDW, pp. –) Christes Bloodie Sweat The Fancies, Chaste and Noble A Funerall Elegye In Memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter Fames Memoriall The Fair Maid of the Inn (with Massinger and Webster) The Golden Meane Honor Triumphant ‘To the Memory of the late Excellent Poet John Fletcher’ (Vickers , pp. –) The Laws of Candy A Line of Life The Lover’s Melancholy Love’s Sacrifice The Lady’s Trial
List of abbreviations and note on references PW Q SD SG TO TPW WA WE
Perkin Warbeck The Queen The Sun’s Darling (with Dekker) The Spanish Gypsy (with Dekker) ‘A Memoriall, offered to that man of virtue, Sir Thomas Overburie’ (NDW, pp. –) ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Welsh Ambassador (with Dekker) The Witch of Edmonton (with Dekker and Rowley)
xxvii
Gary Taylor finds a poem
On November purchasers of the Sunday Times found their breakfast reading enlivened by a challenging question: ‘Is this by Shakespeare?’. The work referred to was a poem printed on page of that issue, beginning like this: Shall I die? Shall I fly Lovers’ baits and deceits, sorrow breeding? Shall I tend? Shall I send? Shall I sue, and not rue my proceeding? In all duty her beauty Binds me her servant for ever. If she scorn, I mourn, I retire to despair, joying never.
How did this ‘discovery’ come about? In the words of Gary Taylor, to whom the ‘discovery’ was credited: ‘on the evening of Nov. ’ while ‘routinely checking references in the Bodleian Library, I came across an item I did not recognize’, and ‘asked for the manuscript to be fetched’. Next day, at first view, he was already convinced: I found the literary equivalent of Sleeping Beauty, a nameless poem awakening from the ancient sheets in which it had lain undisturbed for centuries, a poem without a critical history.
Within a week, a little week, ‘with the help and advice of my senior colleague’ on the Oxford Shakespeare project, Stanley Wells, Taylor ‘had subjected the poem to every accepted test of authenticity; the results were all positive and we could think of nothing else to check’ (Taylor a, p. ). Once the poem had been published on both sides of the Atlantic, Taylor claimed, ‘public reaction to the discovery has been generous and enthusiastic; I have been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of curiosity.
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
Academic reaction to the poem has been mixed’ (p. ). ‘Mixed’ is a nice way of putting it, for apart from Stanley Wells’s loyal advocacy, it is a remarkable fact that no other scholar has endorsed Taylor’s claim. The public, led by journalists keen on a story, may have been ‘generous and enthusiastic’, but scholars who have spent many years working on Shakespeare and Elizabethan literature have been uniformly dismissive. To them it is not so much a Sleeping Beauty as the frog that did not turn into a prince. The case that Taylor made was based on external and internal evidence. The external evidence consisted solely of the fact that the unknown scribe who compiled the manuscript-miscellany known as Rawlinson poet. MS. , having copied out the poem, subscribed it ‘William Shakespeare’. Taylor mentioned several scholars known to have inspected the manuscript which contains this poem – E. K. Chambers, the Oxford editors of Ben Jonson (C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson), Falconer Madan, who catalogued it, and Margaret Crum, who included it in her Index of the Bodleian’s manuscript poetry, and there were surely many others who looked at it – but Taylor was the first to take seriously its ascription to Shakespeare. Although he knew nothing about the scribe, Taylor proclaimed his belief that the copyist could have had ‘no motive for lying about the authorship of a poem’, and claimed that ‘his other attributions [in this miscellany] are reliable’. But, as any reader can see, the question of the scribe’s honesty is irrelevant: all that is at stake is his knowledge, and that seems to have been not infallible, to judge from the dubious or demonstrably wrong attributions found elsewhere in this collection. In any case, manuscript verse anthologies are in one respect like autograph albums today: to have the signature of someone really famous increases the collection’s kudos, and its exchange value. Taylor recognized this point as it applies to plays, commenting that all the works excluded from the First Folio () ‘were first attributed to Shakespeare early in the seventeenth century, when his reputation created incentives to dishonesty, and before the Folio itself ended the market for such fraudulence by providing the public with a reliable dramatic canon’. Surely the same considerations apply to manuscript material. Donald Foster once disclosed that he had found the initials ‘W. S.’ subscribed to over a hundred poems in Jacobean and Caroline verse-miscellanies. Is it mere coincidence that these are Shakespeare’s initials? When Taylor penned this assertion of the Rawlinson scribe’s reliability, he was sure that no other copy of the poem survived, either ‘in the major manuscript collections at the British Library’ or six
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
other libraries, including Yale. But, by one of those coincidences so frequent once a supposedly unique artefact has been identified, within a few weeks a second copy of the poem had been located in the Beinecke rare books collection at Yale, having long been listed in their annotated copy of Margaret Crum’s Index. This time we know quite a bit about the scribe who compiled the Yale miscellany, a precocious teenager called Tobias Alston (–c. ), who had connections with Cambridge poets in the s. It is significant that his text, which differs in over twenty readings from the Rawlinson one, is not ascribed to Shakespeare. A careful scholar’s provisional conclusion would be that an attribution by one unknown scribe, probably writing in the late s, has no claim to be considered reliable external evidence. Gary Taylor, however, at his first interviews with journalists from the New York Times, within a week of finding it, categorically declared: ‘this poem belongs to Shakespeare’s canon and, unless somebody can dislodge it, it will stay there’. Talking to the Sunday Times at the same time, he recorded that as soon as he had ‘finished copying the poem down . . . I felt it in my guts that it was Shakespeare, but it is very easy to talk yourself into such things, so I started running around like a nut trying to prove that I was wrong. Now the onus is on people to prove that it isn’t Shakespeare.’ In his own more studied writings Taylor was just as categorical, asserting that ‘the poem must be regarded as Shakespeare’s until proved otherwise’; and again, ‘unless this document’s attribution can be disproved, this poem must be included in any edition of Shakespeare’s works that claims to be “complete” ’ (Taylor a, p. ). The best answer to such absolute assertiveness is to recall the sober restatement of some fundamental principles in authorship studies made by M. W. A. Smith, a leading scholar in the use of statistics to determine authorship, the most important of which are: . The onus of proof lies entirely with the person making the ascription. . The argument for adding something to an author’s canon has to be vastly more stringent than for keeping it there. . If doubt persists, an anonymous work must remain anonymous. . Avoidance of a false attribution is far more important than failing to recognise a correct one.
The internal evidence – using ‘every accepted test of authenticity’, Taylor claimed – consists merely of a series of verbal parallels that Taylor found, within a few weeks’ work on concordances, between the poem and Shakespeare. Or, as he put it, in a mixture of assertion and speculation,
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
‘Its vocabulary, imagery, style – everything scholarly jargon lumps together as internal evidence – are at least compatible with Shakespeare’s authorship, and, if one gives them the most weight they will bear, they suggest that it could hardly have been written by any other known poet’ (Taylor a, p. ). Well, you may call these categories ‘scholarly jargon’ if you are writing in a non-scholarly journal, such as the New York Times Book Review, but you had better be sure you master them when you write for scholars. When Taylor rewrote this article for the much more scholarly Times Literary Supplement a few days later, he revised the second half of that sentence, now claiming that the internal evidence is ‘at most independently suggestive’ that the poem could have been written by no one else (b, p. ). Gone is the phrase describing his own method – ‘if one gives them the most weight that they will bear’ – but even the ‘more interesting verbal parallels’ adduced in both versions of the article applied more weight than the evidence bore out, as several well-informed scholars soon complained. Taylor’s internal evidence failed to persuade at least eight experienced scholars who wrote in the TLS, New York Times, and elsewhere. I shall pick out from this debate the issues most pertinent to the methodology of authorship studies. The initial, and most basic issue concerns the text itself, as a poem on the page. The first printed versions, in the Sunday Times and the TLS, reproduced the Rawlinson text, as modernized by Taylor, following him in seeing it as consisting of nine ten-line stanzas. Both newspaper versions set the short third and sixth lines of each stanza full out at the right hand margin, at least leaving open the possibility that they formed part of lines and . However, in Taylor’s own text, as printed in the Oxford Complete Works (, p. ), these part-lines are firmly set in the middle of the page, as if they formed distinct units of verse. An examination of the manuscript shows that the scribe transcribed the poem within two ruled lines, occupying just over half of the page, and added ornamental arabesques inside the left margin on the first page, so reducing the available space still further. He decided to divide the long second and fourth lines of each stanza after the internal rhyme, and did so consistently. The sixth line in the stanza, which has no internal rhyme, he set full out to the left margin in the first three stanzas (in the following transcript lines , , ), but neglected to do so in the fourth verse
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
(line ), an oversight which forced him to divide the line at the word ‘us’. He remembered to observe his previous layout in the remaining five stanzas (lines , , , , ). As for the concluding line, he divided it in the first four stanzas (lines , , , ), but changed the layout for the remaining five, setting the line full out left, as he had done with the sixth line (lines , , , , ). Such inconsistencies within his own system suggest that the line-division reflects scribal practice rather than authorial composition. That such variations were often made by scribes is shown, appropriately enough, by Tobias Alston, compiler of the Yale miscellany, who ‘treats each stanza as consisting of only four (long) lines’, as Taylor recorded (TxC, p. ). In the same breath Taylor added that the Bodleian copyist ‘generally divides each stanza into ten (mostly short) lines. (For exact details see the Lineation Notes.)’ Whoever tracks down this appendix (TxC, p. ) will find that it records what I have pointed out, the fact that four of the poem’s nine stanzas divide the final line, so making – on Taylor’s logic – eleven-line stanzas, an obvious absurdity. When the late Jeremy Maule, an outstanding palaeographic scholar, wrote a joint letter (with Erica Sheen) to the TLS pointing out the poem’s affinity with song-lyrics, they ‘treat[ed] the poem as composed of eight-line stanzas’. This conclusion can be strengthened by examining the grammar and syntax of the second and fourth lines, which in each case form a semantic unit, having no innate reason to be divided. Both points suggest that the poem more correctly consists of nine eight-line stanzas. Its proper form is represented by this layout: Shall I die? Shall I fly Lovers’ baits and deceits, sorrow breeding? Shall I tend? Shall I send? Shall I sue, and not rue my proceeding? In all duty her beauty Binds me her servant for ever. If she scorn, I mourn, I retire to despair, joying never.
The difference is not negligible. Taylor’s arrangement gives us a ten-line stanza of which six lines have an internal rhyme, but only four lines rhyme at the line-ending (‘breeding/proceeding’, ‘ever/never’). The rhymescheme, then, would be notated abcdecfghg, giving a highly unusual predominance of five unrhymed lines (bdefh), and the syllable-count would be (later stanzas, as we will see, have difficulty
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
keeping to this measure). With my corrected arrangement we have an eight-line stanza, with four rhymed, four un-rhymed lines, giving the rhyme-scheme abcbdefe, and a syllable-count of . The first arrangement is unsymmetrical and awkward; the second falls tidily into two groups of four lines. The study of stanza-patterns in English Renaissance poetry is in its infancy, with a few honourable exceptions. William Ringler, in his excellent edition of Sidney’s poetry, listed all the verse forms that Sidney used, from which we can see that the poet preferred eight-line to ten-line stanzas, and that in both forms he made every line rhyme (the preferred schemes beginning abab, then permutating bcbcdd, bcdcdd, etc.). David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen, in their ground-breaking anthology of English Renaissance poetry, include an ‘Index of Metrical and Stanzaic Forms’, in which eight-line stanzas out-number ten-line ones by a total of to ; here again, with one exception (the second line of a refrain repeated through six verses) every line forms part of a rhyme-scheme. Similarly, the detailed survey carried out in a recent and pioneering dissertation by M. A. Absi, which deserves to be published, suggests that in the period to eight-line stanzas were much more common than those of ten lines. There is no reason to follow Taylor’s arrangement, and in the subsequent discussion I have restored the eight-line stanza form. It may be convenient at this point to have a complete text of the poem, transcribed from the Rawlinson MS. in which it appears, with oblique strokes marking the line divisions:
Shall I dye, shall I flye lovers baits, and deceipts / sorrow breeding Shall I tend shall I send shall I shewe, and not rue / my proceeding In all duty her beawty Binds me her servant for ever If she scorne I mourne I retire, to despaire / Ioying never. Yet I must, vent my lust and explaine, inward paine / by my loue breeding If she smiles, she exiles all my moane, if she frowne / all my hopes deceaving Suspitious doubt, oh keepe out For thou art my tormentor
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
Fly away, pack away I will loue for hope / bids me venter T’were abuse to accuse my faire loue, ere I prove / her affection therefore try her reply gives thee Ioy or annoy / or affliction Yet how ere, I will beare Her pleasure with patience for beawty sure wit not seeme to blot, her deserts wronging him, / doth her duty. [] In a dreame it did seeme but alas dreames doe passe / as doe shaddowes I did walke, I did talke with my loue, with my dove / through faire meadows Still we past till at last we sate to repose vs / for or pleasure being set lips mett armes twin’d & did bind / my hearts treasure Gentle wind sport did find wantonly to make fly / her gold tresses As they shooke, I did looke but her faire, did impaire / all my senses As amaz’d I gaz’d On more then a mortall complection then that loue, can prove Such force in beawties inflection Next her haire forehead faire Smooth and high next doth lye / without wrinckle Her faire browes vnder those starlike eyes win loues prize / when they twinckle In her cheekes, whoe seekes Shall find there displaid beawties banner Oh admiring, desiring breeds as I looke still vpon her Thin lips red, fancies fed with all sweets when he meets / and is granted
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
There to trade, and is made happy sure, to endure / still vndaunted Pretty chinne, doth winne Of all thats cald comendations Fairest neck, noe speck All her parts meritt high admirac˜ons A pretty bare, past compare parts those plotts (which besots) / still asunder It is meet, nought but sweet should come nere, that soe rare / tis a wonder Noe mishap, noe scape Inferior to natures perfection noe blot, noe spot Shees beawties queene in election Whilst I dream’t, I exempt for all care seem’d to share / pleasures in plenty but awake care take for I find to my mind / pleasures scanty Therefore I will trie to compasse my hearts cheife contenting To delay, some saye In such a case causeth repenting William Shakespeare
Of the poem’s several curious features we note first its lack of thematic unity. The first three stanzas develop the idea of a conventional Petrarchan lover agonizing over whether to declare his love, and risk rejection, or to suffer on in silence. The remaining six stanzas, however, combine a dream-vision with a blazon, the catalogue of a woman’s beauty that conventionally moved from head to toe, or reversed, itemizing her bodily charms in sequence. Each part is typical of many poems of the period, but it was not a good idea to put them together. Muriel Bradbrook caustically described the ‘incongruity of the topoi’ in the two halves: ‘Medieval cooks would have termed it a cockatrice, made by sewing half a capon to half a sucking pig’. The opening three stanzas, as Peter Beal pointed out, form a self-contained unit, and could have been used as a song in a Jacobean or Caroline play, which might explain how Shakespeare’s name got attached to it. But the mixture of the two genres is so clumsy that one cannot imagine Shakespeare perpetrating it at any stage of his career. Whoever reads the narrative poems that he had written by the
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
mid-s (the date that Taylor wishes to give the poem) will find two wonderfully unified works, derived from very brief historical sources, which boldly incorporate major ‘digressions’(such as the tapestry in The Rape of Lucrece depicting the siege of Troy), showing the young poet’s confidence that he could sustain the narrative line without any loss of unity. We have no instance of him leaving any work in this broken-backed state. The second odd feature of ‘Shall I die?’ is its rhyme-scheme. In each eight-line stanza six of the lines contain an internal rhyme, two of which (the second and fourth in each stanza) also rhyme at the ending, with a double or ‘feminine’ rhyme: ‘breeding’ / ‘proceeding’. The two lines lacking an internal rhyme (the sixth and eighth) also end with a feminine rhyme: ‘ever’ / ‘never’. In other words, rhymes can occur every three syllables, or even every two – ‘being set lipps mett’ () – unless we need to make ‘lipps’ disyllabic, for metrical reasons. Of the words in this poem, are rhyme-words, which must be some kind of record – and certainly far exceeds any such ratio in authentic Shakespearian lyrics. Unfortunately, the strain of finding so many rhymes left the poet no other resource than to repeat himself: ‘breeding’/‘proceeding’ in the first stanza is echoed by ‘breeding’/‘deceiving’ in the second (the latter one of several poor rhymes to which critics have objected); line reads ‘Fly away, pack away’, a tautology rather than a rhyme. The self-imposed need to echo rhymes at such a short interval has the more damaging effect of regularly imposing heavy pauses, which break up the line: I did walke, I did talke with my loue, with my dove through fair meadows (–)
There to trade, and is made happy sure, to endure still undaunted ( –)
Our anonymous poet seems to revel in oblique association, analogy, and extremely compressed statement, creating groups of words which are isolated into little clusters by the brevity of the line-length, by the divisive effect of the frequent internal rhymes, and by the heavily accented metre. The verse seems to move in fits and starts, an effect perhaps designed to give the singer of a lute-song time to take breath while the lutenist ornamented the cadences at each point. Whatever the reason for this peculiar combination of rhyme and metre, the strain of finding words of one or two syllables for the needed rhyme also forces the poet to rely on simple, not to say banal, epithets:
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem Next her haire forehead faire Smooth and high next doth lye without wrinckle Her faire browes under those . . . ( –)
and so on. Thomas Pendleton, firmly rejecting its ascription to Shakespeare, found it ‘incredible that the largest poetic vocabulary in the language produced “pretty chin” in line and then “pretty bare” in line , much less the series “fair love” (), “fair meadows” (), “forehead fair” (), “fair brows” (), and “Fairest neck” (), not to mention “her fair” ()’. Sharing his disbelief, I would point out that the only comparable passage in Shakespeare having so many repetitions of the word ‘fair’ occurs in Troilus and Cressida, in the scene where Pandarus visits Paris, Helen, and their entourage: Pandarus. Fair be to you, my lord, and to all this fair company! fair desires, in all fair measure, fairly guide them! Especially to you, fair queen, fair thoughts be to your fair pillow! Helen. Dear Lord, you are full of fair words. Pandarus. You speak your fair pleasure, sweet queen. Fair prince, here is good broken music. Paris. You have broke it, cousin; and by my life you shall make it whole again – you shall piece it out with a piece of your performance. (..–)
But here the laboured puns and mindless repetitions simultaneously evoke this decadent milieu and satirize it. The poet of ‘Shall I die?’ is beyond, or below parody, simply unaware of his own poverty of imagination. Amazed at the highly demanding rhyme-scheme, readers will also have noticed the unusual metre, doggedly carried through over a far longer stretch of verse than anything we can recall in Shakespeare’s authentic work. Defining the metre, however, is more difficult than it seems. Some readers think it to be anapestic, but others find trochaics in the sixth and eighth lines of each stanza. Donald Foster confidently pronounced that ‘ “Shall I die?” is written in continuous anapests, a form almost never used by Shakespeare. So far as I am aware, Shakespeare never wrote five anapests in a row’, and this metre ‘is rarely found in English literature prior to ’. One may agree about the rarity of Shakespeare’s use of this metre, but is it really anapestic? George T. Wright, a specialist in English metrics, expressed surprise that the controversy over the poem’s authorship had largely ignored its poetic form and especially its metre, since ‘it is exactly the odd meter and stanzaic form that have led many readers to think it eccentric and un-Shakespearean.
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
None of Shakespeare’s other poems or songs makes use of such intricate internal rhymes or requires the syntax to perform such acrobatic leaps to prepare for the next rhyme.’ The metre may seem to be anapestic, Wright declared, but it is actually cast in a form that Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries would have recognized as an English stress-equivalent of the Latin cretic measure. For the Romans a cretic measure (sometimes called an amphimacer) scanned – – and was understood as having first and third syllables of equal length and force. But in English, where quantitative measures appear artificial and implausible, the conversion to accentual stress means that the first and third syllables can scarcely remain equal in strength and still occupy the same foot.
Some passages in the poem ‘maintain an approximate equality of stress between the major syllables of each foot’, but normally ‘the strongest syllable in almost every foot is the third’: \ × / \ ×/ Shall I die? | Shall I fly \ × / \ × / × \ × / Lovers’ baits | and deceits, | sorrow breeding? \ ×/ \ ×/ Shall I tend? | Shall I send? \ × / \ ×/ × \ ×/ Shall I sue, | and not rue | my proceeding?
‘The rhythm is essentially dipodic; that is, we have a double foot in which the first half is marked by a secondary accent and the second by a primary one’ (p. ). In ‘sorrow breeding’, for instance, ‘the second stressed syllable is stronger than the first’, being followed by an unstressed syllable. ‘Thus the poem’s meter is strongly accentual. We are invited to hear the \ x / pattern again and again, and wherever the strong syllable (/) is not followed by an unstressed syllable, it will be held longer. The characteristic foot of the meter is \ x / (x)’ (p. ). Yet, having established the poem’s ‘base meter’ as cretic, Wright spent much of his short essay documenting the poet’s departures from it. Some feet where we expect to find three syllables turn out to have only two: \ × / \ / Pretty chin | doth win () \ / \ / No blot | no spot ()
At other times the short lines ‘contain extra syllables, which look like segments of truncated feet’, such as these lines in the second stanza:
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem / \ × / × by | my love breeding () \ ×/ × × / all my | hopes deceiving ()
Wright admitted that his ‘assignment of stresses [here] may seem rather implausible’, but his difficulties in finding a regular metrical pattern derive, rather, from the poet’s difficulties in co-ordinating his rhymescheme with his metre. Thus, in the two longer lines which conclude each stanza (lines , ; , , etc.) there are so many truncated feet that Wright could only count two of the eighteen (lines and in my stanza arrangement) as complete. The remaining sixteen lines all lack at least one and sometimes two initial syllables, and line lacks a third foot altogether: \ × / \ × / × For thou art | my tormentor
Of the several instances of one syllable missing we may cite: × / \ × / \ × / × Shall find | there displayed | beauty’s banner () × / × × / \ × / \ Infe|rior to na|ture’s perfection ()
As examples of two syllables missing: / \ × / \ ×/ × Binds | me her ser|vant forever () / \ × / \ ×/ × She’s | beauty’s queen | in election ()
If the dual demands of rhyme and metre forced the poet to leave many verse feet simply incomplete, another sign of him not being fully in control of his medium is the way the metre forces an unnatural stress in some places, such as the word ‘will’ in line : \ × / ×/ \ × / × I will | love, for hope | bids me venter.
Wright found that emphasis ‘comfortable’: to me it seems strained, as does the word ‘such’ in line : / \ × / \ × / × Such | force in beau|ty’s inflection.
In both cases, I feel, the strong stress diminishes that on the word following, which is semantically more important: ‘love’, and ‘force’. Still more
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
unnatural is the stress forced on line by the exigencies of metre and rhyme: \ × / \ × / \ × / × Wantonly | to make fly | her gold tresses.
As Wright kindly put it, ‘most readers, if left to their own devices and free from any metrical pressure, would be inclined to stress “want-” more strongly than “-ly”, “make” more strongly than “to”, and “gold” more strongly than “her” ’ (p. ). But even his tolerance of the poem’s irregularities and unnatural emphases could find no defence for line : \ × / \ × / \ × / × We sat to | repose us | for our pleasure
This is truly not ‘one of the high metrical moments of the poem’ – but, we might ask, are there any such? Readers who have digested these unusual features of ‘Shall I die?’ – its awkward union of a Petrarchan dilemma-poem with a dream-vision and blazon; its unusually (perhaps uniquely) high proportion of rhyming words ( out of , or percent); and its ambitious but flawed use of a relatively rare metre – may already be doubtful whether all, or indeed any of these features can be fostered on to Shakespeare. But there is an even more unusual feature, which Robin Robbins was the first to notice, the poem’s ‘one outstanding characteristic, the complete absence of the definite article’. Thomas A. Pendleton independently noted that the word the never occurs in ‘Shall I die?’, and spelled out the implications of this strange avoidance. Once we know that ‘the is, far and away, the single most common word in Shakespeare’, appearing over , times in his work, ‘or just about once in every thirty words’, and that ‘the probability of its not appearing in opportunities is . – a little better than one in two million’ (Pendleton , p. ), then we may really wonder whether Shakespeare would indulge in such word-games. (A modern writer who did make such strange avoidances was the French novelist Georges Perec, who revived an obscure classical device known as a lipogram, in which one or more letters of the alphabet are avoided, and wrote La Disparition (), deliberately abstaining from using the letter e, the commonest of the French alphabet.) The self-imposed ban on using the in this poem was obviously a deliberate device, and ‘seems a subtler and even more idiosyncratic discipline than the odd meter and continual rhymes’, demonstrating, as Pendleton puts it, that ‘the poem is an even more bizarre performance than it seems’ (p. ).
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
The question readers must now be asking is, what positive evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship could Gary Taylor cite to set against these four major oddities? His claims were resolutely non-aesthetic – that is, they tried to avoid all notion of the poem’s value. But the question of a poem or play’s quality will inevitably arise whenever anonymous works are ascribed to Shakespeare. We have so much work by him, stretching over an unusually long writing career, that we can describe a general level of competence below which he never sank. His vices in the early phase, such as they are, are those of linguistic effusiveness, an over-elaboration of language that had yet to find its expressive economy. But so many readers have judged this poem to be banal, repetitive, full of clich´es, unredeemed by invention or originality, that they cannot imagine Shakespeare to have written it. Taylor attempted to outlaw from the outset all discussions of the poem’s quality: Anyone is entitled to an opinion of the poem’s merit. But judgments of quality cannot be made the primary, or even the secondary basis of attributions of authorship; if they were, much of Shakespeare’s work would be relegated to the foot of the page (as indeed it was, by Alexander Pope in his edition of Shakespeare). (Taylor a, p. ; b, p. )
That is another characteristic piece of overstatement. It would be interesting to know, if Taylor were to apply his own ‘judgments of quality’, just how much of Shakespeare’s work he would relegate to the foot of the page. But Taylor grossly exaggerated the number of such relegations performed by Pope. In any case, we must reply, judgment of quality can indeed form a legitimate element in authorship discussions, whether at a secondary or lower level. It would be possible to discover music of such conventionality or banality written during Beethoven’s lifetime that musicologists would simply reject out of hand the chances of his having written it, without bothering to submit it to detailed analysis. ‘Shall I die?’ comes into the same category. Despite his categorical denial of their relevance, Taylor evidently applied some aesthetic standards to ‘Shall I die?’, as we can see from the reasoning by which he pronounced it to be an early work of Shakespeare’s: Most readers would, I trust, immediately agree that if Shakespeare wrote the poem at all, he must have written it fairly early in his career. Those to whom I have shown the poem have reacted instinctively in this way; I did myself.
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
But hadn’t Taylor told a journalist a few weeks earlier that, on first view, ‘I felt it in my guts that it was Shakespeare’? Now, however, addressing a different audience, he expressed severe reservations about its quality: The poem – in its subject-matter, tone, obsessive rhyming, heavy verbal symmetries and the conventionality of much of its imagery, repetition of certain words and relative lightness of tone – bears every stylistic hallmark of belonging to the th century . . . Few people would be willing to credit the attribution if it forced us to place the poem alongside The Tempest, or Antony and Cleopatra, or even Twelfth Night. (Taylor a, p. ; b, p. )
In other words, this is a bad poem, but Shakespeare wrote it when he was a young man. Anyone who takes authorship studies seriously must protest at Taylor’s method here, arbitrarily giving the poem an early date in Shakespeare’s career because it is ‘too weak’ to be a work of his maturity. Where dates are ascribed to anonymous poems or plays it must be on the basis of some definite linguistic evidence, not on such a subjective judgment of quality – a type of judgment, moreover, which could easily find the poem ‘too weak’ to be Shakespeare’s at all. Taylor attempted to legitimize this qualitative judgment with the assertion that the poem ‘bears every stylistic hallmark of belonging to the th century’, but this is an empty claim, given the impossibility of finding any stylistic criterion which could distinguish a work written before from one written after that date. In these articles for the New York Times and the TLS Taylor was equally disparaging about its rhymes, which make the poem a technical exercise: a kind of verbal obstacle-course in which one of every three syllables is a rhyme . . . Undoubtedly, the effort to rhyme in places distorts the syntax and weakens the sense. But Shakespeare’s rhymed poetry is often awkward: much of the rhyme in the plays was once dismissed as spurious, because it is awkward.
Poor Shakespeare, writing ‘Shall I die?’ as ‘a young poet, who was never at his best (as Campion and Jonson were) in rhyme, engaged in a technical exercise . . . ’ (Taylor a, p. ; b, p. ), but evidently unable to master it. It is hard to know whether Taylor’s condescending dismissal of large areas of Shakespeare’s work derived from a considered evaluation (his opinion of Shakespeare elsewhere shows traces of Neo-Classical dismissiveness), or whether it was just a piece of special pleading designed to bolster his ascription of this clumsy and pleonastic poem to Shakespeare. Either way, we can dismiss it as not worth serious discussion, apart from correcting another historical blunder: earlier
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
critics had problems with Shakespeare’s rhyme not because it seemed ‘awkward’ to them (another modern, aesthetic judgment) but because they did not understand the conventions by which he used it. After these attempts to disqualify aesthetic evaluation, Taylor presented his evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship, which mostly consisted of a list of words and phrases that occur in ‘Shall I die?’ and somewhere, in some form, in Shakespeare’s works. In listing these parallels Taylor claimed to be dealing with ‘quantifiable . . . aspects of Shakespeare’s style’, and he certainly quantified his findings, announcing that ‘the Shakespeare canon supplies parallels, here quoted, for phrases in the poem; the Spenser canon, only parallels for phrases . . . None of the Spenser parallels is as striking as the best Shakespearean ones’ (a, p. ; b, p. ). But of course, merely adding up the number of parallels you claim, or asserting that ‘ per cent’ are from works written before , is not what scholars mean when they talk of ‘quantifiable’ elements in an author’s style, which involves such things as counting how many times he uses the word of per , lines of verse, say, or in what ratio he uses the variant forms while and whiles. Not having used a quantifiable approach, Taylor once again attempted to disqualify others: The cumulative force of the verbal similarities between the poem and Shakespeare’s acknowledged works could only be weakened by the identification of another poet whose works provided more and better parallels; scepticism may busy itself surveying the works of all possible candidates in the half-century before . But the example of Spenser . . . suggests that any such search is likely to be fruitless. (a, pp. –; b, p. )
On the basis of only a few weeks’ research, as he himself recorded, Taylor in effect challenged scholars to find any other candidate. The haste with which he worked had to do with the proof-reading deadline for the Oxford Complete Works, as he candidly told a journalist: ‘ “We wanted to get it into next year’s edition if we could satisfy ourselves that it was genuine”, he said. “We could not think of any more checks to run. We are satisfied that the poem is by Shakespeare.” ’ When Taylor claimed that this piece will stay in Shakespeare’s canon until someone disproves the ascription, he may have been confusing that canon with the Oxford Complete Works: but they are hardly the same thing. The sad fact is that, despite his confident assertions, Taylor’s argument was seriously flawed. The possibility he seemingly never considered
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
is that this poem merely recycles conventional expressions available to dozens of poets, dramatists, and prose-writers in the period to . Taylor offers us the option, ‘either Shakespeare or poet x, yet to be identified’, but that is a false option, or none at all. The poem’s author may be irrecoverable, because he wrote in the same conventional manner as dozens of his contemporaries. To think that he can, or ought to be, identified with the work of a known author, is an elementary error. Equally irrelevant is the argument Taylor used to account for the ‘facts’ that ‘Shall I die?’ contains seven words that are not found in Shakespeare – ‘explain, inflection, admiring (noun), desiring (noun), speck, scanty and contenting (noun)’ – and that Shakespeare ‘coins more new words than any poet of the period’. Both points may be true, but they in no way allow the deduction that ‘these neologisms therefore reinforce the poem’s claim to authenticity’ (a, p. ; b, p. ). There is a serious error of logic here, for all to see. Shakespeare’s vocabulary was certainly large, but many other writers in this period regularly coined new words, and their vocabularies are easily distinguished from Shakespeare’s, as my discussion of Ford’s (in chapter ) will show. Taylor’s ‘quantifiable’ stylistics rests on elementary errors of reasoning. Readers familiar with the language of English Renaissance literature who are encountering his claims for the first time may be surprised by Taylor’s list of words and phrases that supposedly link this poem indissolubly to the Shakespeare canon. (In the following selection I have altered only the line-references in accordance with the text of the poem given above.) binds me her servant: ‘bind me to your highness’ service’ ( Henry VI ..) joying never: ‘never joy’d’ ( Henry IV ..) vent my lust: ‘vent our love’ (Shrew ..); ‘Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage’ (Venus ) – smiles . . . frown: ‘smile . . . frown’ (Venus ); ‘smiles . . . frowning’ (Romeo ..); ‘smiles . . . frown’ ( Henry VI ..) if she frown: ‘If she do frown’ (Two Gentlemen ..; of his beloved) my hopes deceiving: ‘beguiled my hopes’ (Two Gentlemen ..); ‘falsify men’s hopes’ ( Henry IV ..) keep out: three times in Shakespeare Fly away: (Titus ..; Henry VI ..; Twelfth Night .., twice; Winter’s Tale ..) fair love: (Richard III ..; Lucrece ; L.L.L. ..; Dream ..)
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
– bear . . . with patience: (Romeo ..; Caesar ..; Pericles ..) – beauty . . . blot: ‘blots my beauty’ (Shrew ..); ‘Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame’ (Venus ) doth her duty: ‘do my duty’ (Richard III ..) But alas: (Merchant .., ..; Troilus ..; Othello ..; Cymbeline .., with ‘dream’ in preceding and following line; Kinsmen .., ..) dreams . . . shadows: ‘Swift as a shadow, short as any dream’ (Dream ..; of love); ‘poor shadow . . . A dream’ (Richard III .., ; of the Queen) love . . . dove: ‘Pronounce but “love” and “dove”’ (Romeo ..; characterizing a lover) my dove: (Dream ..; Hamlet ..) repose us: ( Henry VI ..; Coriolanus ..) Being set, lips met: ‘Being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses’ (Venus ) Arms twined: ‘twining arms’ (Venus ); ‘twine / Mine arms about that body’ (Coriolanus ..–) my heart’s treasure: ‘the treasure of thy heart’ ( Henry VI ..); ‘my soul’s treasure’ ( Henry VI ..); ‘this treasure in mine arms’ (Titus ..; of a person) gentle wind: ‘gentle wind’ (Venus ); ‘gentlest winds’ (Pericles ..) gold tresses: ‘golden tresses’ (Sonnet ) fair (as a noun, meaning ‘fairness, beauty’): eleven times in Shakespeare – forehead fair . . . and high: ‘high forehead’ (Romeo .., in a catalogue of a woman’s features); ‘fair forehead’ (Hamlet ..) without wrinkle: Shakespeare associates brows with wrinkles at Henry VI ..; Venus ; Sonnet ; John .., ..; Merchant ..; Lear .. fair brows: ‘fair ladies’ brows’ (Romeo ..); ‘fair brow’ (Sonnet ) Star-like: (Timon ..; Henry VIII ..) eyes: compared to stars at Lucrece ; Sonnet ; Venus –; Hamlet ..; Winter’s Tale .. – Star . . . eyes . . . twinkle . . . cheeks: ‘Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven . . . do entreat her eyes / To twinkle in their spheres till they return . . . The brightness of her cheek’ (Romeo ..–; of a beloved); ‘twinkling stars’ (Two Gentlemen ..) win love’s prize: ‘win the prize’ (Shrew ..)
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
– In her cheeks . . . beauty’s banner: ‘beauty’s ensign . . . in thy cheeks’ (Romeo ..–) – who seeks / Shall find: ‘who seeks . . . Shall never find’ (Antony ..–) lips red: lips are ‘red’ at Venus ; Sonnet ; As You ..; Twelfth Night .. all the world: [emendation by Taylor of the MS. reading all that’s cald ] times in Shakespeare high admirations: ‘top of admiration’ (Tempest ..) bare (as a noun, meaning ‘bareness; naked flesh’): Lover’s Complaint (in a catalogue of a beloved’s attractions) past compare: (Shrew ..; Romeo .., of a beloved’s physical attractions) parts . . . asunder: (Henry V Pro. ; in Henry V of ‘high, uprear`ed and abutting fronts’ naught but: times so rare: times pleasures in plenty: ‘Convey your pleasures in a spacious plenty’ (Macbeth ..) to my mind: (Hamlet ..) some say: times In such a case: (Romeo ..; Caesar ..; Antony ..; Coriolanus ..) Taylor conceded that These parallels vary widely in quality and importance. No one will suppose that Shakespeare is the only author to have called lips ‘red’ (); but it is worth knowing that he did use so conventional an adjective so often – and that three of the other four examples occur, as does this one, in the midst of a catalogue of physical attractions. (Spenser, by contrast, although he refers to lips fiftythree times, never calls them ‘red’.) Even the clich´es of the poem are clich´es Shakespeare frequently employed. (b, p. )
But that concession fails to address the experienced reader’s objection that the vast majority of the parallels that Taylor claimed are entirely undistinctive verbal collocations that occur over and over again in the literature of this period. The provision of electronic databases has grown considerably since , and the imagination truly boggles at the thought of how many instances could now be printed out in a few seconds of the collocations ‘fair love’, ‘fly away’, ‘gentle wind’, ‘all
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
the world’, or ‘some say’. Taylor solemnly informed his readers that in six places ‘Shakespeare associates brows with wrinkles’: he did not tell them how many other writers described this common attribute of foreheads. The hazards of using such commonplace verbal phrases as evidence for authorship has long been known to attribution scholars. The argument from parallel passages can be legitimately used, in combination with other approaches, and provided that certain precautions have been taken. But it can also be seriously misleading, since at least three possible explanations for such parallels can be given. As Muriel St Clare Byrne spelled them out in a classic essay, verbal parallels may reveal ‘(a) unsuspected identity of authorship, (b) plagiarism, either deliberate or unconscious, (c) coincidence’. Scholars citing verbal parallels hope to achieve the first of those goals, but all too often they only establish an instance of imitation or coincidence. As every scholar knows, within the short-lived and intensely focussed evolution of Elizabethan drama, some plays – Tamburlaine, The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, say – had a remarkable impact on actors and dramatists, and were frequently echoed, sometimes unknowingly, at other times by a deliberate allusion. If not imitation, many of the parallels cited in authorship studies turn out to be mere coincidences, an extremely common result given the widely shared poetic diction that is to be found in this, as in other periods. To overcome these errors, Byrne argued, it is necessary to choose parallels of high quality, which show a ‘parallelism of thought combined with some verbal parallelism’, and if enough such parallels can be supplied, the evidence may justify further investigation. More important, but much more difficult, in order to express ourselves as certain of attributions we must prove exhaustively that we cannot parallel words, images, and phrases as a body from other acknowledged plays of the period; in other words, the negative check must always be applied. (Byrne , p. )
The failure to observe these basic methodological principles, Byrne complained, had led several scholars astray, in particular H. Dugdale Sykes, who had claimed to identify Henry Chettle’s authorship of several plays on wholly inadequate grounds (pp. –). Byrne showed that allegedly individual words and metaphors in Chettle’s work were frequently found in Shakespeare, thus the so-called parallels were ‘either cancelled by the negative test’ or were so reduced in significance as to be ‘practically valueless’ (p. ).
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
An equally devastating conclusion was reached at much the same time by Arthur M. Sampley, reviewing attributions to George Peele that had been made by Sykes and J. M. Robertson. To counter their claims, Sampley assembled ‘a list of words and phrases which have been called characteristic of Peele’, and then checked their occurrences in the works of Shakespeare, Kyd, Marlowe, Spenser, Greene, Nashe, and the OED. Sampley found that words or phrases said to be characteristic of Peele were widely used in other Elizabethan texts: ‘sacred’ ( instances), ‘doom’ (), ‘policy’ (), ‘manly’ (), ‘sacrifice’ (), ‘daunt’ (), ‘entrail’ (), ‘massacre’ (), ‘meanwhile’ (), ‘empery’ (), ‘glistering’ (), ‘progeny’ (), ‘solemnize’ (), ‘ruthless’ (), ‘counterpoise’ (), ‘flatly’ (), ‘reproachful’ (), ‘suspect’ as a noun (), ‘youngling’ (), and ‘wreakful’ (). The claimants for Peele’s authorship had also cited a number of phrases which were easily shown to be commonplace: ‘trust me’ ( occurrences), ‘thrice-happy’ (), ‘for the nonce’ (), ‘kill . . . heart’ (), ‘sheep before wolves’ (), ‘work . . . woes’ (), ‘to arms’ (), ‘men of war’ (), ‘private . . . public’ (), ‘mourning weeds’ (), ‘suck . . . blood’ (), ‘in the cause’ (), ‘damned deed’ (), ‘suck . . . bane’ (), ‘now or never’ (), ‘short tale to make’ (), and ‘sink or swim’ (). In this way Sampley showed that ‘about ninety percent . . . of the words and phrases’ said to characterize Peele occur in the work of those contemporary writers whose vocabulary had been analysed, this in turn doubtless forming ‘only a small proportion of the actual instances of those words in Elizabethan literature’, most of which ‘probably occur twenty times as frequently’ as in his list (Sampley , pp. –). Sampley was certainly justified in expressing doubt concerning the validity of basing authorship claims solely, or largely, on such evidence (pp. , ). The essays by Byrne and Sampley demonstrating the weakness of the undisciplined use of parallels based on single words or short phrases were both published in the early s, and have often been cited in the literature on attribution studies since then. Whether Taylor knew of them or not, he had obviously given little thought to the possible weaknesses of his methodology. Those weaknesses were instantly exposed, however, in an essay by Robin Robbins, invited by the TLS editors to broach ‘the counter-arguments’ in the same issue in which Taylor’s claims appeared. Robbins had only a week or two to prepare a reply, but he was still able to show that many of the words or phrases for which Taylor had claimed a unique correlation between the anonymous poem and Shakespeare could be duplicated over and over in Spenser’s poetry, and also in the Elizabethan sonneteers. The phrase ‘all the world’ – an emendation
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
of the MS. reading, ‘Of all that’s cald’, which Taylor treated as part of the original poem – appears fifty-seven times in Spenser, ‘naught but’ occurs thirty-eight times, ‘some say’ four times, as do such common idioms as ‘keep out’, ‘pack away’, ‘fair love’, ‘win the prize’ (Robbins , p. ). In any case, we can add, such phrases are part of the diction of common life, that vast reservoir where no writer can claim proprietary rights. Despite Taylor’s confident assertions that the Spenser canon supplied far fewer parallels with ‘Shall I die?’, and ‘none . . . as striking as the best Shakespearean ones’, Robbins was able to show that in some instances Spenser is actually nearer the anonymous poet. In the phrase ‘joying never’ (), for instance, Robbins pointed out that ‘ “joying” occurs nowhere in Shakespeare, but six times in Spenser’. In the collocation ‘explain . . . pain / by my love’ (), the word ‘ “explain” does not occur in Shakespeare, but does in Faerie Queene ..., while “love” and “pain” occur within a line seven times in Spenser’. When Robbins considered more obviously poetic diction he showed that the language of ‘Shall I die?’ is conventional, not distinctive in any way. Spenser echoes ‘my heart’s treasure’ () twice, uses the idea of ‘fancy’s fed’ () at least six times, ‘beauty’s queen’ () six times, and has several parallels to ‘forehead fair’ (), ‘without wrinkle’ (), and the comparison of eyes to stars (). The sonneteers can be seen working with the same linguistic resources. Fair brows, with or without wrinkles, occur in Drayton’s Ideas Mirror and Daniel’s Delia; eyes are compared to stars at least six times in Delia, and form ‘a basic conceit’ of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. In Sidney’s sequence we find close parallels for ‘All my hopes deceiving’ (), ‘beauty . . . blot’ (–), ‘my dove’ (), ‘lips red . . . sweets’ (–: cf. ‘lips more sweet, more red’, Astrophil and Stella, .), and ‘so rare’ (). In Ideas Mirror we find exact parallels for ‘joying never’ (), ‘explain . . . pain by my love’ (), and ‘smiles . . . frown’ ( –), some of which are echoed in Delia. When we consider how little time Robin Robbins had to produce a counter-argument, it is impressive how many parallels he was able to adduce between ‘Shall I die?’ and other Elizabethan poems. One striking parallel that escaped him occurs in Spenser’s Amoretti, Sonnet , which begins with exactly the same dilemma on which ‘Shall I die?’ is constructed: Shall I then silent be or shall I speake? And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall: and if I silent be, my hart will breake, or chok`ed be with ouerflowing gall.
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
I shall return to this sonnet when discussing ‘Shall I die?’ as a Petrarchan poem, below. The faults in Taylor’s methodology must now be obvious. Robbins pointed out that Taylor’s ‘allegedly statistically persuasive evidence’ failed to take the elementary safeguards against the well-known phenomenon of two writers drawing on a common stock of language: In the absence of respectable tests of inconspicuous function-words, resort is had to individual occurrences and collocations of open-class words – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs – which as evidence are vulnerable in two respects: the conspicuously individual usage is precisely that most likely to strike and be used by an imitator, so that it must fail as a test between one inventive poet and his many derivative admirers; and such words are determined by context: a subject demands a particular vocabulary, love poetry tends to be written in the language of love. (Robbins , p. )
Both objections are unanswerable, although one might qualify the second, inasmuch as individuality is still noticeable within the same genre. If two lost sonnets turned up tomorrow, one written by Sidney, the other by Shakespeare, we should have no difficulty telling them apart, since their other sonnets constitute a large enough database to make comparison easy. The fact that ‘Shall I die?’ is only words long makes it virtually impossible to isolate any distinctive features. Still, we can agree with Robbins that the attempt to decide authorship on the basis of verbal parallels is in urgent need ‘of the negative check: that is, of hard proof that similar correspondences can be found nowhere else’ (p. ). This cogently argued essay was the first substantial reply to Taylor’s attribution, and was shortly followed by three dissentient letters in the New York Times Book Review for January , two of them from scholars who subsequently published longer critiques. Donald Foster reported that the texts in the Rawlinson MS. ‘are in most cases corrupt even by th-century standards. Whole lines are omitted, copied twice or thoroughly mangled’, while ‘at least half the attributions in this manuscript are doubtful’. Foster found Taylor’s internal evidence ‘unconvincing’, and he easily assembled a group of ‘far more striking’ parallels to the poem in the works of Thomas Carew. Foster posed the leading question, ‘Why should we trust an unlikely attribution made by an unreliable manuscript copied from an unknown source at least years after Shakespeare’s death?’ (p. ). Thomas A. Pendleton, in his letter, addressed the poem’s diction, citing six instances of its use of language for which
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
no parallel could be found in the , lines of Shakespeare’s works (p. ). These included the use of a word in a context having a meaning totally different from Shakespeare’s usage. Here Pendleton pithily demonstrated the need to move beyond Taylor’s methodologically na¨ıve list of single-word parallels, considering their full semantic value seen in contexts of use, a fundamental and long-established principle in linguistics. In a third letter Robert Giroux made a related point, dismissing the ‘verbal parallels’ as unconvincing, since they ignored the issue of quality, or at the very least, poetic competence: ‘It is not the mere recurrence of words that counts but how effectively the poet uses them in their contexts.’ As examples of non-Shakespearian usage Giroux cited ‘bad rhymes like “breeding/deceiving” in stanza two; . . . the repetition of “sweets/meets” and “meet/sweet” in stanzas seven and eight; the repetition of “not/blot” and “blot/spot” in stanzas three and eight, the solecism of “admirations” (“merit high admirations”) to force a rhyme in line when the singular would obviously be better; and the anticlimax and feebleness of the final lines to – all these elementary flaws are very unlike Shakespeare’ (p. ). Objections seemed to be accumulating thick and fast, and Taylor had committed himself to answering his critics by the end of the month. He responded to some of their objections, and in a follow-up article for the TLS he reduced the number of phrases for which he was claiming close parallels from to , sacrificing much of his weakest evidence, parallels involving single words. Serious attribution scholars were shocked at this concession. A properly thought-through ascription presents a hypothesis of authorship based on several kinds of evidence, which have been carefully weighed, alternative explanations having been investigated and rejected. If such ascriptions can be reduced by more than a half once they are contested, all the evidence falls under suspicion. Thomas Pendleton, in an important essay showing that the vocabulary of ‘Shall I die?’ differs semantically from Shakespeare in many instances, recalled that Taylor’s ‘list of parallels was the central evidence for the ascription’ to Shakespeare. Thus the fact that between December and January , Taylor could scale down his claims so dramatically, from to , showed ‘how slight this kind of evidence is’ (Pendleton , pp. –). Significantly, Pendleton could now instance parallels in Marlowe and Spenser for seven of these (p. n.). Having drastically reduced his total claims, Taylor still clung to the phrases for which, he claimed, having checked the concordances of eight English poets in that period, no parallel could be found, such
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
phrases as ‘Shall I fly?’, ‘sorrow breeding’, ‘past compare’, ‘if she frown’, ‘high admirations’, and so on. So, he concluded, we now know that the poem shares with the Shakespeare canon twenty-two phrases or images which are relatively rare [sic] in the literary language of the period. The more works we must ransack in order to find non-Shakespearean parallels for the remaining ‘rare’ items, the ‘rarer’ the items evidently become – and the greater the probability that Shakespeare wrote the poem. (Taylor , p. )
But Taylor here made a further basic methodological error. His new claim is a classic example of what has been called ‘ “enumerative inductivism” – the na¨ıve quest for confirming instances of one’s ideas, in the expectation that a certain number of such instances will, as it were, send a hypothesis over the top’. But since ‘the same data can be . . . held to support any number of quite different hypotheses’, it is only by using what Francis Bacon called ‘negative instances’, attempting to disconfirm a hypothesis, that any valid results can be reached. Taylor never seemed to grasp this point. In attempting to identify work of anonymous authorship one essential step is to place it in its historical context. Literary history can help us to establish when a particular poetic form came into use, such as the blankverse line, or the heroic couplet. It can also fix the period when individual genres were introduced: pastoral poetry, satire, or the ‘Character’, for instance. The correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement soon produced some valuable indications of the genre to which ‘Shall I die?’ belongs, and hence its likely date. Erica Sheen, building on Peter Beal’s suggestion that the poem ‘reads . . . very much like a song lyric’, pointed to numerous examples of Renaissance lyrics – they are all lutesongs, in fact – beginning with a lover posing a question in the form ‘Shall I . . . ?’. Sheen merely cited their first lines, but if we read them fully we will find several likenesses to Taylor’s pseudo-Shakespearian poem which will help us define its generic context. The earliest of the lute-songs included in the standard anthology of English madrigal verse is an anonymous lyric printed in John Dowland’s The Second Book of Songs and Ayres (). The first stanza reads Shall I sue? shall I seek for grace? Shall I pray? shall I prove? Shall I strive to a heavenly joy
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem With an earthly love? Shall I think that a bleeding heart Or a wounded eye, Or a sigh can ascend the clouds To attain so high?
This is exactly the same dilemma as expressed in ‘Shall I die?’, whether or not to declare one’s love. Here the poet answers his own question (the rhetorical figure hypophora) with a self-rebuke: ‘Silly wretch, forsake these dreams / Of a vaine desire’, since ‘Ladies’ eyes respect no moan / In a mean desert.’ The lady has the conventional Petrarchan attributes, being ‘Cruel’ and fair, and since she ‘will not . . . pity my grief / Therefore die I must’, the poem ending with repetitions of the word ‘die’, with its inescapable sous-entendre on the male orgasm. One poem in Philip Rosseter’s A Book of Ayres () places the crucial question in the second line: If she forsake me, I must die; Shall I tell her so? Alas, then straight she will reply: No, no, no, no, no.
(EMV, p. )
In most examples of the ‘Shall I?’ genre the poet’s questions are all fruitless, since he already knows that the lady will reject him. Some poems end with the poet resolving to ‘die’, some end with his appealing to the lady, others – such as ‘Shall I die?’ – conclude with him vowing to persevere – ‘I will trie’ (line ). The first of these options, it seems, was the most popular, one exemplary poem summing up the poet / singer’s dilemma: Shall I look to ease my grief ? No, my sight is lost with eyeing. Shall I speak and beg relief ? No, my voice is hoarse with crying. What remains but only dying?
This poem was set to music no less than three times: in Robert Jones’s Ultimum Vale (), in Alfonso Ferrabosco’s Ayres (), and in Henry Lichfild’s First Set of Madrigals () (EMV, pp. –, , ). Three of these ‘Shall I?’ poems end with an appeal to the beloved, as in John Dowland’s A Pilgrim’s Solace (): Shall I strive with words to move When deeds receive not due regard? Shall I speak and neither please Nor be freely heard?
(EMV, p. )
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem or in William Corkine’s Second Book of Ayres (): Shall I be with joys deceived? Can Love’s bands be sealed with kisses? (EMV, p. )
or again in Campion’s Third Booke (): Shall I come, sweet love, to thee When the evening beams are set? Shall I not excluded be? Will you find no feigned let? Let me not, for pity, more Tell the long hours at your door. (EMV, p. )
As late as John Altey was setting a variant of the ‘Shall I?’ form in his First Booke of Ayres (also displaying a debt to Donne, who was working in a quite different idiom): Shall I tell you whom I love? Hearken then awhile to me, And, if such a woman move As I now shall versify, Be assured ’tis she or none That I love, and love alone. (EMV, pp. –)
The dominant mode in this genre, however, remains what we might call the dilemma poem, the Catch- situation as expressed by a Jacobean lutenist: ‘if I speak, I risk losing her; if I remain silent, I shall die of frustration’. One poem in Jones’s Ultimum Vale reduces the whole problem to a single couplet: What if I sped where I least expected? What shall I say? Shall I lie? What if I missed where I most affected? What shall I do? Shall I die? (EMV, pp. –)
Like the author of ‘Shall I die?’, with whom he shares that phrase, this poet recognizes the danger of losing his love by declaring it: I speak, she hears, I touch, she fears; Herein appears her wit. Fa la. I catch, she flies, I hold, she cries, And still denies, and yet! Fa la.
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
The last of the three stanzas goes off at a slightly unrelated tangent, but otherwise all these lyrics show far more inventiveness, economy, musicality, and individuality than ‘Shall I die?’. Judgments of quality apart, it was perceptive of Sheen to identify ‘this little genre’ as having come into fashion ‘in the first two decades of the seventeenth century’, and she could point to several features which help to place Taylor’s ‘discovery’ within this genre: Several of the ‘Shall I . . . ?’ poems use internal rhyme; several conclude with the pun on dying; most position their ‘Shall I . . . ?’ questions in the first stanza, and most of those position them at the beginning of the first and third lines. Out of this, the Dowland song [‘Shall I sue?’] and ‘Shall I die?’ draw even more closely together because both of them underline this repetition with internal sound effects. And of course the very question with which the Dowland begins appears at the beginning of ‘Shall I die?’ (treating the poem as composed of eight-line stanzas).
As she concluded, the ‘Shall I die?’ genre is ‘an identifiable moment in the history of the Petrarchan convention’, datable to the time-span – (Sheen , p. ). Erica Sheen’s intuition that the ‘Shall I . . . ?’ formula was connected with Elizabethan / Jacobean song texts stimulated me to analyse the poems she cited, bringing out their shared inheritance of that Petrarchan dilemma, the dangers of speaking as against the impossibility of remaining silent. But Sheen ignored one important source, for the simple reason that it had not been included in the Fellowes collection, English Madrigal Verse. Thomas Morley’s Madrigals to five Voyces, Celected out of the best approved Italian Authors (London, ), figured in neither the original nor revised editions of that anthology, probably because it frankly declared its status as a translation, not an original creation. But Alfredo Obortello included it in his epoch-making study of the Italian madrigal in England, usefully appending the original Italian texts of Morley’s English arrangements. Two items in this collection which link up with ‘Shall I die?’ are settings from Alfonso Ferrabosco’s two books of madrigals for five voices (Venice, ), namely nos. (Sig. r iii ) and (Sig. r iv ). The first begins, rather obliquely: If silent, then griefe torments mee, If I speake, your patience moueth, Hating him that loueth, Your wrath preuents mee . . .
(Obortello , p. )
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
The remaining six lines describe how ‘sweet hope’ cheers the speaker/poet to wish that ‘these my lines’ may ‘work my joye, by your sweet reading’. The second song has no such fantasy of a fortunate outcome: I languish to complaine mee, With gastly griefe tormented, I stand a mazed, to see you discontented, Better I to hold my peace. And couertly to stop my breth, Then cause my sorrows to increase, and worke my death. ( p. )
That desperate conclusion is typical of so many poems in the Petrarchan idiom, such as Wyatt’s rebuke of his mistress, ‘Since you will needs that I shall sing’, itemizing his ‘Plenty of plaint, moan and mourning’, contemplating once more the acme of suffering and frustrated love: ‘Death and despair afore my face, / My days decay, my grief doth grow’, the cause being that feminine ‘cruelty’ which inspired so many of these anatomies of paralysis. Obortello identified both poems as being taken from Torquato Tasso’s Rime ( –), and they have considerably more eloquence in the original language: S’io taccio il duol s’auanza S’io parlo accresco l’ira Donna bell’e crudel che mi martira . . . Vorrei lagnarmi a pieno Sfogand’il duol ch’io sento Ma vostro sdegno d’irritar pauento. Dunqu’`e meglio ch’io taccia E quel dolor sopporte Ch’oue s’accresca fia dolor di morte . . .
Reference to the standard scholarly edition shows that the two lyrics belong to a series of three on the same subject, the first being a sonnet which expresses even more intensely the lover’s frustration with his mistress for having laid on him ‘the hard yoke of bitter silence’. Suffering a ‘mortal pain’ which is growing in pressure like a volcano, the poet declares ‘I can keep silent and I will’, but warns that if the fire ‘breaks out, let her blame nature and herself ’. Although it starts from the dilemma of speech or silence, this is not really a Catch- poem since the poet can still control his feelings. When Spenser imitated Tasso’s poem in Sonnet
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
of his Amoretti () he characteristically redirected its energies. He begins with Tasso’s question: Shall I then silent be or shall I speake? And if I speake, her wrath renew I shall: and if I silent be, my hart will breake, or chok`ed be with ouerflowing gall.
But, having denounced his mistress’s ‘tyranny’, he resolves to teach his heart and eyes to speak, confident that her deep wit, that true harts thought can spel, will soon conceiue, and learne to construe well.
Spenser’s conclusion is a good deal more sanguine than the Petrarchan mode otherwise offered. The texts by Tasso, Morley, and Spenser place ‘Shall I die?’ even more firmly in the Petrarchan tradition, and help us to gauge Shakespeare’s distance from that mode. Tasso and Spenser could seriously write poetry on the difficulty of declaring one’s love, and even Sir Philip Sidney, the most eloquent and inventive poet of his generation, created in Astrophil a persona suffering from all the usual Petrarchan inhibitions. The sixth sonnet of that sequence, ‘Some Lovers speake when they their muses entertaine, / Of hopes begot by feare . . . ’, mocks in turn poetry using the Petrarchan oxymoron, Ovidian mythology, pastoral disguises, and the use of stock personifications. Having ridiculed these contemporary modes, the best that Astrophil can say on his own behalf is this: I can speake what I feele, and feele as much as they, But think that all the Map of my state I display When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love.
One can read this anticlimax as another sign of Sidney’s partly mocking attitude towards his persona, but the fact remains that Astrophil does not break out of the Petrarchan cul-de-sac, speech or silence being equally unsatisfactory. Significantly, the action in this ‘sequence’ only advances in the songs interspersed between the sonnets: in the second song (between Sonnets and ), Astrophil finally dares to approach Stella when she is asleep, managing to steal a kiss, and in the eighth (between Sonnets and ), ‘his hands in their speech, faine / Would have made tongue’s language plaine’. But Stella refuses him, a rejection which Astrophil accepts, providing the material for more sonnets analysing the lover’s doomed condition. Within a decade, however, Donne’s personae shattered that paralysed state, writing poems of sexual fulfilment in which
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a man ‘gets’, ‘has’, ‘casts off ’ a woman, or picks up again last year’s ‘relict’. Less ostentatiously, in his Sonnets Shakespeare dramatized many stages in a fulfilled relationship, from mutual happiness to betrayal. Both Donne and Shakespeare have affinities with the anti-Petrarchan mode, although Donne drew on an older tradition, Ovidian love poetry. Shakespeare mocked conventional lovers’ diction in Sonnet (‘So is it not with me as with that Muse . . . Who heaven itself for ornament doth use’) and, more memorably, in the burlesque blazon of Sonnet : My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grows on her head.
Both poems poke fun at the conventional Petrarchan comparisons, still found in Spenser’s Epithalamium: ‘Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre’ (line ), that colour recalling the ‘Chiome d’oro’ celebrated in so many Italian madrigals, the ‘fayre golden heares’ of Spenser’s Amoretti , the ‘gold tresses’ of Amoretti , and the ‘gold tresses’ in the blazon of ‘Shall I die?’ (line ). Shakespeare’s distance from this tradition is considerable, for even where he uses some of its details they are put into a new context, that of a real or imagined relationship. Shakespeare’s Sonnets give the illusion of one or more ongoing relationships, leaving far behind the Petrarchan lover’s fear of ever declaring his love, all the while groaning under its intensity. Sonnet dramatizes the poet’s lack of trust in his own ability to ‘say / The perfect ceremony of love’s right’, hoping that his writings may serve as the ‘dumb presagers’ or silent indicators of his feelings. But that is a phase within a relationship, rather than an obstacle to a relationship ever getting started. The distance between ‘Shall I die?’ and Shakespeare, in poetic convention and represented behaviour, is also reflected in that poem’s language, which Gary Taylor confidently assigned to the mid-s. Several contributors to the TLS discussion cited linguistic evidence supporting a dating of the poem to the Jacobean period, or even later. Muriel Bradbrook had intuitively recorded that ‘the language [of the second part] feels to me much later, more Caroline’ (Bradbrook , p. ), and Donald Foster found parallels for the phrase ‘starlike eyes’ () ‘in John Harington, Phineas Fletcher, William Strode, and Thomas Carew (to name but a few), though nowhere in Shakespeare’. He instanced several parallels with ‘Shall I die?’ in Carew’s verse, ‘including several that appear nowhere in Shakespeare (e.g., “my fair love”, “if she frowns”, “beauty
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
binds”, “queen of beauty” [twice]). “Twin’d” or “entwin’d” souls, thighs, arms, and hearts are a frequent image with Carew’, who also shares with the author of ‘Shall I die?’ a fondness for repeating the word ‘beauty’ (Foster , p. ). Foster drew attention to other linguistic details in ‘Shall I die?’ which point to a date later than Taylor’s suggested – the latest point at which he was willing to believe that Shakespeare could have written such a lame and uninventive poem. One such detail is that in a poem only words long the poet contracts the word is three times, as can be seen if the spelling is modernized: ‘fancy’s fed’ (); ‘all that’s called’ (); ‘She’s beauty’s queen’ (). According to Foster, ‘this would have been unthinkable for any English poet in and quite unlikely as late as (Taylor’s lower and upper limits)’ (p. ). Common functionwords were contracted in this period, pronouns or conjunctions such as he’s, she’s, it’s, here’s and there’s, but abbreviating the is after nouns became common only later. In addition to the evidence of contractions, Foster argued that ‘the diction appears to be Jacobean or Carolinian [sic] in other respects’. The ‘OED offers no instance of the sense of “besot” as an active verb prior to , and no instance of the sense of “besot” used in “Shall I die?” prior to . . . “Scanty”, too, is quite rare prior to ’ (p. ). The extraordinary number of gerunds in ‘Shall I die?’ ( proceeding, wronging, admiring, desiring, contenting, repenting) also suggests a date after . According to Foster, ‘the first recorded examples of admiring as a noun are both Jacobean, the first by John Florio [], the second by Phineas Fletcher []. Fletcher, beginning about , employs admiring, desiring, and contenting with great regularity, often using them a half-dozen times or more in the same poem, unlike any known Elizabethan poet’ (p. ). Repeating – apparently in ignorance – the observation by Erica Sheen as to the vogue for ‘Shall I . . . ?’ lyrics in the lute-songs between and , Foster extended her list with George Wither’s well-known lyric, ‘Shall I, wasting in despair’, printed in his Fidelia (), which was expanded into nine stanzas in a broadside published that year, and much imitated between and , together with similar imitations by William Browne and others (pp. –). This essay certainly strengthened the case for a dating of ‘Shall I die?’ to the period –. One of the many weaknesses of Taylor’s argument, as Robbins and others objected, is that it never considered negative evidence. Foster pointed out in passing that ‘Taylor neglects to count words that do not fit the desired result. For example, fancy’s (=fancy is) appears only twice in Shakespeare, once in Henry VIII [c. ] and once in Othello [c. ];
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
wronging (n.) appears only once, in The Winter’s Tale []. Neither word appears in Taylor’s list. Shakespeare uses venter (v.) four times, three times after and only once before; Taylor alters “venter” (stanza ) to “venture” without indicating the emendation and omits it from his count as well’, all evidence of his ‘apparently selective and inconsistent procedure’ (p. ). ’ : ’ Gary Taylor’s ascription of ‘Shall I die?’ to Shakespeare was based on a list of words and phrases, taken out of context. Instead of reading the whole poem against Shakespeare’s known works, considering its argument, structure, and genre, Taylor atomized it into a series of verbal items which could be quickly compared with the work of other poets by reference to concordances. This type of atomistic analysis – much used by Donald Foster in his attribution of A Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare – seems to me to violate scholarly procedures by reducing words to simple counters, shorn of the context which gives them individuality. After the work of Wittgenstein and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophers it may seem rather late to be reminding scholars that the meaning and significance of a word depends on the grammatical, syntactical, and rhetorical context in which it occurs, all of which allow us to establish the user’s intended communicative act. But Taylor (like Foster) does not deal with this fundamental point, and it fell to Thomas Pendleton to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of such an omission when it comes to claiming authorship of anonymous poems. Pendleton’s essay showed that ‘in a dozen or more’ cases, ‘words used with at least some frequency in Shakespeare’s authentic work . . . [bear] in “Shall I die?” meanings that they virtually or literally never bear in that authentic work’ (Pendleton , p. ). One or two such instances, Pendleton conceded, might be dismissed, ‘but as the examples become more numerous, they do not merely accumulate improbability, they multiply it; if it is unusual that Shakespeare used this one word in this manner, it is doubly unusual that he used both these words in this manner’, quadruply so for all three words, octuply so for all four, ‘and so on – quickly passing the bounds of believability . . . ’ (p. ). Pendleton’s instances of the poem’s non-Shakespearian language are mostly lexical, but one is syntactical, namely the speaker’s self-address in stanza , warning himself that the lady’s response ‘gives thee Ioy or annoy or affliction’ (). The syntax here, Pendleton observed, ‘is odd to the
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
point of incoherence, for the speaker foresees not three possibilities (A or B or C), but only two: good fortune – “joy”; or misfortune – in the form of either “annoy[ance]” or “affliction” ’. This is the basic Petrarchan antithesis, as I have pointed out, which runs through the poem. But the grammar is anything but clear-cut. ‘The correlatives or . . . or – the Elizabethan equivalent of our either . . . or – thus connect two components which, taken together, comprise a single alternative within a larger either . . . or alternative’ (p. ). In other words, one of these disjunctive structures is superfluous: to use two together confuses the syntax, and Pendleton could find no comparable incoherence in Shakespeare’s uses of the or . . . or correlatives. Pendleton had first drawn attention to this non-Shakespearian syntax in his letter to the New York Times in January , and Taylor chose to defend this point in the Textual Companion that supplemented the Oxford Complete Works. His answer was to claim that the Fairies’ song, ‘Never harm, / Nor spell, nor charm’ (MND, ..–) is ‘exactly parallel, except that it uses the negative form’ (TxC, p. ). But Pendleton objected that here we have ‘simply a series of three terms connected by conjunctions (A nor B nor C) . . . [and] the first item in the Dream passage (“harm”) is not antithetical to the last two (“spell”, “charm”), as the first item in “Shall I die?” (“joy”) is to both “annoy” and “affliction” ’ (Pendleton , p. ). Pendleton’s careful search among Shakespeare’s nor . . . nor usages found no instance which would display the incoherence of our anonymous poet. It is hard not to conclude that our poet brought many of these awkward expressions on himself by the rhyme-scheme he adopted, which made exorbitant demands on his linguistic resources. Having decided to take over the Petrarchan poet’s Catch- situation – ‘if I declare my love I’ll receive either happiness or misery’ – he might have rested content with the dichotomous ‘Ioy or annoy’. But, as I see it, the exigencies of his rhyme-scheme forced him to add one or two more words to that line in order to produce a rhyme with the line preceding, which ended with ‘affection’: hence he added ‘or affliction’, at the cost of muddling his own syntax. The best comment on the difficulties he repeatedly got himself into is Ben Jonson’s mocking ‘Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme’: Rhyme, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits, True conceit, Spoiling senses of their treasure,
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem Cozening judgement with a measure But false weight. Wresting words from their true calling ( –)
Trying to keep to his rhyme-scheme, the unskilful poet ‘cozens’ or cheats us by giving true ‘measure’ – either a regular metre or the echo of rhyme – but ‘false weight’ or sense. Cleverly using this poetic resource in order to attack (or justify?) it, Jonson ends with a formal curse on the inventor of rhyme: He that first invented thee, May his joints tormented be, Cramped forever; Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never. (–)
That the author of ‘Shall I die?’ was guilty of ‘Wresting words from their true calling’ becomes very clear from Pendleton’s analysis of the opening of stanza , another version of the Petrarchan poet’s ‘speech or silence’ dilemma: Yet I must, vent my lust and explain, inward pain by my love breeding (–)
We might imagine our poet saying to himself, ‘how to find a noun that rhymes with “must” and means something like “love” . . . that is the question’. His solution, ‘vent my lust’, might sound as if he planned a violent attack on the woman, but the next line reassures us that he is only agonizing about whether to declare his love or not. Shakespeare, however, never uses lust as a synonym for love. Pendleton examined the occurrences in the canon of the word lust, in various forms, and in at least of these it means ‘the sexual appetite’, often with shameful or self-loathing connotations (p. ). In Shakespeare lust ‘never means love in any permutation. Indeed, the only characters in his plays who, like the speaker of “Shall I die?” talk of their lust with self-composure are the aspiring rapist Cloten (Cym., ..) and the fraternal rapists Demetrius and Chiron (Tit., ..; ..)’ (p. ). Obviously our frustrated Petrarchan would not dream of including himself in that group.
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Every one of the fifteen instances of the poem’s non-Shakespearian diction that Pendleton cited shows a corresponding divergence from the meaning in which Shakespeare uses words. The anonymous poet admires his lady’s ‘gold tresses’ which ‘Wantonly . . . fly’ in the ‘Gentle wind’: As they shooke, I did looke but her faire, did impaire all my senses (–)
In Shakespeare’s authentic work, ‘without exception’, the word shake (used times) in all its forms ‘always denotes a rough or even violent action’. Even when used, as here, as an intransitive verb, it always means ‘ “to tremble violently”, usually with anger, fever, or fear’ (p. ). The erotic connotations of ‘shaking’ hair for our anonymous poet were not shared by Shakespeare. ‘The only occurrence in his work of hair shaking is in Macbeth’s outcry to the ghost of Banquo, “never shake / Thy gory locks at me” (..–)’ (p. ). As this instance dramatically shows, our anonymous poet, trapped in his own rhymescheme, often uses words vaguely, and frequently with meanings quite different from those given by Shakespeare. In the blazon part of the poem he describes his beloved’s ‘Thin lips red’ (), which is presumably meant to seem attractive. But in Shakespeare, apart from a few technical terms (‘thin and wholesome’ blood, Ham., ..), the word ‘thin’ always has ‘implications of insufficiency or even deprivation’, being often ‘associated with inadequate protection or shelter’. Furthermore, ‘since that which is thin is usually physically unattractive, the word very often occurs in insults based on absurd appearance’ (p. ), such as ‘thin and hairless scalps’, ‘thin-fac’d knave’, ‘thin-bellied doublet’. We cannot imagine Shakespeare using ‘Thin lips red’ as a term of praise. The exigencies of rhyme, and a use of hyperbole common to love poets, account for other non-Shakespearian language. The lady is celebrated for ‘the uncovered portion of her bosom’, that is, ‘A pretty bare, past compare’ (). But for Shakespeare bare ‘is a word with almost invariably negative connotations of inadequacy or vulnerability’, and never ‘of sexual enticement’. Pendleton cited such typical instances as ‘poor and bare soldiers’, ‘a poor, bare, forked animal’, and ‘Lucrece’s “bare breast” () assaulted by her ravisher, Tarquin’ (p. ). Our poet cannot (yet) speak to his lady, nor touch her, but his ‘fancy’s fed’ by the thought of how those ‘Thin lips red’ might be employed, and for the time being he adopts a pose of Stoic resignation, ‘happy sure, to endure still undaunted’ (). But in Shakespeare endure and undaunted
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have ‘far more energetic meanings than are appropriate here’, endure (eighty-five times) ‘usually meaning “to bear, to undergo, to suffer with patience” ’, and undaunted (only four times) ‘always referring quite literally to martial intrepidity, actually displayed in or suitable for battle’ (p. ). These would be quite inappropriate emotions for a Petrarchan poet to emulate. In the dream-vision leading up to the blazon the poet tells us how I did walke, I did talke with my loue, with my dove (–)
For Gary Taylor the rhyme ‘love/dove’ represented strong proof of Shakespeare’s authorship, and he cited Romeo and Juliet, .., ‘Pronounce but “love” and “dove” ’, with the laconic note ‘characterising a lover’ (a, p. ; b, p. ). But Taylor failed to consider for what purpose Shakespeare wrote that line, and Pendleton justly observed that ‘Rhyming this pair of words is explicitly mocked’ by Mercutio’s invocation of Romeo as ‘Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover! / Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh. / Speak but one rhyme, and I am satisfied; / Cry but “Ay me!” Pronounce but “love” and “dove”’. Such a rhyme is also mocked, this time implicitly, by Thisbe’s ‘Asleep, my love? / what, dead, my dove?’ (MND, ..–). Elsewhere, Pendleton showed, ‘there is . . . no place in Shakespeare in which a woman is called a dove without an element of comic inappropriateness’ (p. ). It is indeed one of many inadequacies in Taylor’s advocacy of ‘Shall I die?’ as Shakespearian that he failed to consider the meaning-incontext of the verbal parallels on which his whole case depended. He actually cited Thisbe’s use of the word ‘dove’ in the note following, although he must be aware how comic it is made to seem in this burlesque, adding to it the deranged Ophelia’s ‘Fare you well, my dove!’ (Ham., ..). Shakespeare the dramatist could mock clich´es, or he could give them a new and unexpected pathos by their setting, but otherwise it is difficult to credit one of his lovers seriously using this rhyme. In addition to showing that the poem’s language has none of Shakespeare’s individuality, Pendleton offered a helpful defence of the role in authorship studies of judgments as to the quality of a poem or play being claimed as authentic. Many readers familiar with English Renaissance literature dismissed the case for Shakespeare’s authorship on first sight of the poem, since nothing in it sounds like Shakespeare, a judgment that
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
further study has only confirmed. Pendleton justified his article in that ‘it provides some specifics’ of why so many experienced readers reacted like this. The poem ‘doesn’t sound like Shakespeare because Shakespeare doesn’t say “lust” when he means “love”, doesn’t misuse the “or . . . or” correlatives, doesn’t speak of hair seductively shaken by the wind or of wrinkled eyebrows, doesn’t admire “Thin lips red” or a “Pretty bare” or “plots which besots”, and so on’ (p. ). So many readers intuitively rejected the poem because their reading experience of Shakespeare had made them familiar with his idiom, the range of vocabulary he uses, the kinds of metaphor, other tropes and figures, his typical verse rhythms and choice of rhymes. Readers having this familiarity with his style are also aware what level of performance they may expect, ranging from excellence to at least competence, an expectation which, as Pendleton says, is deeply frustrated by ‘the particular kind of ineptitude’ which ‘Shall I die?’ displays. The poem has an ‘unusual and demanding form’, true enough, but in no branch of his art does the poet control it. ‘The rhythm is often defective, the rhymes often forced or trite, and the content often flaccid or incoherent. By the time one has read a couple of stanzas, it is clear that the author lacks the skill to work within the form’ (p. ). Worse still, the poet does not realize his own incompetence, and ‘flounders through the intricacies of the stanza nine consecutive times’. His imagery is stale, his poetic invention low, as seen in ‘the poem’s repetitive poverty of adjectives’, with its constant recycling of ‘pretty’ and ‘fair’. In Pendleton’s lapidary formulation, ‘if Shakespeare had actually written this way, there would be little difficulty in identifying his work, and less interest in doing so’ (p. ). In presenting ‘Shall I die?’ not just as a dubious ascription in a single, late manuscript but as an authentic work of Shakespeare, and including it in the Complete Works, with all the scholarly and commercial weight of Oxford University Press behind him, Taylor was in a privileged but also difficult position. He was both the poem’s advocate, and the judge admitting it to the canon, and (as the poet of ‘Shall I die?’ might write, confusing a binary disjunction with a third element) its editor, a coincidence of roles that allowed him to decide whether the text should be printed exactly as found in Rawlinson poet. MS. , or legitimately emended in order to lessen its unShakespearian inchoateness. At its first appearance in print Taylor (aided by Stanley Wells) had made several emendations,
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
four of which were visually acknowledged by being enclosed in square brackets: Sure [will] not seem to blot () [Them] that love can prove () Of all [the world] commendations () [From] all care, seemed to share ()
But another emendation had not been indicated by square brackets, for the word ‘sue’ in line is Taylor’s emendation of the manuscript reading ‘shewe’, and his note declares that ‘this is a contemporary spelling of sue which makes better sense and rhyme. The sh-form of the word is very rare, but occurs at L.L.L., ..’ (a, p. ; b, p. ). This comment suggests that Taylor had not understood the poet’s idiom, agonizing over whether to declare his love or not: Shall I tend shall I send Shall I shewe, and not rue my proceeding (–)
It must be obvious that ‘shewe’ is a parallel verb to ‘tend’ and ‘send’, three possible options for the poet in waiting on his beloved, or declaring his need for her: ‘tend’ or ‘send’? But what if ‘shewe’ leads to ‘rue’? The poet debates the best course of action further in stanzas (‘vent my lust / and explaine’) and (‘prove her affection . . . try her reply’). Whichever he decides on, he is well aware, it is a ‘proceeding’ – in the sense of ‘a particular action or course of action’ or procedure (OED . b) – which he may regret. Contrary to Taylor’s assertion, emending the word to sue does not make ‘better sense’, only a different one, unauthorized by the text. As for Taylor’s claim that shewe is ‘a contemporary spelling of sue’, Donald Foster duly checked the OED and found that its editors, ‘in surveying one thousand years of the English language, do not locate a single example’ of shewe as a variant spelling for sue (Foster , p. n.). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, furthermore, Foster pointed out, both Quarto and Folio texts ‘read shue not shew, which is a different matter altogether, for shue was a standard phonological spelling found in non-Shakespearean texts’ also. The emendation of shewe to sue is not only unjustified and unnecessary, ‘the shew: rue rhyme conflicts with Shakespeare’s known practice and quite possibly with Taylor’s early date for the poem as well’. As Foster trenchantly observed, ‘it will not do to use the hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship to amend a rhyme, and then to use the altered rhyme as evidence of Shakespearean authorship’ (p. ). Foster drew attention to
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
another questionable manoeuvre among Taylor’s parallels, where the phrase ‘all the world’ is said to occur times in Shakespeare. ‘But, in fact, “all the world” never appears in the manuscript text. It is a conjectural emendation supplied by [Stanley Wells] in order to make sense of a possibly corrupt line’ – that is, ‘Of all that’s cald comendations’(line ). Scholarly methods are being flouted when Taylor’s ‘own revisions are presented as evidence of Shakespearean authorship’ (Foster a, p. ). Between the poem’s appearance in the TLS and its inclusion in the Complete Works, published in , the editors made several other emendations, which were not indicated in the text (p. ), and were only discussed in the Textual Companion, published much later (). Some of the new emendations had been suggested to them privately, others responded to criticisms made by scholars in the columns of the TLS and New York Times Book Review. Yet, while adopting these emendations, Taylor simply created further problems. One such amendment of the text involved the anonymous poet’s blazon, as it moved from his beloved’s hair and forehead down to her eyebrows and eyes: Next her haire forehead faire Smooth and high next doth lye without wrinckle Her fair browes under those starlike eyes win loues prize when they twinckle ( –)
Unless a poem’s rough drafts are available, one can never reconstruct the sequence of composition, but it is tempting to suggest that, having settled on the epithet ‘starlike’ for her eyes the poet applied to them the (dreadfully predictable) verb ‘twinckle’, which conveniently rhymed with that other conventional epithet for foreheads, ‘without wrinckle’. But here again we see how, in Jonson’s words, ‘Still may reason war with rhyme’, for the exigencies of rhyme left him no choice but to place ‘without wrinckle’ at the end of the line, where it ends up referring to his lady’s eyebrows, not to her forehead. This positioning left him open to the objection (made by Thomas Pendleton in his New York Times letter of January ) that ‘There are no wrinkled eyebrows in Shakespeare (nor, I think, in life)’. Expanding this point in his essay, Pendleton observed that ‘the poem is insisting on the forehead and the eyebrows as distinct features’, and whereas Shakespeare occasionally uses the word ‘brow(s)’ to refer to the eyebrows, it ‘far more often means the forehead’. Further, as we might expect, ‘when the word is associated with wrinkles . . . it is always the forehead which is indicated’. Shakespeare often associates
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
wrinkled foreheads with old age, several times in ‘the visual image of horizontal lines inscribed into a smooth forehead’, as in those familiar lines from the Sonnets, ‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field’ (. –). As Pendleton summed up his survey, Shakespeare’s ‘authentic “wrinkled brow” passages derive from the visualization of an observable phenomenon; the (un) wrinkled eyebrows image in “Shall I die?” derives from something else, that can hardly be visualized and can hardly be Shakespeare’ (, p. ). Pendleton’s letter having drawn attention to the unShakespearian nature of the language here, Taylor emended the text to read Next her hair, forehead fair Smooth and high; neat doth lie, without wrinkle Her fair brows; under those, Star-like eyes,
and so on. In the note in the Textual Companion, two years later, justifying his emendation, Taylor claimed that The passage as it stands in the manuscripts seemed to us corrupt from the moment we attempted to modernize the punctuation. Pendleton rightly objects that ‘without wrinkles’ [sic] is an absurd modifier for ‘eyebrows’ – which is how ‘browes’ must be glossed in the unemended text. However, this absurd interpretation of ‘browes’ depends entirely upon the word ‘next’ in line , which is intrinsically suspicious, repeating as it does a word in the previous line. If the author had written ‘neat’, the adjective could easily have been corrupted to ‘next’ under the influence of context. With ‘neat’, the passage can be construed in two different ways: either her ‘forehead . . . doth lie’, and ‘Her faire browes’ are a separate item in the catalogue of her attractions; or ‘neat’ begins a new sentence, in which ‘browes’ are essentially synonymous with ‘forehead’. The ambiguity of the syntax allows ‘those’ (line ) to be understood as alluding to either brows or eyebrows. Neat is a common adjective of praise in this period, being variously glossed as ‘delicate, pretty’ . . . , ‘clean; elegant, fine; nicely made or proportioned’ . . . ; ‘handsome, splendid, fine’ . . . ; it can also be used adjectivally. (TxC, pp. –)
(The last word is surely an error for ‘adverbially’.) But, as Pendleton showed in a devastating sequence of argument, Taylor was guilty of ‘at least five ill-considered judgements . . . ’ here. First of all, One simply cannot take seriously the characterization of ‘next’ in line as ‘intrinsically suspicious’ because it repeats a word in the previous line. There are, within this poem of only [] lines, instances of words repeated from the
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
previous line, not to mention words repeated in the same line, and more repeated from the next line but one. There is nothing ‘suspicious’ here to justify an emendation at all. (Pendleton , p. )
Secondly, the word ‘next’ needs no emendation, since ‘like “next” in the previous line, it introduces a new item in the catalogue – “Her fair brows” ’. Taylor subsequently argued that both words are ‘indicative of place, not sequence’ (TxC, p. ), but as Pendleton rightly objected, ‘since the blazon moves spatially downward from the lady’s hair, there is no difference whatever: next in place and next in sequence are identical here’ (p. ). Thirdly, the connotations of ‘neat’ in Shakespeare are not at all those that Taylor claims, but rather signify something ‘tidy’ (as in ‘neat and cleanly’), or occasionally something ‘ “foppish” or “dandified” ’ (p. ). Neither sense is congruent with Taylor’s newly emended text. Furthermore, ‘Shakespeare always seems to apply neat to a person or activity, never to a part of a larger whole, such as a single feature within a blazon. Equally notable is the fact that Shakespeare never uses neat as an adverb, as the emendation would require’ (pp. –). It is already evident that emendation of the text will not make the problem go away, for even if we read ‘neat’ we are left with the basic absurdity of unwrinkled eyebrows. Pendleton simply rebutted Taylor’s assertions: ‘it is not true that this interpretation “depends entirely upon the word ‘next’ ”; it depends at least equally on the fact that the stanza is structured by the catalogue of the lady’s attractions, four of which are specified – forehead, brows, eyes, cheeks’ (p. ). However one may repunctuate the stanza, the word-order – fixed, as I have pointed out, by the exigencies of the rhyme-scheme – ‘must specify the eyebrows as what are unwrinkled’. Taylor signally failed to extricate himself from this dilemma, even though his emendation of next to neat was clearly ‘motivated by a need to rid the text of an unwelcome phrase’. Pendleton’s original letter to the New York Times argued that Shakespeare cannot have produced this and other absurdities, and Taylor’s emendation seemed to concede the point. But Taylor’s subsequent resort to editorial intervention, as if to guard Shakespeare from the charge of being ‘a fifth-rate poet, toiling in the intricacies of the stanza, and regularly dredging up stock phrases’, shows the conflict between what I have called Taylor’s role as advocate for the poem and his other two roles, as editor and as judge admitting it to the canon. The inference that Pendleton continues to draw from the demonstration of this linguistic absurdity
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
is to question Shakespeare’s supposed authorship; the inference the Oxford edition draws is to reject the text. Since such an inference can be based only on a prior commitment to Shakespeare’s authorship, it does not seem unfair to characterize this as a virtually documented instance of Taylor’s doing what both Robbins and Foster have criticized him for doing – emending the text ‘to lend artificial support to the attribution of the poem to Shakespeare’ (TxC ). (pp. –)
That will seem to many readers an extremely telling point, showing the danger involved in an editor’s emending a text when holding a preformed conviction of its authorship. Pendleton pointed to another instance of such conflict between roles in Taylor’s handling of the concluding lines of the blazon: Noe mishap, noe scape Inferior to natures perfection noe blot, noe spot Shees beauties queene in election. ( –)
Here the anonymous poet’s rhyming words ‘mishap’ and ‘scape’ seem to imply ‘some sort of blemish or irregularity which might (but of course does not) lessen the lady’s perfect beauty. But neither word means anything like this in Shakespeare’ (p. ). Mishap (five instances) ‘always means “ill chance” or “misfortune” ’, while all sixty-four occurrences of scape as a verb mean ‘escape’, as do four of its noun usages, the remaining four meaning ‘escaping moral bounds’. In Shakespeare’s authentic work ‘neither mishap nor scape means a physical imperfection, nor anything close to it’. Imagining that he wrote this line would be to presume that he settled on this uncharacteristic and ‘incoherent vocabulary simply because the words have a negative connotation and rhyme with one another’ (p. ), a vagueness or desperation in the use of language which is not typical of Shakespeare but certainly characterizes our anonymous poet all too often. Having had more time to study the text after its hasty propulsion into print, Taylor had evidently recognized this difficulty, for he emended mishap to mis-shape, adding this note: ‘For the sense and spelling see OED. Taylor [] [that is, Taylor a or b] and other printings have retained the B [Bodleian] spelling, interpreting it as mishap, in the sense ‘unlucky accident’; but this seems less appropriate than ‘misshapen feature’ . . . the primary meaning seems to be ‘mis-shape’. The word does not appear elsewhere in Shakespeare . . . ’ (TxC, p. ). (There again we see Taylor’s use of the rhetoric of impersonality.) But
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
it is deeply misleading to present the emendation as merely a matter of modernizing the spelling. As Pendleton objected, ‘mishap and mis-shape are completely different words semantically and etymologically, and they remain completely distinct in Shakespeare’s usage’. Mishap always means ‘ill-chance, misfortune, unlucky accident’, and while mis-shape never occurs in Shakespeare, the eight participial usages (misshapen seven, misshap’d once) all ‘mean “deformed”, as is obvious from the fact that four times this quality is predicated of Richard III . . . , once of Caliban . . . , and once of Chaos itself ’ (p. ). Trying to solve one difficulty, then, Taylor submerged himself even more deeply. For, ‘on the basis of Shakespeare’s usage, mis-shapen, if transposed into a substantive, would mean “deformity”, and it would be grossly inappropriate in “Shall I die?” to encapsulate the lady’s beauty by asserting that she is not deformed’ (p. ). We can now see that Taylor’s authoritative style – ‘For the sense and spelling see OED’ – cited that authority to support a reading which turned out to be unfounded. Pendleton, like Foster, called Taylor’s bluff by indeed consulting the OED, which states that ‘Mis-shape, as a noun, means “a bad or deformed shape or figure; deformity. Also concr. a mis-shapen body or person” ’, so that it becomes a simple ‘category error to transfer to the part a quality possessed only by the whole; a mis-shape is not “a mis-shapen feature” ’ (p. ). Here again Pendleton indicted Taylor for ‘exculpating the text from saying what Shakespeare would not havesaid’. Both texts of the poem read mishap (Bodleian: mi hap; Yale: mi happe), but with the acknowledged Shakespearian meaning of ‘unlucky accident’ seeming to Taylor, on reflection, to be ‘less appropriate than “misshapen feature” ’, in his position as the editor he substituted the superficially similar but etymologically distinct word mis-shape. As Pendleton concluded, that was an extremely bad guess both in terms of Shakespearian usage and of dictionary definition, but at this point an editor ought not to be speculating about what is more or less appropriate; he ought not to be guessing at all. The evidence of the poem is that its author used mishap as vaguely synonymic with ‘blot’ and ‘spot’; that this is rather slovenly vocabulary and that Shakespeare did not use the word this way does not mean the text is in error, unless, of course, the editor’s function is predetermined by the advocate’s commitment to Shakespeare’s authorship. (p. )
This is precisely what I mean by the title of this book, ‘Counterfeiting’ Shakespeare: the ‘discovery’, and interpretation of an anonymous text
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
so as to present it as Shakespeare’s. And I have discussed Thomas Pendleton’s article in some detail, which deserves to be recognized as of classic status in authorship studies, because it brings out so clearly how, on the morning of November , when Gary Taylor first set eyes on Rawlinson poet. MS. , his ‘gut reaction’ that this poem was written by Shakespeare was unfortunately allowed to affect his editorial judgment. Pendleton has even suggested that it is the editor’s responsibility, in presenting an attribution claim, to ‘provide a disinterested account of the evidence that will enable the reader to distinguish that which is authentic from that which is dubious or even spurious. Emending the text to support the attribution is the worst of the Oxford edition’s sins against this responsibility . . . ’ (p. ). The debate over ‘Shall I die?’ took place in the columns of two serious literary journals, and the objectors included a number of respected scholars, several of whom had years of experience working with Renaissance poetry, especially manuscript miscellanies. Their collective knowledge was formidable, and their trenchant objections to so many points of Taylor’s argument would have caused most people claiming a Shakespearian attribution to desist, or to rest defiantly content with the case they had made. But Taylor was in the fortunate position of being one of a group of four editors about to publish the new one-volume Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, whose research had been subsidized by the university for eight years, and which seemed to carry with it some kind of academic imprimatur. So supported, Taylor duly included ‘Shall I die?’ in the Complete Works, not in a section called ‘Dubia’ or ‘Doubtful Ascriptions’, but in one called ‘Various Poems’, where it is given pride of place. In the introduction to this section the senior editor, Stanley Wells, summarily informed readers that ‘the poems in this section . . . were all explicitly attributed to him either in his lifetime or not long afterwards. Because they are short it is impossible to be sure, on stylistic grounds alone, of Shakespeare’s authorship; but none of the poems is ever attributed to anyone else.’ To other Shakespeare scholars the criterion used by the Oxford editors to admit anonymous poems to their edition – whether or not such an ascription had been made in the seventeenth century – has seemed like an ad hoc theory designed to legitimize ‘Shall I die?’. Had it been followed through consistently, they would have had
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
to include The London Prodigall (), A Yorkshire Tragedy (), and the spurious reprints of Sir John Oldcastle () and The Troublesome Raigne of King John () – which of course they did not. Wells’s defence of their decision included other irrelevant arguments – that the poems are not attributed to any other poet is of no significance if they are falsely attributed to Shakespeare – together with a failure to engage with the substantial arguments ‘on stylistic grounds’ that had already been presented against this ascription. Wells never discussed the criteria by which such ascriptions should be evaluated, taking refuge in impersonal and apparently objective utterances. The general reader was informed that ‘Shall I die?’ is transcribed, with Shakespeare’s name appended, in a manuscript collection of poems, dating probably from the late s, which is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; another, unascribed version is in the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The poem exhibits many parallels with plays and poems that Shakespeare wrote about –. Its stanza form has not been found elsewhere in the period, but most closely resembles Robin Goodfellow’s lines spoken over the sleeping Lysander (MND, ..–). Extended over nine stanzas it becomes a virtuoso exercise: every third word rhymes. The strain shows in a number of ellipses, but there is no strong reason to doubt the ascription: the Oxford manuscript is generally reliable, and if the poem is of no great consequence, that might explain why it did not reach print. ( p. )
This aloof announcement simply ignored the whole debate over the poem’s authenticity, including many substantive issues. To ignore one’s critics is to kill off scholarship, denying the whole purpose of intellectual exchange. But any reader who has followed this debate will instantly recognize which of these crucial issues have been left out, and how much juggling with the evidence is displayed in what is stated. The poem’s stanza form has indeed ‘not been found elsewhere in the period’, since it is Taylor’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the manuscript layout, producing a ten-line form having six unrhymed lines. The ‘strain’ that the poem displays exists on more fundamental levels than that of ellipsis; the Oxford manuscript is by no means ‘generally reliable’; and if the poem really had been by Shakespeare it would not have been ‘of no great consequence’, but would have suggested, against all other evidence, that Shakespeare was capable of writing totally uncharacteristic and incoherent verse. This rhetoric of aloof authority, while passing over many dubious points in silence, also misleads the general reader in its account of the manuscript evidence. As one of several reviewers who recorded major reservations about the edition, Peter Davison expressed his fear
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
that the editors’ presentation of their ascriptions without any justification might lend them ‘an unintended degree of authority which the untutored reader may take to be absolute. In this context, such a reader may find the statements that a poem appears in two manuscripts, manuscripts described as “different”, as necessarily doubly authenticating an ascription to Shakespeare’. Disturbed by ‘the special pleading of the introduction to this section’, Davison reiterated his fears that less-experienced readers may be convinced by the seeming authority of this edition, its authors, and their stance, so that statements that poems have never been attributed to anyone else, or that ‘the attribution to Shakespeare has not been disproved’, or that they appeared in a number of manuscripts (at a time when copying from one manuscript to another was hardly uncommon), may be taken as proof positive.
Having read this ‘tendentious introduction’ Davison felt that Gavin Ewart’s parody, ‘Shall I Die? A Critical Exercise’ was even more justifiable. That reviewer charitably wondered whether the Oxford editors might have given ‘an unintended degree of authority’ to their speculations by their anonymous, impersonal presentation. When the long-awaited Textual Companion finally appeared (in February ), one could see that the appearance of authority was an effect deliberately cultivated. In his long essay on ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays’, Gary Taylor addressed the problem of the size of sample necessary for reliable attributions to be made, justly observing that ‘as the verbal sample gets smaller, the verbal evidence gets less reliable’ (TxC, p. ). So, he reasoned, in judging Shakespeare’s claims to short poems we are at present, and perhaps for ever, forced back upon kinds of internal evidence which resist confident statistical formulation or evaluation: primarily, verbal parallels, imagery, and certain formal features – all subject to imitation, or to conscious artistic variation in lyric contexts. About such matters differences of judgement cannot be banished, or resolved.
As readers will already have noticed, it is sometimes necessary to read Taylor’s arguments rather carefully. We accept that differences of judgment may continue between those arguing for a specific ascription and those denying it, but in what sense is it true to say that they ‘cannot be . . . resolved’? If this means that the two or three Oxford editors who endorsed Taylor’s claims for ‘Shall I die?’ continue to believe it, then the issue does not need to be resolved, since for them it has never been
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
an issue. But when a remarkable unanimity among scholars rejects the ascription, is their consensus not of some significance? As for the ‘internal evidence’ which supposedly resists ‘statistical formulation or evaluation’, the ‘verbal parallels’ which Taylor claimed to have discovered – for fiftytwo phrases, reduced within a month to twenty-two – these were in themselves so unspecific as not to constitute evidence at all, especially given Taylor’s failure to consider negative instances. The criticisms of his claims made by Robin Robbins, Donald Foster, and Thomas Pendleton all addressed the counter-evidence, and all presented data which could be evaluated statistically. Taylor’s ability to ignore all the opposite evidence is breathtaking. This is how he restated his claims: More such stylistic evidence has been accumulated in support of Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘Shall I die?’ than for any other short poem in the canon; yet, in spite of it, most critics apparently remain sceptical, simply from an intuitive conviction that the poem does not ‘sound’ like Shakespeare. The sceptics may be right in their disparagement of the available internal evidence, but if so one can only conclude that in the study of Shakespeare’s uncollected poetry internal evidence remains, as yet, a tool too crude to trust. Where we cannot trust internal evidence, we have little choice but to credit external evidence. The Oxford edition accordingly includes all those poems – and only those poems – attributed specifically to ‘William Shakespeare’ in contemporary documents which are not contradicted by other contemporary documents. As editors, we can only modestly defer to the testimony of the extant witnesses, when we lack any other evidence more substantial than our own aesthetic judgement. (TxC, p. ; my italics)
This is an extraordinarily specious sequence of argument. Taylor was claiming – the passive form, ‘stylistic evidence has been accumulated’, seems to create the impression of an impersonalized agent or group of agents at work – that his single essay of December still constituted ‘stylistic evidence . . . in support of Shakespeare’s authorship of “Shall I die?” ’. If ‘most critics apparently remain sceptical’ – there can be no ‘apparently’ about this certainty – it was simply due to their ‘intuitive conviction that the poem does not “sound” like Shakespeare’. Since Taylor gave no details of his critics’ arguments, preferring to pass them over in silence, the uninformed reader will not realize that they were based on a rational evaluation of the evidence, in a properly historical manner, with the citation of a great many counter-instances. Silent on this point, Taylor then made an amazing turn-about: the critics may, after all, be right to disparage ‘the available internal evidence’, but that does not prove
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
that such ‘evidence’ is non-existent. Rather, it proves that ‘in the study of Shakespeare’s uncollected poetry’ – once again begging the questions whether any such poetry exists, or whether it includes ‘Shall I die?’ –‘internal evidence remains, as yet, a tool too crude to trust’. Taylor tried to extricate himself from this difficulty by dismissing stylistic analysis in authorship studies, calling in question the whole discipline he was meant to be practising. Fleeing one horn of his dilemma, Taylor sought refuge in the other, declaring that the Oxford editors forgo ‘aesthetic judgement’ (that old bogey-man) as they ‘modestly defer to the testimony of the extant witnesses’ – that is, we recall, the single ascription by the anonymous compiler of the Bodleian miscellany, at some time in the late s. Taylor’s response to his critics was deeply unsatisfactory. His strategy was apparently to deny everything, concede nothing, dig himself more firmly into his trench. In the detailed commentary on ‘Shall I die?’ that followed in due course (TxC, pp. –), Taylor seems to have continued to resist serious questions. The first remarkable feature of this discussion is that, having presented the poem in December as Shakespeare’s, on the strength of verbal parallels for fifty-two phrases, Taylor now printed none of his previously so compelling ‘internal evidence’. Readers who were fortunate enough to have read, and to have kept, the original publication, or who have access to a library containing them, are immensely privileged, compared to those beginning here, who are told that ‘the poem’s publication precipitated a flurry of critical and scholarly comment, much of it conducted in newspapers and periodicals’ – is there anything wrong with that? However, ‘we do not attempt to reproduce all the commentary . . . Taylor[] provides a history and bibliography of the first months of the controversy’ (p. ). (We note that the Textual Companion now adopts the plural form, presents Taylor’s contributions in the third person – ‘Taylor[] ’ – and adopts the passive mood, all devices which established a rhetoric of impersonality and authority.) Needless to say, no one expects editors to ‘reproduce all the commentary’ on this or any other issue, but when it comes to including the key evidence for the attribution being made, it seems a desperate decision to omit it altogether. That omission did not mean, however, that Taylor had any doubts about these parallels, or wished to withdraw them. Indeed, he once again reaffirmed his claim, and once again dismissed his critics out of hand. Taylor [] [the original essay] also considered a variety of internal evidence which
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
supported the external evidence of the Bodleian attribution. One element of this evidence was a comprehensive list of verbal parallels between the poem and the Shakespeare canon, including necessarily a good many commonplace ideas and images. Criticism of Taylor’s internal evidence has hitherto been largely confined to selective quotation of and commentary upon the more commonplace or trivial items on this list. Taylor [] [‘ “Shall I Die?” Immortalized?’] reported the results of a comparison of the original list with the available concordances to nine other major poets of the period; even after the parallels duplicated in other writers have been eliminated, twenty-two remain – some, in our opinion, striking. These verbal parallels are supported by the evidence of rhymes, by the proportion of hapax legomena, by the chronological clustering of ‘rare’ words; all these features, like the verbal parallels, confirm each other in associating the poem with Shakespeare’s work in the early to mid s. (TxC, p. )
Readers unfamiliar with the original publication must simply take it on trust that Taylor offered there ‘a comprehensive list of verbal parallels between the poem and the Shakespeare canon’, or even that ‘twenty-two’ of these remain – ‘some, in our opinion, striking’ (which, one wonders?), or that all the pieces of internal evidence – a scholarly category which he has just dismissed as ‘too crude’ to prove anything – ‘confirm each other’ in the ascription to Shakespeare. Once again, readers who have followed the debate will appreciate the degree to which Taylor has ignored criticism and counter-arguments, and how completely unjustified it is for him to claim that ‘criticism of Taylor’s internal evidence’ has been ‘confined to selective [discussion of] the more commonplace or trivial items’. The self-righteousness that pervades Taylor’s defence, and which has alienated a number of commentators , simply swept aside the reasoned arguments of Peter Beal, Robin Robbins, Donald Foster, and Thomas Pendleton: For the most part, objections to this cumulative external and internal evidence have been based upon personal judgements of the quality of the poem. Such criticisms have been considered in detail in Taylor[] and Taylor[] ; they are intrinsically, and in practice, unreliable. (TxC, p. )
But to describe his evidence as ‘cumulative’ is to heap sand on sand; trying to deflect the issue by claiming that his critics simply expressed a ‘personal judgement’ is once again to misrepresent and trivialize the whole discussion. Taylor, who obviously thinks that his methods alone ‘are intrinsically . . . reliable’, categorically rejected the ‘more specific negative evidence . . . accumulated by Pendleton’ in his letter to the New York Times, and dismissed Foster’s criteria for evaluating the relative merits
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
of the Bodleian and Yale manuscripts as ‘inconsistent and implausible’ (p. ). Such dogmatism may spring from a genuine conviction that he is right, but by the same token it shows Taylor’s utter inflexibility. George Walton Williams expressed widely shared misgivings at the way in which the Oxford editors included ‘Shall I die?’ in the Complete Works ‘as a Shakespearian item’, despite the fact that no serious scholar endorsed their ascription: ‘Taylor’s reluctance to hear the cries of scholarly rejection verges on the wilful.’ As for Taylor’s earlier claim that the Oxford editors could ‘only modestly defer to the testimony of the extant witnesses’ – that is, the single manuscript attribution – lacking ‘other evidence more substantial than our own aesthetic judgement’ (TxC, p. ), Williams dismissed that argument as ‘inadequate’: ‘Rather, the responsibility of the editors should have been to weigh each attribution and to record the attitudes and opinions of other editors and scholars . . . for or against . . . “Modesty” might have included a concession that they might just possibly have been wrong.’ It is significant that the Oxford editors could summarily dismiss claims about the ascription of The London Prodigal to Shakespeare – ‘No serious scholar has taken the attribution seriously’ (TxC, p. ) – while not noticing that a similar verdict must be made of ‘Shall I die?’. The consensus of scholarly opinion, seen both in the number of cogent essays or reviews questioning its attribution, and the absence of any supporting publications other than those by Taylor himself, might seem to have settled the rejection of ‘Shall I die?’ from the canon, except for its privileged place in the pages of Oxford’s Complete Works. Yet in the poem achieved further distribution, as if it were an authentic Shakespearian work, in the pages of the Norton Shakespeare, edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. The well-known publisher W. W. Norton had apparently long wanted to bring out a Shakespeare edition of its own, but rather than incur the expense of assembling an editorial team to produce a fresh text, it simply ‘bought in’ the Oxford text. It seems as if the academic editors had no qualms about the Taylor–Wells ascriptions, for the section called ‘Various Poems’ was taken over wholesale, with a new introduction and explanatory notes by Professor Walter Cohen. This editor tells readers that ‘modern editions of the complete works exclude many of them – in most cases wrongly, it seems’ (Greenblatt et al., , p. ), where the words ‘many’, ‘most’, and ‘seems’ betray a disturbing degree of uncertainty. Cohen presents no evidence whatsoever for Shakespeare’s
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
authorship of ‘Shall I die?’, contenting himself with recycling Taylor’s description of it as ‘a virtuoso display of rhyming’ (p. ). The reader wanting to know on what conceivable grounds it was ever attributed to Shakespeare is left none the wiser, for Cohen’s ‘Selected Bibliography’ (p. ) includes no details of the original controversy, lists Foster’s essay, but unaccountably omits Pendleton’s more important one (). All that Cohen reports is that ‘the poem was first assigned in print to Shakespeare in , a claim that has aroused considerable skepticism. The name in the manuscript [the date that Cohen assigns to Rawlinson poet. MS. ] and the independent analysis of the poem’s language carried out by statisticians make attribution to Shakespeare possible, though not particularly likely’ (p. ; my italics). Readers familiar with the episode will be surprised at Cohen’s reference to the ‘statisticians’ who supposedly made an ‘independent analysis of the poem’s language’, since Taylor’s arguments carried no statistical weight, and they might expect an editor aware of the ‘considerable skepticism’ surrounding the attribution to have performed some evaluation himself, before including it among the ‘Various Poems’ which ‘were composed from the early s until shortly before Shakespeare’s death’ (p. ). That the Norton Shakespeare should take over Taylor’s attribution without any apparent attempt at an independent, critical evaluation is a disturbing abdication of editorial responsibilities. Cohen seems to have given the matter only perfunctory attention, for his annotations to the poem show the vaguest awareness of the poem’s genre or style. Commenting on line (in Taylor’s emended and modernized text) Shall I sue, and not rue my proceeding?
he writes that ‘Both “sue” and “proceeding” refer to lawsuits’ (p. , n. ). It is true that if one simply looked up the two words in a dictionary, those meanings would be available, but to propose them here suggests that Cohen failed to grasp what the poem is about. The poet is surely not intending to take his beloved to court. Despite his ‘New Historicist’ credentials, Cohen shows only an imperfect awareness of the supercharged but paralysed world of Petrarchan love-poetry, and especially of this poet’s dilemma, whether or not to risk making a verbal declaration of one’s love, for his comment on lines – – ‘her reply gives thee Ioy or annoy or affliction’ – is that ‘ “Affliction” may also suggest a sexually transmitted disease’ (n. ). This might be true of a poem by Rochester, but for a Renaissance Petrarchist it is simply unthinkable. Cohen believes that ‘wantonly’ () means ‘capriciously’, when it really
Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
means ‘provocatively’; he glosses the ‘fair brows’ () as ‘forehead’; he thinks that ‘beauties banner’ in her cheeks refers only to ‘a blush’; and he explains the poem’s erotic highlight – A pretty bare, past compare Parts those plotts (which besots) still asunder (–)
as follows: Incomparably pretty ‘bare’ skin and breasts (exposed above a low neckline) separate the nipples (‘plotts’) that, always separated, (always) cause infatuation. (p. , n. )
Tautology is evidently contagious: Cohen here goes on record as stating that a woman’s nipples can be described as ‘plots’, and that they are ‘always separated’ by the breasts, which ‘(always) cause infatuation’. The whole misguided identification of this mediocre Petrarchan poem as a work of Shakespeare reaches its lowest point here, as an editor supposedly committed to the ascription demonstrates his failure to understand its basic idiom. Elevated into undeserved prominence, the poem is now accepted in the canon of the Norton Shakespeare with a careless and perfunctory gesture towards annotation. Readers who thought that Taylor’s ascription, clung to so stubbornly, fell far below modern scholarly standards in authorship studies, will be even more depressed to find it given an extended lease of life for an innocent and unsuspecting public. The process by which this poem gained entry to two major Shakespeare editions shows that scholarly considerations are not the only factor in getting attributions accepted. The dissentient voices in this debate, American and English, drew on a considerable fund of knowledge, but it proved insufficient to deter the Oxford and Norton editors from canonizing ‘Shall I die?’. In the Epilogue I return to this issue of the other factors – involving the media, institutions, the politics and ethics of controversy – which can help decide whether an attribution becomes accepted or not.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
In the critical reaction to Gary Taylor’s claims for ‘Shall I die?’ the name of Donald Foster occurred several times, as the author of letters to the TLS and New York Times in , and a longer essay for Shakespeare Quarterly in . These contributions were well presented, citing lexical and other data which would date that poem to the Jacobean period, far later than Taylor’s theory allowed. At this point Foster had published none of his work on the Funerall Elegye for William Peter (), and his interventions seemed like the work of a disinterested scholar, concerned to establish the truth. From Foster’s recent autobiography, however, a quite different picture emerges. According to this colourful account, ‘the “Shakespeare” attribution for “Shall I die?” had been documented long ago in standard reference works’, and ‘though new to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, had long been known to other scholars . . . ’, but without arousing interest. But it was no sooner published than ‘the academic establishment exploded into raucous laughter’, and the poem ‘was described . . . as the most ridiculous piece of rubbish produced in the seventeenth century’. Foster explains that, ‘neither good nor bad, probably a stage jig, “Shall I die?” was just one of several lyrics’ doubtfully ascribed to Shakespeare. When the Oxford editors published their attribution, he claimed, the general response was so derisive that ‘with cheeks stung red by this icy blast, Stanley Wells did an about-face, directing all queries to his junior associate, Gary Taylor, the American’, who ‘was forced to eat the poisoned apple’ when English journalists dismissed the attribution as ‘the product of an American scholar’s gullibility’. According to Foster again, ‘the Times Literary Supplement kept the frenzy going with mirthful letters to the editor, but no one presented concrete evidence that the attribution was wrong. Taylor was simply shouted down . . . ’ (Foster , pp. –). Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Foster’s doctoral advisers obtained special funding ‘and put me on a plane for Oxford to cobble together an authoritative reply’. Having taken copious notes in the Bodleian,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Foster ‘returned home and wrote a spirited rebuttal to the Wells–Taylor attribution . . . sharpening my points somewhat more than was required for the occasion. The Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times Book Review jointly published my commentary’, with the gratifying result that ‘My mailbox was soon crammed with congratulatory letters and thank-you notes.’ This account places Foster at the centre of events, but at the cost of several inaccuracies. No one had taken the Shakespearian ascription of ‘Shall I die’? seriously before Gary Taylor did so in November ; it was his claim, and Stanley Wells never disowned it (many scholars wish that he had). The poem was a song, a Petrarchan account of frustrated love, not a ‘stage jig’, or ‘comic or farcical performance given at the end or in an interval of a play’.The letters to the TLS were far from mirthful, including serious commentary by such respected scholars as I. A. Shapiro, Muriel Bradbrook, Peter Beal, Erica Sheen and the late Jeremy Maule, all of whom presented evidence, based on manuscript collections and literary genres, casting doubt on Taylor’s claim. Indeed, the issue of the TLS in which Taylor first formally presented it ( December , pp. –), carried some very detailed ‘counter-arguments’ put together at remarkably short notice by Robin Robbins (pp. –), still one of the best discussions of this issue. Foster has conveniently forgotten all this, presenting himself as the first to produce ‘concrete evidence’ against the ascription. As for Foster’s ‘commentary’, the New York Times Book Review of January carried a letter by him, amounting to about , words, which was substantially reprinted in the TLS of January. Although containing some cogent criticism, it was by no means ‘an authoritative reply’ (one would blush making such a claim), which was provided by Robbins, and by Thomas Pendleton’s demonstration of the poem’s non-Shakespearian language (Review of English Studies, ). Foster himself declares that his intervention in the controversy was not disinterested, but derived from his uncomfortable realization ‘that I was about to place myself in Taylor’s position – announcing as possibly Shakespeare’s a long poem that folks wouldn’t like very much’ (Foster , p. ). Foster saw Taylor as a threat to his own enterprise, fearing that Taylor had so debased Shakespeare authorship studies that that discipline would be discredited for ever after, and that he would be unable to get a job. This is a somewhat extreme formulation (it is hardly possible that one false ascription could discredit attribution studies as a whole), but Foster’s critique of Taylor has been duly accepted by his supporters as having rescued the discipline from corruption. It remains
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
to be seen whether Foster’s ascription was based on sounder scholarship than Taylor’s. The enterprise which Foster was so keen to defend was his doctoral dissertation for the University of California, Santa Barbara. His autobiography describes how he came to work on the Funerall Elegye, coming across the poem in January while researching the publications of George Eld. At first view, his ‘opinion of its Shakespearean qualities rang[ed] from “Maybe” to “Yes”, to “Never in a million years”, and back again’ (p. ). Foster spent the summer of in England researching the archival records (pp. –, –), and wrote up his dissertation by August . Turned down by two publishers (pp. –, ), it was finally published in . Foster organized his discussion of the poem’s authorship around the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ evidence, starting with the former. The Stationers’ Register, the official record of the Stationers’ Company, contains the following entry for Thursday, February : Thomas Thorpe. Entred for his Copye under th’ [h]andes of the wardens, A booke to be printed when it is further authorized called, A funerall Elegye in memory of the late virtuous master WILLIAM PEETER of Whipton neere Exetour . . . vjd. (Foster , p. )
Shortly afterwards the Elegye appeared in print, a quarto of twenty-one pages containing a poem of rhymed lines, claimed to be ‘By W. S.’, the title-page giving the name of the printer, George Eld, but withholding that of the stationer, Thorpe. Thanks to Foster’s researches we know perhaps as much as there is to be known about the life and death of William Peter. His grandfather had been mayor of Exeter three times; he was the second son of Otho Peter, gent. (who died in ); he was christened in the Devonshire parish of Shillingford St George on December , and grew up in an ‘elegant manor house’ on the family estate at Bowhay (Foster , p. ). Educated either at home or at some village school – Foster suggested that he may have attended Exeter Grammar School (p. ), but that was some distance away – Peter entered Exeter College, Oxford, on July . He matriculated on October that year, following in the footsteps of his elder brother John, who had gone up to Exeter in , and in moved on to the Middle Temple. Foster has discovered that William Peter was a close friend of William Ford, who had been brought up by his uncle Thomas Ford of Ilsington (a nearby village in Devon), father of John Ford, the poet and dramatist (pp. –). William and John Ford went up to Exeter College in September , and although the future
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
dramatist went down in April , his cousin William followed an academic career which had close links with William Peter. They shared a tutor (Simon Baskerville) at Exeter for several terms, and ‘were much in one another’s company at least until April (when Ford graduated MA) and perhaps until the summer of (when he departed for Constantinople)’ (p. ). William Peter took his BA in , his MA in , and went down from Oxford in the autumn of . On January he married Margaret Brewton, ‘the daughter of wealthy parents of Exeter and Whipton’ (p. ), the marriage producing two daughters. William Peter’s uneventful life came to a sudden and violent end on Saturday January . Drawing on documents in the Devonshire Record Office, Exeter, notably the Coroner’s inquest, Foster was able to reconstruct the events of that day, on which Edward Drew and his younger brother John, friends of Peter, spent several hours with him, drinking in various Exeter taverns. As the day wore on the two brothers began to behave violently, and Edward, who had earlier announced that he was going to ‘ “make a quarrel with [William Peter] about the buying of a horse” ’, repeated his offer to exchange horses, ‘but Peter refused to sell’ (p. ). At o’clock that evening, William Peter rode home, and the two brothers galloped after him. When Edward Drew caught up with Peter, he stabbed him in the back of the head, apparently without the knowledge of his brother. Apprehended by a constable next day, they were brought before the Coroner’s jury, where Edward was found guilty on charge of wilful murder, his brother John named as an accessory after the fact. Foster found no proof of their punishment. ‘Scanty evidence suggests that Edward, at least, escaped custody to spend the rest of his days as a fugitive from justice.’ He died in , being buried on an estate owned by his eldest brother, while John had died in (p. ). William Peter’s widow, Margaret, remarried, but remembered her dead husband’s friend William Ford, who had returned from Constantinople in to Exeter College, where he took his BD in . In Ford ‘was appointed vicar of East Coker, Somerset, with the assistance of Peter’s widow’, who had retained ‘the tithing garb and tithing hay of the rectory of East Coker, which had belonged to William Peter as part of his marriage settlement’ (p. ). William Ford subsequently became vicar of West Coker, and enjoyed more than two decades of peaceful life, in sharp contrast to William Peter’s brutal murder. What has this sad story, about an obscure Devonshire gentleman, got to do with Shakespeare? Donald Foster, convinced that the initials ‘W. S.’ could only refer to a poet actually having a Christian name and
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
surname beginning with those letters, devoted most of his monograph to considering ‘The Case for William Shakespeare’ (pp. –). He also considered, only to dismiss, ‘The Case for William Strachey’ (pp. –, –), and gave short shrift to W. Shute, William Segar, William Slatyer and Wentworth Smith (pp. –, –). Although Foster occasionally made judicious disclaimers about positively identifying Shakespeare as the poem’s author (e.g., pp. , , , –), that claim evidently formed the major rationale of his monograph, to which most of his energies had been dedicated. Any doubts Foster might have had were dispelled (or so he claims) by the intervention of Richard Abrams, who in gave a paper at the Shakespeare Association of America’s conference, affirming Shakespeare’s authorship and inviting Foster ‘to help him mount a fresh and more assertive case’ for it. Accordingly Foster presented ‘new evidence’ at the same association’s meeting in , and in a widely publicized paper given to a meeting of the Modern Language Association of America at Chicago later that year, soon published in that association’s journal, PMLA. Here Foster made a remarkably confident series of assertions: A Funeral Elegy belongs hereafter with Shakespeare’s poems and plays, not because there is incontrovertible proof that the man Shakespeare wrote it (there is not) nor even because it is an aesthetically satisfying poem (it is not), but rather because it is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare. Substantially strengthened by historical and intertextual evidence, that web is unlikely ever to come unraveled. As a result, future editors will probably include A Funeral Elegy among Shakespeare’s works – as David Bevington, G. Blakemore Evans, and Stephen Greenblatt have done in their forthcoming editions. (Foster a, pp. –)
Foster has always scornfully rejected Gary Taylor’s case for including ‘Shall I die?’ in the Shakespeare canon, and it was no doubt with a sense of virtuous superiority that he echoed Taylor’s confident pronouncements, a decade earlier, that ‘this poem belongs to Shakespeare’s canon and, unless somebody can dislodge it, it will stay there’, and that ‘unless this document’s attribution can be disproved, this poem must be included in any edition of Shakespeare’s works that claims to be “complete” ’ (see above, p. ). Foster deliberately echoed Taylor’s assertions, without realizing that the ‘web’ he had constructed might be like those made by the scholastic philosophers, as Francis Bacon described them, derived not from ‘matter’ – here, the objective and open-minded study of a wide range of possible authors – but from some internal sources: ‘for the wit
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
and mind of man, if it work upon matter, . . . worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it worketh upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it . . . brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or merit’. Of the many objections already made to Foster’s assertion that Shakespeare is to be identified with the ‘W. S.’ whom either Thomas Thorpe or George Eld claimed to have written the Funerall Elegye, one has not been affected by the ‘new evidence’ that Foster purported to have found in , namely the complete absence of any proof that Shakespeare had ever heard of William Peter. Peter lived most of his brief life in the Devonshire villages of Bowhay and Whipton, near Exeter, apart from his time at Exeter College, Oxford. There is no firm evidence that Shakespeare was ever in the West Country, although the King’s Men performed at Barnstaple in , a fact which inspires Foster’s trivial suggestion that Edgar’s ‘West Country’ dialect in King Lear (.) ‘owes something to this Western tour’ (Foster , p. ). Nor do we have any definite, fully reliable evidence that Shakespeare was ever in Oxford. True, his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s, later the King’s Men acted there perhaps six times between and , a point which Foster tries to build into an argument that he may have met Peter on these occasions (pp. –, –). Foster has even consulted the Buttery Books of Exeter between and , attaching great significance to the fact that Peter took six leaves of absence as a student, and on three of these occasions ‘his absence coincides with provincial tours by the King’s Men that began and ended in Oxford’ (p. ). Of course, Peter’s absences may have coincided with all kinds of other family commitments, back in Devonshire, but Foster fantasized that he was a ‘stage-struck’ youth who may even have been ‘traveling with the players’ (p. ). Professor Foster is entitled to read whatever meaning he chooses into such ‘evidence’, but most other scholars would rate as virtually non-existent the chances of Shakespeare meeting an obscure Devonshire undergraduate and forming an affection warm enough to warrant him writing an elegy for him ten years later. Perhaps Shakespeare knew people who knew Peter and his family? Foster argued this point diligently, citing Shakespeare’s acquaintance with John and Francis Beaumont (p. ), and with the poet John Ford and his brother William (pp. –) – a link to which I shall return, with a rather different intent. Foster even revived the dubious story that Shakespeare not only knew the Oxford vintner John Davenant,
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
but – according to John Aubrey’s testimony, many years later (p. ) – also fathered on his host’s wife a bastard child, who became the future dramatist William Davenant. Other possible mutual friends whom Foster canvassed include Leonard and Dudley Digges (p. ), and Henry Willoughby (pp. –). Willoughby was the author of what Foster described as a ‘po`eme a` clef ’,Willobie his Avisa (), which is known for its early allusion to Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, and in which the heroine ‘Avisa’, a married woman, rejects the advances of five suitors, one of whom is called W. S. ‘This friend, described as a “player”, is hinted to be William Shakespeare’, Foster claimed, before pointing out that Willoughby was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, between and , at a time when ‘George Petre, of Hayes Devonshire’ was an undergraduate, George Petre (the preferred spelling of the wealthier branch of the family) being ‘first cousin on his mother’s side, and second cousin on his father’s side, to William Peter of Bowhay’ (p. ). Shakespeare may have known Willoughby through Thomas Russell, ‘the executor of his will’ (p. ), who – but I break off this report of Foster’s outwardspiralling biographical researches, which failed to establish any definite evidence of a direct link between Shakespeare and the Peter family, and whose claimed ‘indirect links’ turn out to involve much speculation, drifting further away from any firm identification. If you spend enough time in local history archives it is possible to discover ‘links’ between a wide range of English gentlefolk, and if you include friends and friends of friends the possibilities become even more diffuse. Foster candidly admitted that ‘a still greater obstacle in ascribing the Elegy to Shakespeare may be that the poem suggests some measure of intimacy with young Master Peter, as in lines –, –, –, –, –, and in the prefatory epistle’ (p. ). He even disarmingly conceded that ‘it is difficult to see how a friendship could have existed between an Oxford student and a largely untutored playwright, nearly twenty years his senior, who lived much of his time in London, fifty-five miles away’ (p. ) – and miles from Exeter. But whoever reads the passages to which Foster refers (see Appendix I, pp. f ) will soon wonder whether the ‘intimacy’ that he alleges between ‘W. S.’ and ‘young Master Peter’ was ever close. The diction of the Elegye is remarkably abstract, as my later discussion will show, and all the references to the deceased are completely vague, giving no details of his education, home, or family, all standard topics for writers of funeral elegies. Although he claims to have known William Peter, and regrets that he failed to declare his love earlier (FE, ff ), ‘W. S.’ seems either poorly
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
informed or quite out of touch with recent events. The only family matter on which the poet goes into greater detail concerns the chief mourner, Peter’s wife, ‘she who those nine of yeares / Liv’d fellow to his counsailes, and his bed’ (FE, –). Carried away by sympathy and eloquence, the poet unfortunately gets his facts wrong: Peter wed Margaret Brewton on January (Foster , p. ), so that they had been married for just three of years, not nine. Stanley Wells drew attention to this error in a piece for the Times Literary Supplement, concluding, fairly enough, that it must cast grave doubts on the theory that ‘W. S.’ ‘was a close friend of William Peter’, and makes it ‘even less likely that Shakespeare, at this stage in his career, would have written at such length about someone he scarcely knew than about an intimate friend’. Richard Abrams – whom Foster credited as inspiring him to make a ‘more assertive case for Shakespearean authorship’ – tried to rebut this argument, claiming that ‘there now exists a tight web of circumstantial evidence linking Peter with Shakespeare’, and arguing that Wells confuses the wife of three years with a woman with whom Peter is described as having shared ‘his counsels and his bed’ during his nine years away from home. It would not have been possible for Jacobean readers even to imagine W. S. mistaken on this matter, for everyone knew that Oxford students were not allowed to marry, and the poet himself gives an accurate account of Peter’s student years. Not only, then, does W. S. seem to be personally acquainted with Peter, but . . . he displays considerable daring in affording pride of place to the ‘other woman’ as the most deeply aggrieved of Peter’s mourners.
Here Abrams merely shows his ignorance of the mores of English society, and of small collegiate universities. The truth is the opposite: ‘It would not have been possible for Jacobean readers even to imagine’ a poet stating, in the elegy to a young man of a good family recently murdered, that he had a mistress of nine years’ standing who would be entitled to claim chief place among the mourners. And it is inconceivable that Peter’s Oxford tutor (a post explicitly defined as standing in loco parentis to his charges) would not know, in such a small community as Elizabethan Oxford, of a pupil having a mistress. Professor Abrams totally misunderstands Elizabethan middle-class society if he thinks such a situation possible – rather, his scenario reads like a recent American TV drama, championing the rights of ‘the other woman’. This desperate invention was dismissed by Stanley Wells a week later by simply pointing to the full context of the Elegye, with its ‘reference to “the chaste embracements of conjugal love” – not just conjugal, but chaste – followed a little later by
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
the words “divorce” and “husband”, all pointers to “the victim’s wife, not his mistress”’. Abrams had asserted that ‘Considerable biographical evidence in the Elegy supports the claim for Shakespeare [sic] authorship’ (a, p. ), but the more we learn about the poet, the more obstacles we face in identifying ‘W. S.’ with ‘the “real” W. S.’, as Foster calls him. Indeed, in his monograph Foster left till last an even more startling ‘obstacle to belief ’, namely the fact that ‘On February , just nine days after Peter was slain, and sixteen days’ – actually ten, as Stanley Wells pointed out (Wells a, p. ) – ‘before the Elegye was registered in London, there was buried at Stratford one “Gilbertus Shakespeare, adolescens”. It seems likely that this was Shakespeare’s brother Gilbert’, born in , misdescribed as adolescens by a country parson who took it to mean ‘unmarried’ (p. ). So, if Shakespeare’s brother (who is thought to have been a London haberdasher) was buried in Stratford in the same week that William Peter was buried at Exminster, one may well ask what the chances are of Shakespeare’s finding either the time or the inclination to write a funeral elegy for a young man with whom he can no longer [sic] have had a close association. Indeed, even assuming that Shakespeare performed at court with the King’s Men during the winter of /, one may ask what the chances are that he would hear of William Peter’s death in time to write a major poem on the subject, and to have it completed within three weeks of his friend’s burial. Add to this the fact that Shakespeare cannot with certainty be placed in Oxford for any length of time, nor William Peter in London; the fact that Shakespeare was old enough to be Peter’s father; the fact that no seventeenth-century writer makes mention of Shakespeare having written a funeral elegy; and that the Elegy was omitted from John Benson’s Poems in (while many items not written by Shakespeare were included) – and the case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Peter elegy becomes clouded. We shall do well to consider such problems before adding this Funerall Elegye to the canon of William Shakespeare. (Foster , pp. –)
Many scholars will agree with MacDonald P. Jackson’s verdict that these are truly ‘almost insuperable obstacles to belief in Shakespeare’s authorship’. But time has shown that for Foster and his associates they were by no means completely insuperable. In effect, all objections have simply been ignored, quietly dropped while their full resources of argument have been devoted to trying to prove that the Funerall Elegye is formed from textual and linguistic fabric ‘indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (Foster a, p. ). The external biographical proof that Shakespeare ever heard of William Peter is non-existent. Foster’s only remaining piece of ‘external’
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
evidence is the presence of the initials ‘W. S.’ on the poem’s title-page, and at the end of the dedication. For Foster and his supporters this must be interpreted as cast-iron proof of Shakespeare’s authorship. But it is a general fact in all human experience that any phenomenon may have more than one explanation. The fact that the sun seems to rise in the morning and set in the evening may mean that the earth is motionless, the sun moving – or it may mean the opposite. In the complex domain of attribution studies, where scholars attempt to identify the author of an anonymous poem or play by weighing up a mass of linguistic detail, it is particularly important to keep an open mind, testing all hypotheses, provisionally accepting those that seem best supported by the available evidence, but being ready to change one’s mind if either new evidence appears or a better interpretation can be discovered. Yet, from the outset of his researches, Foster seems to have closed his mind to any other explanation of the presence of the initials ‘W. S.’ on the title-page and at the end of the author’s dedication. His discussion of ‘Authorship’ in the monograph began as follows: Any attempt to determine who wrote this Funeral Elegy for William Peter must doubtless begin with the initials, W. S., on the title page, and the first thing we must ask is whether the initials are not simply wrong. The answer is almost certainly no. There are a few known instances of Renaissance poems or plays having been issued, perhaps for the sake of improving sales, under the name or initials of a popular writer, even when the said writer had little or no part in the work. In none of Thomas Thorp’s other publications is he guilty of such a practice, and there would be little cause for him to begin here, especially if, as appears to be the case, he never made any effort to market the volume for public distribution. ( p. )
Having awarded the publisher a certificate for honest trading, Foster dealt in equally bland terms with the general question of the reliability of initials indicating authorship of Renaissance books: Scholarly investigation has shown that the use of false or transposed initials on printed works was the exception even when there was an apparent desire for anonymity, and then only when there appears to have been a good reason for concealing the author’s identity, as in the case of a scurrilous satire or an unauthorized religious tract. (p. )
Foster added a footnote informing his readers that the relevant authority, ‘Horden (D. A. P.) lists fewer than two hundred initialed works in the period – for which the author’s initials, as given, are known or suspected to be incorrect. The vast majority of these are religious
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
polemics, of them tracts by Roman Catholics.’ Eliminating those, and some other inapplicable cases (such as Nicholas Breton’s idiosyncratic use of ‘twelve sets of pseudonymous initials’), Foster concluded that ‘there are fewer than two dozen initialed works printed in the years – for which the author’s initials are possibly transposed or otherwise in error – a very small number, considering the many thousands of books and tracts printed during these years’ (p. ). Judged as a pure statistic, of course, that may well be a small number, but Foster committed the simple logical error of not considering negative instances (having observed , white swans, it only needs one black one to falsify the proposition that all swans are white). Among this ‘small number’ it is perfectly possible that the Funerall Elegye should be placed. And in any case, the relevant figure for comparison would be not the number of books printed but the number of those in which the authorship is indicated by initials: sets of initials which are ‘transposed or otherwise in error’ out of fewer than is, after all, more than percent, a substantial proportion. In this way Foster assured his readers that the use of initials was, for the most part, a sincere authentication of identity. But scholars familiar with this problem know that, when initials were used, it is actually very difficult, four centuries later, to know whose name was being honestly declared, falsely insinuated, or spoofed. The essential caveat about identifying Renaissance authors from initials was made by that formidable scholar Franklin B. Williams, Jr, drawing on his experience of ‘examining twenty-odd thousand volumes while indexing dedications and other preliminaries in British books published before ’, namely that ‘Nothing is more futile than irresponsible conjecture. Almost as bad is premature satisfaction when one has hit on a likely fellow whose name fits.’ Anyone tempted to make a straightforward identification of authors from the given initials should study Williams’s analysis of common errors, ‘mirage initials’, ‘arbitrary initials’, ‘integrated affixes’, ‘limiting appendages’, ‘scrabbled initials’ – that is, ‘initials that have been deliberately juggled either in a spirit of fun or to achieve concealment’ (Williams , p. ), and deliberate ‘mystifications’. In this area few things are as simple as they seem. Among the categories of initials discussed by John Horden are initials representing a style, such as ‘M. W.’ for ‘Master (William) Whateley’; initials representing the last letters of a writer’s Christian name and surname, such as ‘M. E.’ for William Prynne and ‘M. N.’ for William Camden’ (Horden , p. xxvii), and ‘simple reversed initials’, such as ‘W. I.’ for John Weever,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
and ‘H. T.’ for Thomas Heywood. Foster belatedly acknowledged that Simon Wastell, who plagiarized the Funerall Elegye in his own elegy, The Muses Thankfulnesse (), might be a candidate for the authorship of the earlier poem, seeing that ‘Wastell’s initials are simply the reverse of “W. S.”’ (, p. ) – but of course he rejected the possibility. The use of initials may be divided into three categories: honest, playful, and fraudulent. By ‘honest’ I mean, for instance, cases where writers of Catholic, often anti-Protestant, apologetics disguised their identity in order to escape prosecution, torture and death. As John Horden observed, of all initials ‘perhaps the most difficult to interpret are those which are entirely false or which may represent a name as yet unestablished. Concealment of authorship in this fashion was largely the province of Recusant writers who naturally had an urgent need to remain unidentified’ (Horden , p. xviii), but it was not exclusive to them. In the second, ‘playful’ category I would include what Colin Burrow recently described as a tradition of erotic fictions which use their preliminary matter to hint that the characters in the fiction might have some bearing on real life. George Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F. J. is found in a volume prefixed by an epistle, supposedly from someone called H. W., but almost certainly by Gascoigne himself, which relates how its manuscript passed to him from someone called G. T. to his printer A. B. The proliferation of initials in F. J. invites its readers to apply them to real people, although it is fairly clear that they are inventions of the author.
But playful could also turn into mischievous, and some early modern writers had cause to complain that not their name but their initials had been taken in vain. Richard J. Kennedy drew attention to a complaint made by John Taylor (–), the popular and prolific ‘Water Poet’. In his Taylor’s Pastorall (: STC ) the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ contains this announcement (understanding that in Elizabethan printing ‘I’ and ‘J’ were interchangeable): Foure thinges, I have, doe, and ever will observe in my Writings; which are, not to write prophane, obsceane, palpable, and odious Lyes, or scandalous Libels. In keeping which Decorum, I hope I shall keepe my selfe within the limits or bounds of good mens Respect. And this Advertisement more I give the Reader, that there are many things Imprinted under the name of two letters, I.T. for some of which I have been taxed [alleged] to be the Author: I assure the world that I had never any thing imprinted of my own writing, that I was either afraid or ashamed to set my name at large to it; and therefore if you see any
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
Authors name I.T. I utterly disclaim it: for I am as I have bin, both I. and T. which with additions of Letters, is yours to be commanded in any laudable endevours, IOHN TAYLOR
The third of my categories of Renaissance writers using initials is that of deliberate fraud, where those involved in the publication of a book – the stationer, the printer, the bookseller (three functions which were sometimes fulfilled by two or just one person) – knowingly subscribed the initials, or even the name of some other author. It was extremely disingenuous of Donald Foster to inform his readers that there are only ‘a few known instances of Renaissance poems or plays having been issued, perhaps for the sake of improving sales, under the name or initials of a popular writer, even when the said writer had little or no part in the work’, for he surely knew that Shakespeare, above all other Renaissance writers, suffered most from this malpractice. The third Folio edition of his works () included six wholly spurious plays, the so-called ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’. These had previously appeared in quarto, all falsely ascribed, as follows: () The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine . . . Newly set foorth, ouerseene and corrected, By W. S. Printed by Thomas Creede (). () The first part Of the true and honourable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle, the good Lord Cobham. Printed by V. S. for Thomas Pavier (). () The True Chronicle Historie of the whole life and death of Thomas Lord Cromwell . . . Written by W. S. [R. Read] for William Jones (; ). () The London Prodigall . . . By William Shakespeare. Printed by T. C. for Nathaniel Butter (). () The Puritaine or The Widdow of Watling-streete . . . Written by W. S. Printed by G. Eld () – who printed the Funerall Elegye in . () A Yorkshire Tragedy. . . . Acted by his majestie’s players at the Globe. Written by W. Shakespeare. Printed by R. Bradock For Thomas Pavier (; ). None of these plays has been accepted into the canon, since the claimed authorship depends solely on the publisher’s declaration on the titlepage (and, in the case of A Yorkshire Tragedy, an entry in the Stationers’ Register). In the words of C. F. Tucker Brooke, a pioneer editor of this ‘pseudo-Shakespearian’ material, ‘such ascriptions are either the most authoritative of all, or they are utterly valueless; they may rest on personal knowledge or general contemporary report; they may, on the other hand, be no more than the fabrication of an ignorant or fraudulent bookseller’. The dual claim for A Yorkshire Tragedy (both Shakespeare’s
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
name and Shakespeare’s company) might well move us to read the play before rejecting the ascription, but the similar claim for Sir John Oldcastle, ‘absurd on the face of it, is proved mendacious beyond the shadow of a doubt, by the record in Henslowe’s Diary of the actual authors: Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway’. Such claims are only worth serious consideration, Tucker wrote, when ‘there is no prima facie evidence to believe the witnesses grossly ignorant of the matter, or dishonestly intent on palming off their spurious wares as the works of Shakespeare’ (Brooke , p. viii). The latter motive becomes clearly visible when we meet The Troublesome Reign of King John, in two parts, the source from which Shakespeare developed his play, of which the first edition () was anonymous. The title-page of the second quarto (; V. Simmes for J. Helme) says ‘Written by W. Sh.’, evidently hinting at Shakespeare’s authorship, which is finally openly claimed in the third quarto (; A. Mathewes for T. Dewe), as ‘Written by William Shakespeare’. The fact that Locrine (), Thomas Lord Cromwell (), and The Puritan () all bear the same inscription, ‘by W. S.’, even though the evidence of style and method suggests that they were written by three different dramatists, puts them in the same category as The Troublesome Reign of King John, where ‘a dishonest but cautious bookseller’ intended the public to construe ‘W. Sh.’ as ‘William Shakespeare’, boldly asserting it in (after Shakespeare’s death). Brooke concluded that the initials ‘W. S.’ may well stand for ‘William Shakespeare’, but that ‘such doubtful and suspicious evidence, though it apparently impressed the editors of the third Folio’, has no weight in deciding Shakespeare’s authorship (p. xvi). Foster seems to have forgotten the Shakespeare Apocrypha, else, having spent nearly a hundred pages urging Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye for William Peter, he would surely not have begun his discussion of ‘The External Evidence’ with this candid concession: If Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegy had to be proven in a court of law solely on the basis of surviving evidence, the case would be dismissed in short order. Such evidence is slight indeed, consisting of little more than a set of appropriate initials, and a publisher, Thomas Thorp, who is known to have arranged the printing of Shake-speares Sonnets in . If William Shakespeare’s full name were printed on the title page of the Elegy, there could remain no doubt who wrote it. We have instead only a set of rather ordinary initials. (, p. )
But the evidence of the Apocrypha – Sir John Oldcastle, The London Prodigal and A Yorkshire Tragedy all had ‘Shakespeare’s full name . . . printed on the title page’, and they turned out to be worthless witnesses – disproves that
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
assertion. Foster was also strangely ignorant of Baldwin Maxwell’s full discussion of the ‘W. S.’ / ‘William Shakespeare’ signatures in his book on the Shakespeare Apocrypha. Maxwell pointed out that between and thirteen plays were printed ‘with what purport to be the authors’ initials’, and that ‘ “W. S.” appears more frequently than any other initials’, being used by three separate printers (Maxwell , p. ). Maxwell observed further that never did the initials ‘W. S.’ appear on any authentic work by Shakespeare. His name is given on Venus and Adonis (), on The Rape of Lucrece (), on the Sonnets (). His name is attached also to The Phoenix and the Turtle () and to ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (). Only nineteen of Shakespeare’s plays were printed before the appearance of the folio of . Of these eleven are from their first appearance stated to have been written by ‘W. Shakespeare’. The eight others – all early – were first printed as anonymous, but three of the eight were within a year of their first appearance reprinted under his full name. No play by Shakespeare first printed after , whether in pirated or authorized text, fails to bear his name on the title-page. Yet Cromwell () and The Puritan () are ascribed merely to ‘W. S.’ (pp. –)
Maxwell considered the possibility that ‘W. S.’ might refer to other contemporary dramatists with the same initials, such as Wentworth Smith, who between and was paid by Philip Henslowe for his involvement in writing fifteen plays (all but two of them in collaboration with one, two, or three other dramatists), and a ‘W. Smith’ who published a play in (pp. –). The evidence for a shared name being so slight, Maxwell naturally considered the possibility that the use of ‘W. S.’ might be intended to cash in on Shakespeare’s reputation: When Cromwell () and The Puritan () were published there can be no doubt that Shakespeare’s name upon a printed play would have definitely assisted its sale. I suspect it would also have done so when Creede published Locrine in . . . [by when] there had been two, possibly three editions of Venus and Adonis and one of The Rape of Lucrece, all of course bearing Shakespeare’s full name . . . ( pp. –)
Earlier, commenting on the fact that in three of the apocryphal plays, ‘Shakespeare’s name was used in full’, E. K. Chambers observed: ‘it looks as if Shakespeare’s reputation had “publicity” value. The play-lists of Archer () and Kirkman (, ) expand both sets of initials into his name.’ As we have seen, Gary Taylor recently drew attention to the fact that all the plays excluded by the editors of the First Folio ‘were first attributed to Shakespeare early in the seventeenth century, when his
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
reputation created incentives to dishonesty, and before the Folio itself ended the market for such fraudulence by providing the public with a reliable dramatic canon’ (TxC, p. ). Shakespeare’s name already had sufficient kudos for publishers to ascribe to him not only plays but some apocryphal poems. In or William Jaggard published The Passionate Pilgrim. By William Shakespeare (STC , the second edition; the fragmentary copy of the first edition, ., lacks the date). This is a small collection of twenty-one poems, of which only five are certainly by Shakespeare, including three sonnets from Love’s Labour’s Lost and two of the ‘sugared sonnets’ that were circulating among his private friends, as Francis Meres recorded in his compilation Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (). Jaggard was obviously trying to cash in on Shakespeare’s current popularity, indeed he repeated the offence in the third edition (), which included additional poetry, this time lifted from Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britannica: or, Great Britaine’s Troy. A poem (), partly translated from Ovid. Heywood instantly drew attention, in the epistle to An Apology for Actors (), to the ‘manifest injury done me in that worke’ by Jaggard having taken two of his verse epistles between Helen and Paris and printing them in a lesse volume [The Passionate Pilgrim], under the name of another [Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him; and hee to doe himself right hath since published them in his owne name [Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ]: but as I must acknowledge my lines not worthy his patronage, under whom he [ Jaggard] hath publisht them; so the Author I know much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknowne to him) presumed to make so bold with his name. (quoted in Greg , p. n.)
Shakespeare might well be angry with Jaggard, but the organization of the Stationers’ Company was not designed to protect the authors but rather the stationers who claimed to own the rights to print a text, although authors did occasionally take remedial action in their own right. Greg noted that ‘Jaggard at least had the decency to print a cancel titleleaf from which Shakespeare’s name was removed’ (p. ) – Malone’s copy, now in the Bodleian. The temptation of invoking Shakespeare’s name, or initials, was even greater – because less noticeable, no publication being involved – among the many copyists and collectors of poetry, that manuscript culture whose vigorous existence in an age of print we are only just beginning to take stock of. As I have suggested, to add the name ‘William Shakespeare’ to a poem like ‘Shall I die?’ was to instantly increase its value for the copyist or collector.
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
One highly relevant piece of information concerning the deliberate misuse of the initials ‘W. S.’ was provided by Donald Foster himself, but (so far as I can see) only outside the context of his claims for the Funerall Elegye. In one of his several cogent objections to Gary Taylor’s ascription of ‘Shall I die?’ to Shakespeare, Foster argued, in a letter to the New York Times, that ‘mis-attribution in these manuscripts [poetic miscellanies] is common. It is worth remarking, moreover, that we have nearly poems in various th-century manuscripts ascribed simply to “W. S.”. (Some of those were written by William Strode and William Smith; other “W. S.” poems were in fact written by Robert Ayton, Thomas Carew, John Fletcher, Richard Love and Benjamin Stone.) That the Rawlinson scribe might have expanded “W. S.” in his copy text into “William Shakespeare” is not implausible’ (Foster a, p. ). Foster here did not consider what the motives of those scribes might have been, in adding Shakespeare’s initials to a poem. I fully agree with Foster’s argument concerning the Rawlinson scribe. But of course it proves another, more embarrassing point for his ascription of the Funerall Elegye, namely that scribes, like printers, were often tempted to upgrade the value of some poem or play – whether or not they knew its true author – by appending Shakespeare’s initials to it. That a manuscript copyist should add ‘W. S.’ to a poem whose true author he may not have known is relatively harmless, since – for the most part – there was no intention to mislead others. In the publication of plays, equally, we can acknowledge Baldwin Maxwell’s reminder that play-books were usually sold by the theatre company, and that since ‘the great majority of the manuscript playbooks which survive contain little information’ about the author, ‘it is possible that when, as often happened, the rights to a play lay with the bookseller rather than with the printer’, the printer may have had to invent the information presented on the title-page (Maxwell , p. ). Nevertheless, enough instances of deliberate misattribution exist for modern scholars to consider the possibility that ‘the title-page ascriptions to “W. S.”, like the bolder false ascriptions to “W. Shakespeare”, [can] be interpreted as deliberate designs on the part of printers to capitalize upon Shakespeare’s recognized superiority by misleading hesitant purchasers into thinking they were being offered plays by William Shakespeare’ (p. ). Although he warned against simply assuming the printers’ and publishers’ guilt, Maxwell delivered forthright denunciations of Nathaniel Butter and Thomas Pavier, ‘two of the most unscrupulous publishers of their time. It was Butter who, in the same year in which he brought out The Prodigal, published Heywood’s If
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
You Know not Me from a pirated text declared by Heywood to have been “copied only by the eare” with “scarce one word true”. It was Butter and John Bushy . . . who published the presumably pirated first quarto of King Lear’ (pp. –). Concerning Pavier’s ‘untrustworthiness’, having in published – together with William Jaggard – ‘the pirated and thoroughly bad texts’ of Henry V, Pericles, the Bad Octavos of and Henry VI, and A Yorkshire Tragedy, all ‘declared to have been written by “W. Shakespeare” ’, as well as five other plays ‘with antedated or otherwise false title-pages’, including Sir John Oldcastle, ‘which Pavier had previously printed without an author’s name’, this brief catalogue of his unreliability must invalidate his ascriptions. As for George Eld, involved with Thomas Thorpe in publishing Shakespeare’s Sonnets, theFunerall Elegye, and over twenty other titles, Maxwell judged him ‘trustworthy’ (pp. –), for of the ‘four plays entered to his name and published by him – all four within scarcely more than two months of ’, he correctly ascribed Northward Ho to Dekker, printed both The Revenger’s Tragedy and A Trick to Catch the Old One without an author’s name, but reprinted the latter in with an ascription to ‘T. M.’ (Thomas Middleton), while ascribing The Puritan to ‘W. S.’. Maxwell argued that if Eld intended to encourage the belief that Shakespeare wrote that play, ‘either he knew surprisingly little about Shakespeare or he was remarkably careless in his plan of deceit’, for the title-page declares it to have been ‘Acted by the Children of Paules’, and any London playlover in would have known that Shakespeare never wrote for any of the children’s companies, and that from the mid-s he had only worked for the Chamberlain’s, subsequently the King’s Men (pp. –). Maxwell sought to exonerate Eld, but a quite different evaluation was made by David Frost in his important study of Shakespeare’s influence on Jacobean and Caroline drama. Arguing for Middleton’s authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy, Frost discussed the Quarto, printed by Eld, which states on its title-page that the play was performed by the King’s Men, and found reason to doubt his veracity. Eld operated from about to , both as a general printer for booksellers and as a printer and bookseller in his own right. ‘His career, as reconstructed from the Stationers’ Registers and the Short-Title Catalogue, had the usual ups and downs: in and the Stationers’ Company fined him for printing ballads without licence, in they imprisoned him for “being disobedient to the master of this company and using indecent and unfitting speeches to the wardens”, in he was fined again’, for violating another printer’s copyright, and he got into debt. As Frost remarked,
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
‘probably none of this suggests particular roguery, given the conditions of the trade at the time’ (Frost , p. ). However, signs of strain may be detected in the period –, when he attempted ‘to break out on his own as a publisher’. Previously he had printed only two books for himself, ‘but between and he entered a large number of works in the Stationers’ Register, printed fine editions of histories in translation, and acquired the copyright’ of the only four plays that he published on his own behalf. Some of these plays came from the defunct Paul’s Boys, who had folded after . As a printer attempting to set up on his own as a publisher, Eld needed bestsellers; consequently, we hardly need to search for a motive for attributing plays of a defunct company to the popular King’s Men. But does some parallel dishonesty on his part support the suggestion that The Revenger’s Tragedy is misassigned? Striking evidence of sharp practice is to be found in Eld’s attribution of another of his four plays, The Puritan, not indeed to the King’s Men, but to their leading dramatist, one ‘W. S.’ (p. )
David Frost’s doubts about Eld’s veracity were shared by MacDonald Jackson in his study of the Middleton attributions. Jackson endorsed Frost’s suggestion that Eld ‘may deliberately have misattributed The Revenger’s Tragedy to the King’s Men’, and added: ‘Eld’s use of the initials “W. S.” on the title page of The Puritan was almost certainly intended to mislead.’ Knowing these facts, it would be extremely na¨ıve to issue a blanket certificate of good trading to George Eld. Fifty years ago Leo Kirschbaum described ‘the printers, publishers, and booksellers in Shakespeare’s day’ as being ‘mainly interested in money. They were thoroughly wide-awake business men who were out for a quick penny.’ They may well have been ‘honest, hard-working men . . . But the historian had better forget modern publishing law and ethics and see them in the light of their own day.’ With Thomas Thorpe we must register an equally mixed judgment. He has been best known to Shakespeare scholars as the bookseller who in issued Shakespeare’s Sonnets, together with A Lover’s Complaint, in a quarto printed by George Eld, which exists in two states, one ‘to be solde by William Aspley’ (STC ), the other ‘to be solde by J. Wright’ (STC a). This volume includes the famous (or notorious) dedication ‘To. The. Onlie. Begetter. Of. These. Insuing. Sonnets. Mr W. H.’, signed ‘T. T.’ The fact that the dedication was signed by Thorpe, not Shakespeare, is one of several features that have aroused doubts as to whether Shakespeare authorized publication of this volume. Thorpe
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
seems to have enjoyed writing dedications, as can be seen from the revised Short-Title Catalogue. In he brought out John Healey’s translation of Epictetus his manuell (STC ), with a dedication by himself to John Florio; in he brought out an enlarged edition (STC ), this time adding his dedication to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and in George Eld published Healey’s translation of Augustine’s City of God with a dedication signed by Thorpe. Katherine Duncan-Jones recently reviewed Thorpe’s career, presenting him as a man of probity and suggesting that Shakespeare may have actually sold the Sonnets to him in a legitimate commercial transaction. However, Colin Burrow has objected that Duncan-Jones omitted some counter-evidence. ‘She does not discuss the fact that in Thorpe’s first effort with William Aspley to register a piece of copy’, John Gordon’s panegyric to King James (STC –), ‘was cancelled because the work was already registered’ to John Seton, so violating ‘one of the key principles of the stationers’ company’, that each printer’s copy rights should be preserved (Burrow , p. ). Duncan-Jones also gave only brief attention to ‘Thorpe’s apparent piracy of Marlowe’s Lucan’s First Book Translated’ in (STC ), although Thorpe subsequently enjoyed close relations with the printer concerned, Edward Blount. But Thorpe’s publication, in , of Thomas Coryate’s The Odcombian Banquet (STC ), printed by George Eld, is described by the Short-Title Catalogue as being ‘largely a pirated reprint of the prelims of ’ Coryats Crudities (STC ), published earlier that year, a piracy which Duncan-Jones dismissed as a mere prank (Duncan-Jones , p. ). Duncan-Jones described Thorpe’s ‘florid and quipping epistle to Blount’, prefixed to the Marlowe Lucan, as ‘the first of the eccentric, rather self-assertive epistles and dedications which characterize some of [his] publications’ (p. ). But W. W. Greg showed that although ‘written in a facetious vein’ it could be ‘intended for bitter sarcasm’, for ‘it contains phrases that seem deliberately meant to wound’, and can be read as ‘an invasion by Thorpe of what he pretends to be Blount’s claim to all Marlowe’s literary remains’. Burrow endorsed Greg’s suspicions, listing three other works ‘for which Thorpe may have composed anonymous preliminary matter’, but offered the charitable explanation that Thorpe only did so ‘for volumes whose authors were dead . . . or out of the country’ (Burrow , p. ). However, there is enough evidence of Elizabethan printers (or stationers) being ‘so cavalier in their treatment of an author’s work’ for us to be suspicious of repeated claims that a book ‘was printed in the author’s absence (and presumably without his knowledge)’. At all events, it is obvious that Thorpe, like other early
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
modern publishers took far greater liberties with their authors’ texts than (one hopes) contemporary publishers would dare to do. For the commercial ethics of both Thorpe and Eld, as we can see, quite divergent estimates have been given in recent years. In part, this may be due to the huge gap of time that separates us from early modern publishing practices, which were certainly very different from our own. Even Thomas Pavier, who has been denounced for over a century as ‘a notoriously piratical publisher’, has recently been defended as a trustworthy, conscientious tradesman. When Gerald D. Johnson came to examine the circumstances surrounding the ‘notorious’ quartos issued in with some faked dates, at a time when Pavier was ‘enjoying his promotion into the governing councils of the Stationers’ Company’, he found it ‘unlikely that Pavier, at this stage in his career, would have perpetrated a fraud that put his reputation at risk’. Still, Johnson was forced to acknowledge ‘the faked dates’ in these quartos, together with the disturbing probability that ‘the faked imprints were not intended to deceive the copyright-holders. Instead, the intended dupes were supposedly the acting company or their agents’, who had persuaded the Lord Chamberlain to send a letter to the Stationers’ Company in May ordering that none of the plays belonging to them should be printed without their express permission’ ( Johnson , p. ). The fact that no record exists of anyone protesting suggests to Johnson that ‘the ruse succeeded, or that, as is more likely, the officers of the Company simply winked at the affair’, an unpleasing complicity. Either way, he could only conclude that ‘the circumstances involved . . . remain a mystery’ (p. ). Donald Foster, similarly, who did not mention the numerous plays falsely attributed to ‘W. S.’, ‘W. Sh.’, or ‘William Shakespeare’ when discussing the issue of initials, belatedly acknowledged their existence at the very end of his book, in a discussion of William Strachey. Referring to Thomas Lord Cromwell (; repr. ) and The Puritan (), Foster commented that ‘both plays were reputedly “Written by W. S.”, though neither can be Shakespeare’s. It has been proven to the satisfaction of many scholars that The Puritaine is principally, if not entirely, the work of Thomas Middleton. How the Quarto came then to bear the initials ‘W. S.’ must remain a mystery’ (, p. ). Both writers, faced with what seems like a publisher’s unequivocal intent to mislead, take refuge in the term ‘mystery’. While acknowledging that publishing practices in the early modern period are difficult to understand, we can see that Foster’s attempt retrospectively to declare both Thorpe and Eld incapable of what would seem to us sharp practice, is a sign either of na¨ıvet´e or of
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
a self-serving argument, designed to foreclose any further discussion of the issue. Either way, to claim that the initials ‘W. S.’ added to A Funerall Elegye really did refer to a professional writer having those initials is to assert more than can be known. If Foster was correct in arguing that the title-page’s failure to give the place at which the poem could be purchased means that it was published privately, and intended for the use of the deceased’s family and friends, then the possibility remains that Thorpe, or Eld, with or without the agreement of the actual author, attempted to console the mourners with the suggestion that a truly major poet had offered his mourning tribute. There is indeed one passage in the Funerall Elegye, which has never been commented on, so far as I know, in which the poet smuggled into the poem a signal that the declaration on the title-page did not indicate the real author. So the poet addresses the deceased, declaring: And I here to thy memorable worth, In this last act of friendship, sacrifice My love to Thee; which I could not set forth In any other habit of disguise. (–)
Neither Foster nor Abrams has commented on these lines, but they surely state unequivocally that the initials ‘W. S.’ do not disclose the poem’s real author. Whatever one makes of this suggestion (much of this poem will always be obscure), it should by now be clear to everyone that for Foster to dedicate several years’ work to the authorship of the Funerall Elegye, having decided from the outset that the initials referred to Shakespeare, was an ill-considered act. One other credible explanation of the initials was made for the first time, as far as I know, by Richard J. Kennedy, namely that ‘W. S.’ was ‘possibly the man for whom John Ford wrote the elegy’ ( ., April ). I had also entertained this idea for a while, without knowing what to do with it, but a plausible scenario has recently been presented by Gilles Monsarrat, in his concise but remarkably telling argument for Ford’s authorship of the Elegye. Suggesting that ‘W. S.’, a friend of the deceased, invited Ford to write a memorial poem as a Devon man who had previously known the Peter family well (at any rate until he went down from Oxford in ), Monsarrat used this thesis to cast light on one of the poem’s most obscure aspects, its several passages of complaint about some ‘shame . . . cast / Upon my name and credit’ by ‘My countries thanklesse misconstruction’:
‘W. S.’ and the ‘Elegye’ for William Peter
If, as I suggest, Ford wrote the elegy at the request of W. S., who wanted to dedicate it to John Peter, this signifies that the ‘speaker’, the person expressing himself in the poem, the ‘I’, would be understood by John Peter (and by any other of its few readers at the time) to be W. S. himself. The words, the phrases, the ideas are Ford’s but when the elegy becomes more personal and reminisces about the past (–, –, etc.), Ford is surely putting into verse what W. S. asked him to say. In the same way a scrivener writing a letter for an illiterate customer would convey his client’s message, not his own, even though the words, phrases and style would be those of the scrivener.
This suggestion would be worth exploring by a historian knowledgeable in Devonshire affairs, in the hope that archival evidence might yield a suitable candidate. As an explanation of these otherwise obscure passages, to consider the initials ‘W. S.’ as representing the person who commissioned the poem makes a good deal of sense. To consider that they represent Shakespeare’s initials, in the absence of any other evidence, makes no sense at all.
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
Since the external evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship of the William Peter Elegye is negligible, Foster’s case rests wholly on the internal evidence, the ‘textual and linguistic fabric’ that it supposedly shares with Shakespeare’s authentic work. Foster itemized several passages in the Funerall Elegye which, he stated, offered close parallels with Shakespeare’s plays and poems. As we saw in discussing Gary Taylor’s claims for ‘Shall I die?’, two scholars in the s, Muriel St Clare Byrne and Arthur Sampley, conclusively showed the dangers involved in citing verbal parallels as a proof of authorship. Careful attribution scholars since that time have regularly warned against the misuse of this method, and have applied it cautiously themselves, pointing out truly striking parallels, involving an idiosyncratic grammatical usage, rare vocabulary, or some ‘parallelism of thought combined with some verbal parallelism’ (Byrne , p. ). Several attribution scholars used this method fruitfully, aware of its dangers, including E. H. C. Oliphant and R. H. Barker on Middleton’s authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, and Cyrus Hoy on the plays in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, all of whom discussed verbal parallels in relation to similarities of attitude (especially the use of irony), dramatic situation, and style. A thoughtful discussion of the methodological issues involved in citing parallel passages was provided by David J. Lake, after making the obligatory caveat that ‘this type of evidence has been grievously abused in the past’. Lake observed that the average ‘parallel passage’ cited ‘has been () undefined as to objective points of similarity, () hence uncountable for statistical purposes, () striking in thought and diction and hence open to imitation, () not subjected to the negative check’, thus defeating four of the main desiderata for valid internal evidence. Yet, Lake added, all these faults are avoidable, for ‘if the parallel is defined, counted, fairly unobtrusive, and searched for through a whole corpus of comparison plays’ in order to establish ‘a recurrence of identical elements’, then it may be
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
used (Lake , p. ). Lake suggested that verbal parallels (which he called ‘collocations’) should be delimited to clearly defined categories, including (a) ‘combinations of more than one word . . . co-occurring in the same sentence’, the combination being carefully defined and its occurrence counted ‘through the entire corpus’; (b) ‘some particular grammatical or semantic pattern’; and (c) ‘single words in special senses’, that sense being ‘always established by the context’ (p. ). As he observed, collocations often ‘have the advantage . . . of high distinctiveness, but usually the disadvantage of low frequency’, such highly individual verbal combinations not occurring often enough to permit statistical analysis. Thus, they are best used ‘in combination with colloquialisms and contractions to show that such items do not signify a mere transcript or superficial revision, but true authorship’. In the s Byrne had urged the importance of applying a ‘negative check’, for ‘in order to express ourselves as certain of attributions we must prove exhaustively that we cannot parallel words, images, and phrases as a body from other acknowledged plays of the period’ (Byrne , p. ). Lake endorsed the importance of the ‘negative check’: collocations may be admitted when examining ‘collaborate play scenes whose authorship can be proved by other means; especially when the item in question does not occur in the undoubted works of the other collaborator’ (Lake , p. ). Many scholars would agree with Lake that verbal parallels form contributory, rather than primary evidence, and ‘should never be relied on to prove a case alone; but the lack of parallels is a suspicious circumstance in any authorship case, and therefore parallels should be cited as “defensive” evidence’ (p. n.), to be used in combination with ‘probative evidence’, such as the distinctive use of contractions and other linguistic habits (pp. –). We can legitimately expect that Donald Foster, writing in , would have been aware of these discussions of the methodological problems involved in citing verbal parallels. He showed some general sense of the error frequently made, seizing on an identification and then spending all one’s time on justifying it: The appearance in an anonymous work of phrasing that appears elsewhere in a work of known authorship is rarely convincing as a basis of attribution. Barring instances of wholesale plagiarism, verbal echoes generally dwell in the ear of the beholder. What one scholar calls an ‘echo’ of this or that author may in fact be nothing more than a commonplace expression or sentiment, and even when two or more texts contain obvious similarities of diction or phraseology, no firm conclusion may be drawn from it, for there is nothing easier than for one writer simply to borrow the words of another. (, p. )
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
But while recognizing the dangers of subjective judgment, commonplace echoes, and imitation, Foster gave no sign that he had reflected on the ways in which these failings could be avoided. Indeed, his own work exemplifies many of them. Foster’s claims for Shakespeare’s authorship started at once with the poem’s dedication (for the original text see Appendix I, p. ). As he innocuously put it, We may begin with the dedication, since this short epistle to John Peter of Bowhay is not the only dedication that may have been penned by Shakespeare. We have also the dedications of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, both addressed to the Earl of Southampton, and when we compare the Elegy dedication to that of Lucrece, we find that the two are remarkably similar in language and format. The one begins: ‘The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end’; and the other: ‘The love I bore to your brother, and will do to his memory, hath crav’d from me this last duty of a friend’. (, p. )
At once objections clamour to be heard: ‘not the only dedication that may have been penned by Shakespeare’ is a remark that already sets high stakes, suggesting that Foster is confident that he can make the ascription tell. But his first actual stylistic comment, that the two dedications are ‘remarkably similar in language’, is totally unconvincing, for the opening of Shakespeare’s dedication to Lucrece is striking both in its brevity, and in the way it sets up a disjunctive formula. As the late Jonas Barish showed in his classic comparison of the prose styles of Shakespeare and Jonson, Shakespeare’s prose is characterized by its ‘logical syntax’, which uses various strategies to suggest cause-and-effect relations. Shakespeare’s ‘penchant for strongly marked disjunctions’, such as ‘if . . . if not’, ‘the one . . . the other’, ‘either x or y’, ‘as . . . as’, ‘not only . . . but also’, gives to the syntax of his prose a ‘symmetry and exact balance’ quite unlike Jonson’s calculated asymmetries. In addition, as I showed some years ago, in many prose passages in his plays Shakespeare regularly used the most popular rhetorical figures in order to create symmetrically balanced clauses, allowing him to create all manner of effects – emphasis, irony, obsession, inversion, and much else. Given his fondness for patterned prose, it is hardly surprising that in the only two pieces of prose that he wrote in propria persona, the dedications to his two early narrative poems, he should have used exactly the same rhetorical devices to structure his acknowledgment to his patron. The dedication to The Rape of Lucrece neatly completes the first, and many subsequent symmetries, as can be seen more clearly if the rhetorical parallelisms are set out:
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutor’d lines makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours, What I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater, meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship; To whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.
Anyone familiar with rhetoric will notice how adeptly Shakespeare uses the main figures of symmetry. In every unit we find parison (equal structure of clauses, part corresponding to part) and isocolon (equal length of clauses); anaphora repeating the words ‘What I have . . . ’ at the beginning of two clauses; epistrophe ending three clauses with the word ‘yours’, and two with ‘greater’; anadiplosis carrying the expression over from one clause to the next (‘as it is, it is bound’), and polyptoton transforming it from its root (‘long . . . lengthened’). The style of ‘W. S.’, by contrast, seems remarkably dissimilar, the shapeless sentence which Foster quotes taking twenty-three words to make its point, as against the concise ten by Shakespeare. Foster continued his argument that the Elegye’s dedication, too, ‘may have been penned by Shakespeare’, by quoting snippets from both. In fairness to ‘W. S.’, we should let him speak undisturbed, continuing after the first period: I am heerein but a second to the priviledge of Truth who can warrant more in his behalfe, then I undertooke to deliver. Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am lesse adicted to, but there must be miracle in that labour, which to witnesse my remembrance to this departed Gentleman, I would not willingly undergoe: yet what-soever is heere done, is done to him, and to him onely. For whom, and whose sake, I will not forget to remember any friendly respects to you, or to any of those that have lov’d him for himselfe, and himselfe for his deserts.
With its plainness, verbosity, awkward inversion of subject and object (‘Exercise in this kind I will little affect’) and Latinate diction, this prose passage is typical of the Elegye’s style in verse. True, it uses rhetoric,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
with the double anadiplosis on ‘heere done, is done to him, and to him onely’, but the effect of insistence is rather spoiled by being repeated in the sentence following (‘For whom, and whose sake . . . ’), an instance of the overkill often found in the poem’s verse rhetoric – and again in the last clause, on ‘himselfe’. But it is quite unlike Shakespeare’s polished epistle, at once sprightly yet deferential, which conveys much more in its words than ‘W. S.’ does in his (Foster’s figures, who also asserted that they ‘are alike’ in being ‘shorter than most Renaissance epistles’ (, p. ): how many has he counted?). Foster claimed further parallels between the Lucrece and the Elegye dedications. In content, he argued, each poet ‘minimize[s] the value of his work (a conventional feature of Renaissance book-dedication)’, and ‘both dedications conclude with a promise . . . ’. The completely conventional nature of these gestures must be obvious to any reader, who will be all the more surprised, then, at Foster’s conclusion: ‘In a fairly exhaustive search, I have not been able to find another dedication that so closely approximates Shakespeare’s model. The striking likeness of these two epistles cannot be attributed solely to the dictates of convention. If this dedication was not written by William Shakespeare, it appears at least that the ‘real’ W. S. has sought to imitate him’ (p. ). The reader’s jaw may well drop at this point. Not only has Foster failed to show that the Elegye’s dedication ‘closely approximates Shakespeare’s model’, he now goes on record as having made a ‘fairly exhaustive search’ of the dedications in – presumably, since no details are given – most, or all books (of verse only? or also prose?) published in England between , say, and , which would be a remarkable claim. This kind of strenuous affirmation of the supposed uniqueness of the Elegye in displaying some specifically Shakespearian stylistic marker recurs often in Foster’s book, as we shall see, and takes on an increasingly hollow ring as we discover that ‘W. S.’ was in no way unique in using the device in question. I have shown that in terms of rhetoric and prose style these two dedications are quite different, and it must be obvious that their observing of the conventions of literary dedications – protesting the writer’s love for the dedicatee, and readiness to go on serving him, while simultaneously deprecating the value of the composition now being offered – must be shared with innumerable books. It would be possible, though tedious, to find many other dedications resembling the Elegye’s in this respect (although I would imagine that few match Shakespeare’s polished symmetries), but I shall not carry out the search. However, we should take note of the counter-argument of Katherine Duncan-Jones, that ‘the phrase in the dedicatory epistle,
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
“what-soever is heere done, is done to him, and to him onely” is evidently adapted from Sidney’s dedication of the Arcadia to his sister – “Now it is done only for you, only to you” ’. The Arcadia was first published in , The Rape of Lucrece in , so that it is perfectly possible that Shakespeare’s phrasing – ‘What I have done is yours, What I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours’ – may have recalled Sidney’s. Certainly the parallel Duncan-Jones cited is a closer echo than anything Foster proposed, but ‘W. S.’ had twice been anticipated in the imitation of Sidney by John Ford. In Ford dedicated to Lady Mary Talbot, Countess of Pembroke and Lady Susan de Vere, Countess of Montgomery, his poem Honor Triumphant, a defence of chivalric love ‘which explanes, but what is done for you, what is done by yours . . . being to you devoted: and only to you devoted’. That same year Ford dedicated Fames Memoriall, an elegy on the death of Lord Mountjoy, to his widow, Penelope, Countess of Devonshire: ‘To you (excellent Lady) it was intended, to you it is addressed’ (NDW, p. ). No doubt other writers besides Ford echoed Sidney, but I hardly feel that the question is worth pursuing. Foster’s claims that the dedication indicates Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye can be dismissed as without substance. One category of external evidence linking ‘W. S.’ and ‘the “real” W. S.’, according to Foster, is that they were both plagiarists, who both pillaged an earlier writer, Samuel Daniel. The further insinuation is that Shakespeare and ‘W. S.’ may be identified as one and the same. Foster’s discussion of this issue was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it appeared in an all-too-brief section which claimed to be reviewing ‘Contrary Evidence’ (, pp. –): however, Foster’s discussion turned out to bring no such contrary evidence, rather to incriminate both poets by association, or contiguity. Certainly the author of the Funerall Elegye modelled several passages in his poem on two earlier funeral elegies, both written on the death of Charles Blount, the eighth Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of Devonshire. One of these sources was recognized by Foster, who pointed out that ‘W. S. has clearly used as his model Samuel Daniel’s Funerall Poeme uppon the Late Noble Earle of Devonshire. Like Daniel, W. S. writes his elegy in continuous quatrains, with couplets interspersed. Like Daniel he includes apostrophes to the deceased. W. S.’s borrowing from Daniel extends even to the theft of particular thoughts and phrases; in fact, the echoes appear frequently enough for us to identify the particular edition in W. S.’s possession: he used the privately printed Quarto of . . . ’ (p. ) − that is, STC , a ‘xylographic’ production, as the catalogue records, ‘white on black’ (copies recorded in the British
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Library and the Huntington Library). But although Foster mentioned in passing the parallel funeral elegy by John Ford, Fames Memoriall, Or The Earle of Devonshire Deceased (; STC ), he did not recognize it as another source for ‘W. S.’– indeed, as a later chapter will suggest, Foster was anxious to keep Ford out of the picture as much as possible. Foster’s account of ‘W. S.’ as a plagiarist from Daniel was exaggerated, but it had some substance. His parallel claims for Shakespeare’s plagiarisms lack any validity. This is how he argued in : The mere fact that W. S. has borrowed from Daniel’s poem is not in itself a problem. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of theft that Shakespeare is noted for, even in the last plays. He was often brasher in borrowing from other writers than from himself, and the same pattern obtains here. W. S.’s borrowings from Shakespeare are generally diffuse and indirect, yet he appears to have written his Funeral Elegy with Daniel’s Funerall Poeme lying open on his desktop. In this, the Elegy seems characteristically Shakespearean. Moreover, W. S., like Shakespeare, offers always an augmentation of the image or phrase in question, even when borrowing most directly . . . (pp. –)
‘W. S.’ indeed knew Daniel’s poem, but Foster’s claim that the Elegye is ‘characteristically Shakespearean’ in having lifted whole sequences from Daniel is completely unjustified. Indeed, on the next page he retracted that verdict, noting that ‘Shakespeare’s boldest thefts’ are restricted to the drama, and conceding that ‘one does not find in any of Shakespeare’s nondramatic works the same close study of a particular source that is evident here’ (p. ). But instead of frankly admitting that the Funerall Elegye is actually profoundly unShakespearian in its pedantic and unimaginative borrowings from Daniel’s poem, Foster was reluctant to abandon any scrap of ‘evidence’ that might implicate Shakespeare as its concealed author, dithering first one way, then the other: We might provide excuses for Shakespeare – that he wrote the Elegy in obvious haste, that he had little affection for ‘exercise in this kind’, that he borrows as heavily from Daniel in other works. Still, I suspect that many readers will find W. S.’s use of Daniel’s poem a major obstacle to a hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship. (p. )
The concluding formulation in seemed to come down against Shakespeare’s authorship, although the suggestion that ‘many readers’ – not ‘all’, or ‘most’ – might reject the hypothesis still leaves open the possibility that others will accept it. Since , however, Foster has been proclaiming the ascription to Shakespeare with ever-increasing emphasis, so he must now be accusing Shakespeare of shamelessly plagiarizing Daniel.
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
Before discussing Foster’s evidence for this claim, I must express dismay at the remarkably crude terms in which it is expressed, apparently ignorant both of Renaissance scholarship and of developments in modern literary theory. For the first, ever since H. O. White’s still serviceable study we have known that the Elizabethans recognized various grades of literary indebtedness. The first, entirely legitimate stage involved imitatio, the conscious use of an earlier text as a model, usually carrying with it the spur to aemulatio, surpassing or ‘overgoing’ that model. Here Renaissance writers could draw on the Romans’ many statements legitimizing their having imitated and (as they thought) excelled the Greeks (White , pp. –). Imitation leading to emulation was an accepted practice throughout the whole European Renaissance, as White showed (pp. –, –, etc.), and as several recent studies have confirmed. Another legitimate form of imitation was the allusion, quoting a line or passage from a famous model in the expectation that readers will recognize the borrowing and realize that you are putting yourself in that poet’s league, or are using the same form or genre. Modern literary theory has dubbed this practice ‘intertextuality’, according it many detailed and sophisticated discussions. Shakespeare was familiar with both forms of imitatio. His two narrative poems display his use of classical sources, which he far surpasses in copiousness and abundance, while at several points in the plays he cites lines from earlier dramas knowing that his audience will spot the allusion. Familiar instances include two references to Marlowe, one to Hero and Leander – Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ (AYLI, .. –)
and one overgoing Dr Faustus, when Troilus describes Helen as ‘a pearl / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships’ (Tro., .. –). But while his contemporaries would have accepted both forms of imitatio, they would not have countenanced plagiarism, the deliberate theft of another writer’s property. Roman writers attacked the literary pirate, whom Martial called a plagiarius or kidnapper (White , pp. –), and English Renaissance writers denounced the abuse vociferously, pointing to several scandalous instances (pp. –, –, –, –, –, –, –). The universal dislike of plagiarists can be summed up from Donne’s Second Satire, surveying various perversions of poetry, culminating in the plagiarist:
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct But he is worst, who (beggardly) doth chaw Others’ wits’ fruits, and in his ravenous maw Rankly digested, doth those things out spew, As his own things; and they are his own, ’tis true, For if one eat my meat, though it be known The meat was mine, th’excrement is his own. (–)
Jonson expressed a comparable disgust in one of his Epigrams (no. , based on Martial, .), to ‘Prowl the Plagiary’, a thief who steals other writers’ livelihood. A charge of plagiarism in this period would be a serious accusation, and would need to be carefully documented. In the event, Foster’s casual branding of Shakespeare as an unscrupulous plagiarist is not supported by any evidence from the plays or poems, nor could it have been. The truth is exactly opposite, for many excellent studies have shown how Shakespeare freely transformed source material, radically changing its direction, fusing it with other sources, ignoring key elements, inventing new ones, making something quite original out of the exchange. As H. O. White put it, ‘the test of originality is the degree of reinterpretation, of individualized transformation achieved by the author’ (p. ), a test which Shakespeare passes easily, ‘it [being] a commonplace to say that the originality of his genius never appears more clearly than when one of his works is compared with the sources’. Such a comparison will validate ‘the classical theory that literary excellence depends, not on the writer’s ability to fabricate plots, but on his power to do something original with a plot, wherever he gets it’ (p. ). Among Renaissance dramatists Shakespeare was exceptional in the pains he took to structure polyphonic plots, in which a major element is echoed on two or more levels, as in Hamlet or Measure for Measure, or two elements freely interfuse, as in the great double plot of King Lear. All this free reshaping of inherited material perfectly exemplifies Renaissance teachings on how imitatio should lead to aemulatio. Not only asserted from a scholarly vacuum, Foster’s belief that Shakespeare was ‘noted for’ his borrowings from Daniel derived from a careless misreading of the relevant documents. Foster first mentioned Daniel’s Funerall Poem as a model for the Funerall Elegye, it being one of three contemporary elegies written in continuous quatrains, and the only one that ‘inserts couplets, sporadically, between the quatrains’. After that sensible observation, Foster jumped to a wildly inaccurate conclusion: This is in itself of interest, since Shakespeare looked always to Daniel as one of his principal mentors. His debt was obvious even to his contemporaries,
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
as is evident, for example, in the Cambridge Parnassus plays, wherein ‘Sweete Mr Shakespeare’ is charged with the ‘monstrous theft’ of plagiarizing Daniel’s verse wholesale. ‘ “I think”, says Ingenioso, “he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniells”.’ (, p. )
Unfortunately for his argument, Foster completely misrepresented that scene (..–) from The First Part of The Return from Parnassus (performed , printed ). In it Gullio, ‘the foolish courtier and admirer of Shakespeare’, as J. B. Leishman described him in his outstanding edition of these anonymous plays, outlines to Ingenioso (who may be a portrait of Nashe) the ‘enthusiasticall oration’ he has just made to his ‘new Mistress’ ears’, and offers to repeat it. At each stage Ingenioso comments scathingly to the audience on Gullio’s plagiarisms from the current bestsellers by Shakespeare and Kyd: Gullio. Suppose also that thou wert my Mistress . . . thus I would looke amorously, thus I woulde pace, thus I woulde salute thee . . . ‘Pardon faire lady, thoughe sicke thoughted Gullio makes a maine unto thee, & like a bould faced sutore gins to woo thee.’ Ingenioso [aside]. We shall have nothinge but pure Shakespeare, and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the theators. Gullio. ‘Pardon mee moy mittressa, as’t am a gentleman the moone in comparison of thy bright hue a meere slutt, Anthonie’s Cleopatra a blacke browde milkmaide, Hellen a dowdie.’ Ingenioso [aside]. Marke Romeo and Juliet: o monstrous theft, I thinke he will runn throughe a whole book of Samuel Daniells. Gullio. ‘Thrise fairer than my selfe,’ thus I began, ‘The gods faire riches, sweete above compare, Staine to all Nimphes, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves and roses are: Nature that made thee, with herselfe at strife, Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.’ Ingenioso [aside]. Sweet Master Shakespeare. Gullio. ‘As I am a scholler, these arms of mine are long and strong withall: Thus elms by vines are compast ere they falle.’ Ingenioso. Faith gentleman, youre reading is wonderfull in our English poets. Gullio. ‘Sweet Mistress’ – I vouchsafe to take some of their wordes and applie them to mine owne matters by a scholasticall imitation. Report thou upon my credit, is not my veyne in courtinge gallant & honorable?
(Leishman , pp. –. Line numbers refer to this edition.)
But rather than ‘scholasticall’ imitatio, this is what the Elizabethans would have recognized as gross plagiarism, for Gullio has appropriated for his mistress, as if they were his own composition, excerpts from the
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
following works: (a) ff: Romeo and Juliet, ..ff; (b) ff: Venus and Adonis, –; and (c) –: Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ..–. Rather than ‘Sweete Mr Shakespeare’ being an accusation of plagiarism, as Foster hastily concluded, with this remark Ingenioso simply identified the source of Gullio’s preceding lines. Thus Gullio is mocked as one of those uninventive lovers in Elizabethan drama who steal lines from other men’s writings, in order to ‘applie them to mine own matters’, a list which includes Matheo’s courtship of Hesperida with an ‘elegy’ stolen from Hero and Leander ( Jonson, Every Man in his Humour, .), and Amorphus advising Asotus to do the same (Cynthia’s Revels, ., and .). We could add Volpone, wooing Celia with his version of Catullus , ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus’ (Volpone, ..–), and Slender, wooing Anne Page but quite lost for invention: ‘I had rather than forty shillings I had my Book of Songs and Sonnets here’ (Wiv., ..–). True to type, Gullio subsequently commissions Ingenioso to write some New Year’s verses for his mistress ‘in two or three divers veynes’, in the styles of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare, his preferred model: Marry I think I shall entertaine those verses which run like these: ‘Even as the sunn with purple coloured face Had ta’en his laste leave on the weeping morne’, etc. O sweet Master Shakespeare, Ile have his picture in my study at the courte. (..–; Leishmann , p. )
And when Ingenioso duly appears with centos of Chaucer and Spenser, it is Shakespeare who wins the day, no longer with a direct quotation from Venus and Adonis but with a pastiche stanza of his own invention, which sends Gullio off into more raptures: ‘let this duncified worlde esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, Ile worshipp sweet Master Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe . . . ’ (..– ; pp. –). I have quoted the whole context of that scene, partly for its intrinsic interest (the ridiculous Gullio being the first recorded instance of bardolatry), and partly so that readers can see for themselves Foster’s careless error. It is not Shakespeare, of course, who is accused of being likely to steal ‘a whole booke of Samuel Daniell’s’, but Gullio, the unscrupulous plagiarist in the course of wooing his mistress. To have based such a serious charge on such a careless interpretation of primary documents is another warning to Foster’s readers that his scholarship may not be wholly reliable. Foster’s error was not the only instance of hasty misreading in his argument for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye. He assembled
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
a group of ‘Thematic and Verbal Affinities’ (, pp. –) between the Elegye and Shakespeare which may well be the weakest section of his book. Foster’s claims signally fail to satisfy the criteria laid down by careful scholars in attribution studies since the s, that such parallels, to be convincing, must contain echoes in both thought and style, and should consider not just individual words but groups of phrases or even longer passages. Foster, having made the astonishingly confident assertion that one may proceed through the Elegye ‘line by line, finding for each sentence a Shakespearean counterpart’ (, p. ), offered such parallels as these (p. ): () Sat reason by religion oversway’d (FE, ) The will of man is by his reason sway’d (MND, ..) () How piety and zeal should be obey’d (FE, ) Which my love makes religion to obey (Ant., ..) For the first, Shakespeare’s allusion to the traditional notion of the reason controlling the passions is such a commonplace that another thousand instances could be provided, but we can also observe that he nowhere presents ‘religion’ as performing this role. His theatre is resolutely secular; the Elegye is explicitly Christian, as we shall see in chapter . In the second quotation ‘W. S.’ literally states that William Peter learned to value the Christian virtues of piety and zeal, but the Shakespeare passage is purely metaphorical, as the full context will show, with Dolabella addressing Cleopatra: Madam, as thereto sworn by your command (Which my love makes religion to obey), I tell you this: Caesar through Syria Intends his journey. (..–)
It is obvious to any reader that this passage has a totally different range of reference, using ‘religion’ as a weak, conventionally polite metaphor. Foster, we may surmise, used a concordance or a computerized wordsearch to establish this parallel, and perhaps never consulted the actual play-text to discover the sense in which these words were being used. And in both cases Shakespeare’s diction clearly differs from the Elegye’s indulgence in abstraction: the Quarto carefully marked all four abstract nouns with italics, ‘Reason’, ‘Religion’, ‘Piety and Zeale’. In other of Foster’s claimed parallels, the fact that the Elegye uses the phrase ‘in their kind’, which is also found in the Two Gentlemen and Winter’s Tale; or that a reference to the colour ‘white’ in the Elegye can be matched with
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
two from the narrative poems; or that the expression ‘the other senses’ occurs in the Elegye and Macbeth (p. ) − these are unbelievably trivial instances. It would be tedious to examine each of Foster’s claimed parallels, but we cannot overlook his most surprising conclusion, that echoes of Richard II in the Elegye prove Shakespeare’s authorship of that poem. Foster claimed to find ‘more than thirty . . . echoes in the Elegy which suggest that the poet, whoever the author, knew Shakespeare’s Richard II’ (p. ). Having listed some of these, Foster argued that ‘although a list of parallels with W. S. may be produced for virtually any of Shakespeare’s works’ – given his criteria of what constitutes a parallel, we readily believe him – the ‘correspondences’ with Richard II are ‘more frequent, and more explicit’ than with other Shakespeare plays (pp. –). This he finds ‘surprising, even assuming Shakespearean authorship, for Richard II was written ca. , much earlier than the Elegy’ (p. ; my italics). There we meet again Foster’s tactic of repeatedly insinuating Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye, the elementary fallacy of begging the question to be proved. But Foster had a larger insinuation up his sleeve, for he claimed that most of these ‘parallels’ occur with Richard’s part, and suggested that the King’s Men may have performed Richard II in the winter of /, and that Shakespeare – shortly before his retirement – may have played the title role. Of course, he hastened to add, we don’t know for sure which roles Shakespeare performed, nor is there proof that Shakespeare acted at all after about . Nevertheless, W. S. clearly had Richard II on his mind at the time he wrote the Elegy, and it appears quite likely that he had recently reviewed or acted King Richard’s part. This is at least an interesting coincidence. (p. ; my italics)
Now we understand why Foster earlier declared that the Elegye’s ‘borrowings from Shakespeare . . . appear to be instances of unconscious repetition, sometimes involving no more than the linking of a noun with a particular adjective, as in “fair conditions” (appearing also in H), “true friendship” (as in Tim.), and so forth’ (p. ; my italics). In that passage, Foster, without apparently having reflected on its weaknesses, tried to legitimize a scholarly method based on casual epithet-and-noun parallels. But if we consult the Chadwyck-Healey electronic database for other examples in English Renaissance literature of the collocation ‘true + friendship’, the emptiness of the method becomes obvious. A simple search reveals that the combination occurs once in Misogonus, a
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
Cambridge comedy dating from , no less than ten times in Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pythias (), and in the anonymous plays A Knack to Know an Honest Man () and The Trial of Chivalry (). The phrase ‘true friendship’ also occurs three times in Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (), and once each in Jonson’s The Case Is Altered (), William Percy’s The Fairy Pastoral (), Elizabeth Cary’s closet-drama Mariam (), and Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, pt. (). Foster’s claim that the phrase constitutes a real link between the Funerall Elegye and Timon of Athens can be dismissed as ungrounded. But, more extravagantly, he also insinuated that ‘W. S.’, in echoing Richard II, may have been echoing himself by some form of ‘unconscious repetition’. Foster stated this claim openly a few pages later, urging that ‘the kind of borrowing that is evident in the Elegy . . . is characteristic of the way in which Shakespeare usually borrows from himself . . . ’ (p. ). The instances cited show, in fact, Foster’s remarkable insensitivity to the language of poetic drama. He claimed to find ‘two dozen’ correspondences between Richard II and Macbeth, but cited only two: first the phrase ‘doubly redoubled’, which occurs in both plays (R, ..–; Mac., ..–). Secondly, Foster suggested, ‘it may even be that Richard’s remark about murdered kings, “some sleeping kill’d”, helped to inspire Macbeth’s horror after killing King Duncan: “Sleep no more! / Macbeth doth murther sleep” (R ..; Mac. ..–)’ (p. ). The first parallel may indeed be called a Shakespearian self-echo, if hardly fulfilling Foster’s claim that such borrowings involve ‘always an incremental change’. But the second is not an echo at all, for Foster seems unable to distinguish kings being murdered while asleep from someone who, having killed a king, has difficulty getting to sleep. This is one of many instances in this book proving the truth of his own observation that, all too often, ‘verbal echoes dwell in the ear of the beholder’ (p. ). As for ‘W. S.’ having known Richard II, that is neither impossible nor surprising. One fact that Foster did not mention, for whatever reason, is that Richard II was the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays with the reading public. The first quarto edition appeared in , with two more editions in . The fourth edition () included ‘new additions’, that is, the Parliament scene (..–), dealing with Richard’s abdication, evidently cut for political reasons when the play was first printed, to be followed by a fifth quarto edition in . Many readers interested in English drama had the chance to buy or borrow Richard II, and it would be surprising if a poet working in London in did not know it. That
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
said, many of Foster’s suggested parallels are disappointingly feeble. Both the Elegye and the play contain the expression ‘rase . . . out’; both have the phrase ‘nature . . . built’, or ‘built by Nature’; both have the word ‘breast’ (‘a perfect breast’, or ‘a quiet breast’); both use the expression ‘fearful change’; both have the words ‘commonwealth’ and ‘government’ recurring within two to five lines; the Elegye has ‘a more severer doom’, the play has ‘a heavier doom’ (pp. –). If these are ‘parallels’ – ‘the grouped sample provided here removes any doubt that W. S. knew Richard II’ (p. ) – then the authorship of a large number of Renaissance plays and poems will tremble in the balance. Other parallels seem more distinctive, but we can provide alternative, and perhaps better explanations for apparent similarities. ‘W. S.’ writes of ‘a book where every work is writ’ (FE, ), while Richard contemplates a future time When I do see the very book indeed Where all my sins are writ . . . (..–)
Both writers had a common, biblical source, that famous vision in Revelations: ‘And I saw the dead, both great and small stand before God: and the bookes were opened, & another booke was opened, Which is the booke of life, and the dead were judged of those things which were written in the bookes, according to their workes’ (Rev. :). As the Geneva editors glossed that verse, ‘Every man’s conscience is as a booke wherein his deeds are written, which shall appeare when God openeth the booke.’ Similarly, the parallel cited between ‘Enrich the curious temple of his mind’ (FE, ) and ‘That temple, thy fair mind’ (Cym., ..), also derives by analogy from biblical contexts describing – as Alexander Cruden put it – ‘Christ’s body or human nature, in which the fulness of the Godhead dwells bodily, as the glory of God did visibly in the temple’. The locus classicus in the Bible is that passage in St John’s gospel describing Christ’s altercation with the Jews, after He had cast the money-lenders out of the Temple, where, in response to their demand ‘What signe shewest thou unto us’, Jesus replied: Destroy this Temple, and in three dayes I will raise it up againe. Then said the Jewes, Fortie and sixe yeres was this Temple abuilding, and wilt thou reare it up in three dayes? But he spake of the Temple of his body. ( John :–)
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
The Geneva editors added a gloss justifying John’s metaphor: ‘Christ’s body might justly be called the Temple, because the fulnesse of the Godhead dwelleth in it corporeally’, and giving a cross-reference to Colossians :, ‘For in [Christ] dwelleth all the fulnes of the Godhead bodily’. In biblical contexts the temple metaphor could also describe a whole congregation of believers, as in St Paul’s rebuke to the Corinthians: ‘Know ye not that ye are the Temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?’ ( Cor. :). This biblical metaphor influenced many poets in the English Renaissance, who made the analogical development (perhaps already familiar in religious contexts) from ‘body’ to ‘mind’. According to the ChadwyckHealey databases, the association of ‘temple’ and ‘mind’ first appears in Renaissance drama in Samuel Daniel’s closet-tragedy Cleopatra (): ‘heart, the temple of thy mind, / The sanctuarie sacred from above’. In the same year Shakespeare himself used the biblical metaphor in The Rape of Lucrece to describe the ‘fault-full’ Tarquin’s self-violation, having violated Lucrece: For now against himself he sounds this doom, That through the length of times he stands disgrac`ed Besides, his soul’s fair temple is defac`ed . . . (–)
The association of the mind or soul with a temple soon became a commonplace, no doubt due to the universal presence of the Bible in early modern culture. Secular poets used it, as Joshua Sylvester (– ) did in ‘Honour’s Epitaph’, which celebrates ‘Grace: a beautious Temple/Of a bountious Minde’, as did Milton in Comus (‘The unpolluted temple of the mind’). Not surprisingly, we find it in overtly religious works, such as Richard Brathwait’s paraphrase of The Psalmes of David (), addressing God ‘amidst thy Temple, mind’; in Christs Passion. A Tragedie (), adapted by George Sandys from the Latin of Hugo Grotius − ‘his Temple in the Minde erect’, and Richard Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple (): ‘so shall I find / The faire center of my mind / Thy Temple’. According to Donald Foster’s methods, such parallels would no doubt prove that all these poets had plagiarized from the Funerall Elegye. A more balanced verdict would be that all derive from a common source. But if ‘W. S.’ shares this metaphor with Shakespeare, Daniel, Sandys, Milton, Sylvester, Crashaw, Traherne, St John, and St Paul, he also shares it, interestingly enough, with John Ford, who in Love’s Sacrifice () makes the
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Duke angrily question Biancha how her seducer overcame her ‘honour’ (chastity): confess What witchcraft used the wretch to charm the heart Of the once spotless temple of thy mind? (..–)
Further reading would show that few of the ‘more than thirty . . . echoes’ that Foster so confidently announced between Richard II and the Elegye will survive critical scrutiny. For that poem’s description of William Peter, ‘Fair lovely branch too soon cut off ’ (), Foster cited a passage spread over five lines in the play, the Duchess of Gloucester’s lament for Edward III’s seven sons, ‘those branches by the Destinies cut’, of which ‘One flourishing branch . . . / Is hack’d down’ (..–). The idea is common, but a more likely model for ‘W. S.’ – and perhaps Shakespeare too – was Marlowe’s Epilogue to Dr Faustus: ‘Cut is the branch that might have growne ful straight.’ W. L. Godshalk, who also noted the parallel with Marlowe, judged this section of Foster’s case ‘unsatisfactory’, resting on so many ‘forced’ and ‘inaccurate’ parallels. Foster quoted the phrase by ‘W. S.’, ‘Feeds on the bread of rest’ (FE, ), claiming a parallel in Bolingbroke’s reference to ‘the bitter bread of banishment’ (R, ..), but Godshalk found ‘quite a difference here between “bitter bread” and “bread of rest”. When Shakespeare gives “bread” an emotional valence, it’s often negative. For example, Hamlet’s father dies “grossly, full of bread” (..), and compare “cramm’d with distasteful bread” (H, ..) . . . As far as I can see, Shakespeare does not link “bread” and “rest” as does W. S.’ (, ., May ). In any case, the Bible is a more probable source for this collocation. The Psalmist refers to ‘the bread of the mighty’ (Ps. :), ‘the bread of tears’ (:), and ‘the bread of sorrows’ (:). The book of Proverbs refers to ‘the bread of wickedness’ (:), and ‘the bread of idleness’ (:), while Isaiah refers to ‘the bread of adversity’ (:), and John reports Christ’s assertion, ‘I am the bread of life’ (:). St Paul refers to ‘the unleavened bread of sincerity’ ( Cor. :), and commands ‘busybodies . . . that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread’ ( Thess. :). Here, surely, is the model for ‘Feeds on the bread of rest’. As for Foster’s other claimed parallels between the poem and the play, it is hardly suprising that A Funerall Elegye should include references, over two hundred lines apart, to the universal experience of death and burial:
Parallels? Plagiarisms? And we low-level’d in a narrow grave . . . And buried in that hollow vault of woe
(FE, , ).
Nor is it surprising that a messenger in a play, bringing news of the execution of three traitors, should report that they ‘lie full low, grav’d in the hollow ground’ (..): does this constitute a ‘correspondence’? What is the consequence of being buried, after all, if not lying in the low ground, and are not burial vaults usually hollow? MacDonald Jackson commented that these and other parallels that Foster claimed between the Elegye and Richard II actually show the great difference in quality between the two writers, and in that sense are more instructive than he realizes. He compares, for example, ‘The grave, that in this ever-empty womb / For ever closes up the unrespected’ (Elegy, –) with ‘a grave, / Whose hollow womb inherits nought but bones’ (Richard II ..–); and ‘When the proud height of much affected sin / Shall ripen to a head’ (Elegy, –) with ‘foul sin, gathering head, / Shall break into corruption’ (Richard II ..–). The author of the Elegy has caught onto the womb–tomb paradox, but succeeds only in making it seem uninteresting; the ‘bones’ in Richard II bring to the image a vividness that the poem lacks. In the passage from Richard II, ., the idea of a suppurating boil is implicit in the combination of words; the Elegy’s ‘ripen to a head’ has the potential for the same metaphorical substance, but the author neutralizes it with ‘the proud height’ – which makes one wonder whether he envisaged sin as a field of ripening corn, but the context does nothing to support such a notion. Whereas in Shakespeare’s verse a whole group of words is animated by a basic image or complex of images, in the Elegy ill-assorted poetic clich´es are bundled lifelessly together. ( Jackson , p. )
One ‘correspondence’ cited by Foster can be accepted – although, of course, this gives no ground for fantasizing that ‘W. S.’ wrote Richard II, or that Shakespeare wrote the Funerall Elegye. There is a certain similarity between King Richard’s self-pitying farewell to Queen Isabel, anticipating a time when she will In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire With good old folks and let them tell thee tales Of woeful ages long ago betid; And ere thou bid good night, to ’quite their griefs, Tell them the lamentable tale of me, And send the hearers weeping to their beds. (R, ..–)
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
and ‘W. S.’s’ lines: such as do recount that tale of woe, Told by remembrance of the wisest heads, Will in the end conclude the matter so, As they will all go weeping to their beds. (FE, –)
That may stand as a parallel, although ‘W. S.’ may also have known the sources Shakespeare used. However, the way in which the two poets used this idea differs considerably in poetic quality. In the Elegye, the energy created by Richard’s insistent use of one-syllable active verbs – ‘tell’, ‘bid’, ‘’quite’, ‘tell’, ‘send’ – is dissipated by the poet’s academic and tautologous phrasing, ‘recount that tale . . . Told by remembrance of the wisest heads’, and ‘conclude the matter’. A similar gap in energy and accomplishment exists between another passage cited by Foster to insinuate Shakespeare’s authorship of both the play and the poem, the Elegye’s description of the deceased’s virtues: his mind and body made an inn. The one to lodge the other, both like fram’d For fair conditions, guests that soonest win Applause . . .
(FE, –)
Foster argued that this sequence echoes Anne’s contrast between the defeated Richard and the triumphant Bolingbroke: Thou most beauteous inn: Why should hard-favoured grief be lodged in thee, When triumph is become an alehouse guest? (..–)
However, as Jackson objected, in the Elegye passage ‘the mind and body together constitute an “inn”, while the body is also the conventional inn in which the mind lodges. And both mind and body are “fram’d / For fair conditions”, which are welcome guests – as though there had now been built two inns, to which good qualities repaired. This is not complexity but confusion. The author does not really think in images; for him words are mere counters to be marshalled into rhyming lines.’ In Richard II, by contrast, ‘the relation between the different types of inn . . . and their abstract guests is consistently and fully imagined in lines that have real metaphorical life’ (, p. ). This forceful objection
Parallels? Plagiarisms?
exposes the futility of claiming that the anonymous Funerall Elegye and Richard II were written by the same hand. Despite his confident assertions that ‘a list of parallels with W. S. may be produced for virtually any of Shakespeare’s works’, all that Foster achieved was to demonstrate once again that the verbal parallels which are used to argue common authorship, if hastily chosen, may be completely insubstantial. To build on such foundations is to rest, not upon sand, but upon air.
Vocabulary and diction
Foster’s treatment of diction is a major prop in his claim that the Funerall Elegye ‘is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (a, p. ). The term ‘diction’ is something of a misnomer, however, since Foster used it to discuss matters of vocabulary, rhetoric, compound words, verbal parallels, and much else. In , under this heading ‘Diction’, Foster put forward several linguistic items which, he claimed, are unusually prominent in both Shakespeare’s works and in the Funerall Elegye (pp. –). As two of his keenest critics pointed out, Foster’s method essentially consists of identifying some ‘rare Shakespeare quirk’, recording that he has found no other example of this quirk other than in the Elegye, and proceeding to the next point. Though he does not openly claim that the presence of any given Shakespeare quirk shows a work to be Shakespeare’s, or that its absence shows that a work is not Shakespeare’s, he strongly implies that many such quirk tests seem so close to perfect in their immunity to false positives that a work, if it passes enough of them, ‘must be Shakespeare’.
Notionally, Foster also attempted a negative check in some cases, by referring to a database that he had assembled, consisting of a ‘Cross-Sample’ of English verse elegies published between and (Foster , pp. –, –). This was only a small excerpt from the larger ‘Checklist’ he had compiled, of ‘English Memorial Verse, –’ (pp. –), and it is highly regrettable that Foster chose such a limited range of verse, presumably for his own convenience in computation. The proper course would have been to take the period –, say, and analyse all the poetry and drama published in this period. Fifteen years ago that would have been an impossible task, but since the Chadwyck-Healey databases of English poetry and verse drama have been available (recently fused with other material to form the valuable resource ‘Literature Online’). These resources include a fair
Vocabulary and diction
proportion of the poetry (by no means all of it), and most of the drama, and a relatively full search would now be a practicable proposition. Foster could have made a better choice of comparative material, but his corpus was so small that no pronouncement he made about the rareness or otherwise of a linguistic marker, based on a sample of only , verse lines, can be given any authority. These are important points to bear in mind, given the misconception disseminated by some of his uncritical supporters, that Foster had scoured all possible sources. But the real failings of his work lie in the domain of quality, not quantity. It would take a great deal of time to check every claimed correlation, but two examples must suffice to show that Foster’s evidence was feeble, and that he distorted the argument. I take, to begin with, his claim that Shakespeare was unusual in preferring the word ‘comfortable’ where most contemporaries prefer ‘comforting’ (p. ). Shakespeare uses the word thirteen times, we are told – as in ‘Be comfortable to my mother’ (AWW, ..) – always ‘as an approximate synonym for “comforting” or “cheering”’. (We can discount a different usage in the nonShakespearian part of Pericles.) After having – it might seem – made an extensive and exhausting survey of the linguistic records, Foster informed his readers that Among the principal sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, only George Herbert uses ‘comfortable’ as Shakespeare does to denote that which gives cheer, though there is perhaps a similar instance in Milton’s ‘comfortable heat’ in Paradise Lost. Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, and Donne, for example all prefer either ‘cheerful’, ‘comforting’, or a suitable alternative. W. S., however, uses the word after Shakespeare’s manner: His younger years gave comfortable hope To hope for comfort in his riper youth ( –).
An argument for common authorship which hesitates to use as evidence the occurrence of a single sememe in both authors is an argument that will build on any rock, however small. In this case, however, there are no rocks. Everyone who knows Handel’s Messiah, or who has ever taken Communion in the Church of England, will know that the words ‘comfortable’ or ‘comfortably’ in the sense of ‘offering comfort’ are by no means unique to Shakespeare. The libretto prepared for Handel by Charles Jennens includes an aria for tenor setting the text ‘Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her . . . iniquity is pardoned’ (Isaiah :). Other biblical uses of the combination ‘comfortably’ and
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
‘speech’, ‘speak’, or ‘words’ include Samuel :, ‘go forth and speak comfortably to thy servants’; Chronicles :, ‘he spoke comfortably to all the Levites’, and :, ‘he set captains over the people, and spoke comfortably’; similarly Hosea :, ‘I will allure her, and speak comfortably to her’. The combination ‘word / comfortable’ also appears in Samuel :, ‘the word of my Lord shall now be comfortable’, and in Zachariah, where the prophet records a conversation with the angel of the Lord in which the angel asks O Lord of hosts, how long wilst thou not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of Judah, against which thou hast had indignation these three-score and ten years? / And the Lord answered the angel that talked with me with good words and comfortable words. (:,)
Those passages in Zachariah were quoted from the Authorized Version, but reference to a biblical concordance will show that the same wording is preserved in the Rheims (Douai) and Geneva versions. The Geneva Bible, however (commonly used by English Protestants before the King James version), also uses the phrase ‘comfortable words’ in its influential marginal notes, which occasionally give controversial Calvinist interpretations, deeply disliked by King James I and some leaders of the Church of England. (Other scholars have produced evidence that Shakespeare echoes these marginal notes, which shows that he had read this Bible, not just heard it read aloud in church.) So, to the passage where Job ‘complaineth of his friends’ with the question ‘Was it because I sayd, Bring unto mee? or give a rewarde to mee of your substance?’, the marginal note – which, for the previous verse, has recorded Job’s disappointment when ‘I looked for consolation at your hands’ – explains here that Job criticizes ‘the worldlings, which for no necessitie will give part of their goods, and much more these men, which would not give him comfortable words’. Again, to Proverbs :, ‘Heaviness in the heart of man doeth bring it downe: but a good worde rejoyceth it’, the postil explains, ‘That is, words of comfort or a cheerfull mind, which is declared by his words, rejoyceth a man . . . ’ As all these biblical instances show, the basic use of the phrase is in contexts referring to consolation, the root meaning (con + fortis) being to give strength to those in distress. This is obviously the dominant meaning of the word in Shakespeare, as in King Lear’s deluded belief that he still has ‘a daughter, / Who, I am sure, is kind and comfortable’ (Lear, ..–), or in this text-book example from Richard II of consolation asked for, and refused:
Vocabulary and diction . Uncle, for God’s sake speak comfortable words. . Should I do so, I should belie my thoughts. Comfort’s in heaven, and we are on the earth, Where nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief. (..–)
The phrase will also be familiar to members of the Church of England or readers of the Book of Common Prayer, from the version to the present day, for at one point in the Communion Service the priest is instructed to say: ‘Hear what comfortable words our saviour Christ saith, to they that truly turn to him.’ Indeed, this section of that widely used manual is called ‘Comfortable Words’. As Stella Brook observed, in this text ‘comfortable . . . has the force of modern English comforting’, and still includes the old sense of ‘comfort . . . as something which strengthens or encourages or supports’. The phrase ‘comfortable words’ was also widely diffused within the Church of England from the Elizabethan period until the present day, often in connection with a preacher’s function in ministering to his congregation. Foster made only sporadic reference to the Bible, a surprising oversight given the Elegye’s heavily Christian language, visible in several other direct borrowings. That he should claim Shakespeare unusual in knowing the significance and proper application of the phrase is even more surprising given its frequent occurrence in English drama and poetry. Chadwyck-Healey’s issue of the English Verse Drama Full Text Database made possible wider searches than Foster performed. In it the earliest citations of the phrase ‘comfortable words’ come from medieval religious drama, The pageant of David: ‘up o kinge & speake some comfortable words unto thy men’, The pageant of Joseph: ‘fayne would I heare a comfortable answeare’, and The pageant of Naaman: ‘with comfortable wordes of good cheare’. Its use in such plays is to be expected, given their reliance on the Bible as source-material, but we soon find it being widely used in secular drama. The earliest instances come from the academic world, in the Cambridge play Misogonus (): ‘consider I beseche you the comfortable wordes . . . ’; the Inner Temple Senecan tragedy Gismond of Salerne (; revised as Tancred and Gismund, ): ‘Maidens forbeare your comfortable wordes’; and a ‘Moral’ by George Wapull, The Tide Tarrieth No Man (), ‘Oh what comfortable words are these.’ The phrase soon reached the public theatre, as in (?) Anthony Munday’s The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (), where one character refers to ‘O comfortable woordes were they but true’. In Robert Greene’s Selimus () someone exclaims ‘Your graces wordes are verie comfortable’,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
while Dekker refers to ‘comfortable words’ in Old Fortunatus (). In Chettle and Munday, The downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon () we find: ‘O blessed woman, comfortable word’. Dekker and Middleton used the collocation in The magnificent entertainment given to King James (), in the form ‘play the Midwife, whose first comfortable words were . . . ’, as did Dekker, Ford, and Rowley in The Witch of Edmonton (): ‘very comfortable words’ (meant ironically, as the context will show). Foster’s claim that Shakespeare is unusual in choosing ‘ “comfortable” where most contemporaries prefer “comforting” ’ was hopelessly wrong, as can be seen from its continued availability (no doubt due to the continuing presence in English culture of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer) to Webster, in The White Devil (): Flamineo: ‘Your comfortable words are like honie’, to Fletcher in The scornful ladie (: in prose): ‘For these comfortable words I remaine your glad . . . ’, and to Massinger in The picture (): ‘I forgive thee Hilario. O comfortable wordes’. By reference to Chadwyck-Healey’s parallel production, the English Poetry Full-Text Database we find that the phrase was frequently used in verse, including some out-of-the-way poems by Francis Sabie, Nathaniel Baxter, and Robert Aylett. But we also find it used in widely read works, such as Harington’s Orlando Furioso (): ‘for his defence / These comfortable words Rogero spoke’; Drayton’s The Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy (): ‘Giving the souldier comfortable words, / And oft Imbalmed’, and The Miseries of Queen Margarite (): ‘cheere / her up with comfortable words’; also in Sir Arthur Gorges’s translation of Lucan, and George Sandys’s version of Ovid. In Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britannica: or, Great Britaine’s Troy (), the phrase occurs no less than three times: ‘with comfortable words the Lady cheeres’; ‘But with our comfortable words, to cheere you’; and ‘With comfortable words he cheares the youth.’ Shakespeare’s thirteen uses of it through a writing career stretching over twenty years is in no way unusual. Since Foster claimed that echoes from Richard II in the Funerall Elegye prove Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem, it is strange that he did not consult the Arden edition of that play, edited by Peter Ure (). There he would have found a reference to Richmond Noble’s book on Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Bible, which located the phrase in the Communion Service and in Zachariah :, but suggested that, in view of the use of ‘discomfortable’ elsewhere in Richard II (..), Shakespeare may have been echoing Ecclesiastes :, ‘speake no discomfortable
Vocabulary and diction
words’. Naseeb Shaheen, who has produced four volumes devoted to Shakespeare’s use of the Bible, discussing this passage in Richard II, cited the biblical loci and Communion Service, and took issue with Noble’s suggestion: The expression ‘comfortable words’, however, seems to have been a common one in Shakespeare’s day. In his Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, written ca. –, Cavendish used that expression at least seven times . . . It appears in Hall’s account of Richard III (.) as Richmond encourages his troops at the Battle of Bosworth. It also occurs in Lancelot of the Laik, the Scottish paraphrase and adaptation of the Lancelot story, written ca. –: ‘And confortable wordis to them schew’ (). Even Chaucer has ‘And with wordes to comforte’ in The House of Fame (). It would appear, therefore, that Shakespeare was using a common expression, but one that he also repeatedly heard in the Communion Service. (Shaheen , pp. –)
Foster’s claim that Shakespeare was unusual in preferring the word ‘comfortable’ simply shows that his database was seriously unrepresentative. Indeed, it should be a matter of some embarrassment to the community of Shakespeare scholars that those who endorsed his attribution of the Funerall Elegye accepted this piece of evidence without question. Another word that Foster claimed to have special significance for ‘W. S.’, as for Shakespeare, is ‘opinion’. Foster introduced this discussion (new in ) with another of those apodictic assertions that mark his recent work: One also finds in the elegy fairly ordinary nouns used as only Shakespeare is known to have used them. Take WS’s odd use of the noun opinion, without an article or a possessive pronoun, to signify a ‘[f ]avorable estimate of one’s abilities’ (OED, sb. c): Will Peter was a man not addicted ‘to [c]ourting opinion with unfit disguise,’ and the poet has a tendency to ‘court opinion in my deep’st unrest’ (, ). This rare usage supplies only OED citations, all from Shakespeare – to which I can add ten more instances in Shakespeare and three in the Elegy. The collocation to court opinion does not occur in Shakespeare or in the hundreds of other early modern authors available in machine-readable form. Nor does it occur in any published concordance. Virtually all authors in Shakespeare’s day use opinion in its modern sense, ‘belief ’ or ‘judgment’, and none uses opinion with the verb to court. (a, pp. –)
(Incidentally, that passage is further evidence of the increasing inflation of argument and assertion in Foster’s work between and , indeed
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
even within this essay, for just before this he had described his powerful database, ‘the Vassar Electronic Text Archive, a machine-readable collection that comprises dozens of authors, hundreds of texts, millions of words’: p. . What were ‘dozens of authors’ becomes within a page, a little page, ‘hundreds’ of authors.) Foster recorded, however, that ‘I have turned up a second instance of this collocation. It appears in the first scene of Double Falsehood, Lewis Theobald’s redaction of Cardenio’, namely the lines ‘I trust my brother / Will . . . / . . . court opinion with a golden conduct’ (p. ). Foster’s confident statements may have led some readers to overlook several dubious inferences. Cardenio is the title of a lost play on which Shakespeare and Fletcher collaborated, being twice performed at court in the season –. Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood was printed in , with a preface claiming that he had drawn it from a manuscript copy in the hand of Downes the prompter, which Shakespeare had given, ‘as a Present of Value, to a Natural Daughter of his, for whose Sake he wrote it, in the Time of his Retirement from the Stage’. As E. K. Chambers observed in his discussion (Chambers , . –), ‘there are many queer points’ in Theobald’s account, ranging from the claim that Shakespeare had a natural daughter, to whom he gave a play-text (which would belong to the play-house in any case, and would hardly have much value), to Theobald’s announcement that he owned no less than three manuscript copies of it, all of which mysteriously disappeared. Chambers could not find ‘a single passage [in the play] which compels a belief in Shakespeare’, and dismissed Double Falsehood as a fabrication. And of course Theobald was eminently well able to write a pastiche of Elizabethan drama, ‘his mind steeped in Shakespeare’, as can be seen from his adaptation of Richard II in . It should be evident by now that Foster’s argument was desperately weak, supporting his claim for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye with a single verbal match in a play published more than a century later. – And in any case, as we shall see, the phrase occurs several times in Jacobean and Caroline literature. That extraordinary clutch of assertions employs such a strenuous style that the unwary reader might think that Foster was asserting that Shakespeare, too, used the phrase ‘to court opinion’. But a closer look reveals that all he says is that OED gives ‘only three . . . citations, all from Shakespeare’, of the ‘rare usage’ he had defined, and that ‘W. S.’ alone used the phrase ‘to court opinion’. So what is all the fuss about? The trustful reader may well be impressed by Foster’s apodictical assertiveness, but anyone who checks in OED will be disturbed at his apparent
Vocabulary and diction
failure to read that entry properly. He has correctly reported the first lemma of the substantive ‘opinion’, in its first two senses: .a. What one thinks or how one thinks about something; judgment resting on grounds insufficient for complete demonstration . . . ( . . . sometimes = belief ). b. Qualified by common, general, public, vulgar, etc. Such judgment or belief on the part of a number, or the majority, of persons; what is generally thought about something. Foster has also registered correctly the second lemma: .a. (With an and pl.) What one thinks about a particular thing, subject or point . . . But his claim that ‘Virtually all authors in Shakespeare’s day use opinion in its modern sense, “belief ” or “judgment”, overlooks OED’s massive category .c. Opinion ‘in the same sense [as .b.], without qualification’, as in Florio’s Montaigne (): ‘Opinion is a powerfull, bould, and unmeasurable party.’ Lots of writers in Shakespeare’s day used ‘opinion, without an article or a possessive pronoun’, as Foster specified, but not to mean ‘favourable self-estimate’, as he claimed, rather to describe that cluster of human beliefs and attitudes, often unfavourably described as ‘vacillating’, ‘fickle’, ‘inconstant’. Peter Ure documented this widespread definition of ‘Opinion as untrustworthy, shifting and dissimulatory’, and showed that the term had important connotations within Renaissance Neo-Stoicism, a point to which I shall return in chapter . If we consult that useful florilegium of Elizabethan poetry, Robert Allott’s England’s Parnassus, we will find several instances of this sense cluster (nos. –; some have been misplaced under ‘Occasion’, nos. –). These include quotations from Daniel, such as Opinion how dost thou molest Th’affected mind of restless man? (Tragedy of Cleopatra, )
Or Marston’s ironic apostrophe to ‘Great Opinion’: Great arbitrator, umpire of the earth . . . Thou moving Orator, whose powerfull breath Swa¨ıes all mens judgements. (Pygmalion, )
Every reader will think of similar instances in Shakespeare, such as
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Opinion, that did help me to the crown (H, ..) Opinion, a sovereign mistress of effects (Oth., ..)
This sense of ‘opinion’ shades over into OED’s .a. What one thinks of a person or thing; estimation, or an estimate, of character, quality, or value (as in Macbeth’s ‘I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people’, ..) and .b. spec. Good, high or favourable estimate; esteem (as in Thomas Morley’s Introduction to Music, : ‘Those who stande so much in opinion of theire owne sufficiencie’). Foster mentioned neither of these senses, nor did he cite OED’s . What is thought of one by others; the estimation (esp. good estimation) in which one stands; standing; reputation, repute, character, credit . . . Obs. (as in ‘Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion’, H, ..). The fact is that, contra Foster’s claim, these are the dominant senses for which ‘opinion, without an article or a possessive pronoun’ was mostly used in Shakespeare’s day. Indeed, in the edition of the Elegye, commenting on line of that poem, where the speaker worries that ‘ . . . perhaps I ignorantly range / And court opinion in my deep’st unrest’, Foster himself offered the following note: ‘court opinion] pursue public favor; cf. line ’ (, p. ). That earlier passage praises the deceased as a kind, true, perfect gentleman – Not in the outside of disgraceful folly, Courting opinion with unfit disguise. ( p. )
Those are entirely unexceptional instances of ‘opinion’ in OED’s sense – or even .c, and .b. It could be any of these. But I find no evidence that it could be explained by OED’s ‘.c. Favourable estimate of oneself or one’s own abilities; either in bad sense (self-conceit, arrogance, dogmatism), or in good sense (self-confidence). Obs.’ In both instances, where ‘W. S.’ worries whether he may be at fault – or praises Peter for avoiding that fault – in courting opinion, it can only be the opinion of others that is meant, not one’s own favourable self-estimate. Foster, wanting to claim that the Elegy is by Shakespeare, and noting that OED’s .c quotes exclusively instances from Shakespeare, seems to have collapsed both points into the assertion that W. S. uses ‘opinion’ in a specifically and uniquely Shakespearian sense. It looks impressive on paper, particularly
Vocabulary and diction
attended by Foster’s whole barrage of assertions, rhetorically bolstered by statistics; but when you check it out you find that it is both false to the dictionary evidence and to the obvious meaning of Peter’s elegy, as Foster has himself determined it. As for ‘opinion’ in the other OED senses, there is ample linguistic evidence for its use in Shakespeare’s day as a noun, unqualified by an article or possessive pronoun, meaning ‘reputation’, or ‘good estimate’ in the eyes of others. In those Renaissance texts dealing with what we might call the presentation of the self in everyday life, such as Bacon’s Essays, we find several instances of this sense. The concluding advice in ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ is: ‘The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion . . . ’ (Vickers , p. ). Similarly, in ‘Of Vain-glory’, Bacon describes vain-glorious men (boasters) as well able to create ‘an opinion and fame . . . of virtue or greatness’, adding the biting proviso that ‘in these and the like kinds, it often falls out that somewhat is produced of nothing; for lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance’ (p. ). In ‘Of Honour and Reputation’ Bacon discusses the opposite case, virtuous and deserving men who do not show their parts to the best advantage, those who ‘darken their virtue in the shew of it; so as they be undervalued in opinion’ (p. ). In the ‘Tudor Poets’ (–) section of the Chadwyck-Healey English Poetry database, we find several interesting usages, starting with the first poet (alphabetically speaking), Sir William Alexander (–). In Doomes-Day, or the great day of the Lord’s judgement (Edinburgh, ; STC ) we even find the phrase ‘to court opinion’, which Foster declared in did ‘not occur in Shakespeare or in the hundreds [sic] of other early modern authors available in machine-readable form’ (a, p. ). In a passage of moral diatribe Alexander attacks hypocrites: That troupe on Sathans coat Gods Badge which beares, Who hatching mischief, holiness pretend, With whoorish sighs, and with adulterous teares, Their action all to court opinion tend; Weigh’d words, school’d looks, squar’d steps, fain’d griefes, and fears . . .
Lest anyone be tempted to claim this as proof that Alexander was imitating the Funerall Elegye, they should note that the word ‘opinion’, without article or possessive pronoun, occurs ten times in Alexander’s corpus, sometimes with a transitive verb (compare Bacon: ‘to breed opinion’), as here:
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Those who (affecting vaine ambitions end) To gaine opinion muster all in show.
Alexander is typical of many writers of Shakespeare’s age in opposing ‘opinion’ in the negative sense to some admirable positive: ‘Prys’d by opinion, but by substance bought’. Similarly Drayton juxtaposes it with ‘reason’ (‘Nor constant reason leaves / Opinion to pursue’), as does Barnaby Googe (‘This reason guides the wysest men, / Opinion leads the lowte’). Many instances of ‘opinion’ are negative, as in Alexander Barclay (‘I kept the opinion of witlesse commontie, / And grounded myselfe on none aucthoritie’; ‘ . . . nought but voyce of witlesse commontie, / And vayne opinion subject to vanitie’), Sir John Davies (‘So Fancies pleasure all those pleasures passe, / Because Opinion esteems them best’), Thomas Deloney (‘Beautie that standeth on Pride, and Opinion, / by Lady Lucre oft catcheth a fall’), Fulke Greville (‘Forms of Opinion, Wit, and Vanity’), Gervase Markham (‘This Siren our Opinion, wind-borne lame’; ‘Opinion, th’onely torture of your minde’). But there are also positive usages, as in Daniel (‘In most upright opinion he doth stand’; ‘He onely treads the sure and perfect Path / To Greatnesse, whom love and opinion hath’; ‘For, friends, opinion, and succeeding chaunce / . . . Were not the same, that he had found before’; ‘For they had left, although themselves were gone, / Opinion and their memorie behinde’), Drayton (‘No friendly Bosome gave him any Place, / Who was cleane out of all Opinion cast’; ‘Nothing might passe, but that which I allow’d, / A great opinion to my wit to gaine’), and Tourneur (‘. . . opinion, like a Centinell / Held watch upon their Actions’). These are just some of the many instances of ‘opinion’ used in the regular senses as defined by OED. I can find no certain instances of the sense ‘.c. Favourable estimate of oneself or one’s own abilities’, for which OED could only cite three instances, all from Shakespeare. I do find some contexts where ‘opinion’ is coupled with ‘self ’ or its cognates (all negative), as in Greville’s Treatie of Humane Learning: Our chiefe endeavour must be to effect A sound foundation, not on sandy parts Of light Opinion, Selfenesse, Words of men, But that sure rocke of truth; Gods Word, or Penne
and again in his Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, attacking ‘popular vaine pride . . . to applause and self-opinion ty’d’; similarly in Thomas Lodge, Truths Complaint over England:
Vocabulary and diction
A fashion feedes the fancies now a dayes When as in Court promotions passed be By selfe opinion
and in Samuel Nicholson, Acolastus his After-Wit, describing the man convict of Heresie, Whose Judgement doomes him death by cruell flame . . . Full faintly wending onward to the fier Where selfe opinion shall receive his hire.
Apart from these instances, I find no examples of that rare, Shakespearian sense of ‘opinion’, as ascribed by OED. – But since it does not occur in the Funerall Elegye, either, then Foster’s whole argument was pointless. I hope that this corrective will at least have the value of re-establishing the lexicographical truth, however unsurprising it may be. Foster’s study of the Elegye’s diction considered several other issues on which he made confident-seeming pronouncements, intended to show a stylistic identity between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare. In he laid special emphasis on the negative prefix un–: It is a commonplace observation that one of Shakespeare’s characteristic means of adding words to our language, or at least to his own vocabulary, was with the un– prefix; as in the Elegy, where we find ‘unrememb’red’, ‘untouched’, ‘unfit’, ‘unbeseeming’, ‘unfamiliar’, ‘unburthen’d’, ‘unfeign’d’ (x), ‘unlov’d’, ‘unblushing’, ‘unhappy’ (x), ‘unsteady’, ‘untrue’, ‘unfortunate’, ‘unaffected’, ‘(to) unlock’, ‘unadvis’d’, ‘unjust’ (x), ‘unholy’, ‘untoward’, ‘uncivil’, ‘(to) unsound’, ‘unprevailing’, ‘unrespected’, ‘unexpected’, ‘unkind’, ‘undoubtedly’, and ‘unrest’ – an extraordinary number of un– words for a poem of less than lines. (p. )
Foster then cited Alfred Hart’s pioneering studies of Shakespeare’s vocabulary, in which he estimated that ‘the important group of words beginning with the prefix un– amounts to nearly four percent of Shakespeare’s vocabulary’. However, Foster alleged, Hart overestimated the actual percentage of un– words in Shakespeare’s vocabulary. Spevack’s Concordance registers , different ‘words’ in Shakespeare (with a ‘word’ defined as any particular configuration of letters); of these are un– words, or . percent, about half the figure cited by Hart (he has perhaps counted until, unless, unto, uncle, and words beginning in uni– or under–). Hart likewise overestimates Shakespeare’s uniqueness in this respect, for I find several poets who approach Shakespeare in their frequency of un– words, including,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
for example, such prominent authors as Edmund Spenser, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Heywood. It is nevertheless true that Shakespeare’s vocabulary contains an unusually high percentage of un– words, even at . percent. The same is true of W. S. In the Elegy (including the epistle, in which no un– words appear) there are , words. Of the , ‘different words’ (using Spevack’s definition), are (different) un– words, or . percent. W. S. thus comes closer to Shakespeare’s mean than does Shakespeare himself in Venus and Adonis (.%), The Rape of Lucrece (.%), The Sonnets (.%), and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (.%). (pp. –)
That is another superficially impressive sequence of argument, capped with statistics. But, of course, Foster has committed a simple but most damaging logical error. While conceding that other (earlier) writers also used ‘un–’ words, he climaxed his discussion with that entirely fortuitous statistical correlation between the Elegye and the global figures for Shakespeare’s usage. The unwary reader is left with the impression that Shakespeare was highly unusual in his liking for ‘un–’ words, as was ‘W. S.’, and that the coincidence was not accidental. Had Foster made proper use of the secondary literature, however, he would have known that a liking for the prefix un– was by no means unusual in this period. In fact, a book that he himself cited – as we shall see, all too inaccurately – Charles Barber’s excellent study of Early Modern English contains some valuable information in this connection. Barber’s chapter on ‘The Expanding Vocabulary’ (Barber , pp. –) considered both borrowing (‘loan-words’, ‘loans from Latin’ and other languages) and word-formation, especially by affixation (‘suffixes’, ‘prefixes’, ‘compounding’, and ‘zero-morpheme derivation’). Barber described his method: ‘Taking a two-per-cent sample of the OED, I have scrutinized every word in it’ (p. ). But, he warned, ‘because of my sampling methods, the material will not give a reliable picture of the frequency of various prefixes’, being based on ‘pages of the OED’ (p. ). While not affecting ‘the overall figures for the frequency of prefixation’, his sampling technique did affect the figures for particular prefixes, since some may have been missed altogether, others over-represented. One finding, however, is certainly correct. The commonest prefix in the sample is un–, with examples out of the . It does not need much study of the OED to show that un– should indeed be ranked first among the prefixes. It is used freely before nouns, adjectives, participles, verbs, and adverbs, and with words of foreign origin as well as native ones. A few examples: uncircumcision (),
Vocabulary and diction
unclasp v. (), unclimbable (), uncircumspectly (), uncloaked (), uncivil adj. (), uncited (), uncomfortable (), uncivility (), unclog v. (), uncivilized (), uncircumscribed (), un-coalcarrying ‘unwilling to submit to insult’ (), uncity v. () uncome-at-able (). The word uncivility was coined (and persisted) despite the fact that the French loan incivility () was already in the language. The form un-coalcarrying is recorded only once, in a play by George Chapman, and illustrates the ease with which the prefix was used for nonce-formations, as today. (p. )
When Barber issued a revised edition of his book in he was able to draw on the second edition of the OED (), also available on CDROM, and he had hoped to produce a second sample sorted by etymology. This proved to be impossible, since the dictionary has ‘no standard format for the etymology entries’, so he took a supplementary sample from the OED entries for seven different dates between and , drawing a percent sample from the list for each year (, pp. –). His original sample had consisted of , words, the supplementary sample of words, and he was now able to provide comparative statistics for the un– prefix. In the main sample it amounted to ‘ percent of the examples’, and its ‘dominance is confirmed by the supplementary sample, in which it forms percent of the examples’ (p. ). Against this background, with ‘un–’ forms forming four out of every ten prefixes in English, Shakespeare’s fondness for such forms no longer seems so exceptional – nor does that of ‘W. S.’ Warren B. Austin, in his pioneering use of computational stylistics to prove that Henry Chettle wrote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, showed that Chettle used un– words much more frequently than Greene, and in a much more enterprising manner. J¨urgen Sch¨afer’s study of Thomas Nashe’s vocabulary showed that Nashe was also inventive in his formation of un– words, listing seven examples which antedate the OED’s citation for first usage. Whether ‘W. S.’ was particularly inventive in this respect remains to be seen. Foster devoted a brief paragraph to this topic, but characteristically pushed it in the direction of insinuating Shakespeare’s authorship, begging the question, as so often: Of W. S.’s un– words, several appear only rarely prior to Shakespeare, or not at all. The OED (which is not, of course, exhaustive), offers only one prior instance each of the adjectives ‘unblushing’ (Daniel, ) and ‘unfamiliar’ (Hooker, ); only one of ‘unburthen’d’ prior to King Lear . . . [and] one instance of ‘unexpected’ prior to King John (Sidney, ), while ‘unrespected’ makes an early
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
appearance in the Sonnets. ‘Unprevailing’ (Elegy, ) may be one of many such Shakespearean coinages: I have discovered no instance of it prior to Hamlet’s ‘unprevailing woe’ (Ham. ..) or, indeed, any additional examples during Shakespeare’s lifetime . . . (, p. )
The availability of the Chadwyck-Healey databases now makes it easy to verify those claims, but the point at issue is not the first appearance or frequency of these or so-called ‘Shakespearean coinages’, rather the unreflective methodology by which Foster could make global pronouncements about Shakespeare’s vocabulary and that of the Funerall Elegye, as if the two formed some specially isolated category within the English language. So far I have dealt with three linguistic markers which Foster cited in arguing that the verbal preferences of ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare are indistinguishable, the words ‘comfortable’ and ‘opinion’, and the negative prefix un–. All three markers are visible to the untrained reader, who can register both the meaning-bearing words and the negating prefix in the normal reading process. A fourth marker that Foster invoked, however, is not easily perceived in normal reading, and needs to be checked and counted in a separate activity, namely the use of ‘function-words’, or ‘high frequency words’. These are such things as definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and so on, ingredients which, as MacDonald Jackson put it, ‘contribute little to the content of a passage, much to its structure’ ( Jackson , p. ). One great achievement of modern stylometry has been to show that writers have distinct preferences as to which of these words they use, and how frequently. Jackson, drawing on the classic work by Mosteller and Wallace on the Federalist papers, applied this approach to Middleton’s plays, defining his normal usages and then showing that this evidence strengthened the case for his authorship of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Puritan, and A Yorkshire Tragedy (pp. –). In his study Foster discussed the use of function-words in the Elegye, in another of those confident-sounding sequences, replete with statistics, designed to make Shakespeare’s authorship seem unquestionable. He informed his readers that Of nearly , different words (including inflections) in Shakespeare’s collected vocabulary, there are nine and only nine – and, but, by, in, not, so, that, to, with – that never deviate in the plays by more than a third from their respective mean frequencies. The four prepositions (by, in, to, with) have, unfortunately, little if any value as indices of style: the practice of Shakespeare and W. S., though much the same, is not remarkably different from that of other English poets of
Vocabulary and diction
the same era. However, the remaining five words (and, but, not, so, that) may serve as a kind of stylistic Geiger counter. (, pp. –)
To lay readers that may sound like a legitimate argument, although they will hardly understand the significance of stylistic markers not deviating ‘by more than a third from their respective mean frequencies’, a technicality that could easily have been explained. Such innocent readers will also no doubt be duly impressed as Foster explains the method he has devised for ascertaining ‘the most probable frequency’ for the occurrence of these five words, taking ‘as our strictest possible control group the four plays that immediately precede the Elegy (Cor., Cym., WT, and Temp.) . . . ’ (p. ) – the phrase ‘strictest possible control’ being intended to arouse confidence in the tester’s scientific accuracy and objectivity. Finally, such readers will be especially impressed by Foster’s demonstration that, given the principles on which he has compiled this data, the indices for the Elegye ‘consistently fall not only within the “probable range” for a poem by William Shakespeare, but with uncanny predictability fall in every case within the more narrowly circumscribed range of the “most probable frequency” within the broader spectrum, for a poem written late in his career’ (p. ). According to Foster, these five indices, ‘(and, but, not, so, that) together with most and like are probably the seven most reliable single-word measures of Shakespeare’s style’, the frequencies being so consistent throughout his career. And now follows the link with ‘W. S.’ that the jaundiced reader has been expecting, with ‘uncanny predictability’: ‘Of the forty items in the – Cross-Sample, none passes more than four of the seven tests’ (p. ). Since these poems, according to Foster, provide an accurate and comprehensive record of poetic usage in Jacobean England, ‘Then the chances are quite negligible that any non-Shakespearean poem from this period will match Shakespeare’s probable frequency for all seven words (no matter what the poet’s initials). The Funeral Elegy, by W. S., matches the frequency for all seven’ (pp. –). Quod erat demonstrandum. Those four pages are typical of Foster’s confidence with statistics, far exceeding that of most literary scholars. (Foster’s undergraduate degree was in psychology and sociology: Crain , p. .) They also reveal the pathetic vulnerability of ordinary readers, including experienced Shakespearians, before such a barrage of quantification, a vulnerability which partly explains Foster’s reputation for scholarly rigour. However, certain adjustments, invisible to the lay reader’s eye, took place during that process of choosing which items to include, and which to leave out.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Fortunately for us, MacDonald P. Jackson, a scholar of the utmost accuracy, with some thirty years’ experience in authorship studies, revealed in his review of the monograph just what these adjustments were. As Jackson pointed out, if Foster had ‘not dismissed the prepositions from consideration, he would have obtained results far less favourable to his case. In occurs in the Elegy with exceptional frequency – times, or at a rate of . times per one thousand words. The overall rate for Shakespeare’s plays is . . . . ’ ( Jackson , p. ). Jackson made it perfectly explicit that in offering these figures he was ‘using the same method that Foster himself uses on pages – of his book’, which would give ‘– instances of in per thousand words as the range within which the rate for a Shakespeare poem written in would probably fall’, a rate less than half of the Elegye’s use of in. It is all the more significant that the results Jackson achieved, by considering the whole group of prepositions, and not only those where the statistics suit Foster’s case, were startlingly different: ‘The collocation in the is especially common in the Elegy, occurring twenty-four times for a rate of . per thousand words. In Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works the rates range from . . . . to ..’ For each of these function-words Jackson demonstrated a sharp difference between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare: ‘The incidence of with in the Elegy would also be anomalous . . . The Elegy uses by too often to have been written by Shakespeare . . . To . . . is also used at an unShakespearian rate . . . ’ (p. ). ( Jackson did not comment on of, another function-word which occurs with remarkable, and unShakespearian frequency in the Elegye, as we will see.) The fundamental differences between the two writers may be grasped more clearly as set out in table . (all frequencies are per thousand words). Quoting Foster’s assertion that for the four prepositions ‘the practice of Shakespeare and W. S. . . . [is] much the same’, Jackson judged it ‘clearly incorrect; in respect of each one of the prepositions, Shakespeare and “W. S.”, far from being “much the same”, are utterly dissimilar’ (p. ). Jackson charitably concluded that Foster suffered from an ‘unconscious bias in the selection and application of the tests’, as he also did in his computation of the word-lengths in the Elegye, that is, ‘the proportion of words of one, two, three, four, five, and six or more letters’. According to Foster (, pp. –), in respect of this stylistic marker the Elegye by ‘W. S.’ falls within an estimated Shakespearian range, while elegies by Donne, Tourneur, and Webster do not. Jackson objected that Foster had designed this test incorrectly, and that ‘the proper way of
Vocabulary and diction Table . . Function-words in A Funerall Elegye and in Shakespeare FE (, words) total
frequency .
in the
.
with by to
. . .
in
Shakespeare frequency (range) . (plays) . ( poems) .–. ( poems) .–. ( late plays) – .–. .–.
Source: Jackson , pp. –
comparing the four elegies to the Shakespearian sample is by means of a chi-square “goodness of fit” test, using the raw figures’, where ‘the larger the chi-square value, the greater the difference between the samples’. Properly applied, the test for word-lengths gives chi-square values for the elegies by Webster, Tourneur, and Donne (respectively, ., ., and .), which ‘match the Shakespearian sample much more closely than does the Peter Elegy (with its chi-square value of .)’ ( Jackson , p. ) – indeed a striking divergence. As Jackson concluded, ‘If such solid-looking blocks in the case that Foster constructs can be shown to be hollow, the whole edifice seems in danger of collapsing’ (p. ). Foster did not reply directly to Jackson’s criticisms, but he allowed his associate Richard Abrams to do so in an essay for The Shakespeare Newsletter. Uncritically recycling Foster’s main arguments and judgments, with even more hype, Abrams claimed that ‘though a few details have been challenged, not one major piece of evidence’ produced by Foster ‘. . . has ever been impeached’, with the exception of MacDonald Jackson’s review, which apparently ‘chides Foster for failing to test for the four most common prepositions (by, in, to, with) . . . ’ – ‘chides’ is a nice way of putting it. But Abrams was confident that he could dismiss this critic: These strictures would perhaps have more force if Jackson’s own figures weren’t so assailable. For example, Jackson egregiously lumps infinitive to with prepositional to, more than doubling the incidence of the latter. (Abrams , p. )
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
In a footnote Abrams informed the trusting reader, who perhaps never read the original review, published five years earlier, that Jackson’s practice in handling statistics is to give career averages, burying trends. Thus, he complains that by appears too often in FE, actually making this a sufficient ground to reject Foster’s attribution. [But this was only one of Jackson’s non-Shakespearian markers.] Shakespeare’s use of by, however, increases chronologically, from a low of ./k [per thousand] in Shr to a high of ./k in LC [Lover’s Complaint]. FE’s use of by stands at ./k, higher than elsewhere but continuing a demonstrable trend. Also, Jackson complains of the frequency of in, but Shakespeare’s use of in is much higher in the poems than in the plays. In the plays, in never exceeds ./k, but in LC in occurs at a rate of ./k, and in FE, at a rate of ./k, again continuing the trend . . . When Jackson’s figures for prepositional to are corrected by elimination of infinitive to, FE yields what we would expect for a Shakespeare poem written in –. It contains instances of preposition to (not Jackson’s reported instances) for a rate of ./k . . . Shakespeare’s rate rises regularly . . . FE is right on the money at ./k . . . (Abrams , p. , n. )
Knowledgeable readers will have two immediate objections: for one, it is by no means certain that Shakespeare wrote the poem A Lover’s Complaint, which Thorpe appended to the edition of the Sonnets. While some scholars whose judgment I respect (notably Jackson himself, and A. K. Hieatt) argue for Shakespeare’s authorship, it has always seemed to me to have too many oddities in vocabulary and rhetoric to be easily acceptable, and some of the counter-evidence cited by J¨urgen Sch¨afer, and by Elliott and Valenza, weaken the case significantly. Secondly, it was wrong of Abrams to run together statistics from two or three poems by Shakespeare and then to extrapolate some ‘trend’ which – hey presto! – is exactly confirmed by the Funerall Elegye. In reply, MacDonald Jackson politely pointed out some misrepresentation, identified two serious errors in Abrams’s use of statistics, and objected that Abrams ‘greatly distorts’ the argument in several respects. Jackson never claimed that ‘the words by, in, to, and with’ were the four most common prepositions in Shakespeare, indeed, he pointed out, ‘of and for occur more frequently . . . than by or with’, but he had shown that they ‘occur in the Elegy at rates outside’ Shakespeare’s norm. Since Foster himself ‘referred to nine “words” that’ consistently recur in Shakespeare, and ‘it is the graphic unit to that is used by Shakespeare with the degree of consistency that Foster notes’, Abrams had simply missed the point in claiming that prepositional and infinitive to should
Vocabulary and diction
be distinguished. Abrams was also ‘completely incorrect in asserting’ that Jackson had given career averages, burying trends, for in his review, Jackson stated, I gave ranges for plays and for poems, made such remarks as that ‘there is no tendency for the rates [for to] to increase towards the end of Shakespeare’s career’, and, most significantly, [I] adopted Foster’s own way of calculating rates to be expected in the Elegy if it is Shakespeare’s. Abrams, in contrast, selects figures for a handful of poems and plays to concoct ‘trends’ that might result in the rates observed in the Elegy: had Foster regularly utilized these procedures, his whole case would have been worthless. ( Jackson , p. )
As for the ‘trend’ that Abrams claimed to find, Jackson commented: ‘three poems provide an infirm base from which to deduce a trend, which is not substantiated by the plays’ (p. ). Foster cannot be blamed, of course, for errors made by a supporter attempting to sweep away Jackson’s uncomfortably accurate critique, but the exchange does show how easily the unwary reader can be misled by the manipulation of statistics. And the fact that Abrams retrospectively muddled Foster’s methodology, producing ‘worthless’ figures, shows that not all who use statistics actually understand them. Foster seemed happy to let Abrams suffer this rebuttal, not coming to his defence, indeed he may even have thought that his argument for function-words had been strengthened. In fact, it had been blown away. In this chapter I have reviewed four linguistic markers cited by Foster as proving the linguistic fabric of the Funerall Elegye to be ‘indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (a, p. ). For the first, the word ‘comfortable’, I showed that Foster’s linguistic sample, and his own limited reading, were both inadequate to support any claim that Shakespeare was unusual in using this word to mean ‘comforting’. For the second, I showed that Foster’s account of the word ‘opinion’ both muddled the evidence given by OED and failed to find any instance of it being used in the Elegye ‘as only Shakespeare is known to have used [it]’ (p. ). For the third, I showed that Foster was completely mistaken in claiming that both ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare used un– words with unusual frequency, having overlooked easily available evidence to the contrary from standard accounts of English linguistic history. Finally, I have shown that Foster gave a highly selective account of the Elegye’s use of function-words, so as to bring the poem closer to Shakespeare, and that
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
he has repeatedly ignored a devastating critique of his findings. Given that Foster’s case for Shakespeare’s authorship rests largely on internal, verbal evidence, to commit four such methodological errors while dealing with this fundamental material is nothing short of disastrous. But worse is to come.
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
In his attempt to establish Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye Donald Foster identifed a number of what seemed to him ‘stylistic quirks’ in the poem, which he then investigated. One of these ‘quirks’ involves a grammatical construction which would be anomalous in modern English, the use of ‘who’ for inanimate antecedents, such as ‘th’assault of death, who’ (FE, ). Such a usage would be unacceptable today, but in Shakespeare’s age it might have been common, and in order to form an accurate estimate of this matter the Shakespeare scholar must turn to histories of the English language, of which there is no lack. It seems that Foster made a hasty raid on this material, did not look very far, and misinterpreted what he saw. His account of this grammatical feature is a travesty of the historical record, and it must be a matter of some embarrassment to the scholarly community that so many writers on Shakespeare have seized on his account of ‘the anomalous who’ as if it represented a reliable account of the English language in Shakespeare’s age. Far from being a distinctive Shakespearian usage, it turns out to be an entirely commonplace grammatical variant, which persisted right through the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth. In his monograph Foster relied largely on one main source of information, which was not – and did not pretend to be – an authority on the development of the English language, A. C. Partridge’s analysis of the grammatical conventions in Shakespeare’s poems (), with a brief nod to Charles Barber’s Early Modern English (). According to Foster, Partridge had identified some ‘syntactical features that are characteristic of Shakespeare’s verse’, including the frequent substitution of one relative pronoun for another; thus in the Elegy, where we find who for which when used with animals or with personified nouns: truth who (dedication), death who (), time who (), dove who (). But a survey of Renaissance verse shows these examples in fact to be quite ordinary. What makes Shakespeare’s practice unique is that he frequently
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
substitutes who for which when there is no apparent justification for it – as in the Elegy, where we find ‘embracements . . . who’ (–), ‘hopes . . . who’ ( – ), ‘designs, on whom’ (), ‘orbs in whom’ (). Excepting Shakespeare, the use of who for inanimate and unpersonified antecedents such as these is rare indeed. The phenomenon never occurs in the poetry of Sidney or Jonson, and never in the poems or plays of Christopher Marlowe except perhaps in those ‘breathing stars’ in Hero and Leander ‘who . . . / Frighted the melancholy earth’ (which is probably just another instance of personification). These three are the only poets for whom a detailed concordance is available at present. (, pp. –)
There is a degree of anticlimax, indeed bathos, in the concluding admission that Foster could only make use of three concordances to Renaissance poetry, as if these constituted reliable sources of information as to the use of relative pronouns in Early Modern English. That passage also shows Foster illicitly begging the question by placing the Funerall Elegye side by side with Shakespeare, who ‘frequently substitutes who for which . . . as in the Elegy’. Foster’s assertions became even more insistent as he swiftly cited other, apparently trustworthy evidence: Charles Barber finds only one non-Shakespearean example in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that, some three generations after Shakespeare, in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (). Turning to the Memorial Verse, I find only one such substitution in eighty-two thousand lines. It occurs in David Murray’s epitaph for his cousin of the same name . . . (p. )
Here Foster cited his own ‘Cross-Sample’ of English Memorial Verse published between and , perhaps imagining that it represented an accurate sample of English linguistic usage. The misconceptions involved in this assumption are horrendous, as anyone who has used a real linguistic corpus will appreciate, and the fact that Foster’s database included only a single instance of the anomalous construction shows once more how unrepresentative it was, in this as in other ways. Foster then moved on to Shakespeare, citing some examples of this anomalous use of the relative pronoun from the late plays (‘vessel who’, ‘anchors who’, ‘belly who’), early poems (‘eyelids who’, ‘brambles and bushes through whom’, ‘tongue who’), and the Sonnets (‘books who’, ‘night who’). He summed up his argument with statistics and more of those categorical assertions which have impressed, and misled, several Shakespeare scholars who ought to have known better: Of occurrences in the Shakespeare poems of who and whom, , or . percent, appear with incongruent antecedents, as against . percent in the
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
Elegy . . . Shakespeare’s startling use of who and whom where virtually all of his contemporaries used which, if not explicable as a peculiarity of Stratford vernacular retained from his childhood, may result from simple confusion, as it is certainly not mandated by any artistic necessity; and though isolated instances of this phenomenon may be found elsewhere in Renaissance literature, so far as I can ascertain there is no other known poet (including David Murray) who makes a habit of doing so – unless, of course, W. S. is someone other than William Shakespeare. ( pp. –)
In his PMLA article this claim, like all the others, was expressed even more emphatically, in a truly eye-catching manner: Assisted by electronic searches, scholars can determine whether a mannerism or odd grammatical feature of WS’s text is a commonplace of the age or a linguistic habit that points toward (or away from) Shakespearean authorship. Consider Shakespeare’s extraordinary use of who or whom as an impersonal relative pronoun. A. C. Partridge was the first to note Shakespeare’s peculiar use of ‘who’ where virtually all other English-speaking authors, of any century or native region, would use ‘which’ or ‘that’. (a, p. ; my italics)
That extraordinarily wide claim was made, but then scaled down in the following sentence. (From the sentences picked out for quotation by Foster’s followers, one can see that the eye-catching assertions get noticed, the subsequent qualifications being less quotable. This is an effective, but dangerous rhetorical device.) Here is the revised claim: On occasion most early modern authors will use ‘who’ for personification and for referring to animals, as does W. S., in ‘truth who’, ‘death who’, ‘time who’, ‘dove who’. But Shakespeare regularly uses ‘who’ with unpersonified inanimate antecedents. The last plays provide such examples as ‘vessel who’, ‘thing who’, ‘smile who’, ‘anchors who’, ‘belly who’, ‘knees who’, ‘elements on whom’, and many more.
According to Foster, ‘in Shakespeare’s canonical poems and in W. S.’s elegy, twenty percent of the clauses beginning with “who” or “whom” are of this idiosyncratic form. Elsewhere in English literature, the percentage is immeasurably small. The Vassar archive supplies only a few non-Shakespearean texts in which Shakespearean “who” appears more than once’ (p. ). Several elements in these apodictic assertions arouse unease. First, the bathos by which the attention-catching assertion in the first sentence that ‘virtually all’ English authors ‘of any century or native region’ would not practise this usage, was modified in the next sentence to read ‘On occasion most early modern authors will use’ it. Still, by not specifying the occasion on which they did so Foster preserved himself
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
from the most blatant self-contradiction between virtually all writers of any century not doing it, and most early modern authors doing it. Again, while ‘twenty percent of the clauses beginning with “who” or “whom”’ in Shakespeare’s poems are ‘of this idiosyncratic form’, its percentage elsewhere is said to be ‘immeasurably small’. But of course any percentage, however small, can be measured (if the usage occurs at all). Foster himself proved this by citing two instances in Edward III, then documenting a ‘frequent use’ of what he now calls ‘Shakespearean “who”’ in John Wilkins, it being also used, if ‘less frequently’, by Ford (a, p. ). Both Wilkins and Ford, of course, can be safely included in Foster’s long list of writers whose conscious and unconscious linguistic practices were influenced by Shakespeare – being, as he put it, ‘junior playwrights who learned to write . . . at Shakespeare’s knee’. It is axiomatic, in Foster’s world, that unwelcome resemblances between the ‘linguistic fabric’ of the Funerall Elegye and the work of any dramatist other than Shakespeare can be put down to that dramatist having either imitated Shakespeare or having been formed by him. In Foster’s closed world there are no free agents. Foster’s claims for what he and, alas, other scholars now call ‘the Shakespearean who’ raise, in an acute form, the nature of authority and trust in literary discourse. It is likely that most readers of Foster’s work, if they lack any independent knowledge of the literature he alludes to, may take his assertions in good faith, without bothering to verify them. Anyone who claims to have consulted the whole of Shakespeare, the concordances of three major poets, the OED, a text sample of Elegies produced between and , running to , lines, a further electronic archive (‘the Vassar archive’, which we are invited to imagine as immeasurably large), and the work of two reputed scholars, A. C. Partridge and Charles Barber, can normally count on his readers taking his assertions on trust. However, a reader who knows more about the history of the English language than Foster did, or who checks the authorities whom he cited, soon realizes that his assertions on this topic were completely unfounded; that these authorities have been misrepresented, or misunderstood – to give the more charitable option; and that there is a large secondary literature, dating back over a century, which gives a very different picture. To begin with the secondary authorities cited by Foster, the inquisitive (or by now, suspicious) reader who consults Partridge’s work will find there no such exclusive claim as Foster attributed to him. In the ‘Conclusions’ to his work, under the heading ‘Syntax’, Partridge drily listed some
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
‘notable aspects of syntax’ in Shakespeare’s poems, including: ‘Sporadic use of relative who for things in Shakespeare and others . . . ’ (Partridge , pp. –). Earlier Partridge had noted four instances of ‘relative who for “things” ’ in Venus and Adonis (p. ), and another four instances in The Rape of Lucrece (p. ); but he failed to give any examples of this usage in the Sonnets (pp. –). At no point did Partridge claim to be the first to notice this grammatical variant, nor did he regard it as particularly ‘peculiar’: indeed, he explicitly referred to ‘Shakespeare and others’. Foster also misrepresented Charles Barber’s work, with sad consequences for himself, for that pioneering synthesis of modern scholarship on Early Modern English, lucidly and intelligently organized, could have saved him from several colossal errors with which he confused himself and his readers. Any even moderately attentive reading of Barber’s discussion of relative markers will discover a clearly organized account of how the pronouns who, which, and that were gradually differentiated until the usages standardized in modern English became accepted (Barber , pp. – ). Barber showed that during a transitional period in the seventeenth century – the boundaries for which have been drawn more accurately by recent scholarship – which was regularly used with both non-personal and personal antecedents, while who was used (less frequently) with impersonal ones (pp. –). In addition to many examples drawn from Sir Thomas Elyot, via the admirable study of Mats Ryd´en, Barber cited Sugden’s study of Spenser’s grammar (see below), Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Middleton’s city comedies, and the King James Bible, none of which Foster bothered to consult. Barber’s use of these sources was intended to be exemplary, and he never claimed to have made an exhaustive search of two centuries’ printed record of the English language. He merely observed that ‘the same trends continue in the th century. In the Restoration period . . . who and which are almost entirely confined to personal and non-personal antecedents respectively . . . The situation towards the end of the century can be illustrated from Book I of Locke’s Essay’, in which Barber found ‘just one example of who with a non-personal antecedent’ (pp. –). From that actual quotation, expressis verbis, we can see how false was Foster’s hyped-up claim that Barber ‘finds only one non-Shakespearean example in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’. One might be willing to forgive such a misrepresentation in a doctoral dissertation as a juvenile error (although his examiners might have been expected to pick it up), but when a mature scholar presents it in plenary lectures before the Shakespeare Association and the MLA, and repeatedly in print, it becomes much more serious.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Foster committed another error in applying linguistic evidence by appealing to the OED as an authority about the frequency of usage. (Although he claimed the right to criticize others for making the same error: ‘Partridge is a victim here of depending too heavily on the OED . . . ’: , p. .) The OED is not a corpus, at least not in the sense of attempting a complete documentation of any linguistic usage at any time, an obviously impossible task. Every scholar of substance, I imagine, knows the weakness of that marvellous reference tool: the texts surveyed by the Victorian readers and editors consisted of many, but not all the relevant documents (some of which were rare or unavailable then), while the taxonomy of main meanings and subordinate meanings, although heroic in its attempted coverage, was inevitably incomplete. For these reasons the evidence that OED gives for the first use of a word, or for its first use in one specific sense, is always questionable, and in many cases has been shown to be out by several decades. Where OED cites instances, furthermore, its aim is to exemplify usage, not to document its totality, nor to guess how widespread such usage was at any given time. Foster knew this (‘The OED is not, of course, exhaustive’: , p. ), but he continued to misuse it, making claims for significance based on the presence or absence of instances which are always slanted towards proving Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye. So here, for ‘who’ used with impersonal antecedents, he reported: The only non-Shakespearean example offered in the OED prior to Oliver Goldsmith () is by Archbishop George Abbott (), who writes in his Expositions of Jonah of ‘The snow and rain, who come down from above . . . water the earth, and procure a fruit out of it’ – and even here it seems likely that Abbott is personifying both snow and rain as husbandmen. (, p. )
But the compilers of OED could have found hundreds of examples of this usage in the period –, and beyond, had they been looking. Faced with Foster’s totalizing claims for Shakespeare’s uniqueness, it becomes essential to try and document some of the evidence that shows him to have been completely unexceptionable in his ambidexterous use of these two relative pronouns. Shakespearian scholars have tended to treat ‘Elizabethan English’ as a unity, historically defined since it is so remote from us, but they have seen it in static terms. In reality, a number of changes were taking place, which attempted (with varying degrees of conscious awareness) to normalize or standardize English usage into a limited and clearly distinguished number of forms, compared
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
to the greater freedom of choice enjoyed earlier. The discipline of historical linguistics, more systematic in theory and method than traditional philology, is relatively young, but it has already produced valuable analyses of the types of linguistic change taking place in early modern English. For reasons which are not wholly clear, the relative pronouns who and whom came into common use only in the late fourteenth/early fifteenth centuries, joining þe and that. Olga Fischer’s account of syntax in Middle English, written for The Cambridge History of the English Language, pointed out that in modern English Two parameters are at work: the animacy parameter and the ‘information’ parameter. The first decides the choice of who (whom, whose) against that, which, the former being used strictly with a personal antecedent, the latter with inanimate antecedents . . . The information parameter distinguished between socalled restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. In the first, the information given in the relative clause particularises the antecedent, while in the second the information given is additional; it does not serve to delimit the potential referents of the antecedent. That is the prototypical relativiser in restrictive clauses, which can overrule the animacy parameter by replacing who after a personal antecedent. That is barred from non-restrictive clauses; here who and which are used in accordance with the animacy parameter.
In the fifteenth century ‘which begins to supplant that’, which being found ‘with both animate and inanimate antecedents, whom and whose mainly with animate ones’ (Fischer , p. ). As for who, a study made by Mats Ryd´en in showed that ‘the first true examples of relative who date from the fifteenth century and involve stereotyped closing formulas found in letters’, in which ‘the antecedent is always the deity’ (p. ). In the sixteenth century, as Matti Rissanen pointed out in the next volume of that History, there was considerable ‘variation in the tightness of the link between the relative pronoun and its antecedent even within the restrictive and non-restrictive clauses’. At the beginning of the century ‘which could freely be used with reference to personal antecedents’, and its replacement by who was a gradual and long-drawn-out process. ‘The distribution along the animacy parameter is established in the course of the seventeenth century.’ In Ryd´en’s sixteenth-century corpus, one-third of the occurrences of which have a human antecedent; in that compiled by Dekeyser for the seventeenth century, only one-tenth (Rissanen , p. ). This development is in line with the general tendency in Early Modern English to systematize
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
the use of grammatical forms, and may also reflect ‘the polite and formal expression of Tudor and Stuart society, which probably emphasised the observation of the “personality” of the referent’. Quantitative linguistic analysis has shown that who and which forms were first established in written usage, in connection with ‘less common functions in the clause, in prepositional phrases and indirect object positions’, rather than in normal conversational usage. As Rissanen observed, ‘this implies that the spread of the wh- forms is a “change from above”, from the formal and literary levels of the language’ (p. ). This finding instantly makes a nonsense of Foster’s suggestion that Shakespeare’s ‘startling use of who and whom where virtually all of his contemporaries used which [may be] explicable as a peculiarity of Stratford vernacular retained from his childhood’. In the slow change that extended from to , who, whom, and which were used freely and indiscriminately for personal and impersonal antecedents. The most famous instance of this archaic form must be the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. :, Luke :). Where the Wyclif translations of the s both have ‘Our father that art in heaven’, in Tyndale preferred ‘which art’, the version found in the Geneva Bible, the King James Bible, and in all official versions until the Revised Standard Version of , when ‘who art’ first appeared. The gradual emergence of who as a relative pronoun caused some problems to grammarians in the early seventeenth century trying to standardize an English grammar based on Latin models. As Janet Bately showed, the majority of grammarians in the period allowed which as well as that to be used for all genders, only restricting the use of who. So Charles Butler declared in his English Grammar () that ‘Relatives are likewise : who, which or the which and that. Who is referred only to persons (men and spirits:) which and that, indifferently to anything: as the man which spoke to me, the man that spoke to me; the horse which I saw, the horse that I saw’ (p. ; quoted in Bately , p. ). Butler’s account was quoted almost verbatim by Jeremiah Wharton in his English Grammar () and J. Smith in his Grammatica Quadrilingua (). John Wallis’s revolutionary Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae () at first made no mention of ‘who’ and ‘what’ as relative, recognizing only ‘which’. Not until the fourth edition () did Wallis accept ‘(de personis) who & whom . . . Pro Relativo which, non raro ponitur That’ (pp. –; quoted in Bately , p. ). Wallis appended to his grammar various ‘praxes’, including a significant comment on the Lord’s Prayer, ‘our Father which’, defining qui as a
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
Relative, said equally of things and of persons. None the less one could also say who instead, when it refers to a person, because this is more appropriate for persons, and is being more frequently used nowadays; but still which for things. The reason why this [change] has come about is this: in the Anglican liturgy, where so far which had referred to persons, the recent revision substituted who and whom for almost all instances of which. The same has been done also by more educated persons. But in this Lord’s Prayer, familiar in the vernacular for a long time, not many are seen who distance themselves from the old received form.
And indeed, despite the Savoy Conference, set up in to revise the Book of Common Prayer, ‘which’ continued in the Lord’s Prayer. The division within the leading English churchmen on this issue reflected the uncertainty among grammarians, and the fact of actual usage, as Bately briefly observed, where ‘which with personal antecedent continued in use in certain constructions right up to the end of the century’ (p. ). According to Bately, Wallis was ‘the only grammarian of the th century even to consider the restriction of which to a non-personal antecedent: in fact, it was not until the end of the first decade of the th century that its pronominal use with personal antecedent became actually proscribed’ (p. ). Bately’s conclusion was recently endorsed, but given a much firmer linguistic support, in a wide-ranging study by Hans Peters. One great difference between Bately’s work in and that of Peters in is the rise of corpus linguistics. The compilation of linguistic databases, in electronically searchable forms, has allowed linguists to produce both synchronic and diachronic analyses of the English language more accurately than ever before, using material ranging from traditional literary sources to scientific textbooks, letters, diaries, court reports, political documents, and so on. The Early Modern section of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, compiled by Matti Rissanen and his team at the University of Helsinki, consists of about , words, with samples taken from sixty texts dating from to , representing a variety of genres. Hans Peters drew on this corpus, together with five collections of correspondence (dating from to ), to make a fresh approach to the rise of the relative pronoun in Early Modern English. Also using discourse analysis and pragmatics, he showed that the phenomenon is more complex than previously suggested, since its use involves such factors as formal education, and familiarity with ‘“high” discourse styles’. Where earlier linguistic historians might have criticized Janet Bately’s use of grammar books as constituting a too theoretical form of evidence, removed from
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
speech usage, Peters validated it, pointing to the influence on the educated classes of ‘the teachings of grammarians concerning the correct use of relatives’ (Peters , p. ). Peters surveyed the grammatical tradition afresh, noting that ‘grammarians have taught the preferability of who and the pronouns formally related to it for personal antecedents since the late th century’ (p. ). However, despite their teachings, ‘which continued in use with personal antecedents until the end of the th century’. It was still being condemned by Brightland in , and Addison produced his celebrated ‘Petition of Who and Which’, with ‘The just remonstrance of affronted That’ in (p. ). Drawing on several collections of private correspondence Peters showed that some writers in the mid-seventeenth century used ‘who . . . only with personal antecedents’ (p. ), but others used that, and which with personal antecedents (p. ). The period –, during which the standardization of usage for relative pronouns is supposed finally to have occurred, turns out to be quite inconsistent. In an admirable dissertation produced some seventy years ago, Alfred Kr¨uger showed that the grammarians’ rules separating ‘who’ and ‘which’ were still being ignored. ‘Who’ continues to be used in connection with animals, in Dryden (‘an horse who’; ‘Horses who’), Swift (‘Wisdom is a Fox, who after long hunting . . . ’; ‘the Bird who’), Defoe, and Addison. Abstractions and non-personified concepts still attract ‘who’, in Dryden (‘Nature, who’; ‘bold Attempt / Who’; ‘fortune who’), Swift (‘Nature who’), and even Burke (‘History who’). Dryden is still using ‘who’ for the planets (‘the Moon who’; ‘the Sun who’), Evelyn and Defoe use it for ships (‘vessels, who’; ‘a man-of-war who’), and Wycherley for ‘dice, who’. Sir William Temple might be thought oldfashioned in using ‘who’ for states, did not the same usage occur in Burke and Gibbon (Kr¨uger , p. ). Dryden and Addison use ‘who’ to refer to ‘spirits’, Evelyn and Defoe apply it to ‘souls’ (p. ). Conversely, the relative pronoun ‘which’ is used for entities which are both animate and rational, such as ‘ambassadors’, ‘Christians’, ‘an actor’, ‘an old man’ (p. ), ‘Prisoners’, ‘Bishops’, and ‘dwarfs’ (p. ). Swift writes ‘Deity, whom’, Addison ‘Divinity whom’, but Dryden writes ‘Divinity which’ and ‘Providence which’ (p. ). Kr¨uger’s conclusion, that ‘throughout this whole period the modern distinction between “who” and “which” remains in a state of flux’ (, p. ) confirms the judgment of Hans Peters that the standardization ‘toward the use of who for human, and of that for non-human antecedents . . . was never completed’ (Peters , p. ). The grammarians still differed among themselves in this period, and although some writers – notably Dryden – preached and
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
sometimes practised the ‘transition to who as a relative pronoun for persons’ (p. ), the wide variation among writers continued, even among those coming from notionally the same stratum of society, and having had a similar education. More light has recently been shed on this change by Catherine N. Ball, who made a quantitative analysis of the choice of relative markers in restrictive relative clauses, using both written and spoken data. Ball’s studies indicate that personal which began to give way to who in the sixteenth century, reaching a frequency of percent in her data, and rising to percent in her material from the seventeenth century. The ‘frequency of WH for personal subject relatives’ began to exceed that for non-personal subjects ( percent vs. percent) and ‘that began to be assigned to the non-personal category’, an ‘important qualitative change . . . reflected in the rapid rise of who’ (Ball , pp. –). It is hard to say at this point whether or not ‘who was an element of the written standard, but by the end of the century it does appear to be a prestige variant’ (p. ) – that is, a verbal choice marking a linguistically self-aware social group. If Shakespeare, several generations earlier, did not yet observe ‘the modern dominance of who for personal subject restrictive relatives’, then he was by no means behind his time, or in any way unusual. While historical linguistics has vastly increased our understanding of this phenomenon, the ‘anomalous’ use of who for impersonal antecedents in Renaissance English has long been documented. Given his cultural eminence, it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s use of this variant form was observed over a century ago, in the still standard work on Shakespeare’s grammar by E. A. Abbott, and its extension by Wilhelm Franz – surprisingly, Foster was ignorant of these reputable authorities. A few other sixteenth-century dramatists and poets have received comparable treatment, as in the German doctoral dissertations by Emil Ritzenfeld on Thomas Kyd, and by Hubert Engel on Spenser, soon displaced by the more thorough American dissertation by H. W. Sugden. Two Scandinavian scholars made major contributions. Torsten Dahl produced an excellent study of the prose-writer Thomas Deloney, while Mats Ryd´en gave a model account of relative pronouns in sixteenth-century English, centred on Sir Thomas Elyot but covering several other prose-writers, including Lord Berners, George Cavendish, Sir Thomas More, John Fisher, and Thomas Starkey (Ryd´en ). Other relevant studies I shall draw on include A. C. Partridge’s study of Jonson’s syntax in the plays, and the – section of the Helsinki Corpus. Needless to say, a specialist in this field would be
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
able to cite further literature, but this should be enough to establish that Shakespeare’s use of the ‘anomalous’ who was entirely normal. I have collected more than one hundred examples of the ‘confusion’ between who and which in texts by Shakespeare’s predecessors and contemporaries, of which I give only a small sample here. Like other writers of his time, Shakespeare regularly used the relative pronoun to refer to animals, as Abbott put it, ‘particularly in similes where they are compared to men’ (Abbott , p. ): I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan, Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death. ( John, .. –)
Or as a bear encompass’d round with dogs, Who having pinch’d a few and made them cry. ( H, ..–)
Citing other instances of such usage, Abbott observed that in some cases the pronoun was used ‘where action is attributed to them’ (p. ), as with a lion / Who glazed upon me ( JC, ..–) the lioness / Who quickly fell before him. (AYLI, ..–)
Franz added that in Shakespeare animals are often regarded as beings having a personality of their own, instancing The Tempest: ‘adders, who with cloven tongues / Do hiss me into madness’ (..–); Merchant of Venice: ‘the fulsome ewes, / Who’ (..–), and Julius Caesar: ‘Two mighty eagles . . . / Who to Philippi here consorted us’ (..–). Of the many parallel instances from earlier writers, Sir Thomas Elyot mentioned ‘Bucephal the horse . . . / who’, while Lord Berners wrote of ‘a grete serpent, who kept the founteyne’, George Cavendish described ‘the fierce assault of the boore, who foyned at him’, while Thomas Wilson referred to ‘brute beasts, as the Stagge, who liveth . . . two hundred yeres and more’ (Ryd´en , p. ). Engel documented Spenser’s use in The Faerie Queene of who or whom for animals: there chaunct a turtle Dove . . . / Who seeing his sad plight (..) And as a Beare whom angry curres have touzd (..)
as did Sugden, e. g. ‘a steed who’, ‘bulles whom’, ‘the beast who’, ‘an hynd whom’, and so on. Torsten Dahl added examples from Deloney:
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
another Elephant met him, who according to his kind nature these are the labouring Ants whom I seeke to defend, and these be the Bees which I keepe (Deloney , p. )
That instance used both whom and which in successive clauses, an even-handedness we will meet again. Ben Jonson also used who to refer to animals: ‘an Oxe . . . / Who dy’d soone after’ (Tale of a Tub, written c. –). Like other early modern writers, Shakespeare also used ‘who . . . of inanimate objects regarded as persons’ (Abbott , p. ), as in the winds Who take the ruffian billows by the top. (H, ..–; similarly in Rom., ..) Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down After my seeming. (H, ..–) your anchors, who Do their best office if they can but stay you.
(WT, ..–)
As Abbott rightly commented, in Shakespeare’s use of this form ‘The slightest active force, or personal feeling, attributed to the antecedent, suffices to justify who’ (p. ). So we find The dispers’d air who answer’d (Luc., ) th’ applause / . . . who like an arch reverberates. (Tro., ..–) Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones / Who though they cannot answer . . . (Tit., ..–) bushes, / As fearful of him, part, through whom he rushes. (Ven., –)
Many early sixteenth-century writers used who for things. In one passage Thomas Wilson, like Deloney, alternated both relative pronouns: ‘as in speaking of constancie, to showe the Sunne, who ever keepeth one course; in speaking of inconstancie, to showe the Moone which keepeth no certain course’. The Helsinki Corpus includes an early statute referring to ‘the cooming of the said greet botes with corne and graine downe [the river] Severne, who there dischardgeth’ the cargo. Deloney used who both for natural and for man-made objects: A faire fresh river . . . Who with a cristal cleered streame . . . (Deloney , p. ) S. Pauls Church, whose steeple was so hie, that . . . ( p. ).
Kyd used it to refer to the sea, describing
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct the vexed bowels Of too insulting waves, who at one blow Five merchants’ wealths into the deep doth throw.
(I Jeronimo, with the Wars of Portugal (),.)
Spenser also used this relative pronoun to refer to a ship: As a tall ship tossed in troublous seas, Whom raging windes threatning . . . (Faerie Queene, ..)
Jonson used who to refer to things, referring to ‘or sulphur, or quicksilver: / Who are the parents of all other mettalls’ (The Alchemist, –); to a candle: ‘like an unsavorie snuffe, /Whose propertie is onely to offend’ (Every Man in his Humour, –); and to a tree: a fortune sent to exercise Your vertue, as the wind doth trie strong trees: Who by vexation grow more sound, and firme. (Sejanus, )
Here Jonson was in line with an early sixteenth-century writer cited by Ryd´en, who celebrated ‘The great trees of whom we have frute in wynter and shadowe in summer.’ Shakespeare, like his predecessors and contemporaries, applied who to parts of the body, such as your eye Who hath cause to wet the grief on’t (Temp., ..–)
that is, ‘your eye which has cause to give tearful expression to the sorrow for your folly’ (Abbott , p. ), and the heart, who great and puff ’d up with this retinue (H, .. –) my arm’d knees, Who bow’d but in my stirrup (Cor., ..–)
Similarly, we find ‘her body . . . who’ (Luc., –); ‘the hairs, who wave’ (Ven., ); ‘lips, / Who . . . still blush’ (Rom., ..–); ‘sighs, / Who’ (Rom., ..–); ‘her eyelids, who like sluices stopped’ (Ven., ). Sir Thomas Elyot’s medical works recorded that ‘the phisicions calle those diseases most perilous against whome is founden no preservative’, and that ‘Hemorroides be vaynes in the foundement, of whome do happen
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
sundry passion’ (Ryd´en , p. ). The Helsinki Corpus includes excerpts from Thomas Vicary’s The Anatomie of the Bodie of Man (), which regularly refers to the bodily organs with who, including ‘issues or passages . . . through whom passeth the spirit of life’, and ‘xii spondels [in the back], through whom passeth Mynuca, of whom springeth xii. payre of Nerves’. Shakespeare may differ from his contemporaries in using who less frequently for the virtues and vices, although in the poems we find ‘passions . . . who’ (Ven., –), and ‘Black lust, dishonour, shame, misgoverning, / Who’ (Luc., –), while Cordelia is described as a queen Over her passion, who, most rebel-like, Sought to be queen o’er her.
(Lear, ..)
Elyot, an outstanding figure in educational theory, who helped to establish Renaissance humanism in England, frequently used the inflected form whom in the object function to refer to the individual virtues, as in ‘the commodious vertue calle prudence, whom Tulli defineth to be the knowlege of things which oughte to be desired and folowed’. He often combined whom with other antecedents to refer to personified moral or intellectual qualities, such as ‘experience . . . , to whom’; ‘benevolence, faithfulnesse, and constancie? Without whome . . . ’; ‘those virtues in whom’; ‘those virtues of whom’; ‘two unities seperate in pasinge forwarde; by whom may be signified providence and industrie’. He also made much use of who with a non-human antecedent in connection with an abstract noun, such as ‘Election, who’, ‘Repentance, who’, ‘Veritie, who’, ‘detraction, who’, ‘imagination, who’, ‘rayson and Knowledge, who’, ‘deathe . . . who’, and ‘the world, who’ (Ryd´en , pp. –). Several of these at least imply a personification, in the familiar tradition of allegorizing the virtues and vices – in Elyot’s text both ‘Election’ and ‘Repentance’ are feminine. Other writers shared Elyot’s fondness for humanizing abstract concepts, intellectual faculties, and even human institutions. So we find references to ‘time, who like the wind slides away unseene’; to ‘the world, / With whom there nothing can prevail but wrong’; to ‘my soule whom thou hast delyvered’; to ‘the temporal power, whom ye have hired’; to ‘the catholyque chyrche of whome’; to ‘many thynges . . . among whome good hope is the fyrst’; to the ‘wretched world! Who cankered rust doth blind’; and (in Ben Jonson) to ‘The Lawes, who have a noose to crack his neck’ (Tale of a Tub).
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Although it would need further study to establish this point, my impression is that Shakespeare was less prone than many of his contemporaries to use who to refer to intellectual abstractions, although he does write ‘opinion, who’ and ‘applause who’. He seems to prefer to use this relative pronoun for things in the material world, thereby imbuing them with life and agency, as with Portia’s caskets, where he used both who and which in successive lines (rather like Thomas Wilson and Deloney): The first, of gold, who this inscription bears . . . The second, silver, which this promise carries. (MV, ..–)
That is, in E. A. Abbott’s gloss, ‘the first of gold, and it bears this inscription; the second, (silver) which carries, &c. In the first the material, in the second the promise, is regarded as the essential quality. [Or does euphony prefer which in the accented, who in the unaccented syllables?]’ – Abbott’s parenthesis at least recognized one aesthetic consideration usually ignored in these studies. He concluded: ‘In almost all cases where who is thus used, an action is implied, so that who is the subject’ (, p. ). There are obviously no rules governing Shakespeare’s usage (or anyone else’s), other than artistic choice, the wish to energize or dramatize the items in an imagined scene, in order to give life to such unexpected elements as ‘dial who’, ‘pillow who’. By temporarily lending a human attribute to such items, even something so tenuous as a part of speech, Shakespeare can attribute agency, widen the sphere of responsibility, involve more of the surroundings in the human action: ‘vessel who’, ‘anchors who’, ‘darkness who’, ‘elements whom’ – all become momentarily part of the action. It will by now be apparent to every reader of these pages that Foster’s claims that Shakespeare’s use of the variant who for inanimate antecedents are ‘extraordinary’, or ‘peculiar’, or ‘rare’, or ‘startling’, or ‘idiosyncratic’ were completely hollow, as was his suggestion that Shakespeare’s use of it was ‘not mandated by any artistic necessity’. As for the instances of this usage in the Funerall Elegye, nothing distinguishes them from those I have so abundantly documented in the period to . But it may well be that they can be distinguished from Shakespeare. Consider ‘W. S.’ at work: () I am heerein but a second to the priviledge of Truth who can warrant more in his behalfe, then I undertooke to deliver. (Dedication) () Their vain designes, on whom want hath dominion. ()
Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
() Against th’assault of death, who to relieve him () () Predestinated Time, who all deprives () () The chaste imbracements of conjugall love, Who in a mutuall harmony consent (–) () And weep upon those cheeks, which nature fram’d To be delightfull orbes, in whom the force Of lively sweetnesse playes (–) () Only those hopes, which fate denies to grant, In full possession to a captive hart: Who if it were in plenty, still would want ( –) Readers will see at a glance that items and are quite conventional uses of who to refer to a part of the body. The striking feature of the remaining five cases is that all but one refer to abstractions: ‘Truth who’, ‘designes, on whom’, ‘death, who’, ‘time, who’. That more than half of these instances in a poem of lines should occur with abstract nouns is completely in line with the Elegye’s vocabulary as a whole, which we will find to be markedly abstract. There is nothing about them that remotely resembles Shakespeare’s vivid, energetic, animistic use of this relative pronoun. ‘W. S.’ resembles most of all that learned Humanist Sir Thomas Elyot, with his ‘deathe . . . who’, ‘Veritie, who’, ‘Election, who’, and ‘rayson and Knowledge, who’. Cumulatively, it may well be that Shakespeare uses who and impersonal antecedents more frequently than other poets or dramatists of his age (a point yet to be settled), but there is nothing ‘startling’ about his usage, and it cannot be described as either ‘a peculiarity of Stratford vernacular’ or as a sign of ‘simple confusion’. The ‘Shakespearean who’, as some gullible followers now call it, is a figment of Foster’s imagination, based on ignorance of a well-documented historical corpus and a disinclination critically to review his own argument and methodology. As a basis for claiming Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye, it has no value. Two further comments seem in order on the remarkable success of Foster’s misinformed proclamation of a uniquely Shakespearian grammatical usage. First, from the viewpoint of historical linguistics, Jonathan Hope has commented rather wryly that Foster’s identification of ‘the Shakespearean who’ is ‘exactly the kind of thing literary scholars who distrust quantitative methods are likely to seize on. The notion of Shakespeare as being linguistically unique is a powerful cultural myth – apparent “factual” evidence to support it will quickly pass into common currency’, it being ‘much more attractive than the notion that
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Shakespeare is simply more likely to use it’. Secondly, from the viewpoint of rhetoric, the fact that so many of Foster’s readers accepted his proclamation of ‘the Shakespearean who’ without demur shows – rather sadly for the ideal of rational persuasion – that if someone makes an utterance insistently enough, and with complete self-conviction, many people will believe it.
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
In several places Foster claimed to identify distinctly Shakespearian characteristics in the Elegye’s verse style. Yet, strangely enough, he made no attempt to use the many studies of Shakespeare’s prosody which have appeared over the last two centuries. One might expect a scholar making such a bold attribution to have taken stock of the extant scholarship addressing Shakespeare’s metrical practices. Anyone seriously interested in this topic could be expected to know the work of Edward Capell, Charles Bathurst, F. G. Fleay, John Ingram, F. S. Pulling, Goswin K¨onig, Hermann Conrad, David L. Chambers, Philip W. Timberlake, Ants Oras, Henri Suhamy, Marina Tarlinskaja, and George T. Wright. Foster briefly referred to Bathurst (, p. ), and cited Chambers and K¨onig once each (p. ), but only to indicate that their statistics differed. Not having taken sufficient account of this scholarly tradition meant that Foster seemingly failed to realize that these studies have established the nature of Shakespeare’s prosodic development with remarkable accuracy. Charles Bathurst pointed out that over the course of Shakespeare’s career his prosody changed in at least three respects: he varied the position of ‘the caesura . . . or division of the pauses’; he made fewer pauses at the end of a line, often ‘making the verse end upon a perfectly weak monosyllable’, carrying the movement on to the line following; and he made increasing ‘use of double endings, like the Italian metre’ (Bathurst , pp. –). Bathurst’s intuitive observations were confirmed by several nineteenthcentury scholars, English and German, who produced detailed statistical analyses of mid-line pauses, run-on lines, ‘light’ and ‘weak’ endings. These verse-tests were produced so intensively in the s and s as to temporarily exhaust the topic, and when E. K. Chambers prepared his influential survey of Shakespeare scholarship he could simply take over the ‘metrical tables’ of Fleay, Ingram, Pulling, Conrad, and K¨onig, with minor corrections (Chambers , . –). It was not until
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
modern times, in the work of the American scholar Ants Oras, and the Russian–American Marina Tarlinskaja, that new impetus was given to prosodic studies, charting Shakespeare’s changing metrical practices with remarkable precision. The result of this scholarly tradition, based on quantitative analyses, is that we can now describe with considerable accuracy the characteristics of Shakespeare’s verse style in the years –. If quantitative studies made enormous progress over this period, qualitative studies – that is, analysing the function of verse in its dramatic context, as used by individual speakers for their own purposes, moment by moment – this far more difficult study is still in its infancy. Scholars and critics might agree, in general, that the chief characteristics of Shakespeare’s verse are variety, flexibility, and adaptation to the characterization of a huge number of speakers, but detailed studies along these lines are still rare. Edward Capell’s pioneering essay of showed that Shakespeare used the iambic foot in fluent interchange with the trochee (Capell , p. ); that he placed pauses in all nine possible positions within the blank-verse line, achieving both variety and expressivity (pp. –); that he introduced ‘redundant syllables’, di- and tri-syllabic, both at line-endings and in mid-line (pp. –); and that he often used a monosyllable in the first, notionally iambic foot (producing what modern prosodists call a ‘headless line’) for specific artistic purposes, ‘denoting fervour and earnestness’ (pp. –). Capell showed that Shakespeare consciously introduced these variations into his prosody for two reasons, ‘first, of giving all possible variety to numbers [metre] us’d in the drama; and next, of expressing passions and characters by such [metrical means] as answer to that end’ (p. ). The joint effect of Shakespeare’s innovations was to give his verse the qualities of ‘ease and variety, join’d to powers of expression’ (p. ). Capell’s work, presented in a disjointed fashion over a number of years, and both pilloried and plagiarized by Steevens and Malone, never became widely known, and very few studies of Shakespeare’s prosody to this day have combined his grasp of technicalities with a comparable sensitivity to dramatic design. The books by David L. Chambers () and George T. Wright () include some passages combining both approaches, but a huge amount of work remains to be done. Insofar as the Funerall Elegye is a non-dramatic poem, Donald Foster might be excused his lack of interest in the qualitative analysis of Shakespeare’s verse in terms of dramatic function. But his ignorance of extant quantitative studies proved to be most damaging, as we shall see, while an awareness that the findings of qualitative analysis established
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
Shakespeare’s prosodic variety and flexibility might have made him more cautious about describing the Elegye’s verse as ‘Shakespearean’. Foster’s first claim concerned the Elegye’s over-all poetical organization, which, he argued, ‘W. S.’ had copied from Shakespeare’s Sonnets: W. S.’s Elegy for William Peter has some formal affinity with the Sonnets, for we find in it the same abab cdcd efef rhyme scheme and, frequently, the same syntactical organization of the quatrains, as in the ‘For when . . . / When . . . Then’ series beginning in line of the Elegy (cf. Sonnets , ). (, p. )
That is a fine example of selective description. Foster’s attempt to link the Elegye with the Sonnets describes only the first three quatrains of the Elegye, as if they might be followed by a couplet, completing the fourteen lines of a sonnet. But of course the poem’s rhyme-scheme is actually abab cdcd efef ghgh ijij klkl . . .
and so on, down to lines –, the strikingly tautologous couplet: Now therein liv’d he happy, if to bee Free from detraction, happinesse it bee.
So that, contrary to Foster’s claim, there is no ‘formal affinity’ between the Elegye and the Sonnets. Nor is there ‘frequently [how ‘frequently’? Foster cites only one instance] the same syntactical organization of the quatrains’ in the two works, according to the instance Foster cites from the Elegye: For when the world lies winterd in the stormes Of fearefull consummation . . . When the proud height of much affected sinne . . .
– and so on, down to the anticipation of the Judgment Day: Then in a booke where every worke is writ, Shall this man’s actions bee reveal’d . . . (FE, –)
According to Foster, this is the same syntactical organization as Sonnets (‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’), or (‘When I consider every thing that grows . . . ’). But in both cases the poets are using common rhetorical technique of division, or even, at a more basic level, a simple grammatical marker in a temporal utterance ‘when x . . . then y’. These
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
are linguistic features of enormous diffusion, by no means limited to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Everyone will remember the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droght of March hath perced to the roote . . . Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages . . . (lines –)
Foster’s attempt to align the Elegye with the Sonnets then shifted from ‘the quatrains’ to the couplets: ‘We find moreover a rhymed couplet marking every major rhetorical shift [i.e. in the Elegye] – so that one might describe the resulting structure as a sequence of twelve expanded or contracted Shakespearean sonnets’ (p. ). This is another highly misleading description. Anyone who reads the poem will find that its argument moves around certain familiar topics from the consolatio tradition, but that these do not correspond to divisions created by the eleven couplets. The same topoi recur in several ‘sections’; indeed the poem effectively starts the whole process over for the second time just before half-way, as my analysis in chapter will show. Foster’s claim that the couplets here mark ‘every major rhetorical shift’ can also be dismissed as groundless, for in fact several of these couplets are marked in the original text – but not in Foster’s modernized version – with inverted commas, the standard typographical marker in Renaissance texts to indicate sententiae. Reference to the text at these points will show that these couplets, far from indicating major rhetorical shifts, serve as further moralizing commentaries on an already moralized discourse. We can dismiss, just as bluntly, Foster’s fanciful claim that the poem can be seen as ‘a sequence of twelve expanded or contracted Shakespearean sonnets’, since by no stretch of the imagination can sequences of fortyeight lines (to the first couplet), or forty-four (to the next) be described as sonnets. In fact, the random disposition of the couplets in the Funerall Elegye is very un-Shakespearian. These couplets are separated by as few as four (–), eight (–), and twenty lines (–), or as many as eighty-eight (–) and ninety-six (–); while ‘couplet no. ’, as Foster describes it, is in fact four lines long (–). Foster’s assertions that they mark ‘every major rhetorical shift’ or turn the poem into ‘a sequence’ of sonnets (‘expanded or contracted’, of course), can be dismissed as empty flourishes. But Foster had not yet finished with the Sonnet connection, for a fifth argument followed:
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
If indeed Shakespeare wrote the Elegy, it is only natural that he should use a form more congenial to him than continuous couplets, for the couplet was always too confining for the extended and interlaced patterns of his verse. In fact, here as in the Sonnets, the couplets tend on the whole to be less successful than the quatrains – the first and third couplets in particular seem weak – so that even this poem’s least resonant lines may seem to bear, ironically, the signature of William Shakespeare. (p. )
Whether the couplets of the Elegye are ‘less successful’ than the quatrains is a moot point, for at this low level of competence it is hard to make discriminations of value; but I certainly agree that the first couplet (quoted above) is as bad as the third (which comes sixty-eight lines after the second): “Whereof as many as shall heare that sadnesse, “Will blame ye ones hard fate, the others madnesse. (FE, –)
Foster’s strategy, however, took the form of conceding that point, and by the frequent associations of ‘W. S.’ with Shakespeare (‘here as in the Sonnets’) transferring the same negative judgment to Shakespeare (‘ . . . even the poem’s least resonant lines’ – a euphemism for laboured and unimaginative writing by ‘W. S.’ – ‘seem to bear, ironically [where is the irony?], the signature of William Shakespeare’). But what does it mean, to start with, to say that Shakespeare found the couplet ‘always too confining for the extended and interlaced patterns of his verse’? Shakespeare wrote hundreds of couplets in the plays, and used them – in a complementarity to blank verse, mostly – for a quite specific and coherent set of functions, as has been shown (Ness ). He used the concluding couplet in the Sonnets as an integral part of that form, with considerable variety and often to surprising effect. The glory of Shakespeare’s couplets, at their best, is that they condense, concentrate the thought and experience of the preceding twelve lines into a strikingly concise formulation. Few readers can ever forget the conclusion of : But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.
or that of : Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
or that of :
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
The judgment that the couplets concluding the Sonnets are weak goes back, of course, to some American ‘New Critics’ in the s ( John Crowe Ransom, in particular), and hardly bears examination. As Helen Vendler showed, to an extent that no previous reader had noticed, in the couplet Shakespeare almost invariably repeats key words from the previous twelve lines, linking it to the body of the poem. Vendler pointed out that only ten of the sonnets do not have this ‘couplet tie’, a proof of deliberate poetic organization. If necessary, we could specify other ways – such as the use of metaphor and various rhetorical devices – in which the couplets form an organic part of the poem. There may indeed be couplets that are less striking, but Shakespeare’s (at least occasional) shortcomings with the couplet cannot be seen as unique or characteristic of him. In any case, no couplet in the Sonnets is as feeble as the majority of those in the Elegye. Foster’s attempt to link the Funerall Elegye with the Sonnets, based on a stale clich´e of critical discourse, can be dismissed as another empty and misleading gesture. The fact is that ‘W. S.’ uses couplets in a completely different way, not to achieve a pithy formulation or restatement of the preceding section, but merely to add to a verbose moralizing another piece of verbose moralizing with a different rhymescheme. One additional piece of contrary evidence, had Foster bothered to mention it, is the unlikelihood of Shakespeare, in , attempting to write a poem of nearly lines in quatrains, with couplets interspersed. Shakespeare used quatrains predominantly in the period up to , especially in Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, and Romeo and Juliet. F. W. Ness (, p. ) pointed out the frequent use of a quatrain (sometimes with a couplet added) to conclude scenes, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost (.. –), The Two Gentlemen of Verona (..–), King John (..–), and The Merchant of Venice (..–). Ness also noted that in these plays the quatrain is ‘reserved usually for the passages of greatest lyricism. In The Comedy of Errors, many of the comic passages are in couplets; but when Antipholus of Syracuse declares his love for Luciana he does so principally in quatrains’ (.. –). Similarly Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the lyrical first scene includes an alternating series of rhymed couplets and quatrains (..–). The combination of the quatrain, followed by a rhyming couplet, also occurs in Romeo and Juliet (..–). According
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
to Ness, the gradual disuse of quatrains in Shakespeare’s plays probably derives from ‘the unnaturalness’ of such rhymes, which are ‘essentially lyrical and constitute a higher degree of stylization than the heroic couplet. As lyrical embellishments they are desirable in plays whose atmosphere permits such embellishments’, but are out of place in more realistic dialogue (Ness , p. ). Shakespeare’s only sustained use of quatrains thereafter was for Jupiter’s speech in Cymbeline, in the scene where the apparitions appear over the sleeping Posthumus. The speeches of Posthumus’s father and other relatives are set off from the surrounding blank verse by being in ‘eight and six’ – fourteeners, so divided, rhyming in couplets and triplets, most unusually (..–); Jupiter’s speech is differentiated further by being in pentameter quatrains (–). We can accept Shakespeare knocking out lines of quatrains in , to provide a contrasting verse measure within a play for a supernatural appearance, but hardly setting out in , in propria persona, to write nearly lines of them. Foster’s subsequent discussion of the prosody of the Funerall Elegye concentrated on three aspects only: run-on lines, feminine endings, and hexameters (, pp. –), in each case claiming to find significant parallels with Shakespeare’s practices. However, he overlooked several other relevant stylistic features, and failed to draw on some important studies of Shakespeare’s metrics. He also violated a basic principle of authorship studies, that in comparing the styles of two (or more) writers we must compare like with like – that is, by analysing works from the same genre, or the same medium, and – when a writer has enjoyed a long career – works from the same period, where possible. Foster shifted back and forth between Shakespeare’s early poems (–) and late plays (–) just as he pleased, according to whether one or the other group offered more favourable statistics for his case. In this way scholarly methods are violated in order to reach a predetermined conclusion. A properly objective examination will show that the prosody of the Funerall Elegye differs from Shakespeare in every possible respect. Foster’s first claim concerned what he describes as ‘the extraordinary frequency in the Elegy of enjambed, or “run-on” lines. W. S. is quite remarkable in this respect’ (, p. ). Vaguely reporting scholarly disagreement about what might constitute a ‘run-on line’, Foster argued that ‘Enjambment, strictly speaking, does not depend on the vagaries of punctuation. If there is a syntactic break at the end of the line, even where
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
no punctuation or pause is required, the line is not “enjambed” ’ (p. ; my italics). Foster’s arguments have a tendency to develop so quickly, sweeping aside other considerations, that the reader must be constantly alert to what is said, and what is left unsaid. The phrase I have italicized, ‘the vagaries of punctuation’, conveys Foster’s belief that whatever seemed to him ‘illogical’ about the Elegye’s punctuation could be put down as the fault of the compositors employed by its printer, George Eld. Introducing his second edition of the text, Foster informed readers of PMLA that the Quarto is ‘badly printed, with botched punctuation throughout. The printshop compositors – often bewildered, it seems, by the poet’s highly enjambed verse and light pointing – heavily over-punctuated the text, often confusing the sense. In this conservatively normalized edition, I have kept the pointing light’ (a, p. ; my italics). I have italicized two more of Foster’s assumptions, for which no evidence exists. How does he know that ‘W. S.’ punctuated lightly, and that Eld’s compositors ‘heavily over-punctuated the text’? While willing to accept that Eld’s workmen were not error-free, it is worth noting that when Peter B. Murray studied printers’ treatment of fourteen play-texts by seven authors in the years –, he found that ‘there was far greater agreement in such subliterary elements as colloquial contractions and spelling between plays of a particular author produced by different printers than between plays of several authors produced by a particular printer. Even unusual forms are preserved.’ In other words, many printers, on many occasions, faithfully reproduced the author’s text, including its punctuation. And in fact the compositors for the printer in whom Murray was most interested, George Eld, followed copy so faithfully that Murray was unable to tell them apart. It begins to look as if Donald Foster’s disparaging comments on Eld’s compositors were an instance of special pleading, designed to legitimize choices that he had made on other grounds. Once more he seems out of touch with modern scholarship. More than forty years ago Albert Baugh could begin an essay on Renaissance punctuation practice by observing that The time is past, I suppose, when anyone would maintain that the punctuation of books printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represents only the vagaries of ignorant printers. The telling blow against such a view was struck by Percy Simpson in his little book, Elizabethan Punctuation (). Simpson undertook to show that many features of sixteenth-century practice could be codified, once it was recognized that the underlying principle was rhythmical or rhetorical rather than logical.
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
That is, instead of using punctuation to demarcate separate sense units, or to preserve grammatical hierarchies within the sentence, Renaissance writers often used it to create rhythmic effects, or for emotional emphasis. Foster treated this whole issue, concerning the difference between syntactic enjambment and non-punctuated lines, with a blithe indifference to historical criteria that is almost enviable in its lack of reflection. Deciding that ‘As a measure of style any reasonable definition is adequate so long as the same criterion is used throughout’ – however unhistorical! – he stated that he had ‘sought objectivity by adopting a slightly different index than is usually employed, counting as “open” or “unstopped” all those verse lines that by today’s standards require no end-punctuation, and that are not followed, in the line succeeding, by a parenthesis – regardless of whatever end-punctuation may appear in the original printed text’ (, pp. –; my italics). But the phrases I have italicized show the fallacy, for to seek ‘objectivity’ by ‘today’s standards’ is to apply criteria quite foreign to those of Renaissance poets, or compositors, so that whatever ‘objectivity’ Foster achieved would be a profoundly unhistorical one. This is a major weakness in an argument seeking to deploy a wide range of historical evidence to define who wrote a particular poem in Anno Domini . Foster’s editing of the Elegye so as to ‘normalize’ or modernize spelling, punctuation, and therefore syntax, puts it in the category of an ‘edited text’, on which W. W. Greg made the scathing judgment that ‘an edited text – perhaps legitimate as an aid to aesthetic enjoyment – is from the point of view of every sort of critical investigation merely a text from which most of the relevant evidence has been carefully removed’. Foster assumed that he could lift the Funerall Elegye out of its historical into a modern context with impunity. But several modern studies have shown that Elizabethan punctuation preserved traces of what A. C. Baugh described as ‘a medieval survival’, namely the preference for ‘endstopped punctuation of many run-on lines’ (Baugh , p. ). Baugh cited several instances of what are by modern criteria wholly superfluous commas or full stops at the end of verse lines, in the Folio texts of Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and the Quarto of the Sonnets (pp. –), and suggested that ‘the Elizabethan printer . . . was tempted to put some mark of punctuation at the end of a line of verse if at all justifiable, and in some cases where it was justified by neither logical nor rhythmical considerations’ (p. ). Baugh argued that this practice marked a survival of the habit of medieval scribes, who, when they copied out verse as prose,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
made a mark to signal the divisions of the lines of verse, a practice which persisted when they copied out verse as verse (pp. –). He concluded that ‘by the end of the Middle Ages the practice of ending each verse with a full stop was dying out, but had not yet disappeared’, and he showed the medieval custom surviving in the work of sixteenth-century printers. In the volumes of Farmer’s Student’s Facsimile Edition of Tudor and Elizabethan plays, Baugh estimated, ‘in text after text about percent of the lines end in a mark of punctuation’. In these early texts ‘the predominantly end-stopped character of the verse provides logical justification for heavy end-punctuation, but it does not account for the contrasting absence of punctuation within the lines . . . ’ (p. ). Baugh quoted an excerpt from the old play of King Leir in which every line ends with a stop of some sort, which may suggest that ‘the punctuation is . . . metrical, with the lines so spoken as to emphasize the individual verse as a unit . . . ’ (p. ). In this pioneering essay Baugh documented the surprising frequency of the end-stopped line in Tudor and Elizabethan texts, suggesting that printers were primarily responsible. More recent scholarship has added two other agents, scribes and the poets themselves. Malcolm Parkes, in his wittily titled Pause and Effect, a wide-ranging study of punctuation from classical antiquity to modern times, showed that punctuation to mark the end of a verse was long-established scribal practice: Numerous scribes from the ninth to the fifteenth century placed a punctus after the end of each verse, even when the pause was already indicated by layout. Since in many instances the pointing does not coincide with either a sense or syntactical break, the scribes seem to have been providing an extra signal of what they perceived as a prosodic unit.
In addition to marking a prosodic unit, scribes used line-ending punctuation to avoid possible semantic confusion, and Parkes recorded ‘numerous instances where the end of a verse is pointed to clarify the sense where confusion might arise’ (Parkes , p. ). Parkes diagnosed another reason for adding punctuation at line-endings, namely ‘for oral performance’ (p. ), not a surprising consideration given that ‘prosody’ itself can be defined as ‘the science of versification which led to accurate rendering of classical verse in recitation’ (p. ). Parkes cited instances of such ‘frank metrical pointing for oral performance’ in the poetry of George Gascoigne (p. ), an important figure in early Elizabethan poetry. The prosodic preferences of that poetic generation have been illuminated in an important essay by Carlo Bajetta, who demonstrated that a group of poets connected with Gascoigne shared
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
a common convention in punctuating their verse. In this tradition, best seen in Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas (), mid-line pauses, usually after the fourth syllable, are marked with a comma, and many verse lines are end-stopped. Bajetta showed that these practices were followed by a much greater poet, Sir Walter Ralegh, both in early lyrics, such as ‘Sweete ar the thoughts’ and ‘Farewell to the Court’, and also in the ‘Twenty-first and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’. Here the prescriptive orientation of Renaissance literary criticism added its weight, for in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English () Gascoigne recommended that in ‘Rhyme royal’ – a stanza of seven pentameter lines, rhyming ababbcc, used by Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece () – the pause ‘is at the writer’s discretion’, and can come anywhere ‘until the end of the line’ (Vickers , p. ). The budding poet is also advised to ‘finish the sentence and meaning at the end of every’ stanza, ‘and at the end of every two lines where you write by couples’ (pp. –). This aesthetic demanded a clear correlation between sense units and verse form; the end-stopped line was a prosodic entity, not the error of some clumsy or officious printer. Further evidence that the end-stopped line was a desirable feature of poetry in the eyes of both poets and printers was provided by W. W. Greg’s discovery of cantos to from Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in the poet’s holograph. Greg’s discovery was particularly valuable in that Richard Field (the printer from Stratford who subsequently printed Shakespeare’s two narrative poems in –) had used this section of the original manuscript in setting up the printed edition (), and the surviving manuscript preserves Field’s markings indicating signatures and numeration. Greg printed on facing pages the manuscript and printed versions of canto , stanzas to , subjecting them to close analysis. Discussing the punctuation, Greg observed that Harington’s is curiously mechanical. In every stanza of the extract there is a colon at the end of the fourth and a full stop at the end of the eighth line, quite regardless of the sense . . . All the other lines end with a comma, except one which is accidentally unpointed, and two which are allowed full stops. (Greg , p. )
In other words, Harington was still observing the medieval convention by which a punctus was placed after the end of each verse line, often not coinciding with breaks in the syntax or sense, in order to indicate ‘a prosodic unit’. While Field’s changes to the punctuation mostly tend towards ‘modernization’, one relevant detail showing that poets and printers continued to regard the verse line as a separate prosodic unit
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
is that although Field discarded the central colon in two stanzas, he preserved the lines’ end-stopping, with slight exceptions: in one stanza ‘he alters the final stop to a comma (and in one accidentally omits it)’ (p. ). That is, of the sixty-four verse lines printed here, Field stopped all but one, faithfully reproducing the poet’s end-stopped lines. Another poet who preferred to punctuate the ending of each line was George Wither. As Percy Simpson observed, Wither, having quarrelled with the Stationers’ Company, could get no printer for his work and was forced to set up type for Britain’s Remembrancer () himself. The poem is copiously punctuated, the majority of lines being end-stopped. The upshot of this brief account of Elizabethan and Jacobean punctuation practice is that poets, printers, and readers of poetry agreed that one function of punctuation was to mark the verse line as a prosodic unit. Poetry texts usually got into print direct from the poet’s autograph or a scribal copy, with scribes and printers often observing a poet’s preference for end-stopped lines. Play-texts, however, usually reached the printer from a theatre company, in a form which had often been marked up for play-house use, a process in which authors were seldom involved. (Ben Jonson is the great exception.) For this reason, punctuation in Renaissance dramatic texts varies considerably, as Anthony Graham-White has shown. Given that the basic unit of verse was the line, two opposed conventions can be seen at work between and . According to one, ‘there was no need to place punctuation at the end of verse lines because the end of the line was itself a sufficiently strong marking’, poets and printers ‘taking for granted a slight break at the ends of lines and only punctuating them where there was a complete break’ (Graham-White , p. ). Instances of this ‘silent’ punctuation can still be found in theatrical manuscripts of the s. But ‘At the same time, there are a good many plays in which almost every line is punctuated, and it seems unlikely that in every case this punctuation was doggedly and systematically supplied by the compositors. Presumably in many cases it was in the manuscript copy’ (p. ). In Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (), printed by Edward Allde, ‘only fifty-one of , lines are not end-stopped (and in some of those fifty-one instances punctuation is absent to mark interruptions)’. Similarly with Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (), probably printed by Adam Islip, ‘only seventy-nine lines do not end with punctuation’, and in his A Looking Glasse for London and England (), printed by Thomas Creede, ‘only fifty-two verse lines are without line-end punctuation’ (p. ). Graham-White suggests that ‘The seemingly contradictory conventions of marking virtually every line end and
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
marking virtually none point to a single conclusion: that speakers of the lines marked the line ends in their delivery. Thus it made equally good sense to mark them’ or not (pp. –). Certainly the rival conventions continued side by side right through this period. The two compositors working on the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of had opposite preferences when it came to line-endings: ‘one marked almost all with punctuation, the other almost none’ (p. ). Faced with punctuation practices so inconsistent, and so different from our own, we should heed Michael Warren’s conclusion, based on a comparison of the ‘extraordinary personal and even eccentric’ re-punctuation made in five recent modernized Shakespeare editions, that the variations of punctuation between early modern texts, ‘far from encouraging us to ignore the details of these texts as unreliable, . . . [should] make us acutely conscious of how little . . . we really know about the relation of any extant text to the author’s original’ (Warren , p. ). Many scholars will agree with Warren’s argument that ‘intelligent respect must be paid to the punctuation of original texts since nothing else has comparable authority, and that in editions that aspire to authoritativeness such punctuation must not be freely dismissed in favor of a modern substitute which is potentially confusing, neutralizing, or distorting’ (p. ). Anyone aware of the historical factors affecting Elizabethan and Jacobean punctuation will be disturbed by Foster’s ignoring of this issue, particularly since the punctuation of the Funerall Elegye will play a crucial part in his claims for Shakespeare’s authorship. The use that Foster made of this re-defined notion of enjambment can be seen at once: In the Peter elegy there is an extraordinarily high incidence of open lines: of lines, or . percent, as against . percent in Cymbeline, . percent in Winter’s Tale, . in The Tempest, . and ., respectively, in Shakespeare’s supposed portion of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Shakespeare is the only known poet living in (of any initials) whose frequency of unstopped lines ranges quite consistently above percent. (, p. ; my italics)
The only writers who approach Shakespeare in this respect, according to Foster, are Tourneur, Webster, Ford, Middleton, and Beaumont, a fact that he instantly put to further uses: first, the statement that ‘these five men, all . . . emulate Shakespeare’, suggesting that he was the great original, and that a large number of poets and dramatists spent their best years imitating him – a typically exaggerated claim. Secondly, the fact that the three elegists whose figures for enjambment match Shakespeare’s
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
(Tourneur, Webster, Beaumont) were all London playwrights suggests that the ‘W. S.’ who wrote the Elegye ‘may have been a playwright as well. There was, after all, no better exercise than the writing of blank verse by which to acquire the art of enjambment’ (p. ). Professor Foster is a master of sweeping the crumbs together, hoping to identify the loaf from which they derive. ‘Many a little makes a mickle’, as the old proverb has it. But of course, ‘W. S.’ could have been a dramatist other than Shakespeare. This sequence, with its use of Foster’s ‘Shakespeare-is-unique’ topos (soon followed by its partner, ‘ “W. S.”-is-also-unique’) may impress unwary readers. However, those alert to the issues at stake will naturally check the original text of the Elegye, which (in ) Foster helpfully printed on facing pages to his modernized edition, and which is reproduced as Appendix I below (pp. ff ). Such readers will at once notice the circular procedure by which Foster first removed much end-stopped punctuation, and then based his computation on his own modernized text. This tactic violated all principles of impartial investigation, for any adjusting of the evidence will alter the end result. If, by contrast, we count the ‘open’ lines in the original punctuation, we find that they amount not to of lines (. percent), but to only (. percent, by my reckoning). In terms of the chronology of Shakespeare’s poetic development, a rate of percent open lines would place the Funerall Elegye in about , along with Julius Caesar and As You Like It (cf. Foster’s table ., : p. ). Foster’s anachronistic editing of the text, which makes the Funerall Elegye correlate with Shakespeare’s plays from the period –, was already a severe distortion of any claimed ‘objectivity’. But an even more blatant violation of the principles of authorship study is the fact that all the statistical data from Shakespeare that Foster served up concern blank verse, whereas the Funerall Elegye is rhymed, written in a mixture of quatrains and couplets. Anyone familiar with the elementary principles of comparative stylistics, that like should be compared with like, will see the error of confusing these two verse forms, each with its own constraints. As long ago as , David L. Chambers objected to the statistics of run-on lines in Shakespeare’s verse produced by F. J. Furnivall, who ‘committed the palpable mistake’ of including rhymed lines (Chambers , p. ). Foster’s discussion of the second prosodic feature of the Funerall Elegye, the use of feminine endings, belatedly observed that principle of comparing like with like as regards verse form, but violated it as regards date. So he commented on the
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
relatively high percentage in Shakespeare of feminine endings . . . most notably in the blank verse of the late plays . . . There is little rhymed verse in the late plays with which to compare the Peter elegy, but feminine endings in Shakespeare’s nondramatic verse fall within a very narrow range, from a low of . percent in the Sonnets to a high of . percent in Venus and Adonis . . . The mean frequency for the collected poems is . percent . . . In W. S.’s elegy, of lines have feminine endings, for a frequency of . percent. (, pp. –)
The fact that Foster here displayed compunctions about comparing the blank verse of Shakespeare’s plays with the rhymed Elegye draws attention to his earlier failure to do so. Still, although there may be ‘little rhymed verse in the late plays with which to compare the Peter elegy’, there are still some noteworthy passages, such as the ‘apparition’ that appears over the sleeping Posthumus, chained and imprisoned, in Cymbeline (..–), or the masque of Ceres in The Tempest (..–), the main part of which is written in pentameter couplets, using that metre with an expressive flexibility far beyond the lumbering gait of ‘W. S.’ But if Foster had cited the late plays at this juncture, as he had just done for enjambment, he would have been faced with a very uncomfortable statistic. As other readers have pointed out, their use of feminine endings far exceeded that of the Elegye, as shown in table .. Table . . Feminine endings in Shakespeare’s late plays percentage Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest
Source: Chambers , .
With a frequency of . percent feminine endings, a rate reached by Shakespeare in Richard II, the Elegye is far removed from Shakespeare’s normal prosodic practices in the years –, just as far as the rate for open lines ( percent) differs from the mean of percent for those three plays. The third prosodic element that Foster noted in the Funerall Elegye was its use of hexameters. This is what he wrote: W. S. is a skilled metrician. His elegy contains few irregular lines, and of these, none can be described as unfortunate. There are in the Elegy only two lines with
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
an extra foot (, ), both of which are commensurate with Shakespeare’s practice. For example, the elegist, in compiling a list of seventeen virtues that adorned William Peter, inserts in his iambic verse a single line of hexameter (), as does Shakespeare in Timon’s list of seventeen social goods (Tim. ..– ). In both cases the irregular line helps to vary the rhythm, breaking up the potential monotony of a list. (, pp. –)
Anyone who takes the trouble to compare that passage from Timon – a speech of tremendous energy, the misanthrope’s excoriating curse on Athens and every social and religious bond holding together the society that he so much hates – with the anodyne list of virtues that ‘W. S.’ ascribes to William Peter (FE, –: cf. Appendix , p. ) may well conclude that, of all the exaggerated claims in Foster’s book, his brief assertion that ‘W. S. is a skilled metrician’ could be the most vacuous. Be that as it may, the point at issue here is not the quality of both poets’ verse but Foster’s totalizing claim that the ‘linguistic fabric’ of the Elegye is ‘indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (a, p. ). Foster’s treatment of hexameters managed to blur the whole issue by avoiding any consideration of frequency of usage – the cardinal principle of all quantitative stylistics – and switching the discussion to the possibility that ‘W. S.’ used a hexameter in order to vary the rhythm or break ‘potential monotony’. The blunt fact is that Foster’s admission that there are two – only two! – hexameters in the Elegye, gives an incidence way below Shakespeare’s usage in this period. George Wright (following Chambers, with corrections) provided the statistics in table . for the three wholly Shakespearian late plays. Table .. Hexameters in Shakespeare’s late plays
Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest
Blank-verse lines
Hexameters
Every x lines
, , ,
Source: Adapted from Wright , pp. –
The Elegye, with its ratio of one hexameter to lines, does not even begin to compare with Shakespeare’s documented metrical practices in the period –. The three prosodic features of the Elegye that Foster singled out as being especially close to Shakespeare’s turn out, in fact, to be totally different, once properly analysed. Two further important prosodic elements that
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
Foster overlooked were the use of ‘weak endings’ and the placing of pauses within the verse line. For the first, Ernst Honigmann pointed out that one of the most distinctive features of Shakespeare’s later style (beginning with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus) is his partiality for ‘weak endings’, that is, unstressed monosyllabic conjunctions and prepositions at the end of a verse line. This is a consistent factor in his last plays, including the ‘Shakespearian’ portions of Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, and its almost total absence from the Elegy is surely significant. (Honigmann , p. )
For the second, in Ants Oras published a brief monograph examining the placing and frequency of pauses within the verse line in the work of some fifteen dramatists, giving precise statistical details for over seven hundred plays produced between and . Oras analysed the structure of more than a million lines of verse, investigating ‘the incidence of internal pauses in each of the nine positions within an iambic pentameter line in relation to the totals of such pauses . . . ’ (Oras , p. ). This method allowed him to compute ‘percentage patterns’ for each play, irrespective of its length, and to establish a dramatist’s habitual pausation practices across his whole career. Oras provided remarkably complete documentation (pp. –), giving, for every play studied, the raw figures for the number of internal pauses at each metrical position from to , followed by two percentage figures. These indicate respectively (a) ‘the ratio of such pauses before the fifth position, i. e. in the first half of the line, to pauses after that position (under “First Half ”)’ – that is, comparing positions –, –; and (b) ‘a figure showing the percentage of pauses in even positions, that is, pauses after an even-numbered syllable (under “Even”)’ (p. ). I set out in table . the data for three representative Shakespeare plays, early, middle, and late selected from Oras’s tables. Table .. Percentage pauses in Shakespeare’s blank-verse line
The Comedy of Errors Hamlet Cymbeline
First Half
Even
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
Source: Oras , pp. –
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Studying the pattern formed by all pauses marked by internal punctuation (the A-patterns), Oras showed that Shakespeare’s early plays favour a caesura after the fourth foot; by the fourth and sixth positions are equally favoured, while in the later period the sixth position is dominant, with the unstressed seventh position gaining importance. Oras demonstrated two clear patterns in Shakespeare’s prosody: first, an increase in the employment of ‘uneven pauses, that is, pauses after oddnumbered syllables’, which drops after only to rise again from Antony and Cleopatra onwards; and secondly, ‘the astonishingly steady downward course in the curve for pauses in the first half of the line, a decrease which continues throughout his career, bringing the percentage for such pauses within the totals of all pauses in the A-series down from [. in Comedy of Errors] to only . in Cymbeline and . in Henry VIII . . . ’ (pp. –). Oras also drew attention to ‘the growing frequency of extra-metrical syllables and feminine endings as Shakespeare’s career progresses’ (p. ). Donald Foster strangely neglected to apply Oras’s analytical method to the Funerall Elegye, but I have remedied his oversight. The accuracy of Oras’s scholarship, identifying Shakespeare’s pausation practices for every play, means that an examination of the Funerall Elegye in this respect should provide a very accurate indicator as to whether or not it can be deemed an authentic work of Shakespeare’s in . Bearing in mind Oras’s injunction to use the earliest editions for such studies, since whether they preserve the author’s punctuation or the compositor’s, both express ‘the rhythmical climate of the time’ (pp. –), in the following analysis I have used the old-spelling edition of the Funerall Elegye. Of its lines, I find lines having no internal pauses marked by punctuation, having such marks (many of them more than one). The raw figures for the Funerall Elegye are shown in table .. Table .. Pause patterns in the Funerall Elegye Total pauses after syllable
Expressed as percentages (to one decimal point), as in Oras’s Table A, we can compute the ratio between the pauses in positions to (total ) to those in positions to (total ), giving a figure of . percent for the ‘First Half ’ pause pattern. As for that involving only the ‘Even’
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
positions, that turns out to be . percent. The respective figures for Shakespeare’s poems (B) and late plays (C) are shown in table .. Table .. Pause patterns in the Elegye and in Shakespeare: raw figures First Half
Even
(A) A Funerall Elegye
.
.
(B)Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece Sonnets
. . .
. . .
(C)Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest
. . .
. . .
As those figures show, the pause patterns of the Elegye are distinctly different from Shakespeare’s preferences, early or late. If we were to try and fit the poem into his chronological development, taking ‘the First Half figure’ places it between Measure for Measure () and King Lear (), while ‘the Even figure’ places it nearest to Othello, which many scholars now date to . The differences emerge more clearly if we collate the pauses in the form of percentages. Table .. Pause patterns in the Elegye and in Shakespeare: percentages Pauses after syllable
(A) A Funerall Elegye (B) Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece Sonnets (C) Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
Those figures document, once again, the clearly perceptible difference between the Funerall Elegye and both Shakespeare’s poems and his late plays. The anonymous poet’s preference for the fourth-syllable break is much lower than that of Shakespeare in his poems, but much higher than that of the late plays. His preference for the sixth-syllable break is higher
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
than Shakespeare’s in either group, early or late, while his positioning of the seventh-syllable break is, as with the fourth, more frequent than the early poems, less frequent than the late plays. All these differences are statistically significant, and place the Elegye quite outside Shakespeare’s authorship, but the really telling differences are those in the eighth and ninth syllables. ‘W. S.’ favours the eighth position only slightly more than Shakespeare does in the early narrative poems, but the Shakespeare of the Romances favours it twice or three times more than does ‘W. S.’ In the ninth syllable, even more strikingly, while ‘W. S.’ stays at much the same level as the early poems, the late plays favour this position five or six times more frequently. Taken together, the last three syllables account for . percent of the caesuras in the Elegye, compared to . percent in Cymbeline, . percent in Winter’s Tale, and . percent in The Tempest. In Shakespeare’s late plays this shift of emphasis towards the end of the line has a marked effect on the line’s symmetry. As Oras pointed out, when a strong pause ‘comes after the seventh, or even the eighth syllable, the remaining space usually suffices only for a fragmentary statement which needs to be completed in the following line. In other words, very late pauses make for a run-on technique’ (pp. –). He reported that Shakespeare’s use of run-on lines, as computed by earlier scholars, ‘presents a curve of increasing frequencies which happens to run so closely parallel to my own ratios for second-half-line pauses in relation to first-half-line pauses that mere coincidence seems inconceivable’ (p. ; graph on p. ). Oras illustrated this point vividly with a quotation from The Tempest (in the Folio text): They are both in eythers pow’rs: But this swift busines I must uneasie make, least too light winning Make the prize light. One word more: I charge thee That thou attend me: Thou do’st heere usurpe The name thou ow’st not, and hast put thy selfe Upon this Island, as a spy, to win it From me, the Lord on’t. (..–)
If we were to take any seven lines of the Funerall Elegye for comparison, the difference would be immediately perceptible. Despite Donald Foster’s drastic editing away of the punctuation ending verse lines, the Elegye still lacks the pauses in positions and which are the mark of genuine run-on lines. The inescapable fact is that ‘W. S.’ basically preferred the end-stopped line, while Shakespeare’s increasing use of
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
pauses towards the line-ending moved in parallel with his growing tendency towards enjambed lines. Oras commented that ‘Run-on lines and late pauses increase in frequency simultaneously and to a closely comparable extent, while the percentages for early pauses correspondingly drop’ (p. ). In both respects, the Funerall Elegye does not resemble Shakespeare. Although Foster claimed that its prosody was typically Shakespearian, the truth is exactly opposite. In addition to line-endings, the Elegye by ‘W. S.’ differs from Shakespeare’s prosodic practice in another way, its use of phrase-endings. In a pioneering study the Russian–American prosodist Marina Tarlinskaja broke with traditional English prosody, which categorized English verse metres according to classical models (iambic, trochaic, dactylic . . . ), even though Greek and Latin verse was based on strict quantity, while English poetry is accentual. Instead, she simply designated metrical feet as having weak (W) or strong (S) stresses, the two alternating in regular blank verse:
In this system the even positions are ‘ictic’ or strong (from ictus, a rhythmical or metrical stress), the odd ones non-ictic or weak. But the metrical norm easily accommodates both a loss of stress in the ‘S’ position, and stressed syllables on any ‘W’ in individual lines, as long as the difference between the average values of strong and weak positions remains above a certain threshold (Tarlinskaja , pp. , ), and poets have long exploited these variant forms of emphasis. Tarlinskaja then calculated the ictic stresses for the complete corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and established the individuality of Shakespeare’s verse, contrasting his ‘metrical profiles’ with Marlowe’s, for instance (pp. –, –), and with Fletcher’s, in their collaboration on Henry VIII (pp. –, –). Tarlinskaja’s painstaking analysis of over , lines of verse documented a ‘smooth evolution over the course of [Shakespeare’s] -year writing career, from a more rigid to a looser verse form’ (p. ), a ‘smooth evolution . . . which resulted from both conscious and unconscious effort on Shakespeare’s part’, and forms ‘yet another proof of a one-man authorship of Shakespeare’s canon. Only one author could have written plays in which the rhythmical evolution is displayed so consistently over the course of years’ (p. ). In terms of strong or ‘ictic’ stress the emphasis on the sixth position within the line steadily increased thoughout his career, while that on the eighth decreased, creating a change from
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
‘a rigid, symmetrical bipartite line structure of + or + ’ syllables to a looser verse line, having either no clear division or an asymmetrical one (p. ). At the same time his ‘stress profile’ for the weak, or non-ictic, positions shows a steady decline in stressing the first syllable, while the absolute maximum of non-ictic stressing shifts from mid-line (position ) in the early plays to the end of the line (position ) in the late plays, as the line’s structure ‘becomes progressively more asymmetrical’ (pp. –). If Shakespeare had really written the Funerall Elegye at the very end of his career, its verse should display these looser, asymmetrical qualities: but one can search for them in vain. Tarlinskaja drew attention to several other metrical phenomena which help define Shakespeare’s individuality and prove useful for authorship studies, of which I pick out phrase-endings, or ‘micro-phrases’. In such ‘two-element phrasal combinations of words’, found within the verse line, one element of these combinations, or its stressed syllable, falls on an ictic, or strong (S) syllabic position of the verse line, while the other element falls on a non-ictic, weak (W) syllabic position, either preceding or following S. In the former case the word on W becomes, as it were, a proclitic, in the latter an enclitic to the stressed word on S. (p. )
The term ‘proclitic’ had been introduced into studies of Shakespeare’s prosody in the s, to describe monosyllabic words which receive so little stress ‘that we are forced to run them, in pronunciation no less than in sense, into the closest connection with the words’ following. As Elliott and Valenza commented, these terms describe ‘phrases with a “clinging monosyllable”, which loses stress by virtue of its metric position. If the stress-losing monosyllable is to the left, it is proclitic, from the Greek proklinein, “leaning forward”’, if to the right, ‘it is enclitic, from enklinein, “leaning backward”’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Tarlinskaja showed that the proclitic form is quite common in English, given ‘the prevailing tendency of English speech to stress the last notional word of a phrase (sentence) particularly strongly’ (Tarlinskaja , p. ). The enclitic form, SW, is rarer, and seems to wrench the metre. Tarlinskaja’s analysis of the semantic, metrical, and grammatical aspects of proclitic and enclitic phrases (pp. –) was impressively thorough, and provides a further way of differentiating Shakespeare from his contemporaries. As can be seen from table ., Shakespeare’s ‘idiosyncratic subsystem’ remained more conservative than some of his contemporaries, keeping to ‘the more traditional proclitic tendency: the proportion of enclitic phrases did not change significantly from his earlier to later
Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
works . . . , while other features of his style changed very markedly’ (p. ). The fact that he lagged behind other Jacobean dramatists, Chapman, Fletcher, and Massinger in this respect, confirms Jonathan Hope’s findings from the viewpoint of sociolinguistics, that Shakespeare belonged to an older, more settled generation, less prone to pursuing changes of fashion. Table .. Proclitic and enclitic phrases in Shakespeare and other dramatists Percentage of proclitic and enclitic phrases
Marlowe, Tamburlaine Shakespeare, Sonnets Shakespeare, Richard II Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois Fletcher, Bonduca Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy: ‘Beaumont’ scenes ‘Fletcher’ scenes Massinger, The Maid of Honour
Proclitic
Enclitic
No. of enclitic phrases per , lines
Source: Tarlinskaja , p. , table ., adapted
Although by no means easy to perform, the computation of proclitic and enclitic micro-phrases provides a valuable tool for authorship studies. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, always ready to try out new analytical techniques, soon made use of it in their statistical studies of the many claimants who have been put forward as the real authors of Shakespeare’s plays and poems (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –, –). They discovered that the test did indeed successfully distinguish Shakespeare from his contemporaries, and ‘could eliminate every poet claimant tested’ (p. ). With Tarlinskaja’s help, Elliott took samples from early Shakespeare (the two narrative poems, Richard II ) and late Shakespeare (the Sonnets, The Tempest), divided them into ,-word blocks, and computed the incidence of enclitic and proclitic phrases per thousand lines. In a later study he performed the same exercise on the Funerall Elegye (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –). I combine the results of both tests to provide table ., giving the mean values for each sample.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Table .. Proclitic and enclitic phrases in Shakespeare and A Funerall Elegye
Early Shakespeare Late Shakespeare A Funerall Elegye
Proclitic
Enclitic
Those figures once again clearly differentiate ‘W. S.’ from Shakespeare. In terms of the chronological pattern which Tarlinskaja established in the use of enclitic phrases, the poet who wrote the Elegye is even more conservative than Shakespeare, his metrical profile being closer in time to Marlowe’s. That finding confirms every other impression gained by these objective, statistically based prosodic studies, that ‘W. S.’, far from being ‘a skilled metrician’, as Foster claimed, was not his craft’s master but a journeyman, or an apprentice poet. Foster’s selection of the data producing the most favourable result for his own thesis, together with his overlooking many fundamental scholarly works on Shakespeare’s prosody, produced entirely illusory claims for an identity between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare in matters of prosody. The fact is, they are light-years apart.
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
Among the linguistic resources in the Funerall Elegye which Donald Foster claimed to show Shakespeare’s authorship were some of the verbal devices defined by classical rhetoric. On the face of it, Foster might be congratulated for drawing on this resource, since it is undoubtedly true that preferences in the choice and use of rhetorical figures could be significant in authorship studies. However, his acquaintance with rhetoric seems too superficial for him to make any genuine contribution to this topic. He showed no knowledge of two fundamental works produced by American scholars in the s – T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakspere’s ‘Small Latine and Lesse Greeke’ (), and Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language () – nor of their successors. This gap did not prevent him from making a number of confident-seeming generalizations about the presence of specifically ‘Shakespearean’ rhetorical devices in the Funerall Elegye. Foster claimed that permutatio is ‘very frequent in Shakespeare, as has been noted in numerous studies . . . ’ (, p. ). Whoever turns up the note will find a general list of modern works, without page-references, several of which have no reference to permutatio. Foster informed his readers that ‘One may find in the Peter elegy many of Shakespeare’s preferred flourishes, such as prosonomasia’ (p. ), but without giving any further details; he claimed that ‘another interesting device, and a favorite with W. S., as with Shakespeare, is antanaclasis’ (p. ) – citing only two instances, but mis-defining the figure; and that ‘we find also . . . in the Elegy a number of characteristic Shakespearean devices of style, such as zeugma . . . ’. Foster was apparently unaware how vacuous these assertions are. His definition of permutatio (p. ) confused it with anthimeria, and he adopted Puttenham’s idiosyncratic definition of antanaclasis (which, properly understood, repeats a word while shifting from one of its senses to another), when the example quoted from Puttenham is one of paronomasia (which juxtaposes two words having a similar sound but different meanings).
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
It may need some knowledge of rhetorical terminology to appreciate the mistakes Foster made from flaunting these technical terms, but his misreadings in dealing with rhetorical word-play will be apparent to any reader. Wanting to credit the Funerall Elegye’s poet with linguistic inventiveness, Foster foisted on to him ingenuities of his own devising: Multiple meanings are conveyed also by such words as limb (; cf. limn, ), curious () . . . rehearse () . . . The identical puns in every case appear in Shakespeare, some of them repeatedly. ( p. )
If we refer to the Elegye (in Foster’s modernized text), we find that the word limb in the first instance cited has the normal bodily sense (‘in every limb / Remembering what he was’), but that the second instance – lines later – means to portray or delineate (‘And limn thee to the world but as thou wert’). Two different words (in the original text, spelt ‘lim’ and ‘Limne’), separated by over lines, cannot constitute a pun. The second claimed instance of ‘multiple meanings’ is the phrase ‘Enrich the curious temple of his mind’, where ‘curious’ has the normal early seventeenth-century sense ‘carefully or skilfully constructed’, rather than the more modern sense ‘inquisitive’: where is the pun? Foster’s third instance is the poet’s reference to ‘a mourning style / Which now that subject’s merits doth rehearse’, the last word supposedly having more than one meaning. Presumably Foster intends ‘re-hearse’, that is, ‘put back into the hearse again’, but only a literal-minded modern could read it in that way. Indeed, Foster seems to think that words can be divided up and re-combined ad libitum, as in a crossword puzzle. Mentioning antanaclasis Foster claimed that ‘A striking example from the Elegy is W. S.’s assertion that time may “lay ope malice” (), in order to “right the hopes of my endangered youth” (). The poet’s sentence must “ope”, in time, to make room for partially obscured “hopes” ’ (, p. ). Historical etymology, however, shows that ‘hope’ and ‘ope’, far from the one being ‘partially obscured by the other’, derive from two totally different etymons, ‘open’ (OS. opan, OHG. offan, G. offen), and ‘hope’ (late OE. hopa, MLG., MDu. hope). The same objection applies to Foster’s next example, ‘line , when W. S. writes that his friend was “Sent innocent to be in heaven set” ’ (p. ; Foster’s italics). But ‘sent’ (OE. sendan, OHG. sendan, G. senden), ‘innocence’ (Lat. innocens = IN + nocens, prp. of nocere, hurt, injure), and ‘set’ (OE. settan, OHG. sezzan, G. setzen) are three completely different words. Foster erred by confusing sound with meaning, as he did again in a footnote claiming that ‘antanaclasis is
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
an habitual feature of Shakespeare’s style. A familiar example is Sonnet . –: “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, / That time will come and take my love away” (ruminate − mate = ruin)’ (p. , n. ; Foster’s italics). But here again the sounds ruin / ruminate are not at all similar, so we have neither a paronomasia nor an antanaclasis. Foster’s remarks on rhetorical figures betray a na¨ıve ingenuity unconstrained by historical knowledge. In his PMLA essay he again invoked Puttenham as his authority for antanaclasis as a feature of W. S.’s style, citing the example: ‘ “his predestinated end, / Abridg’d . . . / (his) good endeavors” ( –)’ (a, p. ) – that is, he had claimed earlier, ‘Peter’s “end” comes to stand visually for his own abridged endeavors’ (, p. ). But once again this phrase uses two different roots (‘end’: OE. ende, G. ende; ‘endeavours’: Lat. debere, owe, F. se mettre en devoir, to do one’s utmost), not two senses of the same word. Foster’s treatment of rhetorical word-play was completely unhistorical, cutting up and rearranging words without regard to their real stems. But he happily attributed his own ingenuity to the author of the Elegye: W. S.’s wordplay is never heavy-handed, and is sometimes so deft as almost to escape notice. A splendid example occurs in lines – . . . : His beeing but a private man in ranke (And yet not rank’t beneath a Gentleman) Shall not abridge the commendable thanke, Which wise posterity shall give him than: . . . The optimistic assertion that Peter’s ‘thank’ shall never be ‘abridged’ is ironically contradicted, first in the poet’s use of thank (which is itself an abridgement of ‘thanks’ or ‘thankfulness’), and secondly in the phrase ‘wise posterity shall give him than’ – as if to suggest, if only visually, an inevitable and relentless diminishment of thanksgiving. (, p. ; Foster’s italics)
The idea of a word-play here may indeed be too ‘deft’ to escape notice, since I can find neither punning nor contradiction in that passage. (The idea that ‘thank’ is ‘itself an abridgement’ is too trivial to discuss.) To see ‘abridge’ twice as a self-referring sign is to read with the eyes of Derrida, rather than Quintilian or Puttenham, for the word ‘than’ is not a short form of ‘thank’ but a common Renaissance spelling of ‘then’. To ‘suggest’ such a point, ‘if only visually’, is to reduce words to mere combinations of letters, as in Foster’s earlier suggestion that ‘ruminate − mate = ruin’. Such anachronistic ingenuities betray a shallow knowledge of rhetoric and the English language. Foster displays the same deficiencies as a scholar and critic in the many strained readings with which he claimed that the figure hendiadys
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
constituted another crucial stylistic marker proving Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye. In the monograph he wrote: Far more important for distinguishing Shakespeare’s work from that of his less inventive contemporaries is a figure called hendiadys, a peculiar rhetorical device in which two parallel words (usually nouns) are linked by and, but express a single complex notion that would usually be expressed by an adjective (or adjectival phrase) and a substantive . . . Hendiadys is one of those ‘syntactical novelties’ in Shakespeare that A. C. Partridge overlooks. His extraordinary use of this figure has, however, been noted by William Empson and M. M. Reese – neither of whom actually identifies the phenomenon as ‘hendiadys’ – and it has since been discussed more fully in a landmark study by George T. Wright . . . On account of its rarity, hendiadys is perhaps the closest thing we have to a stylistic thumbprint for Shakespeare. ( pp. –)
In the PMLA essay this element, like every other, underwent further inflation, into the realm of hyperbole: Hendiadys is another distinctive and inimitable Shakespearean feature of A Funeral Elegy. Neither past scholarship nor the Vassar text archive has yielded a single poet besides Shakespeare and W. S. who makes frequent use of . . . a rhetorical flourish that Wright shows is not a commonplace but something like Shakespeare’s private property. Wright locates a few other poets who call on the Shakespearean hendiadys randomly or infrequently, and I have found a few more. However, no one but W. S. uses the hendiadys as often as Shakespeare . . . (a, pp. –; my italics)
Here again, Foster showed the extent to which he relied on modern secondary literature. We all often do so, of course, but it still remains essential to choose our authorities carefully, and to reproduce their arguments accurately. In Foster cited a general work by M. M. Reese (who was by no means an authority in matters of language and style), stating ‘that “It was the only technical trick to which Shakespeare returned again and again, and it was his alone” ’ (quoted in Foster , p. ). But there are dozens of rhetorical figures which Shakespeare used over and over again, in every poem and play, and any claim that one or other of them ‘was his alone’ is meaningless, given the vast diffusion of rhetoric throughout the English educational system, together with our current state of ignorance about writers’ individual preferences. Foster ascribed similar categorical assertions to his other authorities, but (regrettably) misrepresented them in the process. He claimed that Empson ‘notes the rarity of hendiadys prior to Shakespeare’, and that Wright ‘notes its rarity after Shakespeare, excepting Sir Thomas Browne and Milton . . . ’ (p. ). But in fact all Empson said was that ‘such examples as I have noted
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
in Shakespeare’s predecessors are of this form . . . ’. Nor did George T. Wright make any exclusive claims. Indeed, he explicitly stated that ‘I have not looked closely at sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse and prose, or at Jacobean drama, to see how extensively hendiadys is used in these precincts.’ Readers who have observed Foster’s cavalier treatment of other secondary sources will be disturbed by his repeated exaggeration of the printed record. Foster, bent on establishing the ‘unique’ properties of Shakespeare’s style, now speaks of ‘the Shakespearean hendiadys’, just as he had earlier spoken of ‘the Shakespearean who’. The previous claim, as we have seen, was completely fictitious. The present one errs again by its exclusive formulation – Virgil, Ovid, and the Bible all have frequent and striking instances of this figure – and it is hardly true that hendiadys is ‘inimitable’, since Wright coined a few nifty examples of it himself, and found more in Browne, Milton, and Dylan Thomas (Wright , pp. –). But it is true that Shakespeare did use it often, and it is worth investigating what is known about the figure before evaluating the claims that Foster makes for it as a uniquely Shakespearian device which, being found in the Funerall Elegye, proves his authorship of that poem. Although known to the Renaissance (it is mentioned by Susenbrotus, Puttenham, and Peacham), hendiadys is one of the rarer figures, since (despite its name) it never formed part of the Greek rhetorical tradition. The Greek phrase he¯n dia duoin (‘one by means of two’) is recorded for the first time in the commentary on Horace produced by Pomponius Porphyrio (second to third century ), in terms which show that the device already existed and had attracted discussion. The term became widely known thanks to its use by Servius (fourth to fifth century ) in his commentary on Virgil, who drew attention to the poet’s frequent expression of a complex idea by means of two words (often substantives) joined by a conjunction. The standard example comes from the Georgics: ‘pateris libamus et auro’ (.), for ‘pateris aureis’, that is, ‘we sacrifice from bowls and gold’, for ‘golden bowls’. Of the many instances that Servius gave from the Aeneid, the most often cited is ‘molemque et montes’ (.) for ‘molem montium’, ‘masses and mountains’ instead of ‘masses of mountains’. Servius described it as a figure ‘which divides one thing into two’. In both instances we can see how a single idea (the he¯n, or ‘undivided’) is communicated through the yoking together of two nouns, an unusual combination that would be expressed more commonly either by an adjective plus noun (‘golden bowls’) or by a genitive
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
construction (‘masses of mountains’). The paired words can also be adjectives. Many scholars have attempted to define the peculiar nature of this figure. K. F. N¨agelsbach gave a serviceable definition in his treatise on Latin stylistics (): ‘the nature of hendiadys is that two concepts are brought into a co-ordinating relationship with each other, of which one is logically subordinate to the other, inheres in it and to that extent forms a unity with it’. The German Latinist J. H. Schmalz, writing in , defined it as follows: We understand by it the union by a copula of two words which indicate the same thing but from a different aspect. The figure comes about because the speaker found the second term too important to be used simply to modify the first; therefore he co-ordinated it with the first as equally privileged.
According to a contemporary scholar, the special particularity of ‘one divided into two’ is that a single concept is shown simultaneously with two different emphases, thus ‘defamiliarizing the expression’ and drawing attention ‘towards a special and otherwise neglected aspect of the single object described’ (von M¨ollendorf , col. ). But although hendiadys yokes together two concepts to form a unity, formally the two are separated: Hendiadys intensifies utterance precisely through the paradox of the two concepts forming a semantic unity within the actually undivided he¯n, while their verbal counters are syntactically separated. This separation – since it does not place the concepts in any preferential sequence – makes the hearer attribute an independent existence to a concept otherwise regarded as subordinate. (col. )
Working independently of the German classical tradition, the Swiss scholar Henri Morier observed that a hendiadys such as ‘I knew this man and his honesty’ presupposes the two simpler utterances, ‘I knew this honest man’ and ‘I knew the honesty of this man’. The intellectual processes involved in creating and comprehending this figure unite both abstraction and concretization: In this latter form one can see the quality taking shape, turning itself into a noun, which presupposes the author being able to abstract its essence. But, in hendiadys, we are not only confronted by this dissociation of the object from its quality, considered as a truly real substance, but in addition the object and the substance are placed on the same level, in a symmetrical relationship to the conjunction:
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
– and – However, the shared relationship which exists between the object and the quality is not defined: it is suggested. The word ‘and’ only appears to make a connection. Thus the figure appeals to the reader’s intellect, demands that he reconstitute the real relationships, different to those which are presented to us harmoniously, but deceptively, on the balancing pans of a scales. This is why one cannot describe it simply as a figure of grammar (Larousse). We are really dealing with a figure of thought.
That penetrating analysis explains how hendiadys functions on a time axis, appealing to the reader’s mind to reconstruct the differential relations that exist between the two apparently equal terms. A deliberate mental effort is called for on the reader’s or hearer’s part, to understand just what the two concepts which the writer has fused together have in common. This delayed effect is created by the innocent-looking hinge word and (Greek, kai; Latin, et, que, ac, atque), which is given an unexpected function. That is, as the reader’s eye recognizes the sequence < noun + and + noun > (or < adjective + and + adjective > ) it expects that the copula and will be used to join two or more units of meaning which are semantically distinct: ‘tables and chairs’, ‘fair and wise’, ‘rain and fog’. In such expected sequences eye and mind can read on in a steady onward movement, assimilating the units as separate but co-ordinated. But in hendiadys, as the mind takes in the second term it realizes that the two are grammatically and syntactically co-ordinated but semantically differentiated: in other words, although separated they form a compound, in which each term defines the other in a variety of ways. Shakespeare may have learned about hendiadys from Susenbrotus, but he had plenty of opportunity to observe it in Virgil, Ovid, and the Bible. Whatever the sources of his knowledge, he used the figure with great frequency: George T. Wright identified some uses of hendiadys in Shakespeare, carefully computing figures for the individual plays – in Hamlet alone, for instance, and in Othello (Wright , pp. –). Unknown to Wright, two German dissertations had also counted Shakespeare’s use, coming up with differing totals (in Erich Schulze calculated a total of instances, while in Erich Kerl came to ), and two scholars in the s had disagreed over the total instances in Othello, one counting instances, the other . This disagreement underlines the difficulty of producing reliable statistics in stylistic studies, where different scholars notice different aspects of a linguistic
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
phenomenon. These studies also varied in quality, Erich Schulze’s dissertation managing to be both schematic and superficial, while that by Erich Kerl was exceptionally thorough and intelligent. Kerl adopted Schmalz’s definition (cited above) of hendiadys as ‘the copulative union of two words which denote the same thing but from a different perspective. The figure comes into being because the speaker found the second expression too important to be made the modifier of the first; so he co-ordinated the two as equally privileged’ (Kerl , p. ) – that is, syntactically parallel. Kerl concluded that Shakespeare used the figure mainly for emotional emphasis, almost always in verse, since he could find only three instances of hendiadys in prose. But sometimes, Kerl suggested, Shakespeare chose it for purely grammatical reasons, to avoid having two genitives in immediate succession, as in ‘the ooze and bottom of the sea’ (H, ..), rather than ‘the ooze of the bottom of the sea’ (Kerl , pp. –). In this type the two concepts are both substantives; elsewhere they can also be verbs or adjectives. Kerl distinguished six categories within Shakespeare’s use of hendiadys. The largest is what he called the ‘Inh¨arenzverh¨altnis’, a relationship of inherence, where the concepts have their being in and through each other (pp. –). Kerl subdivided this category into three classes, according to the semantic emphasis, calling the constituent concepts ‘A’ and ‘B’. I prefer to think of them as A and A, and have re-named them accordingly: ( a) the two concepts A and A are equally valuable, and inhere in each other reciprocally, as in Percy’s reference to Flint Castle: King Richard lies Within the limits of yond lime and stone (R, ..–)
In this group A = A. ( b) the two concepts are of unequal value, in such a way that to the main concept A concept A is co-ordinated, emphasizing an essential characteristic already contained in A, and in effect fulfilling the function of an explanatory relative clause. A carries the main or primary stress, often representing a genus, to which A is joined as defining a species. Occasionally A is a local modifier of A , used to make the expression more vividly poetic. An example would be: For briars and thorns at their apparel snatch (MND, ..)
where one attribute of briars, namely their thorns, is specified. Here the relationship is A > A.
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
( c) The two concepts are of unequal value, such that A is connected with a characteristic feature of A which is not already contained in A but is rather a supplement, giving it a more specific manifestation. In this category A plays the role of a defining relative clause, often in emphatic opposition to the preceding expression, as in: I will believe, thou hast a mind that suits With this thy fair and outward character (TN, ..–)
Here the relationship is A < A. According to Kerl these three categories of hendiadys are the ones most frequently used by Shakespeare, and he illustrated them in detail (respectively, pp. –, –, –). Kerl also distinguished five other, rarer categories (p. ). These are: () Where the two concepts stand in a causal relationship to each other, as in: Let my tears staunch the earth’s dry appetite; My sons’ sweet blood will make it shame and blush (Tit., ..–)
that is, ‘blush through shame’. Similarly with Adonis’ comparison of his unripe love to an uncompleted garment: Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinished ? (Ven., );
or with Lear’s ‘my train are men of choice and rarest parts’ (Lear, ..) – ‘chosen because of their exceptional qualities’; or with the French King’s reference to his army’s defeat by ‘the fatal and neglected English’ (H, ..), ‘fatally neglected’. In these instances of cause and effect the ‘and’ could be replaced by ‘because’ (more examples, pp. –). () Where the two concepts stand in a concessive relationship, as in Claudio’s hopes for Isabella’s persuasive powers: for in her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect Such as move men (MM, ..–)
In such cases the ‘and’ could be replaced by ‘although’ (pp. –). () In relationships of finality or purpose, as in ‘to live and study here three years’ (LLL, ..); or in Henry V’s ironic reference to the traitors Cambridge, Scroop, and Grey, in their dear care And tender preservation of our person (H, ..–)
or in Othello’s bitter description of Emilia as
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct a subtile whore . . . And yet she’ll kneel and pray; I have seen her do’t (Oth., .. –)
In such cases the ‘and’ could be replaced by ‘in order to’ (pp. –). () Where the two concepts stand in a comparative relationship, as in this evocation of midnight: Pure thoughts are dead and still, While lust and murder wakes to stain and kill (Luc., –)
– that is, ‘as still as death’. Similarly with Richard II’s self-description as looking ‘pale and dead’ (..), or Canterbury’s praise of Henry V’s eloquence, with his ‘sweet and honey’d sentences’ (..). Here the ‘and’ could be replaced by ‘as . . . as’ (pp. –). () Where the two concepts stand in an explanatory relationship to each other, the subordinate one glossing the first, as in Canterbury’s reference to the ancient French law that ‘No woman shall succeed in Salique land’, and to Pharamond The founder of this law and female bar (H, .. –)
In such cases the ‘and’ could be replaced by ‘namely’, or ‘that is’, as again in Leontes’ guilty admission of having been transported by my jealousies To bloody thoughts, and to revenge . . . (WT, ..–)
(other examples, pp. –). Kerl usefully distinguished hendiadys in Shakespeare from some superficially similar stylistic effects: first (pp. –), the use of synonyms, as in Fluellen’s description of fortune as ‘turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation’ (H, ..–); secondly, stereotypical expressions, formulaic turns of phrase, many of them traditional, such as ‘fast and loose’, ‘fine and recovery’, ‘by cock and pie’, ‘hue and cry’, ‘bag and baggage’ (pp. –). The third and largest of these stylistic effects comparable to hendiadys is what Kerl called ‘die Verst¨arkung’, amplification or reinforcement, in which an expression is linked to a second one having the identical or very similar meaning, being designed to emphasize, explain, or make more vivid (p. ). Here the two expressions are syntactically parallel but not semantically differentiated. Kerl’s examples (pp. –) include ‘lost and done’ (H, ..), ‘league and marriage’ ( H, ..), ‘book and volume’ (Ham., ..), ‘leets and law-days’ (Oth., ..). Shakespeare’s remarkable fondness for constructions of this sort is shown
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
by Kerl’s attempt at a complete listing of these doublets, in chronological order, which runs to over sixteen pages, and more than examples (pp. –). Of hendiadys he identified only some instances, found most frequently in the plays of ‘Shakespeare’s highest poetic creativity’, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello. Although other scholars identified more examples, we can still endorse Kerl’s description of hendiadys as an expressive resource that Shakespeare valued highly, particularly for emotionally intense utterance, one element in his increasingly vivid style, with its growing tendency to render abstractions in a concrete form (p. ). In order to be able to distinguish Shakespeare’s contribution to collaborative or anonymous works, or to evaluate claims made for his authorship, anything that makes us aware of his individual linguistic or stylistic preferences should be studied with some care. If I may revert for a moment to Kerl’s largest category, where the two terms forming a conceptual unity are inherent in each other, I can perhaps bring out some specific features of Shakespeare’s use of hendiadys. Methodologically speaking, Kerl’s brief references to speaker and dramatic context allow us to recall the highly varied purposes governing these speech acts, and although he attempted no extended literary criticism his analyses fruitfully stimulate the reader to reflect on the figure’s internal dynamics. As Henri Morier pointed out, the figure contains within itself a time delay. I trust that readers, having been confronted with so many examples in succession, will have noticed themselves being made to perform an incremental definition or qualification of an idea. That is, the ‘and’, instead of leading us on in a straightforward movement in fact forces us to make an unexpected switch, seeing the terms as not co-ordinated but interdependent. The grammatical form is paratactic, but the semantic content is hypotactic, one of the terms being subordinate but defining the other with more precision or more weight. Far from resulting in mystery or confusion, as G. T. Wright claimed, the momentary re-reading yields a richer understanding of what the speaker means, and intends us to feel. If we think of A as the dominant, and A as the subordinate concept – recognizing that they may occur either in that sequence or reversed, with differing effects – then A serves to bring out the specific aspects of A to which the speaker wishes to direct us. For a simple illustration we could take three instances of hendiadys using ‘clamour’ as the dominant concept. Lady Macbeth is convinced that she and her husband can ‘make our griefs and clamour roar / Upon [Duncan’s] death’ (..–); Cominius invites Rome to celebrate Marcius’ honorific name,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Coriolanus, ‘With all th’ applause and clamour of the host’ (..); Leontes, maddened with jealousy, foresees that as a known cuckold ‘contempt and clamour / Will be my knell’ (..–). There each speaker brings out a different attribute of clamour: grief, applause, and contempt. Either noun could be turned into an adjective modifying the other – ‘contemptuous clamour’ or ‘clamorous contempt’ – which shows that the terms are mutually defining. Sometimes the paired concepts describe simultaneous actions or movements, each implying the other, as in the Chorus’s account of the English fleet getting under way, ‘the threaden sails / Borne with the invisible and creeping wind’ (H Chor., –); or the Player’s account of Pyrrhus striking at Priam: ‘But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword / Th’unnerved father falls’ (Ham., ..–); or Angelo’s awareness of his tumescent desire: ‘And in my heart the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception’ (MM, ..–). It would be difficult to give either of those terms priority. At other times we find a single phrase or collocation of words which has been expanded to include a new term, conveying a specific, often emotionally intense emphasis. Such is the blinded Gloucester’s wish that My snuff and loathed part of nature should Burn itself out (Lear, ..–)
where the metaphor of ‘snuff . . . burn’ is given great emotional force by the juxtaposed modifier ‘loathed’; or Richard II’s vision of the ‘antic’ Death humouring the wearer of ‘the hollow crown’, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable (R, ..–)
As Kerl noted (p.), there Shakespeare separates the compound term ‘self ’ from the substantive ‘conceit’ and co-ordinates it with ‘vain’, so seeming to give it an adjectival function. – Compare also Macbeth’s awareness of ‘My strange and self abuse’ (..), and the final report on Lady Macbeth, ‘Who (as ’tis thought) by self and violent hands / Took off her life’ (..–). Another striking instance of Shakespeare separating a linguistic unit to create a hendiadys is Henry V’s recollection of an earlier invasion of England by the Scottish enemy, who
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
Came pouring like the tide into a breech, With ample and brim fullness of his force (H, ..–)
Here ‘brimful’ is split up, ‘brim’ turned into an adjectival epithet and coupled with ‘ample’. Shakespeare’s inventive relocation of the parts of speech forces us to follow him in such acts of grammatical reclassification. So Kent expresses his disgust at Oswald and those like him, who ‘turn their halcyon beaks / With every gale and vary of their masters’ (Lear, ..–), where the verb ‘vary’ suddenly becomes a noun. That the coupling of two verbs, two adjectives, or two substantives constitutes a hendiadys rather than a simple doubling or pair of synonyms can be seen from the coherence of the compounded form. In Ulysses’ disapproving account of Cressida’s sexuality – ‘her wanton spirits look out / At every joint and motive of her body’ (Tro., ..–) – we realize that ‘motive’ has both the modern sense of intention and the older one of motion, either of which is only made possible through the movement of the body’s joints. Similarly in the Duke’s pronouncement of the death sentence on Angelo, with its striking consequence for Mariana: For his possessions, Although by confiscation they are ours, We do enstate and widow you with all . . .
(MM, ..–)
the dual expression sums up a single state, Mariana being richer and poorer at the same time. The duality-in-unity, or unity-in-duality characterizing hendiadys is expressed, as Kerl also pointed out, by the fact that the compound as subject often takes a singular verb. Tarquin, on the verge of raping Lucrece, recognizes in advance his multiple guilt, one element being his relationship with her husband Collatinus: But as he is my kinsman, my dear friend, The shame and fault finds no excuse nor end (Luc., –)
As Kerl put it, the singular voice is ‘a sure criterion that Shakespeare conceived the dual expression as a unity’ (p. ) – as again in the reasons why the devastated Lucrece tries to control herself until Collatinus returns: Besides, the life and feeling of her passion She hoards, to spend when he is by to hear her. (–)
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Kerl’s dissertation, still the best study of this feature of Shakespeare’s style, unfortunately never attracted the attention it deserved, either in Germany or elsewhere. It should be re-issued, or translated. Indeed, it seems to be one of the misfortunes of hendiadys that writers have repeatedly discussed it in ignorance of previous treatments, or without having identified the phenomenon they were discussing. Thus William Empson, in his precocious study, Seven Types of Ambiguity, never used the term hendiadys, although he devoted a large part of one chapter to discussing how Shakespeare used a combination of and and of (, p. ). Empson argued that whereas those ‘linguistic forms are . . . most convenient which insist on no definite form of connection between words and allow you simply to pass on from one to the other’, and can be used in such ways as to force the reader ‘to give it an extended meaning when it connects two words which are mutually exclusive unless applied in different ways. For example, Othello speaks of “the flinty and Steele Cooch of Warre” (..). A soldier’s couch is flinty in that he lies on pebbles, steel in that his weapons are beside him’ (pp. –), the word and fusing the two ideas. Empson was interested in what we might describe as a variant of hendiadys, a linguistic form common in Shakespeare’s verse, and typical of his method; ‘the (noun) and (noun) of (noun)’, in which two, often apparently quite different, words are flung together, followed by a word which seems to be intended to qualify both of them. This implies that they are both early attempts (the result of two casual shots) at saying the same thing; in fact, the whole unit often takes a singular verb; and hence their main meaning, it is implied, is a sort of highest common factor of the two of them. This implies, again, a statement that they are not prime to one another; thus, were’t to renounce his Baptisme, All Seales, and Symbols of redeemed sin: (Oth., ..–)
is a reflection about the character of a symbol; that it depends on the fixture or sealing down of an association, and is thus analogous to an act of faith. Similarly, All bond and privelege of Nature breake (Cor., ..)
states the two opposite ends of the idea of contract, which is not such a trivial feat as it may appear . . . And since this form demands that the reader should find a highest common factor of its first two nouns, it implies that he must open his mind to all their associations, so that the common factor may be as high as possible. That is, it is a powerful means of forcing him to adopt a poetical attitude to words. ( pp. –)
We may discount Empson’s suggestion that hendiadys derives from ‘early attempts’ or ‘casual shots at saying the same thing’, since all the evidence
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
suggests that Shakespeare only gradually learned to master the dynamics of this figure. But Empson redeemed himself by his penetrating analysis of how the figure forces the reader to make a mental revision of this unexpected collocation of two words which turn out to show different aspects of the same idea, having to ‘open his mind to all their associations’ in order to find the ‘highest common factor’ linking the two nouns. Empson’s acute intelligence (although prone at times to excess ingenuity) grasped that characteristic of hendiadys which several scholars have identified, the fact that the hearer or reader’s mind is actively engaged in decoding it. He quoted Claudius’s conviction that whereas in this life he might be able to escape retribution for crimes, ’tis not so above; There, is no shuffling, there the Action lyes In his true Nature and we ourselves compell’d Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults To give in evidence.
(Ham., ..–)
Empson devoted nearly a page to a series of ingenious but unsatisfying explanations of the possible associations between teeth and forehead, ‘all very fanciful and irrelevant, the reader may think’, before appealing in desperation: ‘But what is relevant to these notes of the material for rhetoric, this poetry by physiological shorthand? All we are given is two parts of the body and the Day of Judgment; these have got to be associated by the imagination of the reader’ (pp. –). Some ‘flashes of fancy’ are indeed needed by the reader or spectator, who has all too little time to translate the impression of urgency into some normative utterance. Similarly with Claudio’s puzzlement why Angelo, ‘the new deputy’, had punished him so severely, ‘Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness’ (..). Empson observed that either phrase (‘The fault of newness’, ‘The glimpse of newness’) would be simple on its own, but ‘to impose one on top of the other . . . leaves various ways of making them both grammar floating about in one’s mind . . . ’ (p. ). A deliberate mental effort is needed to parse, so to speak, such collocations as ‘the grosse and scope of my Opinion’ (Ham., ..), or ‘the very age and body of the time’ (..), effects of ‘variety in unity’ (p. ) peculiar to hendiadys. In Empson’s marvellous formulation, it is a figure ‘not likely to be sought for by an author unless he wants to hold a thought in the reader’s mind while he plays round its implications . . . ’ (p. ). Although Empson scorned all forms of technicality, he produced perhaps the single most perceptive account of hendiadys.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Empson’s brilliant, wayward discussion was not known to George T. Wright when he wrote his essay, further confirmation of how discussions of hendiadys have passed by each other. Indeed, Wright could cite no previous secondary literature on Shakespeare’s use of the figure, and necessarily covered again ground that Kerl and Empson had already explored. In his own exposition Wright was unduly influenced by the scepticism expressed by E. Adelaide Hahn in , ‘whether there is such a thing as hendiadys’ (Wright , p. ). But such doubts about the existence of a figure thoroughly documented for over a century by German classicists, and by biblical scholars in several languages, merely shows once again how remarkably slow classical scholars in the Englishspeaking world have been, until very recently, in realizing the importance of rhetoric in Greek and Latin literature. Hahn’s scepticism, unfortunately, had an unsettling effect on Wright, who declared that ‘hendiadys, far from explaining mysteries, establishes them . . . For, except in the simplest instances, hendiadys resists logical analysis’ (p. ). Wright quoted Hahn’s ‘persuasive disparagement of hendiadys in Vergil’, as he called it, to the effect that the figure ‘ “does not seem to have made upon the Roman mind the anomalous and even ludicrous impression” ’ which it has in English. Wright declared that ‘hendiadys (if there is such a thing) has always struck English-speaking people as a disturbing and foreign device, . . . an anomaly’ (p. ). But the examples cited from Shakespeare, and many more we could cite from the Bible, have nothing anomalous or ludicrous about them. Wright made a big issue out of the figure’s supposed ‘un-English’ resistance to ‘logical analysis’, with an eye to the later part of his essay, which moved from linguistic analysis to literary criticism. Here it suited his interest to argue that Shakespeare’s use of hendiadys ‘usually elevates the discourse and blurs its logical lines, and this combination of grandeur and confusion is in keeping with the tragic or weighty action of the major plays’ (p. ). I find neither confusion nor blurring, either in the detail or in the broader structures of Shakespeare’s tragedies, so I shall pass over Wright’s elaboration of this claim and concentrate on the valuable part of his essay, its demonstration that ‘Shakespeare’s examples are dazzlingly various’ (p. ). Wright’s coverage of the canon was impressive, identifying some instances of the figure, involving nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbial (pp. –). His computation (p. ) unknowingly agreed with Kerl in locating the most frequent usage in the great tragedies – Hamlet (), Othello (), Macbeth (), King Lear (). But Wright also showed its prominence in other plays of the period to : Troilus
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
and Cressida (), Measure for Measure (),Henry V (), Twelfth Night (), As You Like It (), and All’s Well That Ends Well (). Also like Kerl, Wright rejected as non-hendiadyc both commonplace formulae (wind and rain, flesh and blood), and ‘mere rewordings of the same idea without any significant increment, usually for an effect of expansion and elevation’, as in ‘chance and hazard’ (Ant., ..) or ‘mute and dumb’ (Ham., ..), combinations which he dubbed the ‘ceremonious parading of synonyms’ (p. ). Wright’s analysis of the figure – a completely coherent analysis, quite lacking in the confusion that he attributed to it – well described the unusual feature of hendiadys, namely that ‘we expect a conjunction like and to join together entities that are not only grammatically but conceptually assimilable’ (p. ). Thus we are momentarily disconcerted to find that ‘the two elements of the hendiadys, though grammatically parallel, are not semantically parallel’ (p. ), for the co-ordinate structure in fact conceals a subordination of meaning that we only grasp by a second look: ‘hendiadys makes us do a double take’ (p. ). When Edmund deceives Edgar into thinking that he has aroused his father’s anger, the bastard son concludes: ‘I have told you what I have seen and heard, but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it’ (Lear, ..–), on which Wright commented: Certainly the horror of it is intensified by the hendiadys more than it would have been if Edmund had said, more conventionally, ‘the horrible image of it’. It may be argued that Edmund’s mind moves from the image to the horror, from the perception to its emotional quality; but this very movement, this procession of interior events, which deeply justifies the phrase, takes us by surprise and makes us feel, as the best examples of hendiadys tend to do, that some structural situation we had become ready for (our picturing something) has jumped and become a different structural situation (our being horrified at something). (pp. –)
That sensitive account well conveys the working of the figure, and something of Edmund’s purpose in using it, to postpone the key emotional element till last, for greater effect. The impact that it had on Edgar’s mind, I would add, is only seen when the terms recur at the play’s tragic climax, when Lear enters carrying Cordelia dead in his arms: : Is this the promis’d end? : Or image of that horror? (..–)
Only, this is the thing itself.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Wright’s careful documentation of hendiadys in Hamlet, taken together with the more searching study by Erich Kerl, establishes beyond question Shakespeare’s frequent and brilliant use of the figure. As far as the Funerall Elegye is concerned, what is at stake is not whether Shakespeare used it, but whether ‘W. S.’ did so, a question which carries with it a further doubt, whether Foster actually understood the specific properties of this figure, as we have observed them. In he suggested that Shakespeare ‘frequently links two opposite or slightly discordant words with another word that seems to qualify both of them, as in “that fantasy and trick of fame”’ (Ham., ..), ‘. . . with the doublet (“fantasy and trick”) serving in effect as a single word combining two disparate notions . . . ’ (pp. –). What has yet to be established is whether ‘W. S.’ ever managed to link ‘two disparate notions’ into a unity higher than its constituent terms. In Foster claimed to find seventeen instances of hendiadys in the anonymous Funerall Elegye. At one point this claim was reduced to it containing ‘ten certain hendiadys (all ten involving nouns), and seven others . . . that at least verge on hendiadys and have a similar effect’ (, p. ). Even the weaker, rather slippery formulation (‘at least verge on . . . a similar effect’) will prove to be overstated. The fairest way of examining it is to set out the instances claimed, in the order Foster gave. (I add italics to indicate the figure.) ()
Since time, and his predestinated end, Abridg’d the circuit of his hopeful days () Whiles both his youth and virtue did intend The good endeavors of deserving praise () his short-liv’d deserts . . . must Even in the hearts and memories of men Claim fit respect () Not that he was above the spleenful sense And spite of malice () to unlock His bosom and his store () Without true proof and knowledge of a friend () The home of his condition and estate () The sour-bitter scourge Of torture and affliction () servant to the base And sensual aptness of disunion’d vices () Was by a hand in vengeance rude and hot () For if his fate and heaven had decreed () Which hardest fate and time thus can lay on me () For nature, and his therein happy fate
( –) (–) (–) (–) (–) () () (–) (–) () () () ()
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
() Had education and new being () () Such in the bypath and the ridgway lurk That leads to ruin ( –) () Whereby the candle and the body’s light Darkens the inward eyesight of the mind ( –) () To purchase commendation by disgrace, Whereto the world and heat of sin entices (–)
Any reader who has attended to the examples from Shakespeare just discussed may well wonder whether we are still dealing with hendiadys, for in most of the cases claimed by Foster the and merely joins two semantically distinct units in a co-ordinating structure. These couplings lack the truly distinctive features of hendiadys, such as mutual implication or inherence, relationships of interdependence (as of genus to species, part to whole), and above all the sense of unity emerging from duality. In his detailed discussion (, pp. –) Foster admitted that many of these examples are doubtful, but closer acquaintance with his methods of argument suggest that this was a persuasive trick, with the examples having been arranged in a sequence designed to minimize objection – or maximize acceptance. Number is said to be ‘doubtful’, and only ‘possible’; then comes ‘distinctive’, ‘cleverest’, and – ‘more’ (clearly meant as ‘solid’). Having gained credibility with six consecutive examples of genuine hendiadys (according to his criteria), Foster could concede as ‘dubious’ and – as ‘just verging on’; for a strong finish he described – as ‘certain’. However, his argument contained so many evasions and so much special pleading that no careful reader will give it assent. Foster chose to ‘begin with a doubtful instance’, in the Elegye’s opening lines: Since time, and his predestinated end, Abridg’d the circuit of his hopeful days ( –)
commenting: At first glance, ‘time’ and ‘his predestinated end’ appear to express two distinct notions, and there is surely a sense in which William Peter may serve as the missing antecedent for ‘his’ – but ‘his’ refers as well to ‘time’, since possessive ‘its’ had not yet found its way into standard usage and since the opening phrase is echoed in the ‘predestinated time’ of line , so that Peter’s life is abridged by ‘the predestinated end of time’, with time in its possessiveness absorbing what might have been ‘his’. (, p. )
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
That hasty argument never stopped to pronounce whether this noun doublet is an instance of hendiadys or not. To me it seems clear that ‘his predestinated end’ in line does refer to Peter, but in the sense of ‘the end predestinated for him’ by providence, since of course predestination is – at least to Calvinists and Protestants generally – a matter for the Divine Will, not for indifferent time. And if ‘his’ really referred to time, that would imply that time’s ending was predetermined, an appropriate remark for a millenarian prophecy, perhaps, but hardly for a funeral elegy. By his reference to line of the Elegye, ‘Predestinated time’, Foster compounded his misinterpretation, for that phrase does not imply that time has been doing the predestinating (how could it?), but refers, once again, to ‘the time predestinated for him’ by providence. Since Foster’s linking of the possessive ‘its’ with time was just a simple misreading, then this is not an instance of hendiadys. He continued: ‘This figure’ – sic, as if that discussion had settled the issue – is followed in turn by another possible instance of hendiadys, in which ‘his’ certainly refers to the poet’s deceased friend. Whiles both his youth and virtue did intend The good endeavours of deserving praise . . . Here ‘his youth and virtue’, not strictly parallel, may mean something like ‘his youthful virtue’, even though the ‘both’ suggests two separate qualities. (pp. –)
These are indeed distinct, unrelated terms, not linked by any subordination of meaning, for the surrounding grammatical structure, ‘both . . . and’, like ‘either . . . or’, has the effect of placing the terms that follow into separate boxes. Such disjunctive structures, by their very nature, defeat any possibility of hendiadys. Foster attempted to strengthen his case by citing Hamlet, where we find three genuine instances of the figure: That youth and observation copied there (..) To youth and liberty (..) And sith so neighbored to his youth and havior (..) But in all three cases, as Kerl (, p. ) and Wright have shown, the two terms genuinely modify each other. In Hamlet’s promise to the Ghost to erase from memory everything ‘That youth and observation copied there’, we understand immediately, as George Wright put it, ‘that these two terms are not separate but compound, that he must mean, “youthful observation”, the habit of observation that he
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
has engaged in up to this moment’ (Wright , p. ) – such as keeping a notebook in which to write down lessons from life. Similarly with the ‘liberty’ belonging to youth, or type of ‘behaviour’ associated with youth, each forms a conceptual unity where the second noun brings into play precisely that aspect of youth that the speaker wishes to focus on. So far Foster has shown no instance of ‘W. S.’ actually using hendiadys, as he seemed partly to concede: ‘But if the phrase concerning Peter’s “youth and virtue” in line three of the Elegy cannot be considered distinctive, there are other examples in the poem that may.’ The reader might well wonder what sense is being given here to ‘distinctive’, or to ‘may’? Foster’s next example of what ‘may’ be a hendiadys stretched the canons of argument still further: ‘Peter’s “short-liv’d deserts” find their preservation in “the hearts and memories of men” (), another false parallel, in which “hearts” has the force of an adjective, as in “the loving memories of men” ’ (, p. ). One can only express puzzlement or disbelief at the suggestion that ‘hearts’ here ‘has the force of an adjective’, another slippery phrase (like ‘not strictly parallel’) which attempts to blur the issue. But the word ‘hearts’ is not an adjective but a noun, used in parallel with ‘memories’, neither term having the relationship of reciprocal illumination or interaction which is the defining mark of hendiadys. Foster seems never to have grasped that characteristic of the figure. He himself wrote that in hendiadys ‘two parallel words (usually nouns) are linked by and, but express a single complex notion . . . ’ (p. ). Well, we may ask, where is the ‘single complex notion’ in the instance now offered as a hendiadys, ‘the hearts and memories of men’? This notion is not single but dual, not complex but simple, for and merely links two totally conventional words, neither of which modifies the other or causes it to be seen from a new perspective. I earlier described the process of reading hendiadys as one in which the mind is forced to revise its perception, realize that a paratactic structure in fact conceals a hypotactic relationship. Wright has also referred to the reader’s ‘double take’, the fact that the best examples of hendiadys ‘take us by surprise’. But ‘W. S.’ has no surprises for us. Foster, always ready to attribute inventiveness to ‘W. S.’, singled out for praise ‘perhaps the cleverest example of hendiadys to be found in the Elegy’, namely ‘Not that he was above the spleenful sense / And spite of malice’ (–), commenting: ‘Here “sense” may be taken as sensation or as insinuation, as act or experience. Either way we arrive at something like “the sense of malicious resentment” ’ (p. ). But Foster simply
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
imported the notion of ‘insinuation’ into the text, while his paraphrase omitted altogether the word ‘spite’, which implies a wish to take malicious action. Other readers will see the lines as describing a double sequence, experiencing spleenfulness and, as a result, acting in a malicious way. But for that reason the phrase fails to establish the mutual relation between the nouns that characterizes hendiadys. Are we perhaps not satisfied? Or suitably impressed? Either way, ‘There are more such: “to unlock / His bosom and his store” was cited above as an example of zeugma, but if bosom is to be associated with generosity rather than with confidentiality, the line denotes one who “gave heartily of his abundance” ’ (p. ). But there is no reason to give ‘bosom’ the meaning ‘generosity’. If we attend to its context, as something which one can ‘unlock’, that phrase implies ‘to open oneself, disclose one’s secrets, take another person into one’s confidence’, without any notion of giving gifts. It is, and remains a zeugma, the single words joining two distinct properties or actions. Only after rewriting the text do these doublets seem like hendiadys: ‘Consider also “true proof and knowledge of a friend” (for “proven knowledge of a true friend”, )’, a paraphrase which merely interchanges the attributes. For many readers the words ‘proof ’ and ‘knowledge’ are nearly synonymous (once you prove it you know it), and I cannot see how they modify each other in any of the processes of subordination or dependence that characterize hendiadys. I would also reject Foster’s claim that in ‘“the home of his condition and estate”. . . all three nouns converge’, for again the poet has simply heaped up synonyms, ‘estate’ being just another word for ‘home’. Foster also paraphrased ‘the “scourge / Of torture and affliction” ’ as ‘ “the afflicting scourge of torture”’, a phrase that might well qualify as a hendiadys, ‘torture’ being a specific instance of ‘affliction’. But the authenticating parallel with Shakespeare – Hamlet’s ‘whips and scorns of time’ (..), in which Wright has pointed out that ‘one is concrete and metaphorical, the other abstract and immediate’ (Wright , p. ) – reminds us again how greatly the abstract and generalized diction of this poem differs from Shakespeare. Having produced what he took to be strong evidence, Foster then pursued his strategy of admitting weak instances in order to elicit assent when he should return to stronger ones. He claimed to find seven cases, ‘five with nouns, two with adjectives that at least verge on hendiadys’ (my italics):
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
The two dubious adjectival examples are, first, ‘the base / And sensual aptness of disunion’d vices’ (where ‘base’ seems to modify ‘sensual’ more directly than ‘aptness’, hence ‘the basely sensual tendency of disunion’d vices’, –), and second, ‘a hand in vengeance rude and hot’ (the two adjectives may modify either ‘hand’ or ‘vengeance’ as ‘hot with vengeance’, ); both phrases find parallels in Shakespeare. (, pp. –)
The phrase ‘verge on hendiadys’, repeated a page later, shows how desperate Foster’s argument has become: a figure is either hendiadys or not. – And these pairs of adjectives hardly ‘denote a single notion’. Rather, they accumulate additional, linear-organized definitions of it, as Foster’s clumsy paraphrases show only too well, and thus neither compel the reader to redefine the relationship between the terms nor to see them as a conceptual unity. As for the concluding invocation of Shakespeare’s name, that is another red herring. Foster added some more professedly weak evidence, part of his strategy to build up to a triumphant conclusion. But for anyone not already convinced that the poem is Shakespeare’s, the inclusion of so much confessedly feeble argument can only seem a mark of desperation, as if sweeping all the scraps together. To the dubious hendiadys in line one may be added at least five additional noun doublets that verge on hendiadys: ‘his fate and heaven’ (), ‘hardest fate and time’ (), and ‘nature and his therein happy fate’ (), are all three phrases that in context seem to denote a single notion, meaning, respectively, something like ‘his heaven-ordained fate’, ‘time’s hardest fate’, and ‘his blessed destiny in nature’; to which may be added ‘education and new being’, a weaker example, which can possibly be taken to mean ‘new being through education’ (). ( p. ; my italics)
By now the alert reader will have noticed the freedom with which Foster paraphrased the quotations to make it seem as if they convey a single idea. But it is obvious that the three doublets, ‘fate and heaven’, ‘fate and time’, ‘nature and . . . fate’, refer to quite distinct concepts, dualities that are not unified into ‘a single notion’ – unless you wish to argue that the poem’s author was an out-and-out Calvinist predestinarian. Even then, you could only do so by widening the concept of fate to cover the realms of heaven, time, and nature, surely a desperate move. The concluding example, ‘education and new being’, Foster suggested, ‘can possibly be taken to mean “new being through education” ’, a linear time-sequence, one statement emerging from the other, but it lacks the fundamental characteristic of hendiadys, which makes us look at each term afresh, in the light of the other.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Foster placed these examples of ‘dubious’ instances, or ones that merely ‘verge on’ hendiadys, towards the end of his argument, leading up to his trump-card, a quotation from William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. Foster was not interested in Empson’s sensitive and ingenious analyses of the ways in which Shakespeare uses the figure. All that concerned him is one point made by Empson, and seen previously by Erich Kerl in , the fact that in Shakespeare the whole unit often takes a singular verb. This is a peculiarity, as far as I can ascertain, exampled nowhere except in Shakespeare (and in W. S.). Having adopted this unusual and logically discordant device as his own, Shakespeare applies to it a singular verb as the final stamp of his own singularity. Of the ten certain examples of hendiadys in the Elegy, only three take a verb in which a distinction of number can be made; in all three instances, the verb is singular: ‘the bypath and the ridgway’, or deviant course (with ‘bypath’ having the force of an adjective to describe what kind of ridgway it is), ‘leads’ to ruin’; the eye, as ‘the candle and the body’s light’ (which is to say, the body’s light-giving candle) ‘darkens’ the mind; ‘the world and heat of sin’ (a figure that resists analysis) ‘entices’ men to purchase commendation by disgrace ( –, –, –). In each case, the apparent parallel absorbs the ‘and’ into a single, more complex, relation. (p. )
But anyone familiar with hendiadys in Virgil, Ovid, or the Bible will know that the use of a single verb is unique neither to Shakespeare nor to ‘W. S.’, and is indeed implicit in the whole notion of a compound form. We have also seen enough examples from various sources to reject Foster’s description of hendiadys (derived from George T. Wright) as ‘logically discordant’, although it does demand some thought from the reader. Perhaps Foster introduced this idea to prepare for the last example he quotes, ‘ “the world and heat of sin” ’, which apparently ‘resists analysis’. It is certainly incoherent, vaguely associating a huge generalized source of evil – ‘the world’ – with a mixture of concrete and abstract, ‘heat of sin’ (where we might have expected ‘lust’). Reference to the full context will show that this example of a moralist’s overkill comes from one of several long-drawn-out utterances in which the Elegye’s author moralized on the vices of the world in such a blurred, generalizing manner as to make it unclear what he was referring to: True ’tis, this man, whiles yet he was a man, Sooth’d not the current of besotted fashion, Nor could disgest, as some loose mimics can, An empty sound of overweening passion, So much to be made servant to the base
Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
And sensual aptness of disunion’d vices, To purchase commendation by disgrace, Whereto the world and heat of sin entices. (–)
Prolonged acquaintance with those lines leaves me no clearer as to their meanings, other than that they include a conventional attack on actors, those ‘loose [lecherous, immoral] mimics’ who can ‘disgest . . . An empty sound of overweening passion’. But as for the style, here is such an undifferentiated level of complaint – quite unlike anything in Shakespeare, unless it be the ambivalently presented protests of selfappointed moralists like Jaques (and he is never so flaccid) – that these claimed instances of hendiadys look to be sharing not the highest common factor but the lowest common denominator. If we invoke the basic characteristics of this figure in examining the phrase ‘the world and heat of sin’, we find no duality-in-unity, no hypotaxis within parataxis, no illumination of the same idea from different perspectives, but simply two separate concepts, poorly co-ordinated. Foster’s argument became increasingly strained towards the end of his discussion, when he reached one of several passages in which the poet moralizes about the envy attached to virtue: Yet who is he so absolutely blest That lives encompass’d in a mortal frame, Sometime in reputation not oppress’d By some in nothing famous but defame? Such in the bypath and the ridgway lurk That leads to ruin, in a smooth pretence Of what they do to be a special work Of Singleness . . . (–)
and so on, ‘W. S.’ losing the thread of argument, as so often, in his easy but undisciplined outpouring of words. Foster commented on line earlier, suggesting that it may include ‘ a punning, and antagonistic, reference to William Peter’s puritanical cousin, Sir Thomas Ridgway – in the Quarto, Ridg-way . . . is capitalized and italicized – though the line may refer only to the causeway on which Peter was slain’ (p. ). But why on earth should the poet wish to introduce any reference to Sir Thomas Ridgway at this point? What had he done wrong? (Apart from being a Puritan, perhaps, when the rest of Peter’s milieu was supposedly Catholic.) It is irrelevant to argue for this personal reference here, since the pleonastic doublet ‘the bypath and the ridgway . . . That
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
leads to ruin’, is merely a variant on the stock moralizing clich´e ‘the road to ruin’. For the same reason no reference can be intended, as Foster suggested, to ‘the causeway on which Peter was slain’: the poet is invoking a metaphoric, abstract road, neither a person nor an actual causeway. Equally far-fetched was Foster’s claim eight pages later, in the context of hendiadys, that here the paired nouns refer to a ‘deviant course’ – where is the evidence for that? – ‘(with “bypath” having the force of an adjective to describe what kind of ridgway it is) . . . ’ (p. ; my italics). Foster knows that the traditional accounts of hendiadys often state that it turns adjectives into substantives: but he cannot cite any evidence that ‘bypath’ could have that grammatical function here. If this is what one has to do in order to accumulate ‘ten certain examples of hendiadys in the Elegy’, then that whole process begins to look self-deceiving. Some readers may regret the time I have spent on discussing Foster’s claims, putting them in the same class as Horace’s famous account of a discrepancy between energy invested and returns: Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (Ars Poetica, ; ‘The mountains shall be in labour, and there shall be born – a silly mouse’). But the blame must rest with Professor Foster, who has made so many sweeping assertions on large and complex issues, assertions which inevitably take longer to unravel than to make. As against Foster’s resounding claims for hendiadys being a unique feature of style common to both Shakespeare and ‘W. S.’, an analysis of the Funerall Elegye has shown them to be grossly exaggerated. Far from having seventeen instances of the figure (‘ten certain and seven dubious’), it has between two and three, depending on the reader’s indulgence. More important, they are all conventional noun-doublets, quite lacking in that element of surprise found in so many of Shakespeare’s usages, that unexpected co-ordination of two different aspects of the same idea which force us to re-define our own understanding in the act of reading. As MacDonald P. Jackson observed in reviewing Foster’s first publication, ‘Foster finds in the Elegy a Shakespearian partiality for hendiadys, but the poem offers nothing resembling such vital collocations as “the rose and expectancy of the fair state”, “the inaudible and noiseless foot of time”, or “the perfume and suppliance of a minute” ’ ( Jackson , p. ). The Funerall Elegye may be a sincerely meant tribute, and it may have served a valuable function in consoling the deceased’s family, but in its use of rhetoric, as in so many other respects, it is quite unlike Shakespeare.
Statistics and inference
One aspect of Donald Foster’s monograph which evidently impressed many readers was the quantity of statistics it assembled. Every possible issue was quantified, percentages or ratios were calculated for an amazingly wide range of linguistic markers, and there are twentyfive statistical tables. A typical example of this quantification process is Foster’s computation that the Funerall Elegye contains ‘twenty-two compound words, for a net frequency of ./ words, as opposed to . in The Winter’s Tale and . in The Tempest . . . ’ (, p. ). That example is one of many in which Foster placed a statistic derived from Shakespeare alongside one from the Funerall Elegye, silently claiming that stylometric data established Shakespeare’s authorship of that poem. Foster’s statistical procedures, however, are flawed in many respects. He himself showed some awareness of the criticism often voiced, that even ‘striking verbal parallels’ would not amount to ‘proof ’ of authorship: What is wanted rather is the closest possible scrutiny of the available evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship, together with all possible contrary evidence. Nor is it enough simply to demonstrate that the poem has certain Shakespearean qualities. It has to be shown that such qualities, at least in this particular combination, are found nowhere but in Shakespeare, a formidable task. ( p. )
Those are admirable principles, but we can now see how little Foster did to realize them. In particular, he gave very short shrift to the ‘possible contrary evidence’ that I have set out here – all of it freely available to anyone with the curiosity and scholarship needed to explore the wider tradition. As for showing that the distinctive qualities of the Funerall Elegye are found ‘nowhere but in Shakespeare’, the gap between desire and fulfilment is immense. The first deficiency in Foster’s use of statistics concerns the scope of comparison. His statistics for the frequency of compound words would be meaningful only if he had produced comparable figures for a very
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
wide range of texts, ideally involving all known writers of poetry and drama in England between and , say. Foster made two gestures in this direction, for the monograph included ‘A Checklist of English Memorial Verse, –’ (pp. –), and had he analysed the whole of this corpus his findings might have been rather different. Unfortunately, he chose to limit his enquiry to a Cross-Sample drawn from poems published between and (pp. –, –), a decision which made the questionable assumption that the writer of the Elegye might have written a similar work shortly before . Foster’s second attempt to widen his comparison base took place between the publication of that monograph and his PMLA essay, where, as we have seen, he proudly announced his creation of the ‘Vassar Electronic Text archive’, which reputedly contained ‘dozens of authors, hundreds of texts’ or even ‘hundreds’ of authors (a, pp. –). However, neither the – Cross-Sample nor the Vassar text archive were anything like adequate for yielding representative linguistic data, and even though Foster made sporadic attempts to check for contrary evidence, he did so too casually to produce any valid check on his thesis. The second deficiency in Foster’s use of statistics illuminates a general principle in literary studies, namely that the value of quantitative evidence depends wholly on the assumptions governing its collection. Meticulously gathered data is worse than useless if the guiding idea is unsound – as computer specialists say, ‘rubbish in, rubbish out’. Foster’s statistics, regularly slanted so as to ‘prove’ Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye, were often based on his mistaken analysis of literary or linguistic phenomena, such as his failure to understand the true nature of hendiadys. As I have shown, Foster claimed to find seventeen instances of this figure in the Elegye, that is, ‘ten certain hendiadys . . . and seven others . . . that at least verge on hendiadys’ (, p. ). He reported having ‘found several hendiadys in the work of William Rowley (ca. –ca. ), a minor poet and playwright’ – how is this to be explained? Did we ever doubt it? – ‘who looked to Shakespeare as his principal mentor’ (p. ). Otherwise Foster could not discover ‘any other writers in the seventeenth century who use the device more than once or twice’ (p. ), a ‘fact’ that was restated much more dramatically once Foster had scrupulously reviewed three possible candidates from his ‘larger bibliography of the Memorial Verse –’: But if we count all three of these instances, we arrive at a maximum relative frequency of . hendiadys/ lines for the entire bibliography, versus a
Statistics and inference
minimum frequency of ./ lines in the Peter elegy, or about a -to- ratio, by W. S. (by way of extrapolation) for one occurrence by all other poets but William Shakespeare. (p. ; author’s italics)
Statisticians would understand what was claimed by the final manipulation, but the unsuspecting layman might take it to mean that Shakespeare is times more likely to have written the Elegye. Either way, the really telling objection would be that there are nothing like seventeen instances of hendiadys in that poem, but at the most two or three, depending on the reader’s charity. So this statistical edifice, too, is shown to be resting on a dubious linguistic analysis, floating weightlessly in space. The relation between quantitative evidence and the assumptions governing its collection was raised again by Foster’s use of a new lexical database in his PMLA essay. Christened ‘Shaxicon’, it contained Foster’s tabulation of the first occurrence and subsequent transmission of all the ‘rare’ words in Shakespeare, here defined as those occurring twelve times or less in the complete canon. Foster announced and described this tool in several articles in Shakespeare Newsletter, and for a brief period made it available for other scholars to use, with mixed results (see the Epilogue, pp. – ). Had Foster been content to list these words, and to document their appearance in other contemporary drama texts, he might have provided a useful tool. But he made a far more reckless claim, that he was now able to identify ‘those roles that Shakespeare is most likely to have acted’ in his own and other dramatists’ plays, ‘based on the poet’s persistent and measurable recall of particular character-specific lexicons’ (Foster , p. ). Foster claimed that his database allowed him to identify, from internal evidence alone, at least thirty and perhaps more than sixty roles that Shakespeare performed over a period of approximately twenty-two years. This claim was cogently criticized from the record of theatrical history by Diana Price, who pointed out that Shakespeare is actually ‘one of the least recited names in the cast lists’ of published Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, ‘and one of the least noticed as a performer . . . We know of no roles that he played.’ Unfortunately, the possibility of evaluating Foster’s argument from the verbal evidence contained in his database has never materialized, for despite his repeated promises to publish it, even announcing that in order ‘to put a wrap on this monumental undertaking’ he had requested a year’s unpaid leave to complete it ( ., Feb. ), Foster had yet to do so by the end of . In these circumstances it is highly unsatisfactory that the scholarly public has no way of verifying the use that he made of Shaxicon
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
in his PMLA article arguing for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye. There he reiterated his belief that the roles Shakespeare acted influenced the language of plays written years afterwards, and he claimed a significant correlation between the role of Egeon in The Comedy of Errors (c. ), the whole play of Henry VIII and the Funerall Elegye, which supposedly matches the ‘distributional curve’ of Henry VIII more closely than it does any other canonical poem or play (Foster a, pp. –). – Given the fact that a scholarly consensus since attributes more than half of Henry VIII to John Fletcher, that hardly speaks well for Foster’s methods. Foster supported these claims with a diagram purporting to show the ‘Rate at Which Shakespeare’s Canonical Plays Share Rare Words With A Funeral Elegy () and Henry VIII (–), by Period’ (p. ). This looks impressive, but unfortunately it contained a major error in the statistical formula (see the Epilogue, p. ) and, in any case, since none of the data were ever released, its accuracy cannot be checked. In addition, Foster cited statistics: For instance, the Egeon role, which Shakespeare appears to have studied as early as and again in – and –, supplies .% of the rare words in The Comedy of Errors. Of The Comedy’s rare words that appear also in Henry VIII, .% are supplied by the Egeon role. In other words, Shaxicon locates roughly twice as many Egeon words in this cross sample as would be produced by a proportionate distribution by character. Henry VIII is thus influenced by Shakespeare’s having learned the Egeon role. The role likewise influences other late texts. Of the rare words that appear both in The Comedy and in Shakespeare’s portion of The Two Noble Kinsmen, .% are supplied by Egeon, more than triple Egeon’s share of the lexical pool. And of the rare words in both The Comedy and A Funeral Elegy, .% are provided by the Egeon role. (Foster a, p. )
That, too, looks impressive to the layman (dulce bellum inexpertis), but of course many other explanations could be given for words recurring in one play, such as the nature of the subject-matter, the sources, or indeed Shakespeare’s basic vocabulary of common words. In addition, someone experienced in working with literary statistics might wonder how many lexical items are in fact involved here – but he would be unable to answer, since Shaxicon has never been published. Fortunately for us, however, in Foster loaned copies (version .) to Charles W. Hieatt and his brother A. K. Hieatt (author of a notable study of Spenser), who used it in their work on the dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The next issue of PMLA (May, ) included in its ‘Forum’ letters from both
Statistics and inference
Hieatt brothers pointing to various errors in Foster’s data. Charles Hieatt challenged Foster’s calculations for the claimed recurrence of Egeon’s ‘rare words’ in the William Peter elegy, giving the new figure of ‘.%, not .% for A Funeral Elegy ( Egeon words out of Errors words in that work)’. However, he commented, ‘the number of Egeon rare words . . . (not the percentage) seems to me statistically trivial in relation to the total number of rare words in the work’, namely only ‘ Egeon rare words in the mass of rare words in A Funeral Elegy . . . ’. His brother, Kent Hieatt, elaborated on the potentially misleading effect of citing such data in the form of percentages: For instance, Foster says that because Shakespeare played the part of Egeon in The Comedy of Errors at various times, he held Egeon rare words in creative memory when he wrote Henry VIII. Thus, although Egeon rare words form only .% of the rare words in Errors, they make up .% of the Errors rare words appearing in Henry VIII (Foster a, p. ). But this increase in percentage amounts to only words of the rare words in Shakespeare’s presumed part of Henry VIII, a statistically trivial quantity. Vocabulary can identify its owner, but a word relates to context as well as to user. In a mass of Shakespeare’s words, contexts may cancel one another out, and the author may be revealed; however, a set of words out of reliably indicates only the fictional events being evoked. This observation is especially important for Foster’s claim that Shakespearean authorship of A Funeral Elegy is more assured because .% of the Errors rare words in the poem are Egeon words. Foster neglects the point that Egeon’s speeches and Elegy are both mostly lugubrious recitals of disaster. How many of the insignificant number of rare words common to the two texts are more likely to be required by shared contexts than by shared authorship? Only attentive study of the contexts of each pair of words will give an answer.
In his brief reply, Foster ignored these crucial objections concerning the discrepancy between an impressive-sounding percentage and the paucity of words involved, limiting himself to stating that ‘there is nothing mournful in the elegist’s [that is, ‘W. S.’] measurable surplus of Egeon words, which includes only such nonlugubrious words as embracement, to fasten, helpful, inn, to retain, twin, and wished (adj.)’. At which point a reader can only express astonishment that Foster could use such slight lexical evidence, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, to support his claim that Shakespeare wrote the Elegye. Once again, Foster was using statistics to support a massive, wide-ranging argument on the slightest of supports. The third deficiency in Foster’s use of statistics concerns the techniques with which he analysed his data. One issue is the size of the sample, and
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
how the linguistic markers composing it are identified. Foster’s computation of the occurrences of the so-called ‘incongruous’ relative-pronoun who in the Funerall Elegye, and in Shakespeare, depended on him having correctly identified those usages. Yet, as Jonathan Hope has pointed out, the problem with using statistics on a semantic feature is that different scholars tend to count slightly different things, with greater or lesser degrees of distinction in the type of relative, grammatical function, and so forth. Hope – a professional linguist, and author of an exemplary statistical analysis of Shakespeare’s language in his co-authored plays (Hope ) – made a count of these pronouns in Shakespeare’s poems which differed substantially from Foster’s. Foster stated that ‘Of occurrences in the Shakespeare poems of who and whom, , or . percent, appear with incongruent antecedents, as against . percent in the Elegy’ (, p. ). As Hope rightly objects, statisticians would deem the total number of instances of who/whom in the Elegye, (with ‘incongruent’), to be too small for reliable computation, and they would not accept a total of items for stylistic markers (N) numbering less than . Hope’s own calculations of the ‘incongruent’ pronouns in Shakespeare gave figures of percent (N = ) for the poems, and percent (N = ) for early and late samples from the plays, as against Foster’s percent for the poems. Divergences of this degree confirm that Foster was more ready to count who forms as incongruent than Hope was to count them as non-personal. But with such inevitably subjective judgments on matters of semantics, the resulting statistics will also be subjective, even before they are ‘processed’. Perhaps the most glaring instance of Foster basing statistical calculations on too small a sample occurs in his discussion of compound words in the Elegye and in Shakespeare (, pp. –). Bent on proving that, as he puts it, ‘W. S.’s manner of hyphenation is indistinguishable’ from Shakespeare’s, Foster actually computes the frequency of occurrence of a single word in the Elegye, ‘harvest-like’, namely ‘.’ instances per thousand words, which he then compares to the frequency for ‘compounds using -like’ in Shakespeare’s last eleven plays, revealing ‘a combined average of .’ instances per thousand words (p. ). Professional statisticians would regard that calculation with derision, and would be horrified by the way in which Foster manipulated the data concerning what is known as ‘Grade Level’, a function of word-length and sentence-length. Elliott and Valenza computed the Grade Level (GL) for Shakespeare’s plays as ranging from to , whereas the poems’ range was from to , and the Funerall Elegye had a value
Statistics and inference
of , far exceeding Shakespeare’s norms (, pp. , Appendix , pp. –). In his S posting Foster accepted these figures, although adding The Phoenix and Turtle (which Elliott and Valenza did not include, presumably as being too short) and ascribing to it a GL of . However, Foster then claimed the Elegye as a Shakespeare poem, stating that the GL values for the Shakespeare poems ‘vary . . . from GL to GL ’ ( ., Apr.). Its high score (twice as high as the narrative poems, and nearly twice as high as the Sonnets), Foster claimed, was due to its being ‘written in continuous verse without any stanzaic breaks’, a characteristic it shared with Heywood’s Troia Britannica, which also scored highly on this test (). ‘When adjusted for stanzaic form’, Foster continued, ‘FE should register a GL between and if written by Shakespeare. At GL , it’s right on the money’ (my italics). Apart from the absurdity of first including the Funerall Elegye in the canon, and then suggesting that if it’s by Shakespeare it should have the same score as it actually has, there’s the mysterious sleight-of-hand of ‘when adjusted for stanzaic form . . . ’. W. L. Godshalk wrote in to this forum, expressing doubt: ‘the phrase “When adjusted for stanzaic form” puzzles me. Obviously FE is not in stanzaic form, and so the phrase must be a negative: when adjusted for not being in stanzaic form. – But how is such an adjustment made?’ (, Apr.). As far as I know, Foster never replied. Foster’s use of sentence-length as a stylistic marker violated several principles in statistics. Anyone familiar with statistical approaches to style will know the pioneering studies of G. Udny Yule and C. B. Williams in the s and s, which explored the extent to which authors could be distinguished using this criterion. As Williams summed up this approach, since ‘the number of words in a sentence is completely at the will of the author; it is no way limited, as is word-length, by the available vocabulary’, then computation of the varying ranges (‘sentences of over four hundred words are not unknown’) can be revealing. Two disadvantages must be confronted: ‘first, that a much larger sample of writing is required in order to establish significant differences; and secondly, that the pattern of distribution is more dependent on the type of writing, whether descriptive or dialogue, poetry or prose’. An additional problem is how to decide ‘the exact definition of a “sentence”. If it is considered from the point of view of punctuation, i.e. as the words between two full stops, one must ask who was responsible for the stops – the author, the editor, or the proof-reader?’ (Williams , p. ). As we have seen, this is a peculiarly important problem in Renaissance texts, where we must also consider scribal influence on manuscript copies. Yule attempted to
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
establish normal usages by taking sample passages from several writers, counting sentence-lengths and then classifying them into ‘class intervals’, sentences containing groups of five words, –, –, and so on. C. B. Williams reproduced Yule’s data for Bacon, Coleridge, and Macaulay, which show that Bacon uses more long sentences, with one of words, while Macaulay’s longest is only words. Bacon’s peak frequency is in the –-word group [ instances]; Coleridge’s is at – [ instances]; while Macaulay has most sentences with only – words [ instances]. Macaulay has also many more short sentences with up to five words than either of the other two. ( p. )
Yule calculated the median, and the arithmetic mean, for the writers studied, which showed clear differences, but also produced a ‘skewed distribution’. Williams suggested that the variation in sentence-length might be on a geometrical, not an arithmetical scale, the variation being ‘geometric about the geometric mean’. Re-plotting the data in this form brought the frequency distribution ‘closer to the normal symmetrical pattern, which is known as the log-normal’ (pp. –), yielding the ‘normal’ or bell-shaped curve. As modified, this is a statistically more acceptable procedure, but the question remains, is sentence-length a reliable criterion for distinguishing authorship? It was used by A. Q. Morton in his studies of the authorship of the Pauline epistles, but Morton’s methodology (which had an unfortunate influence on Shakespearian stylometry in the s) has been largely discredited. One of Morton’s most powerful critics was Gustav Herdan, a leading authority on statistical approaches to language, who summed up the results of his own work on sentence-length as a style characteristic in these terms: I came to the conclusion that differences between samples from texts by the same author may greatly exceed the limits of random sampling, without for practical purposes being of any real, i. e. literary, significance. To put it succinctly, philological or literary identity of authorship is not always reflected by statistical identity of sentence length within the limits of sampling fluctuations and, conversely, literary diversity is not always reflected by statistical diversity in terms of significant differences in sentence length.
In other words, sentence-length is an unreliable criterion for authorship, given both the normal variations within any writer’s practice, and the fact that many writers in the same period might share similar preferences. Herdan warned in particular about ‘the considerable element
Statistics and inference
of personal judgement that may affect the data based on badly and arbitrarily punctuated work’ (Herdan , p. ). Foster, who shows no knowledge of the fundamental work by Yule, Williams, and Herdan, ignored altogether the whole issue of stylistic patterns, which needs computation of a large amount of material before one can establish preferred sentence-lengths. Instead, he simply declared that Another matter for consideration in a study such as this is a poet’s longest independent clause, since few writers ever exceed one hundred words . . . We may define a ‘sentence’ in this case, not as the distance between capital letter and period, since this depends often on editorial preference, but more narrowly as a single independent clause, inclusive of all parenthetical and subordinate elements, but excluding other independent clauses attached to it with a conjunction or semicolon. (, p. )
That hasty opening remark simply skipped over the issue of sentencelength frequency, reducing the stylometric computation to the length of a writer’s longest sentence, a criterion of doubtful validity. The confidentsounding assertion that ‘few writers ever exceed one hundred words’ is given no documentation, the reader being forced to take it on trust. Yet Yule’s statistics showed that in his sample of Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, no less than eighty of the sentences counted were more than words long (Williams , p. ). Admittedly, Bacon was writing prose, not verse, but until a much larger search of available data has been performed all pronouncements of this kind must be regarded with suspicion. As for Foster’s new definition of a sentence, typically ahistorical in its refusal to consider what criteria Shakespeare’s age might have had, it skated over several key issues. First, the semicolon was used in Renaissance punctuation with a rationale quite different from our own (not to mention the limited supply of punctuation marks in the Elizabethan compositor’s box). Secondly, the traditional definition of a sentence as that extent of discourse between two full-stops, Foster claims, ‘depends often on editorial preference’ – yes, but also on that of the author, for although compositors did sometimes reserve the power to alter punctuation within a sentence, I know of no evidence that they would alter a whole sentence ad libitum. – Still, these are all issues of little significance to Foster, bent on producing his kind of statistics, who informs us that ‘Shakespeare in his major nondramatic works, and in all of his last plays, has sentences (so defined) of more than ninety words’ (, p. ). Well, we’d better believe this, even though Foster cited
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
no evidence, and presumably used the modernized Riverside edition. By the same criteria, whatever they were, we are told that ‘the longest sentence in Venus and Adonis is words’, in Lucrece, , and in the Sonnets words. There follow two sentences concluding this discussion: Less than a third of the poets represented in the Cross-Sample have any sentence longer than one hundred words, and only five have a maximum sentence-length falling between and words, as in Shakespeare’s major nondramatic works. The two longest sentences in the Elegy are words (lines –) and words (lines –). (, pp. –)
Here, as throughout, the literary evidence is used to yield statistics which claim a significant identity between Shakespeare and ‘W. S.’ There are two disturbing features in this discussion, the nature of the evidence cited, and the theory that it purports to prove. For the first, the reader who now turns to the Funerall Elegye to verify Foster’s assertion receives a surprise: those two long sentences occur only in the version which Foster himself has modernized! – Truly, so much ‘depends on editorial preference’. In the original text, with its old spelling and punctuation, the first long ‘sentence’, as modernized (lines –), contains two additional full-stops at lines and ; in the second sentence (lines –) there are no less than three periods marked, at lines , , (see Appendix I, pp. –). And, in fact, Foster’s own modernized text has a colon at line , not reaching a period until line , which means that this sentence now runs to words (not as claimed), making the suggested correlation with Shakespeare even more improbable. As for the Cross-Sample, in the massed columns of table . (pp. –), Foster announced that ‘column gives the number of words in the longest independent clause for each work’, as he has himself defined it (p. ) – giving no information as to whether these texts have also been modernized (which seems not to be the case). At all events, any reader familiar with the use of statistics in literature will be highly suspicious of the patness by which Foster can claim an underlying identity between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare in the matter of sentence-length, having himself modernized the text in a way that seems to enhance that identity. As Elliott and Valenza pointed out, Foster’s modernization of the Elegye has raised its average sentence-length by percent, an unfortunate side-effect of modernization, resulting in drastically inflated figures. Modernizing spelling and punctuation is in order, of course, but it is illegitimate to use texts you have yourself modernized as the basis for stylometric arguments, whether for sentence-length
Statistics and inference
or (as noted above) for run-on lines. The second disturbing feature of Foster’s procedure here is that whereas stylometric studies attempt to establish a writer’s normal usage, his or her average sentence-length, Foster chose to focus on the exception. Elliott and Valenza object that Foster’s test, considering the length not of the average but of the longest sentence, is based ‘on maybe one or two percent of the sentences in a poem of FE’s length’. To Foster, whose method was geared towards discovering ‘some rare quirk supposedly peculiar to Shakespeare’, and shared by the author of the Funerall Elegye, such sentences hopefully reveal ‘the hand of the Bard’. But Elliott and Valenza regard the longest sentences in a text as ‘outliers, atypical of an author’s prevailing habits of self-expression. We prefer tests grounded in an author’s normal habits, not his rare aberrations’ (, p. ). That is a far sounder method, respecting as it does standard statistical practice. To take as an indicator what is, even within the Elegye itself, a sentence of outsize length, in order to force a parallel with Shakespeare, is not acceptable practice. The three deficiencies in Foster’s use of statistics that I have outlined here, together with my cumulative critique of his work, should be enough to convince most readers that his case for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye is unproven. The same result was reached in an independent analysis made by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, coorganizers of the Claremont Colleges’ Shakespeare Authorship Clinic, which ran between and . This project, set up to evaluate the fifty-eight claimants to the true authorship of Shakespeare, rejected all of them, validating the authenticity of the canon, with the exception of the collaborative plays Titus Andronicus, and Henry VI, and Timon of Athens. In Elliott and Valenza applied their various tests to the claimed Shakespearian authorship of the Elegye, comprehensively rejecting it (Elliott and Valenza, ). Their methodology differed fundamentally from Foster’s, which they describe as ‘green-light’, that is, ‘designed . . . to include as Shakespeare matches those works that shared some rare quirk supposedly peculiar to Shakespeare’. They, by contrast, performed ‘ “red-light” tests designed to exclude as mismatches works that lack a trait ubiquitous in Shakespeare’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ), a method in line with standard statistical procedures for hypothesis-testing. Foster’s method, to work properly, ‘must show that the quirk is in fact unique to Shakespeare and that every contradictory indicator has been ruled out’ (p. ). This need explains the rhetorical inflation which he and Abrams practise, using such terms as ‘unique’, ‘idiosyncratic’, ‘un-exampled’,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
and so forth, to claim that ‘W. S.’ and ‘the “real” W. S.’ could be set apart from all other candidates in their vocabulary (such as the words ‘comfortable’, or ‘opinion’ in a special sense), their use of the so-called incongruous ‘who’, hendiadys, or function-words. But, as the preceding pages have shown, none of these ‘quirks’ is peculiar to Shakespeare, and Foster’s work is so badly flawed at the analytical level that the plethora of statistics merely add innumeracy to injury. In a section called ‘Statistical Indices’ (, pp. –), Foster subjected his Cross-Sample of forty elegies to a battery of tests, summarized in pages and pages of statistical tables, triumphantly concluding that ‘the Peter elegy passes all seventeen tests’ for Shakespearian authorship (p. ). But Elliott and Valenza pointed out that in Foster’s statistical table (., pp. –) comparing the Funerall Elegye (, words) with forty other examples of elegiac verse, his sample texts range from to , words, which are then all lumped together to give combined averages. They concluded that Foster’s failure to follow the standard statistical practice of matching samples by text size simply ‘invalidated two-thirds of [his] . . . tests, which purported to eliminate elegiac samples as Shakespeare matches, to all appearances leaving only FE as a possible Shakespeare ascription’. Furthermore, Foster’s chosen texts are much too short to compare meaningfully with ,-word samples, far less with whole, ,-word plays. For the same reason one expects greater accuracy from a large poll sample than from a small one, one expects less variability for a given Shakespeare rate extrapolated from large text samples than from small ones. Large samples average away more variance than small ones . . . Any ‘profile’ of a rate, therefore, should if possible be based on samples of roughly the same size. This gets more and more important as size gets smaller. (Elliott and Valenza , p. )
Elliott and Valenza, who developed their methodology over a long period and by a process of trial and error, have always been aware of the superiority of large samples over small (a point that Foster seems unable to grasp). As they explain, because of this fact, ‘ of our tests work on play-length samples, , words or so. Only of these work on ,-blocks, whether poem or play’, because ‘Shakespeare’s variance increased too much in smaller samples to retain % consistency at any range.’ Any experienced person ‘would expect many or most of the tests valid for ,-word samples to be useless for samples half that size, and all of them to be useless for samples of less than ’ (, p. ).
Statistics and inference
Elliott and Valenza announced their preliminary findings for the Funerall Elegye in , in an essay in Computers and the Humanities (Elliott and Valenza , p. and Appendices and , pp. –), and described them in more detail in , as an essay for Shakespeare Quarterly. (Not surprisingly, Foster subjected them to violent attacks, an episode to be discussed in the Epilogue.) They summarized and endorsed MacDonald Jackson’s refutation of Foster’s data for function-words, which I discussed in chapter , agreeing that Foster had chosen only those words that brought the Elegye close to Shakespeare (, pp. , ), and they also endorsed Jackson’s self-defence against Richard Abrams’s distortion of the issue. Elliott and Valenza re-computed data for one function-word examined by Jackson, the phrase in the, against their ‘Shakespeare verse baseline’, which consisted of blocks of Shakespeare’s verse of approximately the same length as the Funerall Elegye, giving in all ‘ten ,-word blocks of poems and nineteen blocks of verse from a selection of five late plays. The result is a range of – in the’s per block of Shakespeare poems and – for verse blocks from Shakespeare plays. FE, with in the’s on our counter in , words, is a clear rejection’ (, p. ), so confirming Jackson’s point (also pp. –). Another test involved the occurrence of ‘no’s per thousand no’s and not’s’, where the Shakespearian range averages for the plays, and for the poems: the Funerall Elegye ‘has a score of , barely half of Shakespeare’s lowest score’ (p. ). In only two of the Elliott–Valenza tests was the Elegye within the Shakespeare range, the highly technical ‘Thisted-Efron Slope’ test (Shakespeare range: −. to ; Elegye: −.), and the ‘New words’ test (Shakespeare range: − to ; Elegye: −), although other tests suggested that in these respects ‘Shakespeare’s own writing was inconsistent and his stylometric range a wide one’ (p. ). Against those two tests, of uncertain value, we must set two further tests which the Elegye failed, first, one computing the use of ‘t’’ plus verb per block [of text], as in t’enoble, where the Shakespeare range is – per , words, the Elegye’s ; secondly, the use of ‘I- combinations, such as I’ll, I shall, I will, or I do (not counting I do not ), per I ’, where Shakespeare’s range is –, and the Elegye scored zero (pp. –). Finally, Elliott and Valenza pointed out ‘further anomalies’ in the Elegye, ‘where W. S.’s word-choice patterns seem to run counter to Shakespeare’s’ (p. ). Nine of these tests, computing the number of times a word occurs in the two writers’ work, are presented in table ..
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Table . . UnShakespearian word choices in the Elegye Word choice
Shakespeare
‘W. S.’
adventure adventer a husband an husband thanks (noun) thank (noun) no other none other ’em in poems
?
Source: Elliott and Valenza , p.
Those figures already show huge differences between the two writers, and Elliott and Valenza added other evidence to prove that their vocabulary preferences differed in many respects: In his plays Shakespeare was two or three times more likely to say while, whilst, or whilest than whiles. In his poems he was twenty-four times more likely to choose while or whilst over whiles. W. S. defied the odds with two while’s and nine whiles’s. Shakespeare chose till over until in his plays four times out of five; in his poems, nineteen times out of twenty. W. S. again defied the odds with one till and two until’s. Shakespeare chose because over for that (meaning ‘because’) in his poems and plays about six times out of seven. W. S. offered six for that’s in this sense (ll. , , , , , ) and no because’s. Are these discrepancies just happenstance? Or do they, too, raise doubts as to whether FE is ‘formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’? (p. )
I shall present more evidence of vocabulary preferences in chapter , which will confirm that Foster’s confident claims on this issue were completely unfounded. We may conclude that Foster’s claim that Shakespeare wrote the Funerall Elegye concentrated on statistics, as on other forms of evidence, which produced the result he wanted. From the outside, at this distance of time, it is impossible to tell whether he consciously or subconsciously selected tests that produced the desired result. Where MacDonald Jackson charitably described Foster as being subject to unconscious bias, Elliott and Valenza declare that he simply ‘ignored “inconvenient” prosody . . . [and other] evidence contrary to his thesis’ (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –), which suggests some kind of
Statistics and inference
self-awareness. Yet the image that Foster projects is one of tireless industry, pursuing every possible form of enquiry. Having announced that the Funerall Elegye had passed all of his seventeen tests for Shakespeare’s authorship, with a rhetorical gesture he added that ‘to these seventeen we might add many others’ – listing half-a-dozen – ‘each of which seems to point toward Shakespearean authorship of the Peter elegy’. With a dismissive gesture – ‘I leave to others the multiplying of such tests on the Cross-Sample’ (as if that were the right, or the only way to proceed) – Foster closed the discussion with another affirmation of the reliability of his methods: In the absence of quantifiable internal evidence against Shakespearean authorship, further tests of this sort can accomplish little except to nudge the statistical probability of non-Shakespearean authorship closer to absolute zero (disregarding, even, the problem of finding a poet with the appropriate initials). In the interests of objectivity, I have therefore made a concerted effort to find a statistically significant test of Shakespearean style that the Elegy does not pass. I have not been able to find one. (, p. )
Disregarding the red herring of ‘appropriate initials’, Foster’s na¨ıve belief that the ‘W. S.’ of the title-page is the real W. S., his mightily impressive declaration of scholarly invulnerability did not survive very long. MacDonald Jackson quickly found several ‘statistically significant’ tests that the Elegye did not pass; Elliott and Valenza added many more; I have adduced further tests from the poem’s prosody, and in the following pages I shall produce several additional tests from the poem’s diction. If Foster sincerely believed in that he had eliminated all other possible candidates, and could affirm in that the issue was now definitely settled, then perhaps the most appropriate comment is Crow’s Law, that lapidary injunction attributed to John Crow: Do not believe what you wish to believe until you perceive what you ought to have perceived.
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
In claiming that the Funerall Elegye ‘is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (a, p. ), Donald Foster never offered a reading of the whole poem, preferring to treat it as a group of linguistic elements, raw material for computational stylistics. Reduced to a bundle of snippets, deprived of context, he then compared it with bundles of other snippets, some from his specially selected corpus of funeral elegies, others from Shakespeare. Here, too, the contexts were eliminated, a favourable decision for his purposes, but unfavourable for a genuinely open-minded exploration of the extent to which the two writers were similar, or different. Fuller citations from the Shakespearian contexts would immediately bring out the differences between his work and the anonymous poet’s, differences which are less visible with Foster’s atomizing treatment of texts. In the same way, a sustained reading of the whole Elegye will reveal even more strikingly its dissimilarity from authentic works written by Shakespeare in the period –. In this chapter I shall offer a brief account of the poem as a whole, before investigating some aspects of its ‘linguistic fabric’ which show it to be the work of a different hand. The linguistic features which I select will be new to the discussion, having been overlooked by Foster. The Funerall Elegye is, for the most part, a completely conventional poem of condolence. Its goal, like all others in that genre, was to remember the deceased with respect, review his virtues and good deeds, offering his family and friends the consolation that his goodness would long be remembered, and that his life had not been in vain. Such comfort was usually given in private, best of all by a personal visit, but poets also offered consolation in writing, in both manuscript and printed form.
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
Foster made a number of impressive-sounding claims for the Elegye as a poem ‘almost entirely without precedent’ in being written for a commoner, but once again bathos intervened when he was forced to acknowledge the many exceptions to that attention-grabbing assertion. Once again he proved himself ignorant of the large secondary literature on the subject he was discussing, the personal elegy in the Renaissance, including important books by Ruth Wallerstein, O. B. Hardison Jr, and G. W. Pigman, all of which were available to Foster, as were several illuminating essays by A. L. Bennett, A. J. Murphy, and C. W. Jentoft. Most of these studies were devoted to the poetic and rhetorical conventions of the elegy, properly enough, but some also considered the social context. Over forty years ago, for example, A. L. Bennett demonstrated that the genre of the personal elegy had existed in England since the s. Foster claimed that the Elegye was virtually unique, in that, with very few exceptions, ‘no such work in English had ever before been printed for anyone outside the peerage’ (Foster , p. ). But Bennett showed that the widely disseminated collection, Tottel’s Miscellany (; editions by ) contains over twenty poems of this genre, including seven addressed to commoners (Bennett , pp. –). Bennett cited at least five other funeral elegies addressed to subjects below the peerage (pp. –), including poems by George Gascoigne, Thomas Proctor, John Donne’s ‘Elegie on Mistress Boustred’, and Jonson’s poignant epitaphs ‘On my First Daughter’, ‘On my first sonne’, and on the boy actor Salomon Pavy (Epigrammes, , , ). Many of these poems are too short to have been published separately, another of Foster’s criteria for asserting the Elegye’s unprecedented nature (, p. ), but others certainly were. Surrey’s famous epitaph, ‘Wyatt resteth here’, actually ‘appeared in , the year of Wyatt’s death, in a separately published black-letter pamphlet entitled An Excellent Epitaffe of Syr Thomas Wyat with Two Other Compendious Dytties, Wherein Are Touchyd, and Set Furth the State of Mannes Lyfe’, STC ( Jentoft , p. ). However, given that by poets were regularly writing elegies on the deaths of men and women below the peerage, or ‘of no rank or fame’, as Foster put it, then it was no great step for a family which wanted to memorialize a child who had died young, or in especially tragic circumstances, to commission a poet to write an elegy for the deceased. Indeed, such an instance occurred one year before the Funerall Elegye, in the separate publication of what is perhaps – jointly with Lycidas – the most famous seventeenth-century elegy, which Foster completely overlooks in his discussion (although it is in his bibliography of funeral elegies: , p. ), John Donne’s two
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Anniversaries, that is, An Anatomie of the World Wherein, By occasion of the untimely death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, the frailtie and the decay of this whole World is represented (), followed a year later by the matching second part, Of the Progress of the soule. As the title-page declares, Donne took the invitation to write a poem commemorating Elizabeth Drury, the only surviving child of a wealthy London landowner, who died in , aged , as the occasion to produce a wide-ranging speculative poem on this world and the next. Donne’s poetry is far more distinguished than the Funerall Elegye, needless to say, but its existence as a separate publication further weakens Foster’s attempts to give that poem a special or even unique status. The family of William Peter had a particular reason to welcome a published memorial, since he had died a violent death. Although Foster never mentioned the fact, in early modern England this category of death was peculiarly subject to scandalous and defamatory gossip, along the lines ‘bad death, bad life’. The anonymous poet devoted much energy to attacking the common view ‘That such as is the end, the life prooves so’, citing the violent death of Christ as disproving that ‘Saw’ (FE, –): Hee thus, for that his guiltlesse life was spilt By death, which was made subject to the curse; Might in like manner bee reprov’d of guilt, In his pure life, for that his end was worse. ( –)
Indeed, the tradition identifying a peaceful death with virtue and a violent one with vice was widespread, as can be seen from the proverbial saying, ‘Such as the life is, such is the end.’ The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs lists four examples of its use between and , including James Sanford, The Garden of Pleasure (), William Lambarde (‘I report me to all indifferent and Godly leaders, whether suche a lyfe deserved not such a death’), and a sermon by T. Sparke, ‘Qualis vita, finis ita, such life such death’. But theologians had long denounced such unthinking deductions. A character in one of Erasmus’s Colloquies describes the Emperor Heliogabalus as ‘most revered’, but is interrupted by another speaker who cites his violent death – ‘he’s the one who was thrown into a sewer and dragged along by a hook’. But the first speaker quashes the objection: ‘If we approve or disapprove of a person on this basis, we shall call Christ bad because he was crucified, Domitian good because he died at home.’ Like Erasmus, the Church of England regarded sudden death as a grave misfortune, and its clergy regularly denounced judgments on
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
a person’s life being made on the basis of their death. One of the verses in the Litany, specified in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer to be read three times a week, entreats: ‘From lightning and tempest, from plague, pestilence, and famine, from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us’ (Booty , p. ). Richard Hooker included in Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Politye a chapter ‘Touchinge prayer for deliverance from suddaine death’ (Book , ch. ), listing the advantages of a ‘slow and deliberat death’, in which ‘the soule may have time to call it selfe to a just accompte of all thinges past, by means whereof repentance is perfected’, patience can be exercised, and we can behave consolingly to those grieving for us. All which benefites and opportunities are by suddaine death prevented, And besides for as much as death howsoever is a generall effect of the wrath of God against synne, and the suddainenes thereof a thinge which hapneth but to few, the world in this respect feareth it the more as being subject to doubtfull constructions . . . [giving] uncharitable mindes occasion of rash sinister and suspitious verdites, whereunto they are over prone.
John Donne attacked such ‘suspitious verdites’ in his last and most famous sermon, Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body, preached at Whitehall on February . This address, widely regarded as ‘the Authors owne funeral Sermon’, took its text from the Psalms (:), ‘And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, i. e. from death’, arguing that ‘it belongs to God, and not to man to passe a judgement upon us at our death’ (p. ). In particular, ‘upon violent deaths inflicted, as upon malefactors, Christ himselfe hath forbidden us by his owne death to make any ill conclusion; for his own death had those impressions in it’ (pp. –). Donne warned his hearers that God governs not by examples, but by rules . . . therefore make no ill conclusion upon sudden death . . . Stil pray wee for a peaceable life against violent death, and for time of repentence against sudden death, and for sober and modest assurance against distemperd and diffident death, but never make ill conclusions upon persons overtaken with such deaths; Domini Domini sunt exitus mortis, ‘to God the Lord belong the issues of death’. (p. )
To God the manner of death is as nothing compared to the way in which a Christian has lived: ‘God doth not say, Live well and thou shalt dye well, that is, an easie, a quiet death; But live well here, and thou shalt live well for ever . . . A good life here [doth] flowe into an eternall life, without any consideration, what manner of death wee dye.’ In applying this argument, including the example of Christ’s death, to the case of
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
William Peter, ‘W. S.’ showed himself to be completely in line with English Protestantism. Besides this special task, ‘W. S.’ also fulfilled the normal expectations of a consolatory work in celebrating the deceased for his virtuous life. Such writing belongs to the rhetorical genre known as epideictic, and Renaissance poets wishing to properly exploit this genre could draw on classical texts, such as the ubiquitous Rhetorica ad Herennium, or on numerous contemporary reworkings of this material. Modern studies, such as those already cited by A. L. Bennett and C. W. Jentoft, have shown that Tudor poets modelled themselves on the ‘places’ or topics for ‘the oration demonstrative’, as set down by Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric (; rev. edn , eight editions by ). Wilson suggests that the writer should ‘observe things’ about his subject ‘Before his life’ (that is, considering the region in which he was born, his parents, family), ‘In his life’, and ‘After his death’ (Vickers , p. ). In a man’s life ‘praise must be parted . . . into the gifts of good things of the mind, the body, and of fortune’, of which the second and third are praiseworthy not in themselves but as they have been used. By contrast, ‘Gifts of the mind deserve the whole trump and sound commendation above all other, wherein we may use the rehearsal of virtues as they are in order, and beginning at his infancy tell all his doings till his last age.’ Like the author of Ad Herennium, and his English contemporaries, Wilson recommends a chronological sequence, itemizing the ‘places’ appropriate to the six ages of man. He then gives brief explanations of each heading, such as the subject’s ‘learning’ in various disciplines, his leisure accomplishments, his ‘prowesses done as service to the king and his country’, and his behaviour during illness and death. ‘The love of all men towards him and the lamenting generally for his lack’, should be mentioned, while ‘after a man’s death are considered his tomb, his coat armor set up, and all such honors as are used in funerals’ (p. ). Wilson urges the eulogist to mention specifically the extent to which the deceased possessed the four cardinal virtues – Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance – depending on whether he or she lived a public or a private life. It is important to evaluate the Elegye’s relation to its genre (another topic ignored by Foster), since the classical–Renaissance theory of genres laid down expectations for writer and reader concerning subject-matter, attitude, tone, and the very details of language. In electing to write within a specific genre, a poet was voluntarily accepting the guidance of accumulated wisdom which mapped out some areas but left him free in others. The funeral elegy was also a consolatio for the surviving relatives and
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
friends, so that it had a double orientation, towards past and present. Viewed from this perspective, we can see that the Elegye for William Peter corresponds to the classical and English Renaissance tradition in some respects, such as subordinating lament for the deceased’s death to praise of his life (Bennett , pp. –). However, the Elegye differs from the ideal type in having an extremely narrow scope, and lacking any overall structure, such as the chronological one offered by the traditional four or six ages of man. Admittedly, William Peter died young, but ‘W. S.’ might have found some other organizing strategy perhaps, if he had had more time. His poem mourns the deceased by itemizing his virtues, one of several possibilities in the poetics of elegy, but it fails to organize these into any coherent pattern. Basically, one main idea – ‘He was a kind, true, perfect, gentleman’ (FE, ), perhaps echoing Chaucer’s description of the Knight in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales – is elaborated through several predictable variations, interspersed with moralizing attacks on the vices of the age, especially malicious report. The poet loyally does his best to reclaim the reputation of a young gentleman of good family unfortunately killed in a drunken quarrel over a horse, but fails to produce any clear development of argument or biographical history. This lack of structure becomes all the more glaring by a curious feature which readers who consult the complete text (Appendix I, pp. ff ) can find for themselves, namely that after some lines we reach what seems at first sight the brief ‘Summary’ that the rhetoric books recommended, a concluding paragraph restating the loss to posterity while fixing the poet in his role of diligent but modest celebrant of virtue: But here I trust, I have discharged now (Fair lovely branch too soone cut off ) to Thee, My constant and irrefragable vow,
namely, to ‘offer up to Memory, / The value of my tallent’ (–, –). But then the poem suddenly starts up again, as if the poet had realized that he had not yet written an acceptable number of lines, or failed to cover the important issues adequately: Yet ere I take my longest last farewell, From thee, faire marke of sorrow; let me frame Some ampler work of thanke, wherein to tel What more thou didst deserve . . . (–)
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
The remaining lines, this ‘ampler work of thanke’, however, add little new, covering much of the same ground again, as any reader can see. Indeed, the same signals of ‘sincere memorialist’ and ‘imminent ending’ recur again at lines –: Now run’s the method of this dolefull song, In accents breefe to thee, O thou deceast! To whom those paines do onely all belong, As witnesses I did not love thee least
And they recur again at lines –: And now if I have level’d mine account, And reckon’d up in a true measured score, Those perfect graces which were ever wont To wait on thee alive, I aske no more.
– but even here he asks his readers to work through a further twenty-two lines. The absence of any overall design can be shown more clearly, perhaps, if we summarize the poem’s argument, or sequence of topics: Line Topic Deceased’s premature death His virtue the best monument His memory will live His goodness: virtuous life undeserving death virtues: faith, constancy, generosity absence of faults innocence The poet declares that all men are subject to defamation from malice The deceased’s promising youth, education, and intellectual gifts His religious piety and zeal His reason defended him against vice His father predeceased him His virtue rejected vice The poet will not give Peter’s full life story, but could display ‘A good man’ in every way
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
Had the deceased lived to old age he would have been respected His honesty, worth; a ‘perfect gentleman’ He did not follow fashion and vanity, but virtuous behaviour He did not indulge in vain discourse, but practised judicious silence His mind preserved an ideal goodness He knew and followed the best, in true perfection His mind and body displayed all the best attributes ( are listed) He deserves praise His memory will live He is mourned in Devonshire The poet points out that virtue can be as glorious in private persons as in the illustrious The poet complains at the ungrateful and unjust way he himself has been treated. But time and truth may one day disclose his malicious enemies The deceased was educated at Oxford, and won respect there for his virtuous behaviour His memory will live Parents will tell their children how Peter was killed by a cruel and mad assailant All who hear this story will mourn When the world ends on the day of judgment, and the book of human deeds is read, his virtues will be revealed He employed his gifts properly, worshipping God His constancy in friendship The poet reminds us that when we die we leave behind a reputation, honourable if we have lived well The deceased deserves honour Although dead, his memory will live All people love and lament him The poet professes his undying friendship, and regrets that he did not declare his love while the deceased was alive Therefore he has chosen to write this memorial, neither hired for money nor seeking to ingratiate Now he has discharged his vow to express his respect for the deceased Here he offers up his poetic talent, such as it is, to memorializing the deceased
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct But before ending he wishes to make a more detailed eulogy He will defend the deceased from malice and false report The poet attacks the errors of humanity, locked in the flesh, prone to ignorance and false inference The poet exclaims against ‘this world’s’ grievous misunderstandings The deceased did not follow fashion, vice, and the corrupt values of ‘the world’, but remained firm in his knowledge and values The poet attacks those who give in to their desires The deceased controlled himself, and found health, peace, and content within the law At Oxford, where he took both his BA and MA, he learned generosity and discretion Returned to his home in Devonshire, he lived a well-ordered life, financially secure His practice of reason and good behaviour made him loved He was a constant friend He was a Christian He avoided extravagant utterance, preferring a disciplined style His chief virtue was faith and constancy This caused the deadly quarrel The quarrel was caused by wrath and choler His memory as a virtuous man will live on The wicked’s name is extinguished by death The poet draws a moral about the dangers of innocent trust The deceased’s death was caused by his virtue of loyal friendship The poet defends the deceased’s reputation from pre- or nonChristian moralists who claim that ‘as a man dies, so he has lived’ The poet cites the contrary instance of Christ, who died to redeem mankind from eternal death The poet argues that the deceased’s death, like Christ’s, followed a guiltless life The poet warns against profaning God, who can punish evildoers with death and dishonour The poet cites another Christian parallel, the biblical account of how Abel was unjustly murdered by his brother Cain, and sent innocent to heaven The poet urges that the deceased, having suffered the same violent death as these innocent sufferers should not be slandered
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
The poet recalls that the saints also, now glorified in heaven, suffered violent deaths, and were rewarded by grace The poet rejects all malicious lies and envious misrepresentations concerning the deceased In the eyes of good people the deceased’s memory will live to a grateful posterity, as a virtuous gentleman The poet reminds us that worldly honours are worthless without virtue, and that accepting a modest and virtuous station in life brings more content than restless ambition, for virtue is the true nobility The poet urges other young men to learn that sudden death can befall anyone Witness the deceased: yet death could not deprive him of the deserved memory that he will enjoy Had the deceased lived longer he would have been a valuable pattern for well doing, so rare in this age Therefore his loss is especially sad, as his friends can testify Among the mourners his wife, married to him for nine years, will miss him most His child(ren) will also miss a loving father But since the deceased was a supremely good man, his memory will live The poet begins to conclude his elegy, taking leave of his dead friend, and wishing that he could bring him back to life The poet hopes that he has discharged the debt of friendship by celebrating the deceased’s virtues The poet vows to bear his own griefs better in future, and to trust in hope The poet finally takes his farewell, trusting that the deceased’s memory will long live among virtuous people and those who loved him Several distinctive qualities of the Funerall Elegye emerge from that summary, more clearly (and certainly more painlessly) than from the poem itself. If we compare it with the range of topics for eulogy outlined by the author of Ad Herennium, and diffused through the European rhetorical tradition for over a millennium, we are struck by the paucity of this poet’s invention. Where the rhetoric books could distinguish external circumstances, physical attributes, and qualities of character, listing half-a-dozen topics under each, the eulogist of William Peter can only offer a rather meagre itemization of virtues, most of which are mentioned in both parts of the poem (here indicated as
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
A and B, observing the premature conclusion I have pointed out at line ): He embodied virtue (A: , , , –, –, –; B: –), and innocence (A: ; B: –) Had he lived longer, he would have been a respected model of behaviour (A: –, –; B: –) He was a good man (A: –, ; B: –, –) His death was undeserved (A: , ) He was a faithful, constant friend (A: , , ; B: , , ) He showed both generosity and gratitude (A: –) He was a pious Christian (A: –, , –; B: , ) He used reason to control his passions ( A: –, –; B: –, ) He was a gentleman (A: –; B: ) He did not follow vain fashion ( A: –; B: –) He avoided redundant speech, practising verbal economy (A: –; B: –) He deserves to be praised (A: –, –) He will be mourned (A: –, –, –; B: –) He was loved (B: –, –) The single topic repeated most frequently is the assurance that his memory will live (A: –, , , –; B: –, , –, –). This is an important topic within the consolatory tradition, of course, especially reassuring for the surviving family and friends, but reference to the topics of the consolatio will again show how sparingly the poet has drawn on this tradition. The sheer amount of repetition well justifies Richard Proudfoot’s verdict that ‘the elegy seems much longer than its lines as a result of redundancy of diction and repetition of matter’ (Proudfoot , p. ). As for the virtues praised, although admirable, their enumeration amounts to a mere listing, a catalogue of approved forms of behaviour, quite lacking any individualizing characteristics. The poet simply heaps them up, generously distributing hyperboles, but without giving any sense of an actual, observed human being. What we perceive, rather, is an ideal, a collection of moral positives put together in the absence of any credible human behaviour, such as the sequence itemizing William Peter’s virtues (FE, –; Appendix I, p. ). They may amount to the ultimate character-reference, but we do not feel that such a person existed. The prevailing vagueness of the poem is partly due to its abstract and tautologous diction (to which we must return), and partly to
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
the poet’s lack of information about the deceased’s life. We are told that he benefited from his early education (FE, –, ), but in such general terms as to leave it unclear whether he was educated at home or attended a grammar school. We receive an equally vague account of Peter’s time at Oxford (–), but in the second part of the poem, that reprise of the first adding a few more details, ‘W. S.’ does mention that Peter ‘was double honor’d in degree’ ( –), having proceeded both BA and MA. We are told that Peter’s father predeceased him (), and (mistakenly) that William had been married for nine years ( –), truly meagre and inaccurate information. As for the topics recommended by the rhetoricians – external circumstances, such as parents and their qualities, the region in which he was born, power and wealth, physical advantages, such as strength or agility – ‘W. S.’ either gives them the briefest attention or ignores them altogether. We are willing to make due allowances to a poet who had to compose at speed, being given less than two weeks to produce a poem, but even so, some first-hand knowledge of the deceased would have added vastly to the poem’s interest. I find it inconceivable that Shakespeare would have written at such length having so little to go on. The poem is dutiful, repetitive, and poorly structured. Shakespeare’s long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, lavish an enormous amount of invention on the rather limited source material, dramatize the stories with considerable vigour, diversify them with episodes, and bring them to a coherent conclusion. The Elegye lacks any innate structure, and could easily be rearranged, shortened, and no doubt improved in the process. The poem is unShakespearian in other general terms. It includes a gratuitous sequence (FE, –; Appendix I, p. ), in which the poet describes some obscure slight to ‘my name and credit’ that he has undergone, complains at ‘My countries thanklesse misconstruction’ (in this period the word ‘country’ could refer to a county or other region), yet expresses the hope that Time, the Father of unblushing Truth, May one day lay ope malice which hath crost it: And right the hopes of my indangered youth, Purchasing credit in the place I lost it. Even in which place, the subject of the verse . . . Had education, and new beeing
Subsequently ‘W. S.’ invites those who ‘injoy the youth / Of your best dayes’ to let Peter’s premature death remind them of the uncertainty
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
of life (–), drawing from the sad story a personal moral for himself: . . . I aske no more. But shall heereafter in a poore content, Immure those imputations I sustaine, Learning my dayes of youth so to prevent, As not to be cast downe by them again (–)
From those passages we may reliably deduce that ‘W. S.’ was still a young man, by the standards of the early seventeenth century, in which life expectancy was much lower than we know it, and ‘middle age’ was thought to begin in the forties. The Seven Ages of Man, as every reader of As You Like It (..–) will know, were classified as infantia, pueritia, adolescentia, iuventus, virilitas, senectus, and decrepitas. Where to classify Shakespeare, who turned forty-eight in , and gave up his theatrical career to retire to Stratford, is a moot point: either virilitas or senectus, but certainly not under iuventus. On the less clear-cut scale of youth, middle age, and old age, he definitely comes in the middle category, as represented by the OED’s apposite citation from Thomas Coryat’s Crudities (): ‘He was a middle-aged man, as about forty yeares old.’ In A Line of Life John Ford described ‘life, whose Charter’ (note ‘the incongruous who’) laid down the triple division ‘youth till twentie, manhood till fortie, old age till our end’ (NDW, p. ). This is yet another point which makes any identification of ‘W. S.’ with Shakespeare highly unlikely. As for the term ‘prevent’ (line ), Foster first glossed it as ‘circumvent’, subsequently suggesting ‘not to ward off or to thwart . . . but “to anticipate chronologically” ’ (, pp. , ). In fact, ‘prevent’ had a theological meaning, ‘To go before with spiritual guidance and help; said of God, or of his grace anticipating human action or need’ (SOED). Once again the present tense, ‘imputations I sustaine’, suggests that whatever has happened to ‘W. S.’ in his ‘dayes of youth’ – whether the initials refer to the poet or to the patron who commissioned the poem, as Gilles Monsarrat (forthcoming) has argued – is very recent, not yet over, and the fact that he makes a resolution to learn from the event and do better in future sounds more like a man in his twenties than one nearing fifty. ( John Ford was aged twenty-five in .) The studied vagueness of this account of the ‘shame’ the poet had undergone might seem to defeat any further biographical investigation. But Foster, determined at all costs to link Shakespeare with the poem,
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
having initially affirmed ‘that the alleged sin took place in Oxford’, subsequently claimed that ‘the poet’s disgrace appears to have been a public scandal of some sort, not linked to the university’ (p. ), thus allowing himself to suggest a connection between W. S.’s unnamed scandal and that infamous (and equally mysterious) disgrace suffered by William Shakespeare as intimated in the Sonnets. That the poet endured some kind of public humiliation is suggested by Sonnets –, –, –, , and perhaps also by Sonnets – . . . [following] Joseph Pequigney’s suggestion, based on a close reading of the sonnets themselves, that Shakespeare ca. was denounced for homosexual conduct of some sort. ( pp. –)
It would take an inordinate amount of space to make a counter-argument properly, so let me simply say that no biographical or ‘close’ reading of the Sonnets has ever produced any coherent evidence that the human feelings described and represented in those poems are actual feelings felt by Shakespeare on specific occasions for real people. Such a na¨ıve approach would turn the whole of lyric poetry from Petrarch to Milton, at least, into concealed autobiography, an unusually silly form of reductivism. As for Foster’s suggestion – dutifully echoed by Richard Abrams (a, p. ) – that in the Elegye Shakespeare is somehow publicly hinting at the ‘infamous . . . disgrace’ of having been branded with the accusation of unnatural sexual practices, any social historian of this period can tell us that to be ‘denounced for homosexual conduct’ in Shakespeare’s time was a very serious accusation, with potentially fatal consequences. Had you been so unfortunate as to suffer that shame, the last thing you would want to do would be to disclose it, especially not in a dozen or so sonnets. And in any case, Shakespeare’s life record, though disappointingly neutral to those who would like to know ‘what he really thought or felt’, took place much of the time in public, and is extensively documented. It is hard to believe that a public humiliation of this kind would pass unnoticed, given the frequent display of righteous indignation expressed by the orthodox moralists of his time against ‘unnatural acts’. Freeing ourselves from such fantasies, the main reason for disbelieving that Shakespeare wrote these obscure and resentful complaints in the Elegye about slurs on his name – slurs which are simultaneously said to be undeserved while forming the subject of the poet’s well-intentioned resolves to improve his future behaviour – is that such a self-disclosure is completely at variance with Shakespeare’s otherwise studious
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
impersonality. Why should a dramatist who had repeatedly lost himself behind the hundreds of characters he created, and never left any utterance in propria persona – except for the dedications to his narrative poems, his deposition in the Bellott–Mountjoy suit, and his will – why should such a writer suddenly reveal his deep sense of personal grievance in a poem written on the death of some unfortunate young man in Devonshire, a poem written, moreover, at the same time that he was taking part in his brother’s burial in Stratford, with all the mourning rituals observed by close-knit families in those times? This theory beggars belief. A third general reason why the Funerall Elegye as a whole must be judged unShakespearian is its religiosity. As I observed above, in his pious and no doubt justified desire to free William Peter from the cynical judgment, ‘as he lived, so he died’, his elegist cited at some length the appropriate parallel with Christ (FE, –; Appendix I, p. ). It so happens that very few of Shakespeare’s characters refer to Christ, mostly those in history plays set in the Middle Ages, which include allusions to promised pilgrimages to ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘The Holy Land’. Shakespeare’s characters very occasionally refer to ‘my redeemer’, or to ‘the precious image of our dear redeemer’ (R, .., ). They sometimes invoke ‘the name of Jesu Christ’ (H, ..), or use the common expression ‘Jesu, Jesu’, but it is significant that such utterances take place mostly in prose scenes, and are spoken by comic characters – Sir Hugh Evans, Fluellen, Mistress Quickly, and Justice Shallow. With these notable exceptions no serious character in Shakespeare’s plays invokes the name of Christ in verse. (No doubt ecclesiastical censorship, albeit sporadically enforced, kept all dramatists for the public stage under some constraint.) The author of the Elegye, by contrast, invokes Christ without any embarrassment or constraint, as the greatest instance of an unjust death after a virtuous life: Thus Hee, who to the universall lapse Gave sweete redemption, offring up his bloud, To conquer death by death; and loose the traps Of Hell, even in the triumph that it stood: Hee thus, for that his guiltlesse life was spilt By death, which was made subject to the curse; Might in like manner bee reprov’d of guilt, In his pure life, for that his end was worse.
(FE, –)
Instancing Christ had a positive effect on the Elegye’s verse, inspiring ‘W. S.’ to a more concentrated focus, a more concise and more
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
euphonious utterance. This sequence shows an intimate knowledge of the major poles around which Christian belief turns – the Fall of man redeemed by Christ, His overcoming death and harrowing Hell (although Donald Foster, either unaware of the biblical context or wishing to trivialize the poem’s Christian content, took this as referring to the trapdoors in Elizabethan theatres), its language expressing an easy familiarity with the Bible. The only doubt we might have, whether it be legitimate to compare the fate of this unfortunate young man with that of our redeemer, can be assuaged when we recall that Donne had done so. Indeed, ‘W. S.’ adds his own justification: But oˆ farre bee it, our unholy lips Should so prophane the Deity above: As theerby to ordaine revenging whips, Against the day of Judgment and of Love: The hand that lends us honour in our dayes, May shorten when it please; and justly take Our honor from us, many sundry wayes, As best becomes that wisedome did us make. (–)
Even that orthodox recognition of divine power has a conciseness about it, reminiscent of the Psalms, which the poet nowhere displays in the sequences eulogizing William Peter’s virtue. Here, for the first time, he seems to compose from a real familiarity with his subject-matter, and with a sense of relief that he has something concrete to write about. Christianity is something that he has lived, is living with. The second and third instances that ‘W. S.’ cites in arguing that a violent death is no proof of a wasted life, Cain’s murdering Abel, and the fate of the Saints as Christian martyrs, produce the most successful poetry in the whole Elegye (FE, –; Appendix I, p. ). The second passage, celebrating the Saints, has been judged worthy of Milton, recalling the conclusion of Lycidas: Those Saints before the ever-lasting throne, Who sit with crownes of glory on their heads, Washt white in bloud, from earth hence have not gone, All to their joyes, in quiet on their beds; But tasted of the sower-bitter scourge, Of torture and affliction, ere they gained, Those blessings which their sufferance did urge. Whereby the grace fore-promis’d they attained. (FE, –)
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
The similarities are clearly due to their common heritage from the Bible, especially the description in the Book of Revelations of the ‘great multitude’ in heaven, ‘which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (:), that great company who ‘sung as it were a new song before the throne’ (: –), ‘the throne of God, and of the Lambe’ (:) from which proceeds the ‘water of life’, with the reassuring promise that ‘the Lamb . . . shall lead them unto the living fountain of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes’ (:; :). The author of William Peter’s Elegye was obviously steeped in the Bible. So was Shakespeare, of course, whose characters regularly quote or allude to biblical texts. But here again a difference can be seen, for they only ever do so in short sequences, a verse or two at a time, for what are allusions, sometimes directly signalled as such, rather than extended discussions. And the biblical parallels in Shakespeare are often indirect, referring to only one aspect of the passage recalled, and are not meant to be taken literally. When Cordelia says, ‘O dear father, / It is thy business that I go about’ (Lear, ..–), Shakespeare (whether consciously or not) was clearly echoing Luke :, ‘I must go about my father’s business’, but that does not make Cordelia a Christ figure, since her ‘business’ is the entirely secular one of attempting to restore Lear to the throne. Shakespeare’s ‘use of Scripture’, according to the leading modern authority, ‘is primarily intended to serve dramatic ends rather than to have theological significance’ (Shaheen , p. ). It does not directly mention biblical events, nor does it seriously discuss issues of guilt and redemption. Whoever consults Naseeb Shaheen’s three meticulously documented volumes will find that the vast majority of Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible consist of one- or two-line passages, corresponding to a single sentence of scripture. Longer, connected sequences are rare. Furthermore, Shaheen’s careful comparison of every Shakespeare play with its sources reveals that for the most part the dramatist ignored biblical allusions in the source material, which are often densely doctrinal. The crucial point, as ever, is that Shakespeare adapted such allusions both to character and to the speaker’s purposes. While we may expect his bishops and archbishops (in Henry VI, Richard II, Henry V ) to be fluent in their invocations of scripture, it is amusing to note that in Henry IV nearly half of ‘the biblical and liturgical references in the play’, out of the that Shaheen accepts as genuine allusions, ‘come from the mouth of Falstaff ’ (Shaheen , p. ).
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
Another character who uses the Bible for his own, sophistic ends, is Shylock, to whom Shakespeare gives one of the very few long scriptural allusions (MV, .. –), Jacob’s bargain with Laban (Gen. –) about the grazing of his sheep, which Shylock uses as a specious apologia for usury (Shaheen , pp. –). And Shakespeare leaves us in no doubt as to how that apologue can be regarded, in Antonio’s tart comment: The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, An evil soul producing holy witness (MV, ..–)
If Shakespeare’s biblical allusions are brief, indirect, and adapted to – often irreverent – dramatic contexts, ‘W. S.’ referred to the Bible frequently, appealing directly to its doctrinal significance. Donald Foster missed many of these biblical allusions, only noting three in his latest edition of the poem, in the Norton Shakespeare (). For the ‘curious eye’ that could ‘scantly find a mote amidst the sun, / Of his too-shortned dayes’ (FE, –), he suggested Matthew : –, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged . . . And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, & perceivest not the beame that is in thine owne eye?’ For the ‘booke where every worke is writ’ () Foster cited two passages in Revelation referring to ‘the Booke of life’ (:, :), but missed the real allusion, which is to :, describing how ‘the dead were judged of those things which were written in the bookes according to their workes’. (Foster then added the appallingly inappropriate gloss: ‘perhaps also anticipating the poet’s own collected works’.) For the ‘Saints’ whose souls are ‘washt white in bloud’ ( –) he cited the passage from Revelation already referred to. In his edition of the poem for the revised Riverside Shakespeare (), J. J. M. Tobin identified four additional biblical parallels. For the Elegye’s account of William Peter’s pious life, through which he ‘did declare, / That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock: / A Rock of Frendship figured in his name’ (–), Tobin – while perceptively describing this as ‘An oddly pious phrasing from the usually religiously inscrutable Shakespeare’ – cited Corinthians :, ‘[our fathers] did all drinke the same spirituall drinke (for they dranke of the spirituall Rocke that followed them: and the Rocke was Christ)’, and Matthew :, ‘And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rocke will I build my Church . . . ’. In the Elegye’s extended comparison of William Peter to Christ (FE, –), Tobin pointed out that ‘the sower-bitter scourge,/Of
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
torture and affliction’ (–) is a deliberate echo of Christ’s passion, as in Matthew :, , ‘Thus [Pilate] scourged Jesus, and delivered him to be crucified . . . They gave him vinegar to drinke mingled with gall . . . ’ Katherine Duncan-Jones also underlined the many biblical allusions in the poem, even arguing that ‘the work most frequently echoed in the Elegie is the Bible, and especially those books most drawn on by Puritans, the Old Testament prophets and Revelation’ (, pp. –). For a passage in the Elegye which Abrams has hailed as ‘One of the poem’s few gems’, the anticipation of the Day of Judgment – For when the world lies winterd in the stormes Of fearefull consummation; and layes downe, Th’ unsteddie change of his fantastick formes, Expecting ever to be over-throwne ( –)
– she suggested a parallel in the book of Daniel: ‘for the overspreading of abominations hee shall make it desolate, even untill the consummation & that determined shall be poured upon the desolate’ (Dan. :). All these parallels establish that the diction and thought-patterns of ‘W. S.’ were deeply influenced by the Bible. One additional allusion which has so far passed unnoticed (I have no doubt that more could be found) concerns the poet’s apparently valedictory signing-off, in what I have described as his first premature conclusion: Heere then I offer up to Memory, The value of my tallent (precious man) Whereby if thou live to Posterity, Though’t be not as I would, tis as I can: “In minds from whence endeavor doth proceed, “A ready will is taken for the deed. ( –)
In addition to the obvious reference to the biblical parable of the talents (Matt. :–), there is a clear reminiscence of the conclusion to the Second book of Maccabees, the final item in the Apocrypha, which describes the victory of Judas Maccabeus over Nicanor, and the latter’s death (in ). The historian–narrator ends his contract with the reader in these terms: Thus farre as concerning Nicanors matters, and from that time the Hebrewes had the city in possession. And heere will I also make an end.
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
If I have done well, and as the story required, it is the thing that I desired; but if I have spoken slenderly and barely, it is that I could. ( Macc. :–)
Given the extensive biblical knowledge displayed in the Elegye, the fact that ‘W. S.’ could write, without any feeling of incongruity or embarrassment, a forty-line sequence directly referring to Christ’s redemptive death, Abel’s murder, and the Saints enthroned in heaven, which resembles nothing in Shakespeare (consistent in not disclosing his personal feelings about religion, or anything else); given, also, his awareness of the Church of England’s official line discouraging the bad-mouthing of those who died a violent death; and his general inwardness or familiarity with traditional modes of piety, it is hardly surprising that some readers have supposed ‘W. S.’ to have been an Anglican clergyman. We need not go to those lengths, but his readiness to address religious topics directly is one of several aspects that make his Elegye for William Peter profoundly unShakespearian. As we have observed on several occasions, the diction of A Funerall Elegye is highly abstract. Other readers struck by this stylistic feature include MacDonald Jackson, who felt moved to comment on Foster’s condescending description of its poetry as being ‘no better, if no worse, than what may be found in Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen’ (, p. ). Anyone familiar with the rich and varied verse of those plays will agree with Jackson in finding this an extraordinary statement, revealing a certain impercipience about the very nature of Shakespeare’s distinction as a poet. Shakespeare’s poetic language is concrete, incessantly linking words to things and deeds. It is packed with sensuous content. It is active, dynamic. It caters to the inner ear and eye. It is supercharged with metaphor that constantly stimulates the reader’s or auditor’s imagination. In mature Shakespearian verse words vitalize one another, drawing out latent images and associations. A Funeral Elegy, in contrast, has a predominant air of dull abstraction; forays into the figurative end in muddled clich´e. The poem is by no means negligible, but it is the product of a dutifully moralistic mind with none of Shakespeare’s linguistic awareness, penchant for the particular, or creative flair. ( Jackson , p. ).
Whoever reads the poem with even moderate attention will find that the ‘air of dull abstraction’ is caused by the proliferation of abstract nouns, many of which are printed either in italics, or with capital letters, or both:
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Whiles both his Youth and Vertue did intend () His constant temper, in the equall weight Of thankfulnesse, and kindnesse: Truth doth leave Sufficient proofe . . . (–)
The late William Peter had a character Which (harvest-like) did yeeld againe the crop Of Education, betterd, in his truth: Those noble twins of heaven-infused races, Learning and Wit, refined in their kind: Did joyntly both, in their peculiar graces, Enrich the curious temple of his mind. Indeed a temple, in whose precious white, Sat Reason by Religion over-swayd: Teaching his other senses, with delight, How Piety and Zeale should bee obey’d. (–)
These are the abstractions of moralizing discourse, in the broad ethical– religious tradition descending from Roman philosophical–political writing (one thinks of the frequency with which Cicero invokes the virtues and vices in De Officiis, De Oratore, and the Disputationes Tusculanae). In the Renaissance, enriched by the traditions of Christian allegory, such abstractions provided the basic terminology for ethical writing, whether academic or popularizing, in sermons or satires, and they were always ready to appear as a walk-on part in some chivalric romance. ‘W. S.’ certainly heaps them up: the most frequently recurring of these terms is ‘Vertue(s)’ and its cognates, of which I count ten occurrences (lines , , , , , , , , , ), followed by ‘Hope’; but we also find ‘worth’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘deserts’, ‘Respect’, ‘errors’, ‘malice’, ‘innocence’, ‘detraction’, ‘Reasons golden Meane’, ‘knowledge’, ‘fit moderation’, ‘Respect’, ‘Honesty and Worth’, ‘Opinion’, ‘vanities’, ‘conceit’, ‘harmony of goodnesse’, ‘Nature’, ‘perfection’, ‘Minde and Body’, ‘Plenty and Desert’, ‘Time, the Father of unblushing Truth’, ‘honesty’, ‘worthiness’, ‘well-imployed wit’, ‘constant faith’, ‘grace and strength’, ‘Youth’, ‘memory and shape’, ‘honour’, ‘fame’, ‘wrong’, ‘worth’, ‘love’, ‘truth’, ‘desert’, ‘President’ [that is, ‘precedent’, not ‘president’, as Foster modernized it], ‘merit’, ‘Memory’, ‘Posterity’ – and so on, in the first lines alone. At this point, as we have seen, the poet takes a deep breath and adds what is in effect a second part to his poem, in which he rewrites every topos he has used at greater length, and with complete predictability. The sheer
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
frequency of these abstract nouns is unlike anything in Shakespeare. Computation of such abstractions, like so many attempts to quantify linguistic material, may give rise to disagreement about definitions and categories. My own estimate is personal, but at least consistently arrived at, and totals abstract nouns in lines, or an occurrence of one every . lines. For a play of the length of Cymbeline, say, at , verse lines, that would mean , abstractions. I invite interested readers to make their own computation for that play, which will surely call in question Foster’s claim that the ‘linguistic fabric’ of the Funerall Elegye is ‘indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’. Another striking feature of the Elegye’s diction is its liking for polysyllabic, Latinate words. Ordinary readers and playgoers might be excused for thinking that Shakespeare made little use of such vocabulary, but linguists have shown that he not only used many Latinisms but created new words based on Latin forms. Bryan Garner’s thorough study of Shakespeare’s neologizing credited him with over words formed on Latin models, ‘by adding nominal suffixes to pre-existing nouns: acture, aidance, blastment’, for instance, ‘by shortening –ion nouns into verbs or participial adjectives: adulterate, arbitrate, castigate’, and so forth. Some of these creations ‘appear to have served as metrical variants – annexion and annexment, . . . illume as an apocopic form of illumine or illuminate, . . . vasty for vast, and reverb for reverberate’ (Garner , p. ). Thanks to the labours of T. W. Baldwin, we know that Shakespeare had had the standard Elizabethan grammar-school education, with its remarkably intensive analytical approach to Latin style, the best students acquiring a high linguistic consciousness and a range of skills which were then let loose on English. Shakespeare may have violated the strict rules of Latin morphology, as Garner pointed out, by employing the inseparable particle dis- with a noun to form the verbs disquantity, disproperty, disbench, discandy (p. ), but the point is that he had sufficient confidence in his linguistic skills to invent freely, whenever he needed a new word for a particular character or situation. Shakespeare’s Latinisms were applied for specific dramatic ends. One familiar purpose, putting his grammar-school teachers in a rather comic light, was to mock pedants. Henry Woudhuysen has recently shown how two characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost are in effect individualized by the different kinds of polysyllables that they use. Holofernes has a fondness for words ending in –tion; in a similar way, Armado finds it hard to resist words which end in –ate. Thus the pedant produces intimation, insinuation,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
explication, replication, inclination, nomination, recreation, salutation, motions, revolutions, instructions and invention, while the fantastic soldier’s vocabulary includes nominate, reprobate, immaculate, situate, passionate, indubitate, preambulate, festinately, educate, congratulate, importunate, potentates, inconsiderate, and captivated. This is a clear instance of what we might call characterization by termination, ‘very ominous endings’. The excessive and indiscriminate use of Latinate terminations, especially words ending in –ate and –ity, was one of the targets in Ben Jonson’s satire on Marston’s affected diction, as Arthur King showed in a classic study, while Shakespeare similarly mocked the linguistic affectations of Parolles. But Shakespeare more often used Latinate speech elements as a foil to native English ones, an insight that we owe to an outstanding book by J¨urgen Sch¨afer, which was unfortunately never translated into English. Sch¨afer used a rigorously statistical approach, computing the percentage of words of a Latin (Romance) or English (Germanic) origin in whole plays and individual scenes. Shakespeare’s use of Romance vocabulary spanned the whole range available in his time, ranging from to percent of the words in a scene (Sch¨afer , p. ). The important point is that neither etymological group constitutes a closed stylistic category (p. ), being played off against each other in specific dramatic situations. Shakespeare varies the proportion of Latinate, polysyllabic words according to a speaker’s changing attitudes. In the opening scene of King Lear the King speaks in a pompous style, the Latinate element amounting to more than percent of his vocabulary in his announcement of the kingdom’s division, his anger against Cordelia, and his banishment of Kent. By contrast, Sch¨afer showed (pp. –), when Lear offers Cordelia to France and Burgundy (..–, –), his language is almost devoid of Romance words – as I would put it, because Lear thinks it no longer worth expending any linguistic energy on ‘my sometime daughter’, and accordingly descends from the ‘high’ to the ‘mean’ style. When Lear makes the exaggeratedly formal, and pitifully shortlived contract with Cornwall and Albany (..–), the proportion of Latinate words reaches percent, its highest level in this play. It is for effects of contrast, large and small, that Shakespeare regularly juxtaposed these two vast linguistic armouries. As Sch¨afer pointed out (p. ), Lear’s angry apostrophe to the storm (..–) is full of unusual Latinisms –‘undivulged’, ‘simular’, ‘covert’, but when he thinks of himself, his aggrieved sense of injustice emerges in the simplest terms: ‘I am a man / More sinn’d against than sinning’ (..–). In the play’s opening scene the varying responses of Lear’s three daughters were also
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
partly defined by their use of Latinisms. Cordelia’s language, in its pained sincerity, has a Latinate element which Sch¨afer (pp. –) found to be less than half that of her sisters’ ( percent as against percent). Goneril’s verse (..ff ) is formally end-stopped, listing the life-positives she claims to feel for her father, but using language notably lacking in metaphor or individualizing qualities, the Latinate abstract nouns further depriving her speech of any warmth. Regan’s rival declaration (..ff ) is slippery or loose-limbed, enjambment being one of several suggestive ways in which she frames her claim to be ‘alone felicitate / In your dear Highness’ love’. That term, used only here in Shakespeare, expresses her feigned and remarkably ephemeral love, as the coda to this scene proves, where both sisters descend to prose, removing the veil of insincerity. It is only at the final appearance of Cordelia and Lear, the ‘Come, let’s away to prison’ scene (..–), that we find another genuine expression of love, in which the percentage of Romance words is as low as in Cordelia’s first speeches. J¨urgen Sch¨afer provided many other sensitive analyses of how Shakespeare skilfully varied the proportion of Latinate diction according to the relations between characters, and developing situations. In his plays polysyllabic words are deployed according to dramatic function. In the Funerall Elegye, by contrast, polysyllables are the order of the day. Of course, it is a monologue, not a piece of dramatic speech, but even so its vocabulary is heavily Latinate, especially in its use of abstractions. If, emulating the pioneering work of F. E. Pierce, we were to compute its Latinisms by counting all trisyllabic words, the list would be very long. Restricting ourselves to words of four and five syllables still gives an impressive list, a point made by Professor Roger Gross in a valuable contribution to the heated discussion of the Elegye that took place in the postings of the Shakespeare Electronic Conference (‘S ’) during . Drawing attention to Foster’s silence on this issue, Professor Gross pointed to the unusually large number of four- and five-syllable words in the Elegye. He made a list of these words, and I reproduce it, with some amendments:
-ion:
Words of four syllables, arranged by terminations conversation (, ), reputation (, , ), education (, ), moderation (, ), commendation (, , ), resolution (), misconstruction (), consummation (), apprehension (), contemplation (), observation (), disposition (, ), suppositions (), defamation’s (),
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
estimation (), inclination (), separation (), imputations () -ity: minority (), posterity (, , ), immunity (), simplicity (), authority (), priority (), humanity () -able: memorable (, , ), lamentable (, ), comfortable (), pleasurable (), questionable (), commendable () -ed: recompenced (), unremembred (), well-employed (), unaffected (), well-profited (), unrespected (), unexpected () -ly: absolutely (), ignorantly (, ), undoubtedly () -ing: unbeseeming (), over-weening (), understanding’s (), ever-lasting (), unprevailing (), supplicating () various: superlative (), incouragement (), unfamiliar (), commentaries (), necessary (), unfortunate (), complemental (), universal (), sour-bitter (), ridiculous (), distemperature (). Words of five syllables predestinated (, ), generality (), irrefragable (), proportionable (), possibilited () Within these lines, or , words, then, quattro- and quinquesyllabic words occur in at least types (individual words), which with repetitions give tokens, or instances. The abstract, Latinate diction of the Funerall Elegye is distinctly different from Shakespeare’s, and no such heaping up of polysyllables can be found in an equivalent stretch of verse anywhere in his career. For purposes of comparison, one could take the two plays closest in time to the Funerall Elegye, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both collaborations with John Fletcher. But it is a well-known phenomenon in authorship studies that collaboration affects the style of both authors, so that the results of quantitative analyses of co-authored plays differ noticeably from plays of single authorship. For this reason, for all computations I shall use the three wholly Shakespearian plays nearest in date to the Elegye, that is, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. As well as matching by date, I shall follow the other standard statistical practices of matching by sample length and subject-matter. I have selected from each play scenes which together approximately equal the Elegye’s total of lines, and which resemble it in terms of subject-matter – that is, involving serious topics discussed by ‘educated’ characters, from higher up the social scale, observing a comparable decorum. From Cymbeline I have chosen Act ,
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
scene ( lines), in which Imogen drinks the drug that Pisanio has given her and seems to die, her exequies being performed by the brothers Guiderius and Arviragus with that short but memorable funeral elegy, ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. This scene also includes Belarius’s description of the brothers’ virtue and education, topics used by ‘W. S.’ in his eulogy of William Peter, and Imogen’s grief-stricken soliloquy over the dead body of Cloten, headless and dressed in Posthumus’s garments, whom she mistakes for her husband. From Cymbeline I also include Act , scene , lines – (omitting the prose conclusion), where the imprisoned Posthumus attempts to console himself against misfortune before falling asleep. While he sleeps there appear to him, ‘as in an apparition’, four deceased members of his family – his father, mother, and two brothers – who first address the sleeper and then appeal to Jupiter for justice, at which point the god appears from the machine, and justifies his providential purposes. In addition to the resemblances of subject-matter, the -line apparition scene is written in quatrains, rhyming abab (the basic form of the Elegye), the humans’ part in lines of eight and six syllables, the god’s in decasyllabics, so providing an example of rhymed verse in late Shakespeare, an important consideration given Foster’s claim that ‘there is little rhymed verse in the late plays with which to compare the Peter elegy’ (, pp. –). These two scenes total lines. From The Winter’s Tale I have not chosen the scene of Leontes’s madness (.), since it is well known that the remarkable language which Shakespeare used in order to display the King’s fit of jealousy and paranoia is intensely Latinate, and would not provide a fair comparison for any quantitative study of Shakespeare’s normal use of Latin-based diction. (Of course, study of its tortured rhetoric or contorted verse rhythms would show how far Shakespeare’s mature style was from anything ‘W. S.’ could write; but that exceptional passage would hardly be a fair comparison, either.) Accordingly, I have chosen Act , scene ( lines), the trial of Hermione, a scene written in a dignified style and concerned with the Queen’s affirmation of her virtue, ending (after her apparent death) with the King’s remorse and dedication to her memory. To it I add Act , scene ( lines), representing Leontes’s continuing repentance and memory of his dead queen, the appearance of Florizel and Perdita giving the occasion for a further account of youthful virtue. These two scenes total lines. From The Tempest, finally, I have selected Act , scene ( lines), where Prospero recounts to Miranda the story of his expulsion from the Dukedom of Milan, and subsequently confronts Ariel and then Caliban, completing the retrospective narrative
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
of their presence on the island. This scene ends with Ariel’s apparition as a water-nymph, informing Ferdinand that his father has died in the even shorter, but no less memorable elegy, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies.’ With these excerpts I have chosen passages very close to the Funerall Elegye in subject-matter, decorum, and style, providing a fair basis for comparison. I have performed two comparative tests on this material. For the first, I have identified words of Latin origin in the Funerall Elegye and in my sample from late Shakespeare, with results as shown in table .. Table . . Latinate words in the Elegye and in late Shakespeare
A Funerall Elegye Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest
No. of lines
Total Latinate words
The Shakespeare total is , Latinate words in , lines, giving a frequency of . per line; the Funerall Elegye uses Latinisms in lines, for a frequency of . per line – that is, percent greater than the Shakespeare sample. Or, expressing it as a ratio, by taking an average for the three Shakespeare samples of per play, the Elegye stands to the Shakespeare plays in the ratio of to . – Either way, the difference is significant, and clearly distinguishes ‘W. S.’ from the real W. S. Taking the same Shakespearian sample, I then identified all the foursyllable words (including two of five syllables) used in these scenes: Cymbeline .: experience, tributary, unfortunate, dishonestly, apprehension, executioner, invisible, civility, melancholy (twice), charitable, admiration, consummation, Mercurial, irregulous, intelligence, divination .: perpetuity, adulteries Total: in lines The Winter’s Tale .: purgation, accusation, derivative, disobedience, ingratitude, commodity, incertainties, honourable .: visitation, infirmity, ability, interpreters, celebrated Total: in lines
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
The Tempest .: inquisition, dedicated, substitution, executing, prerogative, incapable, confederates, inveterate, impertinent, instinctively, necessaries, momentary, desperation, unmitigable, correspondent, apparition, entertainment Total: in lines As every reader can see, many of these words are quite common in both spoken and written English during the Renaissance, and as a whole are much less academic and moralizing than those used by ‘W. S.’ Indeed, in a few cases, reference to the text will suggest that the metre requires some of them to be scanned as trisyllabic. But that would only reduce still further a ratio of polysyllabic words which is already distinctly lower than that of the Funerall Elegye. Table . presents this information. Table .. Polysyllabic words in the Elegye and in late Shakespeare
FE Cym. WT Temp.
Total lines
Total word-(tokens)
Every x lines
. . . .
In other words, ‘W. S.’ uses four- and five-syllable words between four and five times more frequently than Shakespeare does in a comparable sample. But the abstract, Latinate diction of the Funerall Elegye is not the only marker that differentiates the poem’s diction from Shakespeare. ‘W. S.’ makes considerable use of the pleonastic do, in its various mutations (do/dost/doth/did ), in conjunction with a main verb, as in ‘doth leave’ (FE, ), ‘did preserve’ (), ‘doth rehearse’ (), ‘do intend’ (). These filler words are useful in verse, since they can form the unstressed syllable in an iambic foot. In addition, the insertion of the word do allows the second verb to retain its full form and to be placed at the end of a line, permitting a rhyme. Of the examples already cited, ‘leave’ rhymes with ‘receave’ (), ‘preserve’ rhymes with ‘deserve’ (), ‘rehearse’ rhymes with ‘verse’ (), and ‘intend’ rhymes with ‘end’ (). Table . lists the total number of pleonastic do forms in the Elegye, together with the proportion used for rhyme-words.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct Table .. Pleonastic do forms in the Elegye Total lines
Total ‘do’
Used as rhymes
Percentage
.
It is hard to imagine that a comparable stretch of verse in Shakespeare would contain so many instances of pleonastic do, nor that such a proportion of them would be needed for the rhyme. Another striking characteristic of the Elegye is its frequent use of the function-word of – which, surprisingly enough, Foster omitted from his list of those frequently recurring words in the poem which, he claimed, could ‘serve as a kind of stylistic Geiger counter’ for identifying its author (, pp. –). ‘W. S.’ used of very frequently, especially in the grammatical construction <noun + of + noun>, which can be either a normal genitive or a partitive genitive. In the former type, expressing an appurtenance of a thing or quality to a person, the second noun is prefixed by a possessive adjective, a definite or indefinite article, or the indefinite ‘some’, as in . . . the circuit of his hope-full dayes () . . . the tide of this surrounding age () Told by remembrance of the wisest heades ()
(In quoting constructions of this kind, the word of will be printed in italic type.) But also, and more unusually, ‘W. S.’ used the construction <noun + of + noun> for a partitive genitive, in which the first noun ‘in a phrase or construction . . . expresses the relationship of part to whole ( partition), and having the essential form X of Y’, as in ‘tale of woe’, ‘act of friendship’. (In quoting constructions of this kind, the word of will be printed in bold face.) A by-product of this preference – whether a normal or a partitive genitive – is the frequent positioning of the preposition of at the beginning of a verse line, where it fulfils the useful function of being the unstressed syllable in an iambic foot. The frequency of this stylistic feature in the Funerall Elegye was first noticed by Richard J. Kennedy, in the postings of the Shakespeare Electronic Conference, who pointed out that no fewer than of the poem’s lines began with the word of. Defenders of the Foster thesis in that forum speedily produced the specious argument that this high figure was the natural consequence of the verse being ‘highly enjambed’ – that is, accepting the validity of what Foster euphemistically describes as his ‘lightly repunctuated text’. Dismissing this unlikely explanation, I think that Kennedy’s
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
recognition of this stylistic feature as non-Shakespearian was correct. It can be extended if we consider not just the line-openings but the total number of times the poet uses the word of, by my count times in lines, or . times per thousand lines. And once again, counting must be supplemented by reading, by looking at each instance and defining its main grammatical function, in connection with a genitive. Whoever reads the poem with this feature in mind will soon discover that the great majority of these uses consists of the pattern <noun + of + noun>. In my count, there are instances of this construction, of them the normal genitive, the partitive type. For instance, to take the latter type, we find such paired nouns as: minority of love fee of slaves spring of dayes harmony of goodnesse tale of woe times of change act of friendship habit of disguise course of life
() () () () () () () () ()
‘W. S.’s’ fondness for this syntactical construction explains his unusual formula describing William Peter’s wife, ‘she who those nine of yeares / Liv’d fellow to his counsailes, and his bed’ ( –) – a phrase that might otherwise recall Rumpole of the Old Bailey. Here he seems to be treating the numeral as if it were a common noun. The anonymous poet extends this basic formula by adding epithets, participles or other modifiers on either side of the hinge-word of, such as <modifier + noun + of + modifier + noun>, to give more complex, mouth-filling phrases. And whereas the basic type usually lacks a prefixed article, the expanded versions of the normal genitive frequently add articles or possessives: the circuit of his hope-full dayes The good indevor’s, of deserving praise the hearts and memories of men The curious eye, of a quick brain’d survey the assault of youth’s incouragement the tide of this surrounding age the glad sleights of insnaring vice the out-side of disgracefull folly the wast of many idle words the hopes of my indangered youth
() () () () () () () () () ()
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
In expanding his basic formula ‘W. S.’ often ran over the line-ending: the lamentable tombe Of his Short-liv’d desert’s
( –)
honest care, Of harmlesse conversation
(–)
the equall weight Of thankfulnesse, and kindnesse (–) the sun, Of his too-shortned dayes Of singlenesse Of Education Of fond conceit Of Plenty and Desert
(–) a speciale worke, (–) the crop (–)
the flote (–) the wane
the stormes Of fearefull consummation
( –) ( –)
The fact that this syntactic pattern often occurs within the verse line means that it cannot be put down to enjambment. More importantly, the repetitiveness of this formula shows its usefulness, for both the and of offer the unstressed syllable so necessary for iambic verse. The basic formula allows, perhaps even encourages expansion and extension, until it fills a whole line or more. the subject of the verse (Unhappy matter of a mourning stile)
(–)
that tale of woe, Told by remembrance of the wisest heades (–) Th’unsteddie change of his fantastick formes
()
The gainfull fruit of well-imployed wit
()
the lamentable spight Of this worlds teen-full apprehension
(–)
An empty sound of over-weening passion
()
(Issues of discontent and sick despaire)
()
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
The ease with which the poet can elaborate this formula leads him, once again, to excess, as it becomes a habitual syntactical reflex, to be used as much as five times in seven lines: Yet ere I take my longest last farewell, From thee, faire marke of sorrow; let me frame Some ampler work of thanke . . . And free thee from the scandall of such senses, As in the rancour of unhappy spleene, Measure thy course of life . . . (–)
This is what he calls offering up ‘the value of my tallent’ (), or ‘the method of this dolefull song’ (). The general effect of this formula is to increase the number of nouns the poet uses, producing a sense of lexical solidity, but with a corresponding decrease of intimacy. The nouns used are often abstract, not concrete, and in some cases one of them could easily have been an adjective, which might have made the expression more natural, less weighty. But ‘W. S.’ chooses to write ‘an act of friendship’, rather than ‘a friendly act’; or ‘the waste of many idle words’ instead of ‘wasteful words’. As that last instance shows, piling up of nouns in this habitual way can result in tautology, for ‘W. S.’ an all too frequent vice of style. The intuitive reaction of experienced scholars that it is unShakespearian to repeat of to this degree, and in such a formulaic way, is confirmed once we compile statistics for the number of times Shakespeare uses the word of to begin a line in his poems, as shown in table .. Table .. The function-word of in Shakespeare’s poems and in the Elegye A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Total decaFrequency Of <noun F as syllabic per , beginning Every + of + percentage lines Total of lines verse line x lines noun > of B Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece Sonnets A Funerall Elegye
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
,
. .
. .
. .
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
The figures for Shakespeare’s three last plays (the number of verse lines being freshly computed from the Riverside edition) are shown in table .. Table .. The function-word of in Shakespeare’s late plays and in the Elegye A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Total decaFrequency Of <noun F as syllabic per , beginning Every + of + percentage lines Total of lines verse line x lines noun > of B Cymbeline The Winter’s Tale The Tempest A Funerall Elegye
, ,
. .
. .
. .
,
. .
. .
. .
Tables . and . show that ‘W. S.’ begins a verse line with of between twelve and five times more frequently than Shakespeare did in his poems, and between two-and-a-half and three times more often than Shakespeare did in the late plays. The proportion of <noun + of + noun> constructions within the total instances for of in the three late Shakespeare plays ranges from . to . percent: in the Elegye it is . percent. The differences between the Elegye and my Shakespeare sample in the overall use of this preposition remain just as sharp when we consider its specific grammatico-syntactical application for the partitive genitive. In the Sonnets, for instance, where of recurs times, only of these instances take the basic partitive genitive form, ‘X of Y’, while a further expand it with additional modifiers, such as , or <noun + of + adjective + noun>. The total for partitive genitives in the Sonnets is out of , or . percent. In the Elegye the figures are partitive genitives out of , or . percent, a striking difference. In case anyone doubted it, the difference between the two poets remains just as clear if we move from the statistics to examine Shakespeare’s individual use of this construction. He used the basic ‘X of Y’ structure far less frequently than ‘W. S.’, but it does occur: ‘th’expense of spirit’, ‘a waste of shame’, ‘fools of time’, ‘edge of doom’, ‘figures of delight’, ‘mouths of men’. But only a minority of these standard constructions use abstract nouns on one side of the divide, so to speak
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
(e.g., ‘day of youth’, ‘book of honour’, ‘hands of falsehood’, ‘wards of trust’), whereas the majority of the nouns in the Funerall Elegye are abstractions, often on both sides of the divide. Shakespeare’s varied uses give an overall effect far removed from the repetitive substantivization or reification, privileging the noun, that reigns in the Elegye. Shakespeare’s expanded formulae often involve adjectives as modifiers, which either give more prominence to the emotional evaluation of the state described, or form part of a cluster of metaphors: ‘the true concord of well-tuned sounds’ (Sonnet ); ‘A tattered weed of small worth held’ (); ‘the sessions of sweet silent thought’, and ‘The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan’ (); ‘The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age’ (); ‘the wrackful siege of batt’ring days’ (); ‘the polished form of well-refined pen’ (); ‘the blow of thralled discontent’ (). Such combinations have a complexity and internal coherence of a higher order than anything found in the Elegye. The modifiers chosen by ‘W. S.’ all too often add little to what has already been said, falling into the vice of tautology which, as we shall see, is one of his distinctive habits. In such expanded phrases as ‘the wast of many idle words’ (FE, ), or ‘the glad sleights of insnaring vice’ (), the adjectival modifiers (‘idle’, ‘insnaring’) merely duplicate the noun (‘wast’, ‘sleights’). Shakespeare’s Sonnets differ from the Funerall Elegye in many respects, creating far more complex linguistic structures (not to mention the complexities of human relationships). Some of the genitive constructions create intricate effects of interdependence, what we might describe as ‘double’ or ‘two-level genitives’, such as ‘the stormy gusts of winter’s day’, and ‘the barren rage of death’s eternal cold’ (Sonnet ); ‘the perfect ceremony of love’s rite’ (); ‘the rarities of nature’s truth’ (); ‘the blazon of sweet beauty’s best’ (). Shakespeare shows a control of grammar and rhetoric here that ‘W. S.’ never achieved. But perhaps the most striking difference between the two poets is the fact that a substantial proportion of the instances of of in the Sonnets are normal genitives, using the personal pronouns in their full semantic value, especially ‘thy’, ‘thee’, ‘thine’, ‘you’, ‘your’, and ‘me’, ‘my’, and ‘mine’. Instances of such constructions include ‘the treasure of thy lusty days’ (); ‘this fair child of mine’ (); ‘the tillage of thy husbandry’ (); ‘thou of thy self ’ (); ‘love of me’ (); ‘table of my heart’ (); ‘Lord of my love’ (); ‘my comfort of thy worth and truth’ (); and ‘the beauty of thy mind’ (). By my count (with no claims of total accuracy), these amount to instances (‘I’ forms: , ‘Thou’ forms: ), confirming the impressive predominance of
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
those pronouns in the Sonnets, unique in English poetry for its concentration on an ‘I–thou’ relationship, and quite unlike anything in the Elegye. The remarkable frequency of of forms in the Funerall Elegye, especially to begin a verse line, is only one of several verbal ‘fillers’ which ‘W. S.’ placed in the convenient weak syllable of the initial iambic foot. Other words frequently recurring in this position are as, which, that, such, whereby. Here, too, the chosen words easily lend themselves to the poem’s overwhelmingly regular iambic movement, acting as metrical padding. It would take too much space to enumerate all occurrences of these line-openers, but I give a selection in the following list. as . As kind to give, as thankfull to receave . As not the tide of this surrounding age . As those descended from illustrious bloud . As they will all goe weeping to their bedds . As had it chanc’t thou might’st have done to mee . As in the rancour of unhappy spleene . As if the free commission of their ill . As hee would no occasion over-passe . As time can boast of both for love and trust . As theerby to ordaine revenging whips . As best becomes that wisedome did us make . As then the losse of one, whose inclination . As meager Death it selfe seemes to lament . As hee was both an husband and a father . As witnesses I did not love thee least which . Which (harvest-like) did yeeld againe the crop . Which now sits mourning his untimely spoile . Which now that subjects merits doth rehearse . Which payed to heaven the debt that it did owe . Which is a miracle in men (one saith) . Which, by a life well led may honor have . Which shall not thence be sundred, but in death . Which hardest fate and time thus can lay on mee . Which paine to many men, I doe not owe it . Which understands all things amiss; whose light . Which their fond dotage ever-more admires
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
. Which ever hee maintaind in sweet content . Which might make knowne his unaffected care . Which beeing crost, gives matter of bewayling . Which way to wound with defamations spirit . Which wise posteritie shall give him than . Which underneath the roofe of safe content . Which afterwards his praises will expresse . Which guides to doing well, wherein so few . Which now with thee are leapt into thy toombe that . That lives incompast in a mortall frame . That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence . That day by day, assault the weaker man . That full of dayes hee might have liv’d to see . That pitties not thy sad and suddaine wrong . That had not made thee know, how much I pris’d thee . That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock . That Such as is the end, the life prooves so . That may disprove their malice: and confound such . Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke . Such harmony of goodnesse did preserve . Such honor, oˆ thou youth untimely lost . Such duties as it owes to thy desert . Such, and of such condition may devise . Such was the separation here constraind whereby . Whereby t’enrole my name, as this of thine . Whereby if thou live to Posterity . Whereby the candle, and the bodies light . Whereby the life that purity adorn’d . Whereby the grace fore-promis’d they attained Collating the line-openers yields the statistic in table .. As can be seen, in the vast majority of instances the poet uses ‘semantic fillers’ in order to make an additional comment on points he has already made, a practice which accounts for the poem’s painfully slow forward movement, as it constantly rehearses or moralizes on the preceding utterance. This backward-looking tendency (no doubt occasioned by the paucity of material which ‘W. S.’ had to work with) also accounts, as we shall see, for
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
the high proportion of relative clauses, which give the poem’s syntax a curiously Janus-like movement. Table .. Function-words beginning lines in A Funerall Elegye
of as which that such whereby in in the with by to Total
FE total
Total beginning line
Another verbal formula that recurs surprisingly frequently in the Funerall Elegye is the use of a gerund to begin a verse line, a grammatical construction which in English also permits a retrospective comment on the preceding clause or sentence. In A Funerall Elegye we find: Remembring what he was, with comfort then Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt Wasting his best of time: but so content Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise Affecting fashions; nor addicted wholy Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming Purchasing credit in the place I lost it Expecting ever to be over-throwne Comparing by thy death, what thou hast beene Proceeding from a nature as corrupt Ruling the little ordered common-wealth Fore-shewing what he was, and what should be Building large Castles in the empty ayre Betraying pollicies: and shew their braines Expecting yet a more severer doome Learning my dayes of youth so to prevent
() () () () () () () () () () () () () () () ()
Reference to the complete text (Appendix I, pp. ff ) will show how often the gerund refers back to some preceding utterance. The use of a gerund to begin a line occurs times in the poem’s lines, a
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
frequency of . per thousand. Adding this to the previous total, we can see that at least of the Elegye’s lines, more than a quarter of the whole, begin with a word or verbal form drawn from a store of weak-syllable openers, words of low semantic import which can be endlessly recycled. Without attempting to prove the point by analysis and computation, I shall simply declare that verse writing of such a predictable and formulaic nature is unShakespearian. Whoever denies this should produce the evidence. One final element of the Elegye’s diction that marks it off from Shakespeare involves both semantics and syntax, namely the remarkable amount of tautology it creates in a relatively short space. It has long been recognized that the main characteristics of Shakespeare’s language include inventiveness and intellectual energy. His characters’ words often strain to keep up with their thoughts, as one idea tumbles out after another, pressing on to a new aspect of the matter at issue before the earlier ones have been put into perspective. As A. C. Partridge described this phenomenon, Shakespeare cannot serve as a stylistic model for anyone, because his rhythms are individual and accommodated to the needs of the moment; his ideas outstrip his syntax. On the track of the telling and indelible image, he may leave behind anacoluthons and hanging relative clauses in the most inconsequent fashion; he compresses his meaning and tortures his syntax, so that while the effect of the passage may be poetically grand, the meaning is wrung from it with extreme difficulty.
Partridge cited several passages from Henry VIII to illustrate ‘the difficult syntactical progression of Shakespeare’, and observed that ‘the power of Shakespeare’s imagination, especially where the emotional tension of a scene is heightened, called for rapid transitions of feeling, thought and figure, and for these the syntax of the time, of any time, was too halting’ (Partridge , p. ). To me one of the best instances of syntactical energy in Henry VIII would be Buckingham’s angry account of the influence exercised by Cardinal Wolsey over the King, as seen in the expensive but fruitless diplomatic exchange that had just taken place on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Although warned that it would be imprudent to call Wolsey treasonous, Buckingham breaks out: . To th’ King I’ll say’t, and make my vouch as strong As shore of rock. Attend. This holy fox, Or wolf, or both (for he is equal rav’nous As he is subtile, and as prone to mischief
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct As able to perform’t), his mind and place Infecting one another, yea, reciprocally, Only to show his pomp as well in France As here at home, suggests the King our master To this last costly treaty – th’ interview That swallowed so much treasure, and like a glass Did break i’ th’ wrenching. . Faith, and so it did. . Pray give me favour, sir: this cunning Cardinal The articles o’ th’ combination drew As himself pleas’d; and they were ratified As he cried, ‘Thus let be!’ to as much end As give a crutch to th’ dead. But our count-cardinal Has done this, and ’tis well; for worthy Wolsey ( Who cannot err), he did it. Now this follows ( Which, as I take it, is a kind of puppy To th’ old dam, treason), Charles the Emperor, Under pretence to see the Queen his aunt (For ’twas indeed his colour, but he came To whisper Wolsey), here makes visitation – (..–)
– but I break off quotation, with another eleven lines of that sentence to come, complete with two more parenthetical clauses (lines –), a nightmare for modernizing editors. In that sequence Buckingham mingles present tense, present continuous, and past definite; narrative, expostulation, interruptions of interruptions, direct speech, simile, metaphor, irony and sarcasm, colloquial contractions and Latinisms, an extraordinarily varied discourse, switching rapidly and unpredictably from one register to another. The verse of ‘W. S.’ uses far more predictable components. Another striking instance of this imaginative energy in the plays that Shakespeare wrote in –, jointly with Fletcher, would be the scene opening Act of The Two Noble Kinsmen, where Palamon and Arcite resolve to leave their home city, which has been corrupted by the tyrant Creon. The following exchange occurs: . Dear Palamon, dearer in love than blood, And our prime cousin, yet unhard’ned in The crimes of nature – let us leave the city Thebes, and the temptings in’t, before we further Sully our gloss of youth: And here to keep in abstinence we shame As in incontinence; for not to swim
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
I’ th’ aid o’ th’ current were almost to sink, At least to frustrate striving, and to follow The common stream, ’twould bring us to an eddy Where we should turn or drown; if labour through, Our gain but life and weakness. . Your advice Is cried up with example. What strange ruins, Since first we went to school, may we perceive Walking in Thebes! Scars and bare weeds The gain o’ th’ martialist, who did propound To his bold ends honour and golden ingots, Which though he won, he had not; and now flurted By peace, for whom he fought, who then shall offer To Mars’s so scorn’d altar? I do bleed When such I meet . . . (.. –)
Although more controlled than Buckingham’s outburst, we note a comparable unpredictability in the syntax. For example, the way that Arcite’s first metaphor for refusing to comply with the prevailing corruption – ‘not to swim / I’ th’ aid o’ th’ current’ – modulates from its expected conclusion (‘almost to sink’) to a variation on the opposite choice, and its consequences (‘to an eddy / Where we should turn or drown’), before translating the metaphor back into other terms (‘labour through’), to conclude with a hendiadys: ‘Our gain but life and weakness’ (sc. ‘a life of weakness’, one morally debilitated). In Palamon’s reply readers and theatre-goers first have to recognize that the ‘ruins’ in Thebes are not of buildings but of the unpaid soldiers, whose payment – ‘scars and bare weeds’ – precedes (putting the cart before the horse) the recollection of the hopes with which each entered the wars – ‘honour and golden ingots, / Which’ – by a strong and bitter paradox, ‘though he won, he had not’: he had earned, but not received them. The reader must work hard to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant here, and to sort out the appositional structure of the next clause (‘flurted / By peace’) before coming to the sentence’s main idea: who then shall offer To Mars’s so scorn’d altar?
The scornful triple alliteration in that line draws on another stylistic register. The reader of the Funerall Elegye is never forced to make such mental exertions. The narrow range of subject-matter, as we noted above,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
coupled with the heavily abstract, Latinate diction, means that every point is made several times over, rephrased in other words, words which turn out to be much the same as the ones we have just read. Celebrating William Peter’s virtue, ‘W. S.’ affirms that The curious eye, of a quick-brain’d survey, Could scantly find a mote
in his behaviour, or accuse him of any ‘faulty errors’ (FE, –). But the epithet ‘curious’ is repeated in the following epithet, ‘quick-brained’, ‘eye’ is repeated in ‘survey’, while ‘faulty errors’ amounts to the third pleonasm in those four lines. Describing Peter’s education, ‘W. S.’ affirms that Those noble twins of heaven-infused races, Learning and Wit, refined in their kind: Did joyntly both, in their peculiar graces, Enrich the curious temple of his mind. (–)
But if ‘Learning and Wit’ really are ‘twins’, then to say they worked ‘jointly both’ is to restate what is already explicit, and the padding phrase ‘in their kind’ largely overlaps with ‘their peculiar graces’. Peter is praised for being ‘above the spleenfull sence / And spight of mallice’ (–), which repeats the same idea twice, and for Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence Wasting his best of time (–)
where the same idea is repeated three times over: ‘fruitlessly’, ‘prodigal expense’, and ‘wasting’. What I tell you three times is true. Peter also shunned ‘the glad sleights of insnaring vice’ (), which is to make both a noun and a present participle do the same superfluous duty, and he was characterized by ‘discreet / Endeavors; modest speech; beseeming mirth’ (–), where ‘discreet’ means the same as ‘beseeming’, and ‘modest’ is not far removed. Like so many of the repetitions in this poem, this one is repeated, in the subsequent praise of his ‘discreet discerning’ (). The pleonasms become so obvious that it is almost enough to quote them without analysis, simply italicizing the repetitions. Peter did not shine ‘in eminent courts, or places great, / For popular concourse’ (–) – where the ‘or’ bridges the almost dictionary-like definition of ‘courts’ as ‘places great, / For popular concourse’ – but enjoyed the glory suitable to ‘private persons, in their private home’ (). He was noted for his
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
‘constant faith, / Never untrue’ (–), but like other virtuous people, could not shelter from malicious gossips who expressed ‘the rancour of unhappy spleene’ (). He dwelt ‘in a safer contemplation, / Secure’ ( –), and demonstrated ‘a serious awe’ (), living in ‘sweet content, / And pleasurable rest’ (–). Every time I re-read the Funerall Elegye I am struck by the quantity of tautology that ‘W. S.’ used, praising Peter’s ‘taintlesse goodnesse, his desertfull merit’ () – two pleonasms in one line, validating ‘his repute / And estimation’ (–), his ‘best perfections’ (), far above those who are ‘heathnish and prophane’ (). In every instance there the same idea is repeated twice over. Death, we are told, struck ‘the fraile and mortall parts, / Of his humanity’ ( –), but ‘could not touch / His flourishing and faire long-liv’d deserts’ (–). William Peter practised ‘carefull providence’ (), and thus ‘W. S.’ can express the pious hope that ‘may thy worthinesse thy name advance, / Amongst the vertuous, and deserving most’ (–). The repetitions in this poem, both small- and large-scale, become cumulatively numbing. To draw an analogy with music, it is like the form used by Purcell, ‘a fantasy on one note’ – only, showing little or no fantasy. As we shall see, this degree of tautology makes the poem’s attempt to use rhetorical figures woefully unsuccessful. Seriously to maintain that writing of such uninventive repetitiveness ‘is no better, if no worse, than what may be found in Henry VIII or The Two Noble Kinsmen’ is to betray the most superficial feeling for dramatic poetry. Discussion of the characteristic syntactical patterns of the Funerall Elegye may begin with Donald Foster’s claim that they resemble those in Shakespeare’s late plays: The final plays seem to be characterized by a looser, almost experimental syntax . . . Shakespeare . . . was now able to convey the impression of a character thinking as he spoke, often under pressure . . . In thinking aloud we make qualifications and objections, go off at a tangent and partially obscure straightforward communication of ideas. In Shakespeare’s final plays, the increase in parentheses attempts to indicate something of this turmoil. (, p. )
This may be a valid comment on Shakespeare, but when we turn back to the Elegye for comparison, the quality which marks that poem is not compression but diffuseness. Foster himself well described the various forms of grammatical awkwardness that ‘W. S.’ perpetrates: ‘Ellipses are frequent, and sometimes drastic; participial phrases and relative clauses
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
frequently go begging for an antecedent; relative pronouns are sometimes missing; and nearly every sentence in the poem contains parenthetical elements’ (p. ). However, the effect that these solecisms produce is not of a mind thinking aloud under pressure, but of a writer who has started a sentence without having thought it through to the end. As the period unfolds, qualifications occur to him, digressions are made, emphases added, the relative importance of main point and subsidiary points changes or disappears altogether. One sign of this lack of planning is the proliferation of relative pronouns or adverbs, which tack on a further thought by the laziest means of adding it to one just made, a form of ongoing afterthought. As we have seen, among the many semantic fillers that ‘W. S.’ used, the word ‘as’ occurs times in the Funerall Elegye, times to begin a line, often with a retrospective function: As not the tide of this surrounding age () As had it chanc’t thou might’st have done to mee () As hee would no occasion over-passe () As theerby to ordaine revenging whips ()
He also used ‘which’ times, times to begin a line; he used ‘that’ times, beginning a line on occasions (in of these instances ‘that’ is a relative pronoun, in cases it is a deictic pronoun – ‘that soil’, and in cases it is a conjunction); he used ‘such’ times, times to begin a line, and often pronominally (or ‘absolutely’), referring to people mentioned before, adding a – usually negative – qualification: ‘Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke’ (); ‘But death to such gives unremembered graves’ (); ‘the drunken rage, / Of such whose onely glory is their ill’ (–). And ‘W. S.’ used the relative adverb ‘whereby’ times, of them to begin a line. In total, that is over a hundred instances where a part of speech is used to link a present utterance with a previous one. With its profusion of relative clauses the Elegye, we might say, moves one step forward and three steps back, constantly casting a backward glance to see if something more can be added to a point already made, treading water while thinking of something new to say. To the reader it sometimes seems as if the poet has lost the thread of his argument, as when ‘W. S.’ lambasts ‘some [people] in nothing famous but defame’: Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence Of what they doe, to be a speciall worke, Of singlenesse, not tending to offence.
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
Whose very vertues are not to detract, Whiles hope remaines of gaine (base fee of slaves) Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt, But death to such gives unremembred graves (FE, –)
That utterance is additive, but incoherent, the relative clauses and parentheses distracting attention from the point being made. The sentence completely loses its way after line , with the tell-tale sequence of line-openers, ‘Whose’, ‘Whiles’ (note the parenthesis!), and the gerund ‘Despising’, each one looking backward in the hope of attaching itself to something definite that had gone before. Similarly vague – the word ‘some’ is indicative of the lack of focus – is the poet’s complaint about the ‘thanklesse misconstruction’ cast upon his name ‘By some, whose fortunes sunck into the wane / Of Plenty and Desert’ (–); or the sequence tacked on to qualify the term ‘constant faith’, with one relative (‘Which’, line ) leading to another (‘Who’, line ); or the sequence praising William Peter’s self-discipline, which gives us in quick succession ‘That’ (), ‘Which’ (), and ‘wherein’ (). The effect of this Janus-faced syntax, looking backwards as it seems to advance, is to dissipate energy, and to muddy or muddle communication. When relative clauses are over-extended, both writer and reader lose contact with the subject, as in the sequence offering ‘a lesson by experience taught’ (–), or the poet’s self-consolation against future adversity (–): ‘Those perfect graces which . . . those imputations . . . those hopes, which . . . hart: / Who . . . From which . . . ’ – where ‘those’ is another fuzzy all-inclusive word, seeming to define something but failing to do so. Utterance which was vague to start with becomes more blurred, as in the sequence denouncing ‘the froward’, whoever they might be, which tacks on parentheses and relative pronouns without ever clarifying the reason for the poet’s anger (–: including ‘That’, ‘which’, ‘whose’, ‘whose’, ‘that same’, ‘Which’, ‘on whom’, ‘Such, and of such condition’), or the description of the deceased’s wife and children ( –: ‘she who those’, ‘Who’, ‘those cheeks, which’, ‘in whom . . . ’). In these and many other digressive passages the syntax is quite lacking in the energy and onward movement that characterizes Shakespeare’s verse between and , an energy which verges on the over-plus, and compels modern readers to re-read some lines until they grasp the several strands of thought which intertwine. The Funerall Elegye’s syntax causes us difficulties of a quite different kind, having not too much but too little content, eked out and
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
tacked on in constructions which drain away the poem’s, and the reader’s, energy. The syntax of the Elegye is notable in another respect, for its remarkable amount of inversion. In its lines I count something like or more inversions, major and minor. In Shakespeare inversion is an expressive device able to achieve an amazing range of stylistic effects. Shakespeare’s syntax is another important linguistic topic which has been little discussed, and then in a schematic manner. However, John Porter Houston’s final book, an all-too-brief study of Shakespeare’s syntax, made a valuable contribution. Houston found that Shakespeare’s preferred form of syntactical inversion was ‘SOV word order’, that is, ‘the subject–direct object–verb pattern’. In this construction, as in other forms of inversion, ‘the principle usually [is] that one or both of the two grammatical constituents displaced from their usual position will receive emphasis’ (Houston , p. ). Postponing the verb to the end of the line can give a pointed effect: . Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. . Mother, you have my father much offended. (Ham., ..–)
Macbeth’s awareness of the consequences of murdering Duncan postpones the effect of his action in order to underline its awfulness: No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine Making the green one red.
(Mac., ..–)
Houston commented that the word-order here ‘permits both red and its verbal synonym to stand at the end of the line, yet without grammatical parallelism’ (p. ). However, recalling Sch¨afer’s work on etymology, we can observe a mutually reinforcing effect, as the Germanic terms both gloss and emphasize the Latin. The next most common form of inversion, ‘direct object–subject–verb’ (OSV) is well used for Macbeth’s reaction to the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will be ‘father to a line of kings’. Here his bitter realization is redoubled by the postponement of both verbs: If ’t be so, For Banquo’s issue have I fil’d my mind, For them the gracious Duncan have I murther’d. (Mac., ..–)
Setting up an air of resolution and onward movement by placing the verb at the end can also highlight the speaker’s failure to live up to
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
his intention. It is significant that Antony twice resolves to cut his ties with Cleopatra by using a prominent inversion of direct object and verb: These strong Egyptian fetters I must break, Or lose myself in dotage. Ant., (..–)
and again: I must from this enchanting queen break off, Ten thousand harms, more than the ills I know, My idleness doth hatch. (..–)
Wise after the event, by attending to the whole utterance we can see that the climactic nature of the OSV inversion here goes beyond the parallel verbs ‘break’ and ‘break off ’, to end with the consequences of not doing so, ‘dotage’ and ‘Ten thousand harms . . . doth hatch’. Another variation in word-order, ‘direct object – verb – subject’ (OVS), is ‘less frequent than OSV, shares its lack of syntactic tension but is much smoother, each term having at least a direct relationship of some kind to the one following it: disjunction is absent’ (p. ): Ne’er mother Rejoiced deliverance more
(Cym., ..–)
The last form of inversion Houston discussed was ‘the inversion of subject and verb (VS)’ (p. ), as in Antonio’s bitter recollection of how much he had admired Sebastian: And to his image, which methought did promise Most venerable worth, did I devotion.
(TN, ..–)
In this bald summary of Houston’s main categories of syntactical inversion – his book discusses many more topics, in rich detail – I merely want to describe his methods and to summarize some of his conclusions. If asked to guess when Shakespeare made most use of inversion, some readers might think of the early plays, imagining him having to rearrange prose syntax so as to meet the exigencies of the blank-verse line. The correct answer is just the opposite, for Houston established that these syntactical devices are seldom used in the early plays, and that ‘Shakespeare’s taste for inversion grew’ (p. ). It was a resource that he gradually mastered, and he then made considerable use of it. ‘In blank
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
verse Shakespeare used the inversion of direct object and verb [SOV ] far more than Marlowe, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton, or Marston’, not to mention authors of many anonymous plays (pp. –), indeed he seems to have been ‘the sole serious exponent’ of a syntactical usage more common in The Spanish Tragedy than in the Jacobean theatre (p. ). He also made much greater use of the inverted verb and subject (VS) than did Middleton, for instance (p. ), another detail which confirms the impression gained from socio-linguistic and prosodic studies, that Shakespeare was often content to explore older resources rather than turn to new ones. In Houston’s words, ‘beginning with Henry V and Hamlet’, Shakespeare used all forms of deviation from standard wordorder ‘far more than his contemporaries, early or late. Syntactic invention and variety are as much a distinctive character of his work as dense and elaborate uses of imagery’ (p. ). In addition to the individuality and creativity with which Shakespeare adapted syntactical patterns, the other pronounced quality of Shakespeare’s style in this, as in other respects, is its functionality. No one who has read this brief summary of Shakespeare’s syntactical practices is likely to imagine that he used inversion as a mechanical habit, or because he had difficulties fitting his characters’ thoughts into the blank-verse line. Syntax, prosody, rhetoric, diction, all these resources were directed to individualizing character and giving them utterances appropriate to a thousand different situations. Returning to the Funerall Elegye, we can see that for ‘W. S.’ inversion is a stylistic mannerism, on a par with his over-reliance on relative clauses, parentheses, and filler words. Its main effect is to make his utterances still more awkward: Now therein liv’d he happy, if to bee Free from detraction, happinesse it bee (–)
In line subject and verb are inverted (‘lived he’), a main verb is introduced (‘to be’), which leads in the following line to a further inversion of the subject ‘happiness’, the introduction of the completely superfluous word ‘it’, and a repetition of the verb ‘be’. In the abbreviated grammatical terminology used by John Porter Houston we have the sequence VSV () and VSSV (). One result of these inversions is that ‘be’ / ‘be’ form a rhyme, also (involuntarily?) the rhetorical figure epistrophe. Otherwise, they add nothing to the stylistic effect, quite the opposite. It would be hard to cite any comparably clotted and dysfunctional inversions in Shakespeare – unless in a parody. In many cases ‘W. S.’ seems to
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
have resorted to inversion primarily to achieve a rhyme, as in this SOV construction: And though his qualities might well deserve Just commendation, yet his furnisht mind Such harmony of goodnesse did preserve (–)
The need to find a rhyme-word there forced the poet to invert verb and complement in line , and insert the pleonastic ‘did’, a device which he resorted to all too often, as we have seen. Such manhandling of normal syntactical order produced a great number of awkward and unnatural constructions, as here (I number the words to indicate the order that would be used in prose): And as much glory is it to be good; For private persons, in their private home; As those descended from illustrious bloud (–)
The reader can usually grasp the intended sequence of meaning, but the expression gains nothing in the process. Another awkward sequence of inversion governed by the need to find rhymes is the reference to William Peter’s widow: Amongst them all, she who those nine of yeares Liv’d fellow to his counsailes, and his bed; Hath the most share in losse; for I in hers, Feele what distemperature this chance hath bred. ( –)
Presumably the word ‘hers’ () refers back to ‘losse’, and is given the genitive form in order to rhyme with ‘yeares’; but it could also be the predicate of ‘this chance hath bred’, as my numbering proposes. Lines and end with ‘begot’ and ‘yet’, which may explain (if not excuse) the double inversion in the following lines: Was by a hand in vengeance rude and hot, Sent innocent to be in heaven set. (–)
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
‘W. S.’ must have become inured to inversion, repetition making it habitual, even where it was not really necessary: Those Saints before the ever-lasting throne, Who sit with crownes of glory on their heads, Washt white in bloud, from earth hence have not gone, All to their joyes, in quiet on their beds ( –)
A poet who had the skill, or the time, could surely have rephrased those lines into something more like normal English word-order. At least we can agree that such dislocation of syntax in order to produce a rhyme is not characteristic of Shakespeare. As early as , Tucker Brooke dismissed A Yorkshire Tragedy () as non-Shakespearian, its verse possessing few characteristics of Shakespeare’s late verse, having a very high rate of end-stopped lines ( percent) and a comparably high rate of rhyming lines ( percent), rates only found in Shakespeare’s earliest plays. Brooke added: ‘the rhymes, moreover, are frequently obtained by means of a distortion in the word order, such as Shakespeare was not reduced to even in his apprentice work’ (Brooke , p. xxxv). MacDonald Jackson took this feature as one further proof of Middleton’s authorship of the play ( Jackson , p. ). R. H. Barker had made the same point about the early Middleton, describing him as composing in a hurry, ‘satisfied with almost any rhyme that comes to hand. Inverting the normal order or otherwise doing violence to idiom, distorting the niceties of meter or relying on inferior imagery – these things seem to mean nothing to him so long as the rhyme-words come’ (Barker , p. ). These are not comments that can be made about Shakespeare. The Elegye’s syntax is often so disorganized that it engenders ambiguity, as here: His unfain’d friendship where it least was sought, Him to a fatall time-lesse ruine brought. Whereby the life that purity adorn’d With reall merit, by this sudaine end, Is in the mouth of some in manners scorn’d (–)
In line it takes two readings to realize that ‘that’ is a relative, not a demonstrative pronoun, and that ‘life’ here is the subject of the following lines. (Line contains more tautology or padding, ‘fatall time-lesse ruin’, while line , another instance of the fatally vague word ‘some’,
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
adds further padding with ‘in manners’.) The inversion in line , placing ‘Him’ first, cannot be described as a stylistic highlight. The presence of so many inversions, one every five lines, means that all too often inversion becomes the norm, direct word-order the exception. These contortions are often attached to William Peter’s virtues, defined, however, as negatives, the not-indulging-in-a-vice: Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence Wasting his best of time (–) Not in the out-side of disgracefull folly, Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise ( –) Not in the wast of many idle words Car’d hee to be heard talke; nor in the flote Of fond conceit (such as this age affordes) By vaine discourse upon himselfe to dote (–)
One can speculate about the artistic choices whereby ‘W. S.’ gained himself a rhyme between ‘words’ and ‘affords’ (another tautologous phrase), ‘float’ and ‘dote’, but the double or multiple inversions in those four lines produce an ungainly, awkward style. Tautology rules, words are flaccidly interchanged, gaining a rhyme but losing any distinctiveness: yet his furnisht mind Such harmony of goodnesse did preserve, As Nature never built in better kind. Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming In knowing, but for that it was the best: Ever within himselfe free choyce resuming Of true perfection, in a perfect brest (–)
The inversions in lines and allow a rhyme (line ends ‘well deserve’), but add neither point nor emphasis, while the repetition of ‘knowing’ and ‘the best’ in lines – heaps up words without drawing any new energy from them. With this passage we can make the transition to the last aspect of the Elegye’s diction to be considered here, as we move from its awkward and unproductive use of inversion, with omnipresent tautology, to its handling of rhetoric.
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
Renaissance rhetoric, while discovering and reintegrating the classical tradition after its medieval fragmentation, extended it by developing a new emphasis on functionality. It not only identified more than two hundred verbal devices, traditionally divided into tropes (which ‘turn’ the meaning of words, as in metaphor or irony) and figures (which emphasize the ‘shape’ of words by placing and repetition), but urged that these devices should be functionally related to the utterance’s meaning and intended emotional effect. George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie (), insisted that tropes and figures must be organically related to sense and feeling, and not extraneous, as in such clumsy repetitions as ‘To love him and love him, as sinners should do.’ These repetitions ‘be not figurative but fantastical, for a figure is ever used to a purpose, either of beauty or efficacy’. . . (Vickers , p. )
In the enlarged () edition of his Garden of Eloquence (), Henry Peacham added a section to his account of each figure giving both ‘The Use’ and ‘The Caution’, stressing the need for the rhetorical device to be functionally related to the sense, and not over-used. For instance, discussing the figure epistrophe, in which the same word is repeated at the end of a sequence of verse lines or grammatical units, Peacham described its function as being ‘to leave a word of importance in the end of a sentence, that it may the longer hold the sound in the mind of the hearer’ (Vickers , p. ). In his brief but intelligent Directions for Speech and Style (c. ), John Hoskyns accepted that the word repeated should be an important one, but gave a psychological explanation for the device: ‘as no man is sick in thought upon one thing but for some vehemency or distress, so in speech there is no repetition without importance’ (Vickers , p. ). Like all rhetoricians, Hoskyns taught that rhetorical figures, by re-creating the feelings of the character or action portrayed, directly affect the feelings of the reader or playgoer: anaphora ‘beats upon one thing to cause the quicker feeling in the audience’ (p. ). Like Peacham, he urged the writer to tie the figure to sense and structure, having regard to the organic needs of the whole composition: ‘In these two sorts of amplifying you may insert all figures as the passion of the matter shall serve’, observing ‘the proper season and state of each figure’ (p. ). Judged by the criteria of its age, the rhetoric of the Funerall Elegye can only be described as dysfunctional. In the passage just quoted
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
(FE, –), the repetition of ‘knowing’ and ‘the best’ is notionally an example of the rhetorical figure plok´e, but it completely fails to fulfil the injunction laid down by Peacham, Hoskyns, and other guides that ‘in speech there is no repetition without importance’. The echoing of ‘be’ in successive lines of the Elegye (–), discussed above, is, in formal terms, an instance of the figure epistrophe, but it hardly leaves ‘a word of importance’ sounding in the reader’s mind. Polyptoton, which repeats a word derived from the same stem but varies its ending, Hoskyns wrote, ‘is a good figure, and may be used with or without passion, but so as the use of it comes from some choice and not from barrenness’ (Vickers , p. ). On that scale of values, the closing line of the last passage quoted from the Elegye – ‘true perfection, in a perfect breast’, must come dangerously near the pole of ‘barrenness’. The criteria for the functionality of rhetoric laid down by Renaissance theorists demand neither esoteric knowledge nor phenomenal skill from a writer. They are matters of common sense, which any modern reader would endorse if shown the difference between a creative and an uninventive use of rhetoric. In the Funerall Elegye rhetorical figures are made to go through the motion, so to speak, observing the due form of a figure, but signally failing to generate either energy or feeling in the process. The figure plok´e, for example, repeating a word for emphasis, achieves very little when used like this: If these, or all of these For private persons, in their private home Amongst the All of all that lived there Time would to time his honesty commend
() () () ()
Whence now retir’d home; to a home indeed; The home of his condition and estate
(–)
. . . Time shall to time renew’t
()
(I italicize the relevant words for emphasis.) Rather than rhetorical figures which have been chosen by the writer’s judgment, applied ‘as the passion of the matter shall serve’, as Hoskyns put it, and observing ‘the proper season and state of each figure’, we have here several further instances of tautology, as in the unnecessary doubling of ‘private’ (), the triple repetition of ‘home’ (–), or in such vapid echoing as ‘these, or all of these’ (). Symptomatic of the poet’s general lack of invention is the repetition, within a few hundred lines, of the formula ‘Time would to time’ () and ‘Time shall to time’ (). As Puttenham and other
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct
contemporaries would have judged, such repetitions ‘be not figurative but fantastical, for a figure is ever used to a purpose, either of beauty or efficacy’. The figure anadiplosis, where the last word of one clause or sentence becomes the first of the next, can function dynamically within an utterance, describing causation or creating an accelerating movement towards victory or ruin. Here is how ‘W. S.’ used this figure: with honour to the law, That gave peace to his bread, bread to his health (–) And not opprest by wraths unhappy sinne. By wrathes unhappy sinne which unadvis’d
(–)
But since the summe of all that can be said Can bee but said that Hee was good
( –)
Rather than creating any dynamic development of thought, or describing a sequence of cause and effect, those words just mark time while an additional thought is being formed (if indeed any thought takes place). The same verdict can be made of the attempts of ‘W. S.’ to use the figure antimetabole, which repeats two terms while inverting their sequence, as in ‘live to eat, not eat to live’. Peacham described the function of this figure as serving ‘properlie to praise, dispraise, to distinguish, but most commonly to confute by the inversion of the sentence’, while Hoskyns added that ‘this sharp and witty figure . . . shows out of the same words a pithy distinction of meaning’. Here is how ‘W. S.’ used it: His yonger yeares, gave comfortable hope To hope for comfort, in his riper youth ( –) . . . which did declare, That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock: A Rock of Frendship figured in his name (–)
There is nothing witty, or pithy, about these instances, only more of the same predictable, tautologous utterance. The rhetorical abilities of ‘W. S.’ are not much greater than those of that pompous and inefficient speaker, Polonius: That he’s mad, ’tis true, ’tis true, ’tis pity, And pity ’tis ’tis true – a foolish figure But farewell it, for I will use no art.
(Ham., ..–)
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
(Polonius blames his tools, like a bad worker, but antimetabole is one of the most effective figures when properly used.) The Elegye’s dysfunctional use of rhetoric is also shown by these attempts at polyptoton, repeating a word from the same root while varying its ending: The second brother who was next begot, Of all that ever were begotten yet (–) His beeing but a private man in ranke, (And yet not rank’t beneath a Gentleman)
( –)
Give life a new, by giving life againe Where life is mist
(–)
As to whether ‘W. S.’ conceived this figure ‘with or without passion’, as Hoskyns put it, using it ‘from some choice and not from barrenness’, readers are now in a position to judge for themselves. As a coda to this chapter, just to define once more the gap between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare, I should like to quote some instances of these rhetorical figures as used in The Winter’s Tale, written a few years before Peter’s elegy. For an instance of epistrophe, to be contrasted with that feeble echoing of ‘be’ at the end of successive lines in the Elegye, I naturally cite one of the most powerful instances of it in English literature. When Leontes confronts Camillo with his mad fantasies about Hermione having deceived him with Polixenes, Camillo denies having witnessed anything of the kind, and Leontes rounds on him: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? . . . Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, or nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (..–)
This is indeed, as Peacham described it, ‘to leave a word of importance in the end of a sentence, that it may the longer hold the sound in the mind of the hearer’. For truly functional uses of the figure plok´e we can look to Leontes again: ‘Too hot! too hot! / . . . my heart dances, / But not for joy; not joy’ (..–), and ‘Go play, boy, play’ (..). There we feel the speaker’s emotion exerting considerable pressure on the words, as also in Hermione’s outrage at the way Leontes treats her newborn baby,
Donald Foster’s ‘Shakespearean’ construct from my breast (The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth) Hal’d out to murther (..–)
In each case Shakespeare singles out the most important term for emphasis. For Shakespeare, as for any competent user of rhetoric, each figure has a given form but can express an unlimited range of meaning and feeling. Leontes uses polyptoton to describe the willingness he ascribes to ‘true loyal servants’, attentive both to ‘mine honour as their profits’, who ‘would do that / Which should undo more doing’ (..–) – that is, whatever evil deed he should command. Shakespeare can use the same word, varied by the same figure, to express a totally different human sentiment, Florizel’s admiration for Perdita: What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’ld have you do it ever . . . Each your doing (So singular in each particular) Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, That all your acts are queens (..–)
That speech also uses anadiplosis effectively, linking the ending and beginning of successive clauses in order to define Florizel’s total approval of all Perdita’s doings: when you sing I’d have you buy and sell so; so give alms, Pray so . . . When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’th’sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function. (–)
But Shakespeare used anadiplosis equally well as another way of recording Leontes’s obsessive jealousy, convinced that his courtiers were unable to see the adultery of Polixenes and Hermione: all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only That would unseen be wicked (..–)
A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
The urgency with which Leontes invests that figure is comically contrasted with the Clown’s solemn logic, absolving his father of complicity in Perdita’s supposed crimes: ‘She being none of your flesh and blood, your flesh and blood has not offended the King . . . ’ (.. – ). (‘W. S.’, we may say, is closer to the Clown than to either Leontes or Florizel.) The key words for Shakespeare’s stylistic individuality, I propose, are variety, inventiveness, and functionality. All three qualities are shown in his use of antimetabole in this play. It serves Leontes for his self-important appeal that Camillo may see Plainly as heaven sees earth and earth sees heaven, How I am gall’d (..–)
There the repetitiveness is functional to Shakespeare’s presentation of Leontes’s vain attempt to claim legitimacy for his delusions. This figure of inversion also suits Autolycus, exulting over the new garments he is wearing, having just exchanged clothes with Florizel: I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been, without boot! What a boot is here, with this exchange! (..–)
There this ‘sharp and witty figure’ indeed ‘shows out of the same words a pithy distinction of meaning’. In a far more solemn register, the servant announcing the arrival of Perdita predicts that Women will love her, that she is a woman More worth than any man; men, that she is The rarest of all women. (..–)
But the figure does equally well for the Third Gentleman, with his mannered report of the first set of reunions ending this play, between Leontes, Paulina, Polixenes, and Perdita, recording ‘. . . how attentiveness wounded his daughter, till (from one sign of dolour to another) she did (with an “Alas!”), I would fain say, bleed tears; for I am sure my heart wept blood’ (..–). Those few instances of a varied, inventive, and above all functional use of rhetoric, may remind us of the wide gap in capability, and execution, between Shakespeare and the poet of the Funerall Elegye.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Although Foster’s main focus, in his monograph, was on Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, William Strachey, one figure who played a significant role was the poet and dramatist John Ford. Indeed, Foster and his chief associate Richard Abrams may have felt that he had been given too prominent a part, for in their later writings Ford has virtually disappeared, as if his potential status as a rival candidate for the poem’s authorship had become an embarrassment to them. Still, thanks to Foster’s initial investigation we can place Ford very close to William Peter and his family. Ford was born in , in the Devonshire village of Ilsington, and was baptised in the village church on April (not April), as has been recently shown. William Peter had been christened on December , in the Devonshire village of Shillingford St George, some eleven miles away, and grew up on his family’s estate at Bowhay. ‘Nothing else is known of William’s childhood until July , when he entered Exeter College, Oxford,’ matriculating on October, and spending ‘most of the ensuing decade at the University’ (Foster , p. ). Nothing else is known of John Ford’s childhood until September , when he and his first cousin William Ford (born ) also entered Exeter College, matriculating on March . The college Register gives John Ford’s age as sixteen (he was not yet fifteen), but as Foster points out, ‘the ages given in the Register are frequently inaccurate by a year or two’, and throughout the college records they are described ‘as “Ford, se.” and “Ford ju.”’, notations ‘used throughout to denote elder and younger family members, usually brothers, sometimes cousins’ (pp.–). William Ford’s father had died in , when he was just six, and he was brought up by his uncle Thomas Ford of Ilsington, father of the dramatist. John and his cousin William grew up at Ilsington, ‘virtual stepbrothers’, as Foster put it (p. ). William Ford and William Peter, Foster suggested, ‘had probably known one another since childhood. As they were only a
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
year apart in age, it is likely that they attended the Latin high school together in Exeter’ – that is, Exeter Grammar School – ‘and their families were allied on their mothers’ side – Ford’s maternal grandmother . . . was paternal aunt to William Peter’s mother . . .’ (p. ). Furthermore, ‘the Fords of Ilsington and Peters of Bowhay shared numerous friends and relations among the prominent families of Devon, and Peter’s elder brother John attended the Middle Temple with John, Thomas, and Henry Ford’. Foster documented an even closer link between John Ford and the Peter family, given the importance among the English gentry of land-owning, that ever-interesting topic, namely: at the time of Henry Ford’s death in , his younger brother John (the poet) possessed an estate nearly surrounded by lands owned by the Peter clan. Located between Ipplepen and Torbrian, the poet’s property neighbored, on the west, an estate owned first by Otho Peter, then by William himself until his death in , and on the east, a much larger estate owned by Peter’s cousins of Torbrian. (p. )
Foster was justified, then, in claiming John Ford as ‘a probable friend’ of William Peter (p. ), and asserting that ‘it is virtually certain that John Ford knew William Peter’ (p. ). John’s cousin William Ford was even closer to William Peter, for both continued their studies at Exeter College, and shared the same tutor (Simon Baskerville) for several terms. William Peter took his BA in May , and his MA in May , leaving Oxford in the autumn of , at much the same time that William Ford went down, having taken his master’s degree in (pp. –, –). William Ford and William Peter had exemplary university careers (Ford returned to Oxford in , taking his BD in ), unlike John Ford, who left Oxford in April , after only five terms’ study, without taking his degree. But he had lived in the same small college as William Peter for nearly two years. On November John Ford entered the Middle Temple, joining several relatives already in residence, including his great-uncle, Lord Chief Justice Popham, his elder brother Henry, and William’s elder brother Thomas Ford. ‘In the Hilary Term of /’, however, Ford ‘was expelled for failure to pay his buttery bill.’ Ford’s failure to pay his bills, whether due to his father’s parsimony or his own extravagance, was a fault common to many Middle Templars. He was granted readmission on June , having settled his bill and paid a fine of forty shillings, ‘acknowledging his fault with penitency’. According to Joan Sargeaunt, Ford got into trouble with the Middle Temple authorities later, in May , for being one of forty
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
students formally reprimanded for not wearing their caps in Hall. However, Martin Wiggins has shown that this entry more likely refers to a younger Templar also called John Ford, from Somerset. Certainly, Ford had many Devonshire contacts in the Inns of Court. Already, from this brief biographical survey, we can see that it is far more likely that Ford would have been called on, or have volunteered, in February to write a memorial poem on the death of a close Devonshire friend whom he had known all his life, than that Shakespeare should have done so. Ford began his writing career while at the Middle Temple. In he published Honor Triumphant; Or The Peeres Challenge. . . . In Honor of all faire Ladies, and in defence of these foure positions following. . . . Maintained by Arguments, a chivalric debate, with inset poems, in honour of the visit to England by Christian IV, King of Denmark and brother-in-law to James I. As Judith M. Kennedy showed in her edition of the poem, Ford drew on several traditional literary forms – the paradox, courtesy treatises, Neo-Platonic love theory, Elizabethan prose fiction –to create a hybrid work whose ethos is chivalric, aristocratic. Ford was always inspired by the image of ‘an eloquent, learned, valiant gentleman’, as his more eminent senior fellow Templar, John Hoskyns, described Sir Philip Sidney (quoted in NDW, p. ). Although Ford’s commentators disagree about the success of this poem, a readiness to praise the aristocratic temper recurs several times in Ford’s work. Clifford Leech argued for the presence of Ford’s ‘cult of aristocracy’ in Christes Bloodie Sweat (surprisingly, one might feel, for a religious poem), as well as in Fames Memoriall and Honor Triumphant, and pointed to a similar aristocratic tendency in Ford’s drama, towards ‘exaltation of the exceptional human being’. In the same year, , aged twenty, Ford published a much more substantial poem addressed to an exceptional human being, Fames Memoriall, or The Earle of Devonshire Deceased: With his honourable life, peacefull end, and solemn Funerall, a funeral elegy runnning to , lines, on the death of Charles Blount (–), the eighth Lord Mountjoy and first Earl of Devonshire. Ford also contributed a shorter (eighty-line) tribute, ‘In honorable memory of the Right noble the Earle of Devonshire late deceased’ (NDW, pp. –), one of several poetic texts collected and set to music by the Anglo-Italian composer John Coperario, in a volume called Funerall Teares (). In choosing to celebrate Mountjoy, Ford was displaying his lifelong admiration for virtue and nobility, but in this instance that laudable trait caused him to flout both political and moral orthodoxy. A close friend of the Earl of Essex, Mountjoy succeeded him as the lord
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
deputy of Ireland in , and soon reversed Essex’s catastrophic failures with a sustained military campaign that forced Tyrone, the rebels’ leader, to surrender. When Essex mounted his fatal uprising, Mountjoy took pains to distance himself from his friend, pledging his renewed loyalty to the Queen ‘in carefully-worded letters’, as L. E. Stock put it (NDW, p. ). But to Ford Essex was still a heroic figure, and in the poem he apostrophizes the deceased Mountjoy: Goe yet ritch-stiled Peere and overtake (Thy selfe shalt priviledge thy selfe by merit) Thy soules-united Essex for whose sake, Thou didst advance thy love, which did inherit The deere reversion of his elate spirit. (FM, –)
Subsequently Ford appeals for piteous tears on behalf of ‘Peerlesse Essex’, whose ‘strife . . . procur’d’ the fall of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, and leader with Mountjoy of the Essex faction in the late s. Southampton was condemned to death for his part in the rebellion, but subsequently pardoned. Ford must have known that Essex represented a severe danger to the state, but he presents his deathsentence as an injustice: When fickle chance and deaths blindfold decree, From the tribunall seat of awful state, Had hurried down in black calamity Renowned Devereux, whose aukward fate, Was misconceited by fowle envies hate: Back was he cal’d from Ireland to come home, And noble Mountjoy must supply his roome. Looke how two heart-united brothers part, The one to slaughter, th’other to distrust, Yet sorrowing each with other pawns his hart As being loath to goe, yet go they must, Either to horror and a death unjust (–)
Ford has Mountjoy departing for Ireland, ‘Vowing revenge . . . on that land . . . / Which wrought the downfall of his worthiest friend’ (–), as if Ireland were solely to blame for the collapse of Essex’s career. If praising Essex risked outraging loyal English citizens, Ford flouted public morality still further by his praise of Mountjoy’s widow, Essex’s sister, Penelope Devereux, who had been the ‘Stella’ to Sidney’s ‘Astrophil’.
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
In Penelope was forced to marry Lord Rich, although she and Mountjoy (then Charles Blount, a younger son without title or fortune) had apparently exchanged ‘assurance . . . of a future marriage’ (NDW, p. ). Undeterred by this legal marriage, Mountjoy and Lady Rich enjoyed an open love-affair, she bearing him ‘five children out of wedlock in addition to those she bore her husband’. In November Lady Rich secured a divorce, and Mountjoy (now Earl of Devonshire) persuaded his chaplain, William Laud, the future archbishop, to perform their marriage, an action which aroused heated controversy. In Fames Memoriall, however, Ford hymns Penelope even more fulsomely than he does Essex or Mountjoy. She is that glorious starre Which bewtified the value of our lande, The lightes of whose perfections brighter are Than all the lampes, which in the lustre stand Of heavens forehead, by discretion scan’d, Wits ornament, earth’s love, loves Paradise A saint divine, a bewty fairly wise. (–)
In addition to these and other laudations in the printed text, a manuscript dedication copy to the widowed countess exists (formerly belonging to Edmond Malone, and now in the Bodleian), which contains three additional celebratory stanzas. The third of these directly challenges all notions of legitimate marriage, and its violation, by ascribing to Lady Rich a whole rash of moral positives: Thy virtue caus’d thy honor to support thee In noble contract of undoubted merit, His knowledge to his Credence did report thee A creature of a more than female spirit, Concord of musick did thy soule inherit, Courtiers but counterfeit thy Rarity For thy perfections brook’t no parity. (–)
The elevated strain of hyperbole here, reaching even to the subject’s ‘perfection’, is typical of Ford’s style, as we shall see. According to Leo Stock, Ford’s learned editor, the poet was not really offending anyone by praising Essex and Penelope Devereux. With the accession of King James, we are told, ‘Essex’s reputation underwent a belated rehabilitation’, and ‘the executed traitor of now became the
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
subject of exaggerated praise’ (NDW, pp. –). As for Penelope’s marriage to Mountjoy, Stock argued that this was not so shocking either, even though he quoted an authoritative biographer’s report that ‘“the King was in fact offended, that Charles and Penelope were blamed, and perhaps by some treated coldly”’. It is true that Mountjoy was given further offices and Penelope was ‘“visited by the greatest in the land”’ (p. ). Still, Stock conceded that it is entirely possible that ‘Ford himself wished, or was asked, to remove the three stanzas in which Penelope is directly addressed’, and to make other changes, the grounds being ‘simply a sense of delicacy, a feeling of propriety, or a realization that the stanzas . . . were exaggerated and inaccurate’ (p. ). For my part, I find it quite likely that Ford’s celebration of Essex and Penelope did offend people of orthodox views, and that he did so knowingly. Throughout his career, as a poet, prose-writer, and dramatist, he quite deliberately sided with those whom he felt to have been unjustly punished, or those whose crimes would be regarded with disgust by a majority of law-abiding citizens. His evident sympathy with the incestuous brother–sister relationship in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore flouted several social conventions. As Dorothy Farr put it, ‘Ford was always to some degree an iconoclast’, whose plays regularly set up tensions between the individual and the established moral order . . . By ethical standards Giovanni is clearly in the wrong but that is not what the play is about. Similarly Perkin Warbeck’s insistence upon his claim to the throne is an offence against reason and the social order; it is also an offence against truth according to the verdict of history. But as in the case of Giovanni, so in that of Warbeck, the slant of the action is on the hero’s conviction and his loyalty to himself; concern for the established order, whether moral or social, is only ancillary to the purpose of the play.
That purpose often was to portray characters with noble qualities confronting a hostile fortune. My reason for remarking on Ford’s penchant for praising those who exemplified nobility in adversity, even though public opinion disapproved of their deeds, is that it may help explain that strange passage in the Funerall Elegye where ‘W. S.’ utters his sense of grievance at his own misfortunes, having been rewarded with some sadder taste, Of knowing shame; by feeling it have prov’d My countries thanklesse misconstruction; cast
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Upon my name and credit, both unlov’d By some, . . . . . . [who have] sifted to imbane My reputation, with a witlesse sinne, Yet Time, the Father of unblushing Truth, May one day lay ope malice which hath crost it: And right the hopes of my indangered youth, Purchasing credit in the place I lost it. (–)
This passage will probably always remain as obscure as the ‘mistake of conduct’ Ovid made in , resulting in his banishment to Tomis, but I suggest that it could refer to the odium that Ford received by his unqualified praise of Essex and Penelope. The complaint at ‘My countries . . . misconstruction’ refers not to Oxford, as Foster thought, but to his ‘country’, the area from which he comes, the county of Devon, and suggests that members of the landed gentry may have been displeased at his celebration both of a traitor and would-be regicide, and his adulterous sister. In the alternative scenario, presented by Gilles Monsarrat (), these passages describe the ‘witlesse sinne’ of which ‘W. S.’, the poem’s dedicator, was unjustly found guilty, and which he plans to expiate by good behaviour. Both suggestions are speculative, of course, but both are a lot more credible than the Foster–Abrams scenario of a Shakespeare simultaneously professing homosexuality in the Sonnets and recording his shame at having been publicly humiliated, and then reverting to the matter four years later in an Elegye written on an obscure young man and (perhaps) privately published. The shame expressed by ‘W. S.’ at the events which clouded his ‘indangered youth’, whatever they were, at least contain the promise of repentance, with the resolution that he shall heereafter in a poore content, Immure those imputations I sustaine, Learning my dayes of youth so to prevent, As not to be cast downe by them again (–)
Repentance, as so many characters in Ford’s plays remind us, is the first step to moral reformation. Ford’s admiration for the aristocracy, as possessing both honour and virtue, nobility and education, dominates Fames Memoriall. To set out its main topics, as I did for the Funerall Elegye (see pp. –), will show that it shares many ideas and attitudes with the William Peter elegy, although
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
its organization is better. Ford has evidently given some consideration to its plan, since he obeys the rhetoricians’ traditional injunction to follow the subject’s life in chronological sequence, interspersing occasional apostrophes and other personal utterances. Lines
Topics
Prologue: the workings of time and fame A panegyric to Mountjoy His infancy and education He goes to court, learns of love He practises manly sports The poet expresses grief at Mountjoy’s death; his friends mourn him, as do his soldiers Mountjoy’s bravery in the Low Countries (–) His love for Penelope, wife of Lord Rich His campaigns in Ireland (–), replacing the disgraced Essex Mountjoy’s speech warning the Irish rebels His Irish campaign, firm but not vindictive The death of Queen Elizabeth in , which dashes Mountjoy’s hopes of presenting his victory to her As King James accedes to the throne, Mountjoy returns with Tyrone his prisoner He is created Earl of Devonshire in reward Mountjoy’s virtues are generally recognized He excelled in the four cardinal virtues His love for Penelope Rich The poet describes Mountjoy as ‘a theam of wonder’, and writes his laudatio The poet asks what more he can say The poet appeals for grief, as he prepares to recount Mountjoy’s death Mountjoy sleeps in peace and fame His virtues celebrated The poet erects a tomb for him with nine epitaphs, to match the nine worthies The poet’s deploratio for Mountjoy He rests in peace Mountjoy was ‘Renowned in life, blest in his end’ As that summary shows, Ford keeps to the chronological sequence, as recommended, moving from infancy to boyhood, military success, public
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
fame, and death, dutifully interspersing three sections expressing his personal grief (ff, ff, ff ). The repetition of topics – two sections on Penelope Rich, two on Mountjoy sleeping in peace, three on the poet’s grief – is not as extreme as in the Funerall Elegye, but is not dissimilar. Several sections are longer than they need have been, the poet achieving copia at the cost of some verbosity, and they unfortunately obscure the overall plan. It was certainly easier to write a eulogy of a public figure, who lived for forty-three years, and whose doings were abundantly documented, than of William Peter, whose life of decent obscurity ended with such sudden violence. But curiously enough, as Leo Stock points out, Ford did not mention several of ‘the dramatic events of his subject’s life’, such as Mountjoy’s military adventures before his Irish campaigns, apart from a fleeting reference to the ‘wars of Belgia’ (FM, ), and failed to refer to any action in Ireland, ‘not even Mountjoy’s overwhelming victory at Kinsale . . . the last great victory of Elizabeth’s reign’ (NDW, pp. –). Contrasting Fames Memoriall unfavourably with Daniel’s Funerall Poeme to Mountjoy, Stock wrote: ‘Drawing on his knowledge and experience, Daniel wrote a subtle and accurate account of an extraordinary human being. Ford wrote an impersonal elegy about a public hero he had never known and about whom he seemed to have little information’ (p. ) – a strikingly similar situation to the ‘W. S.’ who eulogized William Peter from a distance in place, and perhaps time, not even knowing how long he had been married. In both poems the eulogized hero remains curiously indistinct, a collection of virtues rather than an observed human being. After all, aged only twenty when he wrote his poem for Mountjoy, Ford had had little experience of life, and his knowledge of virtue evidently came from traditional classical and Christian sources. The poem is sincerely meant, and extends its expression of grief at Mountjoy’s death, and righteous indignation over society’s treatment of the two lovers, to quite surprising length, more a tribute to Ford’s stamina, perhaps, than to his literary invention. But readers who come to it knowing Ford’s mature plays are likely to agree with Ronald Huebert’s verdict that his early prose and poetry show little promise, and no dramatic subtlety at all. One can hardly say that the author of Fames Memoriall () develops or matures into the dramatist of the s, because there is little in Fames Memoriall worth developing or capable of maturing. The playwright who wrote ’Tis Pity and The Broken Heart seems to have very little to learn from the sincere but tedious young versifier who preceded him.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In order to grasp the orientation of Fames Memoriall – as of all Ford’s poems and prose works – we must realize that he was writing within the genre of epideictic rhetoric, as first defined by Aristotle. The goals of epideictic were to praise virtue, and discredit vice. Typically, the deeds of some man (usually) who had displayed the four cardinal virtues – wisdom, justice, temperance, fortitude – were celebrated, sometimes juxtaposed with their opposites. When ‘W. S.’ writes of the deceased William Peter that the summe of all that can be said Can bee but said that Hee was good: which wholy Includes all excellence can be displaide, In praise of vertue and reproach of Folly (FE, –; my italics)
he is drawing on the twin poles of epideictic. In addition, ‘W. S.’, like Ford, subscribes to the automatic connection made by classical and Renaissance moralists between virtuous behaviour and its public recognition. Men and women who live virtuously, or so orthodox morality promised, will be rewarded in this life with fame; after their death their memory will persist as a model to be emulated by all right-minded persons. Some key words in this ethico-rhetorical tradition, common both to Ford in his elegy to Mountjoy and ‘W. S.’ in his elegy to Peter, are: ‘virtue’, ‘noble’, ‘merit’, ‘worth’, ‘fame’, ‘honour’, ‘name’, ‘desert’, ‘memory’, ‘monument’, ‘commendation’, ‘pattern’. On the other side, opposed to virtue and fame, are their unavoidable enemies, according to Renaissance thought, ‘envy’ and ‘malice’, attended by the vices shunned by the virtuous. Key words in the ethical terminology of both ‘W. S.’ and Ford here include ‘ease’, ‘sensual’ and ‘sensuality’, ‘vice’, ‘defamation’, ‘slander’, ‘gall’, ‘spleen’. Many of these terms are common to a wide range of moralizing works written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of course; some of them less so. Their significance for our enquiry is that they occur in the Funerall Elegye with a quite remarkable density – perhaps two-thirds of the poem consists of an expansion of those two word-lists – and that exactly the same sequences of thought and vocabulary are found in Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays. As we saw in a previous chapter, the two dominant ideas in the Elegye are that William Peter led a life of virtue (the most frequently used word in the poem, recurring ten times), and that his memory will live and be honoured. The same assurances are given by Ford about the heroes of his poems and prose works – Mountjoy in Fames Memoriall, Harington in
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
The Golden Meane, and even Jesus in Christes Bloodie Sweat. If we compare the elegy for Mountjoy with that to Peter, we find the same generalizing affirmations linking virtue, time, praise, memory, and fame, as in the strikingly similar openings of the poem, cited below. (See no.* in chapter , in which I list more than eighty parallels of thought and language between the Elegye and Ford’s works.) For both poets virtue is the keynote, and they laud the virtues of the deceased (in Peter’s case to the exclusion of almost all other topics), in a very similar tone, delivering hyperbolic affirmations in a matter-of-fact manner. As Leo Stock, Ford’s best editor put it, the ‘chief stylistic device’ in Fames Memoriall is ‘iterated hyperbole: exaggeration piled upon exaggeration’. Much of the hyperbole, however, is ‘general praise of the great man’ (NDW, p. ), the generalities possibly deriving from Ford’s ignorance of Mountjoy’s career. But Stock also suggested that Ford omitted detail and particular reference in a deliberate attempt to portray a hero in the classical pattern. A hero has such-and-such virtues: a hero acts in this and that way. Since Mountjoy was a hero, these virtues and ways of acting are simply applied to him, without example, by way of affirmation, buttressed by repetition and hyperbole. ( p. )
Whether Ford genuinely knew little about Mountjoy, or made a virtue of necessity, the result is the same: an unending stream of eulogy. Indeed, Ford makes the ultimate gesture in epideictic rhetoric, asserting that Mountjoy exemplified human perfection: Such is his sounding notice all do know it, No poet can grace him, he every poet . . . . Nor is one found amongst a world of men, Who can perfect his actions with his pen.
(FM, –, –)
Without any misgivings about over-statement, Ford appeals to his readers to help him erect A trophey consecrated unto fame, Adding within our hearts historicall, High Epithetes past hyperbolicall. (–)
Having licensed his own procedure, he heaps up hyperbolic assertions of Mountjoy’s supremacy, A perfect noble mind’s trew document () This man more than a man, this god in arms ()
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Pausing only to make the rhetorical gesture, ‘I can say no more’, Ford reaches the absolute height of panegyric: He was the best, the most, most best of all, Heaven’s pride, earths joy, we may him justly call. (–)
We may excuse Ford’s excess here (‘most best’ is rather ridiculous) if we recall Aristotle’s observation that hyperbole is characteristic of young men (Rhetoric, a ff ). The word ‘perfect’ and its cognates recur in the Funerall Elegye as ‘W. S.’ assures us that Peter’s ‘taintlesse goodnesse, his desertfull merit’ (), ‘his repute / And estimation’ (–) will never be forgotten, for the grave ‘shall not intombe, / His pleading best perfections as neglected’ (FE, –). Not able to pull out as many stops as Ford did for Mountjoy, victorious general, ‘W. S.’ can only express his wish that Peter remain honoured: Long may thy worthinesse thy name advance, Amongst the vertuous, and deserving most. (–)
Despite the very different subjects of eulogy, the two poems resemble each other in many other ways. Indeed, the similarities between Fames Memoriall and the Funerall Elegye are so striking as to call in question any simple notion of plagiarism. Foster ignored Fames Memoriall in his monograph (although it does appear in his Checklist, p. ), but in Richard Abrams described it as ‘a previously unidentified source of the Peter elegy’: That W. S. had recently read Ford’s poem is evident in many of its phrases. Ford’s dedicatory epistle boasts of speaking ‘with the Privilege of troth’; W. S.’s epistle more modestly describes the poet as ‘but a second to the priviledge of Truth’; Ford’s poem begins, ‘Swift Time’, W. S.’s ‘Since Time’; Ford’s final stanza has, ‘And set thee [Mountjoy] as a president to men’; W. S. takes over the line verbatim in tribute to Peter (FE, ). The echoes make it certain that W. S. had a copy of Ford’s poem in hand while composing the Elegy.
I agree that these parallels prove the indebtedness of the later poem to the earlier one, but I shall argue the alternative scenario, namely that the author of the Funerall Elegye remembered Fames Memoriall since he had written it himself. The very many similarities that I shall point out in the concluding chapter go far beyond the straightforward appropriation of admired lines or expressions that can be seen in the Elegye’s borrowings from Daniel’s Funerall Poeme for Mountjoy. Rather, we find in them a coincidence of attitudes, especially towards the extremes of
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
virtue and vice, a tone of voice, a use of syntax and rhetoric which all derive from very similar habits of thinking and speaking, with a comparable vocabulary, learned, somewhat Latinate, both poems drawing on a Stoic–Christian tradition. There are obvious differences, too, the Elegye being considerably less coherent in plan, and less extravagant in diction. The second point might be put down to Ford’s greater maturity, since those critics who have commented on his early, non-dramatic poems have all noted a distinct improvement from one to the next, while the incoherent structure of the Peter Elegye is undoubtedly due to the extreme speed with which it was produced, within a fortnight. But the same mind produced the eulogies to Mountjoy and to William Peter. In Ford published two substantial works, one of them a prose treatise, The Golden Meane, the other a poem called Christes Bloodie Sweat: or The Sonne of God in His Agonie. The title-page does not divulge the poem’s author, but the dedication (to William, Earl of Pembroke) is signed ‘J. F.’, and since Joan Sargeaunt made the ascription, Ford’s authorship has never been doubted. The title, and basic idea of the poem, derive from the gospel accounts of Christ’s Passion, just before his betrayal on the Mount of Olives, where He prayed, Saying, Father, if thou wilt, take away this cup from me: neverthelesse, not my will, but thine be done. And there appeared an Angell unto him from heaven, comforting him. But being in an agonie, hee prayed more earnestly: and his sweate was like droppes of blood, trickling downe to the ground. (Luke :–)
The Geneva translation, quoted here, adds a marginal gloss on ‘agonie’: ‘The word signifieth y e horror that Christ had conceived, not only for feare of death, but of his Fathers judgement and wrath against sinne.’ This text was the focus of much theological debate as to the nature of Christ’s suffering (which Calvin took to refer to His harrowing of Hell), and formed part of a well-publicized dispute between Colet and Erasmus. It inspired some memorable responses, as in a deeply felt sermon by Lancelot Andrewes. Ford prefixed an epistle to the reader, giving the poem both an autobiographical and a didactic significance: The Way to Doe well, is not so doubtfull, as not to be sought; neither so darke, but it may bee found. I confesse, I have, touching my perticular, beene long carried with the doubts of folly, youth, and opinion, and as long miscaried in the darknesse of unhappinesse, both in invention and action. This was not the path that led to a contented rest, or a respected name. In regarde whereof, I have heere set forth the witnesse that may testifie what I desire to bee. Not that many should know it, but that many should take comfort by it.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
There seems no reason to doubt Ford’s sincerity, which is in any case manifest from the parallels between the ethical content of this Christian poem and his contemporary Neo-Stoic treatise, The Golden Meane (; enlarged, ). Disturbed that he enjoyed neither ‘a contented rest’, the tranquillitas animi which formed the goal of Stoic philosophy, nor ‘a respected name’, Ford decided to declare his faith by praising the greatest instance of virtue in human form. At this stage of his life Ford was still on the books of the Middle Temple, which produced several notable dramatists (Marston, Beaumont, Webster, Shirley, among others), but he now seemed to be setting out on the career of a Christian moralist and essayist. From a few years later, in or around , according to historians of drama, date his first collaborations with Dekker and others, at which point he seems to have switched careers, towards that of a professional dramatist. All the same, the ethico-religious mode continued to attract him, as we see from his later treatise, A Line of Life. Pointing at the Immortalitie of a Vertuous Name (). Christes Bloodie Sweat is a serious poem, designed to reveal Ford’s own self-searchings for the benefit or ‘comfort’ of others. It is lengthy, containing stanzas of six iambic pentameter lines rhyming ababcc (as in Venus and Adonis), totalling , lines. The poem is evidently the product of much study, for the margins contain copious documentation of the relevant loci in the Old and New Testament, roughly in all. A typical example might be this stanza, which also shows Ford’s rather wooden use of rhetoric, especially such figures of repetition as plok´e, repeating a word within a clause or sentence (line ), anadiplosis, placing the same word at the ending of one clause and the beginning of the next (), and parison, symmetrical grammatical structure (). Ford deployed all three figures to describe Christ’s serious, even sorrowful nature: What eye did ever see him laugh? What eares Have heard him speake the languages of pleasure? But every eye that saw him, saw his Teares, All Eares that heard him, heard him speake in measure; For still his wordes, with griefe such measure kept, His speech was sighes, and as he spoke, he wept.
John .... Mar. .. Luke ...
(–)
The biblical knowledge displayed throughout the poem is impressive, while the focus on Christ is typical of contemporary Anglican theology, as in the Christocentric approach of Lancelot Andrewes. Ford writes from a Protestant perspective, which was wide enough to draw on the Catholic
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
techniques of meditation, as Louis Martz showed so well. The result is a constant focus on Christ’s agony as a meditative subject, intended to induce mortification and repentance in the poet and his readers. Ford’s awareness of the exegetical tradition displayed in the Geneva Bible’s explanation of ‘agonie’ as describing ‘ye horror that Christ had conceived . . . of his Fathers judgement and wrath against sinne’, is clear from this passage, in which Christ describes his sufferings in this world: But hereto did my Fathers will me call: Which most above the rest his will with paine, Did cleave my soule, all woe-begon in twaine. The charge of whose hot wrath so fearefull was, As against Nature chang’d my sweate to blood: Which trickling downe my cheekes uppon the grass, Well tould the agony wherein I stood: An agony indeed, whose trembling heate, Powr’d out the wonder of a bloudy sweate.
Luke ..
(–)
The phrase ‘Christes Bloodie sweate’ recurs over and over, a leitmotif designed to aid the meditative process, which Fran¸cois de Sales defined as ‘an attentive thought iterated, or voluntarily entertained in the mynd, to excitate the will to holy affections and resolutions’. As Dennis Danielson commented: ‘No one would accuse Ford in this poem of almost two thousand lines of not iterating an attentive thought or of losing any opportunity to excite his and his reader’s will to holy affections and resolutions’ (NDW, p. ). And Colin Gibson recently described the poem as expressing ‘what was evidently some kind of religious conversion’, which makes it ‘a crucial document in Ford’s development as a writer, showing a previously unmatched emotional energy and concentration on its subject’. Some effects are melodramatic, with ‘the emotion out of control’, but the poem as a whole ‘marks the emergence of a new language of sensation and rapid metaphoric change well beyond the capacity of the timid poet of Fames Memoriall, written only seven years before’ (Gibson , p. ). All serious students of Ford agree that this work documents some kind of spiritual crisis that he had been through, proclaiming an intended selfreformation. Donald Foster, however, allowed himself the jibe: ‘Ford, not long after Peter’s untimely death, was smitten with an uncharacteristic fit of repentance. Hoping (in his own words) to “undoe the many follies” of his youth, he composed Christes Bloodie Sweat, a narrative poem of
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
nearly , lines that is annotated throughout with cross-references to Scripture’ (, p.). In his PMLA essay Foster treated this point, like so many others, in a far more assertive manner, as part of his campaign to present Ford as a slavish and uninventive borrower. Supposedly, Ford based his depiction of Christ in his long meditative poem on William Peter, the unfortunate victim memorialized in the Funerall Elegye: The Funeral Elegy allusions and the biographical details in Christ’s Bloody Sweat make Ford’s Christ sound more like William Peter than like the Jesus of the Gospels: Ford’s Jesus is said to be a scholar but to have turned his back on other scholars who ‘[w]ith terms of art and smooth beguiling rhymes’ sought ‘[t]o paint the grossness of unlawful love’ (–; cf. Funeral Elegy –). A man noted principally for loyalty to his friends, Ford’s Jesus is a beautiful thirty-year-old who suffers detraction before unjustly perishing from a ‘fatal stroke’, a bloody injury to the head (–, –, –). (Foster a, pp. –)
Here Foster displayed a contemptuous disregard of this profoundly serious poem, on which Ford lavished much biblical study and artistic pains, over a considerable period of time. To imagine that Ford had to rely on such a slight poem as the Elegye for his central depiction of Christ’s suffering and redemptive agency is to trivialize religion as well as literature. Foster had, of course, twisted his description of Christes Bloodie Sweat to make it sound as if it were indebted to the Elegye. But unfortunately, as Gilles Monsarrat () points out, Foster got Ford’s poem entirely wrong, making five glaring errors in this brief account. First, William Peter may have ‘turned his back on other scholars’, as Foster claims, by leaving Oxford, but Christ certainly did not turn his back on them, or on anyone else. Ford follows the Gospels’ account of how Christ ‘did pose / Great learned clarkes, and Doctors’ (CBS, –), adding the correct marginal reference to ‘Luk. .’. Earlier in the poem Ford compiled a long list of sinners for whom Christ shed ‘Each drop of blood . . . To wash a severall sin from severall men’ (–), including ‘Princes’, ‘Scribes’, ‘Lawyers’, ‘Soldiers’, ‘Schollars’, and other professions (–), but for each social group Ford repeated the refrain: ‘For those He sweated bloud’ (, , , –, , , , , , , etc.). To imagine that Christ would withhold His redemptive powers from anyone shows a profound ignorance of Christian religion, as well as an inability to read the poem. Secondly, Monsarrat points out, Ford never describes Christ as beautiful, emphasizing rather the ravages caused by his suffering. Thirdly, Peter was thirty when he died, but Christ was thirty-three. Fourthly, Ford’s knowledge of Christian theology was (fortunately) deeper than
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Foster’s, and he was well aware that Christ died to satisfy divine justice, as the poem several times declares: ‘His [God’s] most just justice would no mercy give, / But God as man must die, that men may live’ (–; –). Lastly, Foster’s claim that Christ, just like William Peter, perished from a ‘bloody injury to the head’ is, in Monsarrat’s words, ‘simply untrue; there is no mention of such an injury in [the poem], and “head” does not even occur in any of the passages to which Foster refers the reader’ (author’s italics). Monsarrat describes Foster’s reading of Christes Bloodie Sweat as ‘demonstrably, a travesty of Ford’s poem’, and he draws attention to a note that Foster wrote for the bilingual edition of the the Elegye published in France in , which states ‘(quite amazingly) that Christes Bloodie Sweat can be interpreted as Ford’s “own elegy on Peter”’. That is a choice example of how a critic can be so carried away by a preconceived idea that he cannot read the poem open before him. The desire to prove a thesis can blind one to everything else. Given that Christes Bloodie Sweat is a serious religious poem, with its own unity of theme and focus, what is the relation between it and the anonymous Funerall Elegye? According to Foster, the relation is a simple case of plagiarism, for the poem constitutes prime evidence ‘that Ford had read W. S.’s Funeral Elegy’ (, p. ). Having quoted four striking parallels (pp. –), which we shall come to in due course, Foster commented that since (as he believes) the Elegye for Peter was privately printed, it shows some initiative on Ford’s part to have ‘found access to a copy of the Elegy despite what appears to have been a private printing of limited circulation’ (p.). There is a simpler explanation, of course, namely that Ford still owned a copy of the poem he had written. But to accuse Ford of plagiarism is to avoid asking the obvious question, why on earth should he have needed to plagiarize the Funerall Elegye, when he was evidently engaged on a long work having its own integrity and rationale? No one could ever accuse Ford of being deficient in copia verborum, and it would be highly unlikely that he would need to draw on an anonymously published funeral elegy for an obscure Devonshire gentleman to cover up gaps in his own invention. Both Christes Bloodie Sweat and The Golden Meane were published in , and both show evidence of considerable reading and planning, making as they do a sustained synthesis of sacred and secular texts. A much simpler and more plausible hypothesis explaining the similarities would be that Ford broke off the composition of these two works in January–February to write Peter’s Funerall Elegye in some haste, with his head full of words and phrases which were really part of the longer poem. This hypothesis also explains the fact
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
that the many parallels between the two poems are not like the ad hoc borrowing of conventional gestures from panegyric which the Funerall Elegye made from Daniel’s Funerall Poeme, where secular topics could be fitted into a similar secular context, with no sense of incongruity. The material and attitudes which A Funerall Elegye shares with Christes Bloodie Sweat derive from a widely informed and deeply felt Christian belief. As we saw in chapter , the Elegye is unlike anything by Shakespeare in its confident handling of religious topics, in the long excursus on the death of Christ and the sufferings of the saints as examples of others who suffered a violent death having led a virtuous life. Those pious, and poetically more inspired lines, suggest that ‘W. S.’ had an intimate knowledge of the Bible, and Ford’s competence in that respect cannot be doubted. The many similarities between the Funerall Elegye and Christes Bloodie Sweat suggest that both were written by the same poet, at much the same time. That is, I find it natural to think of Ford reusing for a personal elegy, ‘written in just a few days’ time’, as Foster calculated (, p. ), phrases and lines from the longer, more serious work he was engaged on, even though they did not fit very well. On the other hand, I find it rather unnatural to think of Ford, while composing Christes Bloodie Sweat, poring over a short, secular elegy, of minimal quality, hastily put together and full of repetition, in order to take over several whole lines and many words and phrases into his own poem. – What could possibly have attracted Ford to this Funerall Elegye, one may well ask, among all the run-ofthe-mill verse published in London over the previous few years? This scenario is particularly unlikely, since it involves Ford extracting from that poem words and lines which he then had to shift from a secular to a sacred context, somehow managing to give them coherence and resonance there. In Foster listed a few of the many parallels between the two poems in a rather throw-away manner, as proofs of plagiarism (pp. –), but in his essay for PMLA he felt it necessary to address the issue more fully. Here he revised his earlier statement that Christes Bloodie Sweat ‘owes no obvious debt to Shakespeare’, since his now categorical ascription of the Elegye to Shakespeare made it necessary to typecast any poet or dramatist whose work showed affinities with it as a close imitator of Shakespeare. Therefore Foster repeated his highly exaggerated claim that Ford was ‘Shakespeare’s most ardent epigone. Ford has, of course, other literary debts – most notably to John Marston – but none is more pressing than his dependence on WS and on canonical Shakespeare, especially heavy in Christ’s Bloody Sweat’ (a, p. ).
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
However, the twelve examples now quoted to prove Ford’s borrowing actually suggest that both poems derive from the same pen. If we compare them to the Shakespeare parallels with the Elegye that Foster claimed to find we instantly notice that the correspondences here are fuller, sustained over longer sequences, and with strikingly similar phrasing. The list of parallels between the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s works that I give in chapter includes many more with Christes Bloodie Sweat than Foster noticed, and readers will find full documentation there. But I cite a few of these parallels now to show how wrong Foster was to dismiss the issue so easily. (In the following quotations I have added italics in order to facilitate the identification of parallels.) Now run’s the method of this dolefull song
(FE, )
Set then the tenour of thy dolefull song, To the deepe accentes of my bloudy sweate
(CBS, –)
Reference to the full context below (example *, pp. –) will show that this, and a parallel expression in Christes Bloodie Sweat (‘And here . . . I close the musicke of my weeping song’, –) are integral to the context of that poem, which has an outer framework of a dream-vision, in which a voice from heaven urges the poet to write on Christ’s suffering. In the Elegye this line seems hastily inserted, with other unfortunate consequences, as my later discussion will show. In the religious poem Ford reverts to the ruling metaphor a few stanzas later: Which bloudy Sweate, for that it is a theame, (The happie matter of a moving stile) (CBS, –)
In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ refers to his own poem in identical terms: the subject of the verse (Unhappy matter of a mourning stile) (FE, –)
That would be an unusually crude plagiarism, but we can see its rationale as a self-reminiscence, as bits of a coherent discourse in Christes Bloodie Sweat become fragmented and rearranged. Even more outrageous, if it were a plagiarism, would be the following parallel, between ‘W. S.’ describing how the saints in heaven tasted of the sower-bitter scourge, Of torture and affliction (FE, –)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
and John Ford describing Christ’s redemptive powers, as evil humanity Drew comfort from the sower-bitter Gall Of his afflictions (CBS, –)
It would take a remarkably shameless and uninventive poet to steal such a distinctive phrase. Any student of Ford’s dramatic works will have noticed many instances of self-quotation, extensive parallels which are too long to be put down to conventional poetic diction, and too close to have been imitation. Another passage suggesting self-reminiscence rather than outright theft comes when Ford, reaching the end of his long meditative poem, describes Christ’s voice from heaven approving the ‘modest care’ with which he has Limn’d out my wounds, and told them as they are (CBS, )
Similarly, ‘W. S.’, writing perhaps a few months earlier, commented on having fulfilled his task, to present William Peter as a President to Men, And Limne thee to the world but as thou wert. (FE, –)
Readers can inspect the full list of parallels cited in chapter , and ask themselves whether they really show Ford to be ‘Shakespeare’s most ardent epigone’. Rather than Foster’s scenario of Ford composing his carefully planned and documented meditative poem with half an eye on an anonymous, privately printed Funerall Elegye for passages to boldly plagiarize, I see both poems as products of the same pen. One was composed over a considerable period of time, showing great care and intense religious feeling, the other in some haste; but they reveal the same attitudes, habits of mind, and shaping of language, as my subsequent documentation will show. In his slowly emerging career as a Christian and classical moralist, as yet uninvolved in the theatre, the other work that Ford published in was a prose treatise, The Golden Meane. Lately written, as occasion served, to a great Lord (STC ). A second edition appeared in , almost percent longer, ‘Enlarged by the first Authour. As it was formerly written to the Earle of Northumberland’ (STC ). Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, was imprisoned in the Tower in November , (wrongly?) accused of being involved in the Gunpowder Plot, and remained there until . Ford was evidently attracted by undeserved suffering – both editions describe the work as Discoursing The Noblenesse
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
of perfect Vertue in extreames – and found Northumberland an appropriate recipient of his exhortations to cultivate the virtues of ‘resolution, . . . moderation, temperance, goodness, wisdom, and nobleness’, as Gilles Monsarrat put it (NDW, pp. –). Based largely on the moral works of Cicero (De officiis) and Seneca (Epistulae morales, De providentia, De tranquillitate animi, and the two Consolationes), Ford expounds the traditional Stoic principles of constancy and resolution in the face of adverse fortune, attitudes derived from Seneca’s De constantia sapientis, and widely disseminated in the Renaissance, thanks in part to the De constantia () of Justus Lipsius. As Stephen Clucas has shown, Ford’s application of Stoic ideas (some of them from the consolatio tradition) to express his sympathy for Northumberland’s unjust captivity, had been anticipated by John Davies of Hereford. In Davies had published a collection of poems, Humour’s Heav’n on Earth, which he had planned to prefix with a long Epistle to Northumberland, but was prevented by the censors, clearly aware of the King’s sensitivity to criticism on this head. Davies’s Epistle survives in manuscript, openly critical of James, mixing Stoic and Christian ideas in urging Northumberland to practise virtue in adversity. Ford is more tactful, siding with the Earl without offending the crown, and emphasizes Christian attitudes more than Davies does. As Monsarrat pointed out, Ford carefully doctors his classical sources, omitting anything incompatible with Christianity (NDW, p. ), and explicitly introducing the Christian notion of an afterlife in connection with death, the last of the six reputed ‘miseries’ of existence which the treatise is designed to counteract (p. ). He also emphasizes the need for ‘selfreformation’ to overcome ‘the follies of the past’, a process urged further in Christes Bloodie Sweat, the two works being in this and other respects ‘parallel and complementary’ (p. ). A more explicit Christian colouring emerges in Ford’s second prose work, A Line of Life. Pointing at the Immortalitie of a Vertuous Name (STC ), which appeared in . The Linea Vitae which Ford recommends is ‘goodness’, the ‘infallible rule, which wee as we are men, . . . Christians, and more than Christians, the image of our maker; must take our level by’ (NDW, p. ). Much of the moral doctrine derives from Seneca and other classical sources, being fused with Christian teaching: as his modern editor summed up the work’s moral and theological affiliations, ‘in A Line of Life, Ford crowns the Stoic resolution of The Golden Meane with the Christian goodness of Christes Bloodie Sweat’ (p. ). Monsarrat rightly points out that Ford presented King James I as the climactic
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
example uniting virtue and nobility (p. ), but he has surely undervalued the status ascribed to John, Lord Harington (d. ), who is not merely ‘praised for his “rare and admirable course of life” ’ (p. ), but elevated to the ranks of those human beings – they include William Peter, Mountjoy, and Jesus Christ – whose virtue reached perfection. Ford avers that Harington deserves all prayse and imitation from all. Of whom it may without flatterie (for what benefit can accrue to flatter the dead?) or affection bee said, That He amongst a World of men attayned even in his youth, not only to gravitie in his behaviour, to wisedom in his understanding, to ripenesse in his carriage, to discretion in his discourse, but to perfection in all his actions: A man in himself so absolute [ perfect]. . . that there could not bee more attributed to any living; noe such exquisite rarities to furnishe or sett out a samplarr of wonder and fullnes could bee, which in him were not. Insomuch as hee exceeded any whom former Chronicles have mencioned, and may equall any that tyme heereafter can Callender in the monuments of perpetuitie. (NDW, p. )
Throughout his writing career, Ford became excited by the general idea of goodness, of virtue developed to such a high degree that it attained perfection. Here the same ethical vocabulary recurs as in the Funerall Elegye, when ‘W. S.’ celebrates William Peter’s virtues. Ford praises Harington for having ‘attayned . . . to perfection in all his actions’, and demonstrating the virtues of ‘gravitie in his behaviour . . . wisedome in his understanding . . . ripenesse in his carriage . . . discretion in his discourse’. This laudatio overlaps in several respects with that to Peter, who also manifested ‘true perfection, in a perfect brest’ (FE, ), displaying the virtues of ‘trim behavior, . . . discreet / Endeavors; modest speech; . . . active grace’, and ‘wisht sobriety’ (–). Where Harington ‘exceeded any whom former Chronicles have mencioned, and may equall any that tyme heereafter can Callender,’with Peter ‘Nature never built in better kind’, and his untimely death ‘Robd virtue of a follower so trew, / As time can boast of ’ (FE, , –). Ford drew on the same moral attitudes throughout his poems and prose works, a fusion of Christian and Neo-Stoic ideas, celebrating the traditional virtues, especially loyalty and piety. ‘W. S.’ uses the identical resources to celebrate William Peter’s virtues. The key virtue in both The Golden Meane and A Line of Life is ‘resolution’, a word which recurs more than fifty times in these texts, often qualified by a reinforcing plus-term epithet, such as ‘constant resolution’, ‘vertuous resolution’, ‘well-governed resolution’, or ‘prudent resolution’. In just the same way William Peter displayed ‘Offencelesse resolution’ (FE, ). As Gilles
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Monsarrat concluded his thorough study of this topic, ‘resolution is the basic concept of Ford’s stoical ethics’, as it was the ‘most widespread’ principle of Stoicism in the Renaissance. Monsarrat showed that in Ford’s writings resolution is the virtue which enables man to withstand calamities and to face death with equanimity. It is a ‘castle’ and an ‘armor’, it is ‘settled’, ‘stayed’, ‘sure’, and brings a ‘quiet calme’. But resolution is not simply strength of character and steadiness, it is also an intellectual virtue which is grounded on knowledge and a correct assessment of good and evil; this is why a truly resolved mind is a ‘prepared’ mind. (Monsarrat , p. )
It is in full awareness of this double sense of resolution that ‘W. S.’ lays so much emphasis on the moral education of William Peter. ‘Resolution’ is one of a number of terms in English rendering the firmness idealized in the Stoic ‘wise man’, the vir sapiens. It is important to recognize the specifically Stoic terminology used by Ford throughout his work, and by ‘W. S.’ in the Funerall Elegye. One of the vices of authorship studies as currently practised, where electronic databases give instantaneous access to a far wider range of linguistic material than ever before, is that words become treated as neutral units in computational processes that take no account of their history, or specific subject-connotations. The key words here include ‘firm’, ‘steady’, ‘steadiness’, and ‘opinion’. ‘Steadiness’ is another English term for Stoic constantia, the ability to hold a ‘steady’ course amid all the shocks of adverse fortune. In Sir John Stradling’s translation () of Lipsius’s dialogue De constantia (), the main speaker, Herbert Langius, offers this definition: Constancie is a right and immoveable strength of the minde, neither lifted up, nor pressed downe with externall or casuall accidentes. By Strength, I understande a stedfastness not from opinion, but from judgement and sound reason. (Lipsius , p. )
There Lipsius introduces our other key term, ‘opinion’, emphasizing that true judgment must be distinguished from ‘this impure commixtion Opinion . . . ingendred in us, Which is nought els but a vaine image and shadow of reason: whose seat is the Sences: whose birth is the earth . . . It is vaine, uncertaine, deceitfull’, and ‘a path-way to Inconstancie’, as the marginal note adds (p. ). If we wish to preserve ‘right reason’, and earnestly desire to have a good mind, we must cast downe even by the foundation this castle of opinions. For they will cause us to be continually floting on the waves of doubtfulnes, without any certain resolution, murmuring, troublesome, injurious
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
to God & men. As an emptie ship without balasse is tossed and tumbled on the sea with the least blast of wind: Even so is it with a light wandring minde, not kept steddie and poised with the balasse of reason. (Lipsius , p. )
To keep the mind ‘steady’ is the best remedy against what the Stoics defined as ‘the two kinds of fortune’, good and bad. To do so is also to imitate God’s ordering of the cosmos, in which ‘all things succeed in a steddy and immoveable order’. We must acknowledge God, then, ‘to be stayed, resolute and immutable’ (p. ). Lipsius produced the most influential rephrasing of Stoicism in the Renaissance, and his emphasis on the need to hold certain moral attitudes ‘steady’ or ‘immoveable’ was widely shared. Guillaume Du Vair’s treatise, La Philosophie Morale des Sto¨ıques () was translated in by Thomas James (who dedicated it, interestingly enough, to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy). In it Du Vair restated the Stoic doctrine that the man who fashions ‘his will to the right use of things according unto reason’ will ‘receive much content and quietnes, and . . . remain as stable and immoveable as a rock in the middest of the sea’ (Du Vair , pp. –). Like Lipsius, Du Vair identifies ‘opinion’ as one of the main enemies to reason and constancy (pp. , , ). Several English Renaissance writers took over from Neo-Stoicism the pejorative connotations of ‘opinion’ as a state of mind opposed to truth and reason, as I observed in chapter , discussing Foster’s confused account of the term ‘opinion’ in the Elegye. Peter Ure showed that English writers of a Calvinist inclination agreed with the Stoics in seeing opinion as a delusive outward value which frustrated the true human goal of ‘creating an inward discipline of virtue’. In Fulke Greville’s words, Opinion raignes without, and truth within. Who others please against themselves must sin. (Ure , p. )
Greville, Chapman, and Jonson, among others, shared a ‘Stoic and Calvinist emphasis on inward discipline and virtue, to which Opinion is an exterior ill’ (p. ). Ford produced a brief digest of Stoic teaching in The Golden Meane, where he writes that ‘wisedome consisteth . . . in a steadie providence how to do’ or act (NDW, p. ), and that the wise man squares ‘his resolution in resolved steadinesse to both fortunes’ (p. ). The terms ‘steady’ and ‘steadiness’, which we can expect to find in a Renaissance moral-philosophical treatise, recur with surprising frequency in the Elegye, but none of the poem’s commentators has recognized their ethical connotations. At one point ‘W. S.’ makes another of
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
those general affirmations of a moral principle which abound in Ford’s moral essays, namely that ‘He is steddy / Who seemes less then hee is, in open shew’ (–). Stanley Wells, pointing to several difficulties in interpreting the Elegye which Donald Foster ignored, observed that ‘steddy’ here calls for a gloss, and suggested that since ‘the poet seems to be praising Peter for understatement of his virtues, . . . perhaps OED , “not easily perturbed or discomposed, balanced” comes closest to the mark’ (Wells , pp. –). This is true, but it is more important to realize that the word ‘steady’ here has specific Neo-Stoic connotations. It is quite extraordinary the extent to which ‘W. S.’ goes out of his way to credit William Peter with the virtue of constancy, celebrating His constant temper, in the equall weight Of thankfulnesse, and kindnesse (–)
Immediately before these lines he declared Peter to have been ‘superlative above the rest, / Of many men in steddy faith’ (–), a point repeated several times over (FE, , –, , ). As will be seen from my concluding list of more than eighty close parallels between the Elegye and Ford’s work, the term steady and its opposite unsteady recurred throughout his writing career with specific Neo-Stoic connotations (see chapter , no. *). The ability to remain ‘firm’ (FE, , ), unshaken by prosperity or adversity was the major attribute of the Stoics’ vir sapiens. ‘W. S.’ also claims Stoic virtue for himself, having written this Elegye to keep ‘My constant and irrefragable vow’ (). The attitudes and beliefs that Ford had formed in his youth by the study of the Bible and Stoicism persisted throughout his writing career. At first sight, it may seem unlikely that Ford the dramatist could draw anything from Ford the Christian moralist, but many links can be traced. Such an investigation faces one preliminary difficulty, that of establishing any reliable data for Ford’s theatrical career. According to older accounts, he was the author of a play called ‘a bad beginning makes a good ending’, performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, before King James in the winter of –. However, the only evidence for his authorship is the notoriously inaccurate Humphrey Moseley, who entered in the Stationers’ Register on June ‘twenty-six plays, most of them otherwise unknown’, including three ascribed to ‘Iohn fforde’, one of which being ‘An ill beginning has a good end, & a bad beginning may have a good end’. As G. E. Bentley commented, ‘the confusion about the title of this play is no greater than the other uncertainties about it’,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
and Moseley’s accuracy elsewhere is so unreliable – in this list he assigns three plays to Shakespeare, Duke Humphrey, The History of King Stephen, and Iphis and Iantha – that ‘there seems little point in conjecture among so many uncertainties’ ( JCS, . ). Sadly enough, Donald Foster ignored Bentley’s authority, asserting that ‘Ford began writing for the stage as early as . . . ’ (, p. ), and – more emphatically in his PMLA essay – that ‘Ford seems not to have begun writing plays for the King’s Men before ’, but had been ‘[h]abitually mining Shakespeare for ideas and for new words’ long before then (a, p. ). Foster accepted this groundless ascription to bolster his fixed belief that the many resemblances between the Elegye and Ford’s works could only be explained by creating an image of Ford as a mindless plagiarist, sitting at Shakespeare’s knee and snapping up words as they fell. Once again the desire to justify a thesis seems to have defeated scholarship and reasoned argument. Bentley’s examination of the evidence for Ford’s regular involvement in the theatre concluded that ‘we are not on certain ground until we come to The Witch of Edmonton, ’ (p. ), but in Cyrus Hoy (following the ascription by William Wells and E. H. C. Oliphant) attributed to Ford on strong internal, linguistic evidence a play called The Laws of Candy, printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio (), which can be dated to . Earlier, Eugene Waith had shown that The Laws of Candy, like many of the Fletcher–Massinger collaborations at this time, took some of its plot from the Senecan controversiae, and it may be that Ford was, for a time, the junior partner in this leading group of dramatists writing for a learned, courtly audience. But Ford seems to have complemented that activity by working with one of the major playwrights of the popular school, for several pieces of evidence suggest that he began a period of collaboration with Dekker at about this time. Ford only established himself as an independent dramatist in the late s, his career extending for another decade. In addition to the seven plays universally ascribed to him, a convincing case has been made for Ford as the sole author of The Queen, and part-author of The Spanish Gypsy, The Sun’s Darling, and The Welsh Ambassador (all with Dekker), and The Fair Maid of the Inn (with Webster and Massinger). I survey some of the evidence for these collaborations in Appendix III (pp. ff ), which also gives bibliographical details of the editions I have used. One major piece of evidence helping to identify Ford’s authorship is his remarkable fondness for self-quotation. A striking instance is his
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
reuse of Christes Bloodie Sweat in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, first pointed out by M. Joan Sargeaunt (), elaborated by Robert Davril () and Derek Roper, and documented in more detail by Gilles Monsarrat. In both works Ford describes the tortures of the damned, as experienced by representative sinners: gluttons, wantons, drunkards, murderers. In the religious poem we are warned that Here shall the wantons for a downy bed, Be rackt on pallets of stil-burning steele . . . Each moment shall the killer, be tormented With stabbes, that shall not so procure his death . . . The mony-hoording Miser in his throat Shall swallow molten lead (CBS, –, –, –)
In the play, when the Friar persuades Annabella to repentance, he describes the torments of hell in identical terms: in this place Dwell many thousand, thousand sundry sorts Of never dying deaths . . . there is burning Oyle Pour’d down the Drunkards throate, the Userer Is forc’t to supp whole draughts of molten Gold; There is the Murtherer for-ever stab’d, Yet can he never dye; there lies the wanton On Racks of burning steele . . .
(TPW, ..–)
Robert Davril (, p. ) pointed out another striking parallel: Here then unclaspe the burthen of my woes (CBS, ) To you I have unclasp’t my burthened soule (TPW, ..) here I unclaspe The secrets of my heart (SG, ..–)
In his edition of ’Tis Pity for the Revels series, Derek Roper cited further parallels between the play and Christes Bloodie Sweat, including this description of Christ’s face: His face in which the Rose did with the lilly, Strive curiously for chaunge in little space (CBS, –) The Lilly and the Rose, most sweetly strainge, Upon your dimpled Cheekes doe strive for change (TPW, ..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In the play the Friar observes I know the baits of sin Are hard to leave (TPW, ..–)
Ford had used this metaphor twice in the poem, first to praise Christ’s continence: No wanton baites of pleasure could impawne His chast desire (CBS, –)
Secondly, in word-order which he slightly varied for the Friar: Yet O, tis hard to leave the baites of pleasure ()
Finally, Gilles Monsarrat made an extended analysis of the themes and attitudes held in common between the religious poem and the play, with helpful commentary on their shared theological attitudes (Monsarrat ). This brief allusion to a locus communis of Ford criticism can give only a slight impression of the extent of his practice of repeating the same thought in very similar words. Many more instances will follow. But it does establish the underlying unity of Ford’s work across a long writing career. Of course, as we can see from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, there is no way of predicting how his stock of ideas and attitudes will appear in his drama. In some cases an obvious villain, such as Ferentes in Love’s Sacrifice, is given sententiae which, in other contexts, would be part of a serious discussion, on the principle that the devil can quote scripture. In other cases, the high worth that Ford put on constancy and resolution is shown in extreme situations, where the audience is challenged to endorse such values, even though the characters embodying them appear morally questionable. One recurring dramatic situation in Ford, as many critics have observed, is the nobility displayed by characters suffering mental or physical oppression, that ‘reticent dignity in endurance’, as Una Ellis-Fermor described it. Celebrating these qualities Ford displays both a ‘constant worship of high, aristocratic virtues and the subdued sobriety of expression which reminds us that, for Ford, the greatest of these virtues was continence’ (Ellis-Fermor , p. ). If we understand ‘continence’ as the virtue of rational self-control, self-restraint, we can see its identity with the Stoic doctrines of reason and self-mastery. In the d´enouement of The Broken Heart Orgilus, sentenced to death, chooses
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
suicide, opening a vein in his arm before the whole court while displaying his resolution: But look upon my steddinesse, and scorne not The sicknesse of my fortune (..–)
Bassanes praises his ‘vigour and unshook vertue’, that of a man who can ‘conquer in extremities; this pastime / Appeares majesticall’ (–). Orgilus is an evil character, a murderer to whom Ford, ever ready to sympathize with the underdog, lends dignity in death. The same pattern recurs in Perkin Warbeck, where Warbeck, the pretender who had tried to pass himself off as the legitimate King of England, is captured and sent to execution. In his final scene he displays his ‘contempt / Of injuries’ (..–) with the utmost dignity, asking ‘the world’ to witness How constantly, my resolution suffer’d A martyrdome of Majestie! (–)
Ford increases our respect for Warbeck by the remarkable love and loyalty he inspires in his wife, Lady Katherine Gordon, whose behaviour at this climactic point displays all of the nobility in adversity that Ford so much admired. Lady Katherine’s dignity and constancy in following ‘the current of my dutie’ by tending her ‘Lov’d Lord’ elicits from Warbeck a sequence of hyperbolic praise (–), beginning ‘Great miracle of Constancie!’, that recalls Ford’s own admiration for Mountjoy and his Penelope. Her answering vow of loyalty until death wrings from her father, the Earl of Huntly, another tribute to her virtuous resolution: I glory in thy constancie; And must not say, I wish that I had misst Some partage in these tryalls of a patience. (–)
Forgiving her, Huntly expresses his admiration of Warbeck also, at the wonder of your frailtie Which keepes so firme a station. (–)
These magnificent assertions and celebrations of constancy in the face of adversity are counterpointed by disapproving moralizing comments from the officers of the law and other governmental representatives,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
as found in the play’s sources. But there is no doubt as to where the dramatist’s sympathies lie. Perkin Warbeck and Lady Katherine join Ford’s pantheon of virtuous men and women maltreated by fate: Essex, Mountjoy and his Penelope, Jesus Christ, Northumberland, Harington, Overbury. Several critics have noted Ford’s ‘persistent choice of the resistant or isolated individual’ as the centre of attention in the four mature tragedies (Farr , p. ). I suggest that Ford saw his role as a writer, in the words of one of his characters, as being ‘To stand up in defence of injur’d vertue’ (LT, ..). Damaged as these heroic figures are by envy and malice, tested and ultimately cast down by misfortune, Ford sees his task as being to reaffirm their virtue, win recognition for their outstanding qualities, repair their memory now and for posterity. Such a long-lasting desire to celebrate courage in adversity can help us understand the attraction, for John Ford – whether commissioned by a friend of the family, or acting on his own initiative – to write a memorial poem for ‘the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter’. Like Perkin Warbeck or John, Lord Harington, William Peter can now be recognized as one of Ford’s admired patterns of virtue. His good qualities were so outstanding that he deserves the standard reward for virtue, according to the ideal scheme of epideictic rhetoric, ‘commendation’ in this life and a ‘monument’ after his death, to preserve his ‘memory’ to ‘posterity’. All these terms recur throughout Ford’s works, to a degree that defies documentation. In Ford’s prose works ‘commendation’ is the response that – or so he hopes, like other optimistic moralists – will automatically reward virtuous behaviour. But such a response depends on the social (and ethical) group evaluating that behaviour. Whoever looks for ‘the praises of the vulgar’, Ford warned in The Golden Meane, forgetting ‘the unsteddinesse of the common people’, deserves ‘no commendation at all for so seeking to be commended’ (GM, p. ). To the ‘steady’ or constant man, however – we see how all these key ethical terms are interrelated – ‘every triall gives a severall [separate] crown of commendation, in bearing many troubles with one and the self-same resolution’ (p. ). Over and over Ford holds out the promise of recognition to that heroic virtue which affirms its values in the face of opposition: ‘O the profit is infinite, the commendation memorable, the reward immortall’ (p. ). Indeed, those public figures who steadfastly maintain ‘their resolutions’ may ‘be led to the endlesse immortalitie of an immortalitie, in an everflourishing commendation’ (p. ), a rhetorical over-doubling that, as so often in these early works, rather weakens the effect.
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Ford’s ethical treatises, we can now see, belong to the same mental world as the Funerall Elegye. A particularly striking instance of their underlying identity is the passage where ‘W. S.’ repeats the familiar adage that ‘virtue is the true nobility’. Men who follow ‘Reasons rules’, he argues, are much more noble in the mind, Then many that have noblenesse by kind . . . But vertues and perfections in our powers, Proceed most truly from us, if we doe them. Respective titles or a gracious stile, With all what men in eminence possesse, Are, without ornaments to praise them, vile: The beauty of the mind, is noblenesse. And such as have that beauty, well deserve Eternall characters, that after death Remembrance of their worth, we may preserve, So that their glory die not with their breath ( –)
In its reasoned structure of propositions and deductions, that passage reads like a moral essay, a passage of didacticism that might seem out of place in a funeral elegy. In fact, it versifies several arguments from Ford’s prose works, where the ethical terms ‘nobleness’, ‘ornaments’, and ‘perfection’ recur repeatedly. In the earlier of the two he declares that ‘The Golden Meane . . . is onely there perfectly observed, where true Wisdome and true Nobilitie are the speciall ornaments of a prepared minde’ (p. ). The term ‘ornaments’, in Renaissance English, derives from classical rhetoric, where it describes the ‘gear’ or resources with which the well-prepared orator arms himself. Elsewhere Ford equates it with ‘the noble indowments of the mind’ (LL, p. ), and the honourable ‘furniture of the minde’ (GM, p. ). Although Ford subscribes to the idea that virtue is the true nobility, echoing Juvenal’s famous words, ‘nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus’, this does not express a democratic or populist viewpoint. Rather, he is at pains to argue that nobleness is not a question of birth but an ethical attribute available to all men, a praiseworthy quality which he regularly links with other terms of approval, such as ‘virtue’ (as we recall, the most frequently repeated word in the Funeral Elegye) and ‘wisdome’. For a man facing danger ‘The Noblenes of wisdom must direct, and the Vertue of Noblenesse incourage his resolution’ (p. ). As in the Elegye, Ford’s argument is that nobleness does not depend on ‘Bloud, Birth’ (p. ) or
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
other inherited advantages (p. ), but can only be acquired by virtuous action, and that under the titles of a Wise and Noble man, are comprehended all men, of all degrees and fortunes, whose Vertue does make them wise; as their wisedome doth make them Noble. For wisedome consisteth not only in gray heads, but in a steadie providence how to do, and Noblenesse consisteth not onely in an Honourable race; but in a prudent resolution what to do. ( p. )
Just as in the Elegye, with its insistence that ‘vertues and perfections . . . / Proceed most truly from us, if we doe them’, Ford – following Aristotelian ethics, as Sir Philip Sidney had done before him, but also Stoicism – argues that gno¯sis must be complemented by praxis: In a word, everie action, and the minde of every one that hath a minde to act, is limited within the precincts of those two humane blessings, to wit, Wisedome and Noblenesse. Wisedome informes the minde, and Noblenesse commends the actions: insomuch as every one who can act wisely, and deliberate Nobly, squaring his resolution in resolved steadinesse to both fortunes, may of merit be inrolled among the memorable; and be remembered by the desertfull to be truely wise because Noble: to be perfectly Noble because wise. (p. )
The Golden Meane ends with those words. When Ford returned to the genre of the moral essay six years later, with A Line of Life, he wrote above the preface, in capital letters, the words ‘Wise, and therein Noble’ (p. ), a self-reference linking the two treatises (in addition, perhaps the most extended example in world literature of the figure anadiplosis). This gesture both declares his authorship of the earlier treatise and insists on the continuity of thought and language between them, a continuity which extends to the Funerall Elegye. In the plays, also, Ford reiterated his belief that virtue does not depend on nobility. In The Fair Maid of the Inn the duplicitous Cesario (another dubious character given morally admirable utterances) argues that to be basely born If not base-born, detracts not from the bounty Of natures freedom or an honest birth. Nobilitie claym’d by the right of blood, Shewes chiefly that our Ancestors desir’d What we inherit; but that man whose actions Purchase a reall merit to himself, And rancks him in the file of prayse and honour, Creates his own advancement . . . (..–)
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
The identity of thought and language between ‘W. S.’ and Ford can hardly be doubted. Two smaller works complete the canon of Ford’s verse to be discussed here. One was a tribute to another victim of those unhappy times, Sir Thomas Overbury, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, poisoned in the Tower in . Ford wrote for him a brief elegy (twenty-eight lines), called ‘A Memorial, offered to that man of virtue, Sir Thomas Overburie’, published in the eighth edition () of Overbury’s collection of character-sketches, A Wife, now a Widow, which included ‘New Elegies upon his (now knowne) untimely death’. In the late Jeremy Maule discovered, in the Clark Library, Los Angeles, an unknown manuscript elegy by Ford on the death of John Fletcher, written in about . Ford certainly seems to have specialized in funeral elegies. Indeed, of the total number of , verse lines reliably attributed to him, no less than , (or percent) consist of memorial poems. Although the Fletcher elegy has some linguistic features indirectly linking it to the Funerall Elegye, the Overbury poem has several major parallels with that poem. Foster recognized these parallels, but once again used them to boost his image of Ford as a plagiarist – plagiarism being for him the only conceivable explanation for such a phenomenon. However, instead of analysing similarities and differences, Foster rather protectively kept quiet about the details, merely asserting that in the Overbury poem ‘Ford’s principal source is the Peter Elegy’ and giving his readers this passage to chew over: Ford’s dependence on W. S. is suggestive, for if Ben Jonson loved Shakespeare ‘this side idolatry’, Ford loved him just this side of grand theft. His habitual forages into Shakespeare are well-documented, and need not be detailed here. T. S. Eliot was surely too severe in giving Shakespeare the credit for anything worthwhile to be found in Ford, but one may hardly question Shakespeare’s importance as Ford’s chief mentor. His borrowings are frequent and direct, so that a majority of his critics and biographers have felt compelled to comment upon his debt to the elder dramatist. There is no other author on whom Ford depends so heavily, and none whom he paraphrases so unabashedly, as William Shakespeare. (, p.)
Attentive readers can hardly fail to notice the underlying suggestion of that passage: Ford paraphrasing ‘W. S.’ was in fact paraphrasing Shakespeare. It is not actually stated, but it is certainly implied, and the possibility that Ford might have been paraphrasing himself in the Elegye is not even entertained. I am reminded of the response made by R. W. Chambers to L. L. Sch¨ucking’s argument that any similarities
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
between the style of the Addition to Sir Thomas More by Hand D and Shakespeare could be explained as mere imitation: A theory of imitation would compel us to suppose, on any reasonable system of chronology, that D imitated Shakespeare’s earlier plays, and that Shakespeare, when writing some of his later plays, imitated D. It is simpler to suppose D and Shakespeare the same person.
‘Touch´e!’, as the man says in the James Thurber cartoon, slicing off his opponent’s head. Of course, Foster’s account of Ford’s debts to Shakespeare was considerably over-stated. Foster failed to indicate where exactly Ford ‘depends so heavily’ on Shakespeare, and ‘paraphrases so unabashedly’, and it is symptomatic that his only documentation for this claim was T. S. Eliot’s essay (), and M. Joan Sargeaunt’s book (). One might have expected Foster to cite more recent Ford scholars, widely read in that literature – such as Clifford Leech, H. J. Oliver, Robert Davril, D. K. Anderson, Una Ellis-Fermor, and David Frost – who discussed this issue, reaching a very different conclusion. H. J. Oliver argued that Ford’s use of Shakespeare is often a deliberate ‘literary allusion’ (Oliver , p. ); that Ford ‘was deliberately recalling his dramatic predecessors’, including Jonson and Marston, as well as Shakespeare (p. ), Tourneur (p. ), Webster (p. ); and that Ford transformed Shakespearian ‘borrowings’ to his own distinct purposes (pp. –, , –). Una Ellis-Fermor made the same observations in her classic study, The Jacobean Drama. Rehearsing the obvious similarities between Penthea (in The Broken Heart), Ophelia, Imogen, and some of Beaumont and Fletcher’s heroines, she wrote: ‘Yet Ford’s character and its relations to the other figures are drawn in colours as different from Shakespeare’s as from Beaumont and Fletcher’s’ (Ellis-Fermor , p. n.). She noted a ‘superficially obvious’ resemblance between a scene in Lover’s Melancholy and one in A King and No King, but added: ‘The distinction, in sensitiveness and dignity, is the measure of the difference between Beaumont and Fletcher and Ford.’ Robert Davril discussed in some detail Ford’s debts to his predecessors, pointing out that in Ford’s drama ‘borrowings and suggestions are numberless, and Shakespeare is not the only source. Marston, Webster, Middleton, there is hardly any predecessor to whom Ford is not indebted for some word, phrase, image, scene, plot, or character. The plays so much abound with common-place themes, characters and situations that one is inclined to deny Ford any kind of originality.’ Yet, he added, the ‘dominant strain’ of his unaided plays ‘is Fordian.
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Ford has the knack of changing what he has borrowed – let it be a characteristic feature, a psychological reaction, or even a word – into something different and new’ (Davril , pp. –). Given that Foster invested so much symbolic capital in his picture of Ford as the relentless and unimaginative copyist of Shakespeare, it was unfortunate that he did not draw on Davril’s essay, which might have corrected his misconception of Ford the plagiarist. That misconception would have been shaken still further had he cited another important discussion of Ford’s relationship to Shakespeare, David L. Frost’s book, The School of Shakespeare. The Influence of Shakespeare on English Drama –. Frost reviewed the well-known debts of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore to Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Sacrifice to Othello, and The Lover’s Melancholy to the last plays and Lear (Frost , pp. –), but his account would have lent no support to Foster’s presentation of Ford as borrowing ‘just this side of grand theft’. Rather, Frost argued that in the first case (’Tis Pity and Romeo and Juliet) ‘the parallels are there to provide the audience with novel shocks; the enormity of a crime which no one defends being treated in the terms of a love drama of the previous century’ (p.). In the second case, Love’s Sacrifice, ‘the point of this open borrowing from Othello is to prepare the audience for a tragic catastrophe, and then astonish them by a sudden reversal’, a ‘borrowing from Shakespeare’ which Frost described as being ‘for entirely frivolous purposes’ (p.). Frost’s searching analysis would give no support to Foster’s scenario of Ford as the unimaginative Shakespeare paraphraser – a device, we can now see, eliminated any candidates other than Shakespeare for the role of ‘W. S.’ The special pleading involved in Foster’s picture of Ford as a slavish plagiarist, an argument used to dispose of the many similarities between the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s works, becomes even more transparent in the light of recent Ford criticism. Ronald Huebert, in his account of Ford as a ‘Baroque’ dramatist (anyone dubious about this art-historical category will still find in it much intelligent commentary on Ford’s plays), commented that to compare ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore with Romeo and Juliet ‘has become almost an obligatory exercise’ for Ford critics, but instantly entered a caveat: ‘the important differences between the two plays stand out all the more clearly because of the apparent similarities’ (Huebert , p. ). They contain several structural parallels, he observed, ‘but again the differences are more important’ (p. ), and ultimately ‘the two plays are different not only in moral purpose, but in artistic kind’ (p. ). Huebert commented on Ford’s regular reshaping
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
of conventions (pp. , –), pointing out that in The Lover’s Melancholy such a ‘shift in structural strategy means that the emphases will fall on psychological rather than external conflict’ (p. ). Two years later, Dorothy Farr’s placing of Ford in the context of the Caroline theatre reached similar conclusions, seeing Ford as ‘taking up and rethinking one dramatic pattern after another’ (Farr , p. ), and constantly transforming familiar plots and situations: ‘Ford never fails to surprise us with what he makes of the old medium, the borrowed character or concept. Ford is a far from “passive” imitator’ (p. ). The Broken Heart, she wrote, ‘challenges the whole concept of traditional Revenge Tragedy’ (p. ), while The Lover’s Melancholy may borrow elements from Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster but makes a ‘clear departure’ from the model, using quite distinct methods (pp. , ). ’Tis Pity obviously echoes Romeo and Juliet, but ‘at every point of similarity the play enunciates its independence’ (p. ). Love’s Sacrifice similarly echoes Othello, ‘but the differences are so marked as to imply a deliberate reassessment of Othello’ (p. ). Farr added the general observation that, ‘as usual with Ford’s borrowings, the closer the verbal or circumstantial parallel the greater the contrast in meaning and attitude; so that for an audience familiar with the source the borrowed material serves to illumine the characters and their behaviour’ (p. ). That important consideration, Ford’s intentions towards his audience, who were obviously expected to notice parallels with and allusions to other Jacobean and Caroline plays, was much illuminated by Martin Butler’s discussion of Love’s Sacrifice as ‘Ford’s metatheatrical tragedy’. Building on his earlier close study of the Caroline drama’s historical background, which enabled him to recreate ‘the attentiveness and sophistication of the theatre audience in Ford’s day’ (Butler , p. ), in this essay Butler showed that Ford enjoyed, ‘around –, a large yet intimate circle of friends, lawyers, playwrights, gentlemen and wits, focused principally on the Inns of Court but also on the indoor “private” playhouses’ (p. ), such as the Phoenix. This circle, which included several dramatists connected with the Inns of Court (Marston, Webster, Shirley, Massinger, D’Avenant), was closely attuned to current and recent developments in the theatre, and wrote for ‘an informed, critically alert audience’ (p. ). In this climate Ford’s practice of intertextuality found an appreciative reception, which explains why ‘allusion to the plays of other dramatists is a distinctive feature of Ford’s work’. However, Butler added,
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
always these allusions are not merely incidental but perform complicated structural functions. Sometimes Ford uses them to arouse expectations in his audience which he may later fulfil or frustrate; sometimes they operate as a subtextual critique of the action addressed to the spectator expert enough to detect them. (p. )
Butler notes that Ford critics since the s have been emphasizing his creative reshaping of his sources and analogues, culminating in Anne Barton’s accounts of Perkin Warbeck and The Broken Heart ‘as respectively, an old-fashioned history and a revenge tragedy reconstructed by Ford according to subtly modified designs’. His own discussion of Love’s Sacrifice, ‘possibly the most allusive play of the English Renaissance’ (p. ), relates it, first, to Shirley’s tragedy Love’s Cruelty (), which was in the repertory of the Phoenix at the same time as Ford’s play (pp. –). Butler brings out both the similarities and differences with Shirley, noting the way that Ford appears to be writing a revenge tragedy until the double culmination in the fifth act, in which Biancha is murdered by her manically jealous husband, Duke Philippo, who then presents her as the apotheosis of virtue while killing himself in self-disgust. ‘A revenger who comes to repudiate his own vengeance, the Duke is a most unusual confounder of normal audience expectations. As so often in Love’s Sacrifice, Ford appears to adopt a well-known prototype, only to turn it round unexpectedly so that the allusion both illuminates the play and itself undergoes revision’ (pp. –). This play derives its handling of intrigue tragedy from Webster, but ‘Ford borrows from Webster in order to rework him, establishing the range of his own concerns by a strategy of redefinition’ (p. ). As for the often-discussed borrowings from Othello in Acts and , having itemized them Butler comments: Plainly, this tissue of allusions to Othello is nothing so simple as imaginative inadequacy. Shakespeare’s sexual tragedy was well-attuned to the tastes of the s and at this time may have been his most frequently revived play; Ford’s allusions are conspicuous and must be considered as having a functional role in the design at large. ( p. )
One major consequence of these allusions is ‘vastly to complicate our understanding of Biancha’, who is explicitly linked to Desdemona as a figure of innocence, although she accuses herself of having reached depths of depravity – a detail which makes me think of Macduff ’s equally unjustified self-accusations in Macbeth (.). Butler perceptively observes that
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
‘Ford’s sustained quotation [from Othello] has effectively made what in Shakespeare’s play was a dilemma for the hero into something very like a dilemma for the audience’ (p. ), since we cannot decide whether Biancha is innocent or guilty. In the play’s ‘extraordinary concluding scene’, in which ‘revenge tragedy is displaced by heroic transcendence’ (p. ), the tomb of the murdered wife Biancha is brought on stage. Then, both Fernando (her admirer but never her lover) and the Duke compete in vowing their love, a competition obviously echoing that between Romeo and Paris. After which Fernando drinks poison while the Duke stabs himself. As Butler comments, ‘in theatrical terms, each is competing for the honour of being the tragic hero, and each strives to impose on the end of the play conclusions which, being taken from Shakespeare’s two favourite love tragedies, are well defined but totally incompatible’ (p. ). Love’s Sacrifice is characterized by a high degree of metatheatricality and intertextuality, too much for its own good, perhaps. But Martin Butler’s perceptive essay extends the work of half-a-dozen Ford critics who have shown that his deliberate echoing of his contemporaries and predecessors is a matter of some complexity. Donald Foster’s attempts to write Ford off as a blatant plagiarist, guilty of ‘imaginative inadequacy’, shows both his tendency to treat works of literature as mere collections of words, blind to the author’s intentions, whether obvious or subtle, and his use of special pleading to dismiss any other possible author of the Funerall Elegye. In his formal publications (, , ) Foster had never considered the possibility of Ford’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye. He was inescapably confronted with this argument, however, in the postings of the Shakespeare Electronic Conference, starting on March , when Richard J. Kennedy communicated to this forum the suggestion that, far from Ford making ‘extensive borrowing’ from the Elegye () in Christes Bloodie Sweat (), he might have written the earlier poem. Kennedy quoted both from Foster’s book, and from a hand-out which Foster had distributed at a conference, where he had apparently listed some twenty examples of Ford’s ‘extensive borrowing’, but still refused to consider the possibility of Ford having written the Elegye. In reply Foster attempted to pre-empt any such arguments by citing ‘a dozen words from the Elegy that appear at least once in John Ford’s verse’ but nowhere in Shakespeare – a strange way of diverting attention, to say the least – before declaring that
Ford’s writing career: poet, moralist, playwright
Mr Kennedy is mistaken: John Ford cannot have written ‘A Funeral Elegy’. The mere suggestion that the death of John Peter’s brother provided Ford with the occasion for a quick money-making hoax is foolish; whom does Kennedy think Ford is fooling with the initials ‘W. S.’? John Peter, to whom the poem is dedicated? And who, then, is the W. S., the speaking ‘I’ of this poem, implied to be – if not William Shakespeare? ( ., Mar. )
Foster simply asserted that ‘Mr Kennedy’s attribution has nothing to sustain it’, citing four details of style in which, he claimed, Ford and ‘W. S.’ differ, and ending with the decisive-sounding assertion that ‘Ford himself in makes pretty clear that he thinks FE is by Shakespeare’. I presume that Foster meant that Ford ‘makes it clear’ by borrowing from the Funerall Elegye when he writes Christes Bloodie Sweat, just as he elsewhere (supposedly) constantly borrows from Shakespeare, but this is to beg every question under discussion. Other participants in this forum asked Foster to divulge whatever evidence he had for this reckless assertion, but none was forthcoming. It is regrettable to observe how Foster distorted the issue. If Ford did write the Funerall Elegye, that could hardly be described as ‘a quick money-making hoax’, indeed, ‘W. S.’ explicitly disavows any commercial motive, being ‘Not hir’d, as heaven can witnesse in my soule . . . / Nor servile to be lik’t’ (FE, –). And the sentiments expressed by ‘W. S.’ give every impression of being sincere. Whether or not Ford was paid for the commission (he seems to have been often short of money), the possibility that he wrote the Elegye at the request of a real-life ‘W. S.’, as Gilles Monsarrat suggests (), may help us to understand an otherwise puzzling detail in the poem’s dedication to John Peter, the affirmation ‘Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am lesse adicted to.’ Several details in this dedication point to Ford’s authorship, as we will see in chapter , in which case those words would not mean, as they have usually been interpreted, ‘I am not used to writing poetry’, but rather that ‘I do not enjoy writing poems on behalf of someone else, and do not intend to repeat the exercise.’ Speculation on the identity of ‘W. S.’ seems unlikely ever to find any certain solution, but it will – I trust – soon become evident that Ford really wrote the poem. At all events, Foster’s conviction that the initials ‘W. S.’ could only refer to Shakespeare was the fixed and unexamined point that threw all his scholarly endeavours off course. For it is a sad fact in authorship studies that when an attribution is wrong, everything about it is wrong.
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Donald Foster, arguing Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye, produced several lexical items which, he claimed, were unusual in that poem, but had been used by Shakespeare. As with other such claims, Foster did not pretend to have checked the whole of English Renaissance literature, but he occasionally cited evidence suggesting that he had performed some kind of search, and he definitely left the impression that the lexical items he identified could serve as reliable stylistic markers. In fact, many of them also occur in Ford’s writings, in some cases just as frequently as in Shakespeare, or even more so. I begin with the negative prefix un–, which occurs some twenty-eight times in the Elegye. As we saw in chapter , Foster claimed that the frequent use of words beginning with un– was a distinctly Shakespearian characteristic, such words amounting to . percent of his vocabulary. However, I showed that Foster, in making this claim, was ignorant of C. L. Barber’s demonstration that un– was by far the most popular prefix in Early Modern English, amounting to percent of the prefixes listed in his sampling of OED, and allowing the formation of many nonce-words. Modern linguistics would define it as an ‘open category’ word, for any user can invent new words of this form. As we briefly saw, Henry Chettle and Thomas Nashe coined many un– words – and so did John Ford. Our knowledge of Ford’s linguistic habits was vastly extended by T. A. Wood in a remarkably detailed and virtually unknown dissertation, studying the language of Ford’s four best-known plays: The Broken Heart, The Lover’s Melancholy, Love’s Sacrifice, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Wood compiled a list of one thousand words in Ford which seemed of potential interest, considering ‘either the frequency with which they kept appearing or some unusual quality about a word’ (Wood , p. ), and he checked each against the concordances for seven
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy, and Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy. Having subjected the thousand-word Ford list to fifty-two checks (p. ), Wood then made a systematic comparison of Ford’s vocabulary with Shakespeare’s (pp. –), listing sixty-two words found in Ford but not in the other five dramatists. They include the following thirty-five un– words (used only once unless otherwise indicated): unabsolv’d unhumane unsociable unblushing unimitable unspleen’d uncompounded unknot unsteady () unconscionable () unlanded unsufferable uncut unmanlike unterm’d unedge unmated unthrifts unequall’d unnamed untrod-on unfainedly unraunged unvessel unfitting unrip () unweave unforg’d unsated unwived ungrounded unsent unwritten unhealthy unshrin’d That is, more than half of the words used by Ford alone among these six dramatists were formed with the prefix un– . Many of these Ford un– coinages are striking. In Love’s Sacrifice ‘uncut’ is a strange usage, as the Duke, holding a sword, pronounces: ‘in my hand [I] hold up / The edge that must uncut thy twist of life’ (..–). In the same play, ‘unshrin’d’ joins Ford’s many metaphors for women’s purity, as Fernando affirms his chaste relations with Biancha, denying that he ever ‘unshrin’d / The altar of her purity’ (..–). Another idiosyncratic un– coinage occurs in the following scene, when the Duke stabs himself and observes the blood flow from his veins with morbid satisfaction: ‘So; I grow sweetly empty; all the pipes / Of life un-vessel life’ (.. –). In several of these instances the hearer has to decode what is in effect a double negative. A similar negation occurs in The Lady’s Trial, when Aurelio informs Spinella that Thy wronged Auria is come home with glory, Prepare a welcome to uncrowne the greatnesse Of his prevailing fates. (..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In this play Ford used a number of unusual un– words, including ‘ungay’, ‘unvampt’, ‘unguiltie’, ‘ungently’, and ‘unguided’. In The Lover’s Melancholy the common metaphor of life being a thread spun by the Fates gives rise to a truly idiosyncratic un-word used in a life crisis, Meleander’s appeal, If the Fates Have spun my thred, and my spent clue of life Be now untwisted, let us part like friends. (..–)
In The Fancies Chaste and Noble, a play that Wood did not consider, Ford runs four un– forms together in one sentence, as Livio mocks human achievements as mere gifts of nature: So are Diamonds Uncut, so flowers unworne, so silke-worme webs Unwrought, gold unrefin’d. (..–)
In The Laws of Candy Ford scattered un– words freely, including ‘unfollowed’, ‘unconquer’d minde’, ‘unnoble’, ‘untenant every hope’, ‘unminded’, and ‘not unmatchable’. It begins to seem as if Ford and ‘W. S.’ shared a special liking for this negative prefix. In his detailed study of four plays T. A. Wood compiled a list of Ford’s twelve favourite words (pp. –), each of which he studied separately. The word ‘unsteady’ – which occurs in the Funerall Elegye (), was used three times in Wood’s chosen plays, and in order to establish its lexical context Wood checked the ‘one hundred and thirty Ford words with the “un” prefix’ against all the other concordances, discovering that ‘“unsteady” is one of thirty-six of these words which do not appear’ in forty-eight plays by the other five dramatists. The word ‘steady’, as we have seen, had a special significance in English Neo-Stoicism as a cognate for the key virtue constantia, and we can now appreciate the significance of Wood’s finding that ‘Ford also used the word “steady” (once in Love’s Sacrifice), which is found neither in Shakespeare nor Marlowe, although Webster and Tourneur did use it. But none of the other plays contained Ford’s “steadiest”, found in The Lover’s Melancholy, or his “steadinesse”, which appears in The Broken Heart’ (p. ). Ford obviously attached special importance to this concept.
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Wood noted that ‘thirty other “un” words of Ford . . . are found in more than one of Shakespeare’s plays’, but not in the other four dramatists, and he appended a list of un– words which he found in only one other play besides Ford’s (pp. –): unalterable unexpected unsatiate unbounded unexperienced unthankful unbrib’d unfashionable untrimm’d uncase unguilty untroubled unchanging unhop’d untwisted unclasp’t unjoynt’d unvaile undreamt unnoble unexampled unready (From that list, ‘unexpected’ appears in the Funerall Elegye, line , as does ‘unblushing’, from the previous list, line .) Ford frequently used un– words in all his poems, plays, and prose works, as can be seen from table ., more than seven hundred times in all according to my count (which does not claim to be complete). His scenes for co-authored plays include such unusual coinages as ‘unfile’ and ‘unperish’d’ (Witch of Edmonton), ‘untongu’d’ and ‘unfather’d’ (Spanish Gypsy), ‘unrelish’d’ and ‘unwinded’ (Sun’s Darling), and ‘unknit’ and ‘unpartiall’ (The Fair Maid of the Inn). We can now see how reckless Donald Foster was in suggesting that a fondness for such words linked the Elegye specially, indeed uniquely, to Shakespeare. Another linguistic feature that, according to Foster, links ‘W. S.’ to Shakespeare, and distinguishes him from ‘most poets in the CrossSample’, is a fondness for ‘the quantitative suffix –less or –ful’. Indeed, Foster even declared, hand on heart, that, ‘having made a thorough search among the leading poets and playwrights of the age, I find no one whose vocabulary so closely matches Shakespeare’s in its overlap with the particular un–, –less, and –ful words used by W. S.’, who in the Elegye uses ‘ different words in –ful and in –less . . . ’ (, p. ). Foster claimed a statistical correlation between the rates for these two suffixes in the lines of this poem, and for Shakespeare’s ‘total vocabulary . . . as registered in Spevack’, a claim that cannot be tested for Ford, in the absence of a concordance to his works. But I can show that Ford used these two suffixes freely throughout his career. Table . gives details of their occurrence throughout his poems, prose works, and plays, soleauthored and collaborative (including prose passages, to match Foster’s choice of Shakespeare’s ‘total vocabulary’ as a point of comparison).
A Funerall Elegye In Memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat The Golden Meane A Line of Life The Broken Heart The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady’s Trial The Laws of Candy Love’s Sacrifice The Lover’s Melancholy Perkin Warbeck The Queen ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Welsh Ambassador The Spanish Gypsy The Sun’s Darling The Witch of Edmonton The Fair Maid of the Inn ‘On the best of English Poets, Ben: Jonson Deceased’ ‘A Memoriall, offered to that man of virtue, Sir Thomas Overburie’ ‘To the Memory of the late Excellent Poet John Fletcher’ Totals , , (prose) (prose) , , , , , , , , , , ,
/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
Total decavery as whiles/ elliptical syllabic lines un – words adjective while hath doth wert can
Table . . ‘Shakespearian’ diction in the Elegye and in Ford
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Table .. Adjectival suffixes in Ford
Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat The Golden Meane A Line of Life The Broken Heart The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady’s Trial The Laws of Candy Love’s Sacrifice The Lover’s Melancholy Perkin Warbeck The Queen ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore The Welsh Ambassador The Spanish Gypsy The Sun’s Darling The Witch of Edmonton The Fair Maid of the Inn
– ful
–less
By my calculation, Ford used different words (‘types’) ending in –ful, giving a total of instances (‘tokens’); for –less the figures are and respectively. Of the –ful words in the Funerall Elegye, some are great Ford favourites: ‘desertful’ occurs fifteen times in Ford, never in Shakespeare; ‘hopeful’ is found eleven times in Ford, and nine times in Shakespeare, comparatively less often, given their very different outputs. The only –ful words in the Elegye found nowhere in Ford are ‘teenful’, never used by Shakespeare, and ‘spleenful’, which he used twice. Of the twelve –less compounds (types) in the Elegye, two never occur in Shakespeare, ‘blushless’, which Ford used again in Christes Bloodie Sweat, and ‘taintless’, which he used in Fames Memoriall. On the other hand, of the –less compounds which never occur elsewhere in Ford, ‘offenceless’ occurs once in Shakespeare, ‘timeless’ nine times, and ‘worthless’ eighteen times. Without a concordance it is impossible to offer comparative statistics for Ford, but from Foster’s figures for Shakespeare’s usage – ‘for every , (different) words in Shakespeare’s total vocabulary, end in the suffix –ful and –less’ (p. ) – we can compute the percentage of –less words throughout Shakespeare’s work to be .. For the Elegye the ratio is to , or percent, and for Ford it is to , or . percent. Whether these figures mean very much may be doubted,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
but they do at least show that Ford and ‘W. S.’ shared a preference for the suffix –ful. The fact that Ford used these suffixes over times, and used the prefix un– more than times, shows the hollowness of Foster’s claim that none of ‘the leading poets and playwrights of the age’ had a vocabulary which ‘so closely matches Shakespeare’s’ in this respect. He had evidently never looked at Ford. Foster laid particular emphasis on compound words, claiming that ‘W. S.’s manner of hyphenation is indistinguishable from Shakespeare’ (, p. ). But hyphenation as such is a textual element in which scribes and compositors play a part, and anyone who uses early printed books will know that compound words regularly lack a hyphen, and that word pairs given a hyphen are often not proper compounds. Foster concentrated on compounds based on a verb participle, computing that ‘there are in Shakespeare’s collected non-dramatic works compounds, of which , or . percent, have as their second element a past or present participle, a figure nearly twice the average for other poems of the age’ (p. ), and one matching that for the Elegye, which has participial compounds in a total of , or . percent. – This is my calculation, for Foster, oddly enough, changed his index of measurement in midstream, quoting ‘a combined frequency of . [per thousand words], well within Shakespeare’s range of .–.’. (Foster also never disclosed the criteria by which he identified a compound word, but I assume that a compound joins together two or more words, each having a distinct meaning, as in ‘death-desiring’. This criterion excludes all formations involving a prefix, such as dis–, en– or un–, or the suffix –less.) If we perform the same exercise on Ford’s two major non-dramatic poems – bearing in mind the variable usage of a hyphen in early printed books – we find that Fames Memoriall has a total of compounds (including present, past participles), while Christes Bloodie Sweat has (including present, past participles). The proportions are shown in table .. Table .. Compound words in Ford’s poems Participial
Total
Percentage of participial
.
With the Elegye’s score of . percent, as against Shakespeare’s . percent, we can see that, in this respect, Ford had just as close an affinity with ‘W. S.’
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
As to the individual word-units, Foster cited six Shakespearian parallels for the Elegye’s ‘quick-brain’d’ (p. ), but it is easy to find similar compounds in Ford’s works: ‘starveling-brain’d companion’ and ‘harebrain’d youths’ in The Lady’s Trial; ‘shrewd-brained Whorson’ in Lover’s Melancholy; ‘unbrain’d’ and ‘soundbrain’d’ in The Queen. Foster listed ‘the four words most commonly employed by Shakespeare in the formation of compound words’ as being: well-, found four times in the Elegye (‘wellabled’, ‘well-employ’d’, ‘well-profited’, and ‘well-worthy’); -like, found once in the Elegye (‘harvest-like’); self-, found once (‘self-conceit’); and all, also found once (‘all-encompass’). Informed readers may well wonder why Foster should cite single instances of a word occurring in the Funerall Elegye, even offering statistics for the frequency of -like per thousand words, but the result – hey presto! – shows ‘a combined average of .’ for Shakespeare, and ‘.’ for the Elegye (p. ). As I have observed, no genuine practitioner of quantitative stylistics would take seriously evidence based on the occurrence of a single word. Here again, Foster misled himself and his readers by using such a small cross-sample (only forty poems published between and ), and by neglecting to consider the work of John Ford. As a parallel to the single word ‘harvest-like’ in the Elegye, in Fames Memoriall we find ‘man-like’ (), ‘prince-like’ (), ‘warlike’ (), ‘tyrant-like’ (), and ‘foe-like’ (). The word ‘starrelike’ appears in his Mountjoy poem in Funerall Teares (NDW, p. ), and ‘beast-like’ is used in both of his prose works (NDW, pp. , ). In Ford’s plays we find ‘giant-like’, ‘coward-like’, ‘son-like’, ‘tyrant-like’, and ‘Angell-like’ in The Laws of Candy; ‘Trewant-like’ and ‘Droane-like’ in Lover’s Melancholy; ‘Godlike’, ‘Princelike and Queenlike’, ‘Gentlemanlike’, and ‘Madmanlike’ in The Queen; ‘champion-like’ and ‘Matron-like’ in Love’s Sacrifice; ‘warlike’ in both Perkin Warbeck and The Broken Heart; ‘apelike’ in The Fancies Chaste and Noble; ‘warlike’, ‘goddess like’, ‘lyon like’ and ‘sheep-like’ in The Lady’s Trial; ‘angell-like’, ‘unmanlike’, ‘manlike’, and ‘godlike’ in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; and ‘scholar-like’ in one of Ford’s scenes for The Witch of Edmonton. That is a total of -like compounds, compared to the that Foster counted in Shakespeare, whose output was three to four times larger than Ford’s. Comparatively speaking, Ford’s fondness for -like formations ranks with, or even exceeds, Shakespeare’s. Of the other commonly used compounds in Shakespeare which supposedly link him with ‘W. S.’, while distinguishing both writers from all the other poets and dramatists in this period, Ford made rare use of all-: for the Elegye’s ‘all-encompass’ I find ‘all-desperate’ in Fames Memoriall (), and ‘all-scorning’ in Christes Bloodie Sweat (), but
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
only one comparable usage in the plays, ‘all-commanding’ (LT, ..). But he made frequent use of self- compounds, matching ‘self-conceit’ in the Elegye: ‘selfe-content’ and ‘self-affected’ (FM, Dedication, ); ‘self-neglect’ and ‘selfe-accusing’ (CBS, , ); ‘self-penance’ and ‘selfe confession’ (LT ), ‘selfe-love’ (PW ), ‘selfe humanity’ (LS ), ‘selfeopinion’ (BH ), ‘selfe-love’ (twice in Lover’s Melancholy), ‘selfe-will’d’ (LC ) and one ‘self-center’ (LC ). Ford’s favourite self- compound is ‘selfeunworthinesse’, which occurs seven times in The Golden Meane (with only one instance of ‘selfe-reformation’), once in A Line of Life (one instance of ‘selfe-worthie’), and once each in The Fancies Chaste and Noble and The Broken Heart. As for well- compounds, they abound in Ford, with over fifty instances. If we compare this figure with the one Foster cited for Shakespeare, ninety-five instances, given the difference between their output, we can say that well- compounds are actually more characteristic of Ford (not surprisingly, given his constant preoccupation with ethical behaviour). Foster found the ‘coupling of a noun or adverb to a participle’ to be ‘typically Shakespearean’, as in ‘heaven-bred’, which he compared with the Elegye’s ‘heaven-infused’ and ‘heaven-favor’d’. A direct parallel with the first of those compounds occurs in Fames Memoriall, where Ford justified the praise terms he has just lavished on Mountjoy, ‘Heavens pride, earths joy’: Heavens pride? for heaven into him infus’d, The quintessence of ripe perfection (–)
Other Ford compounds involving ‘heaven’ include ‘heaven-blest’ (BH ), and ‘heavens-incensed’ (CBS, ). To match ‘never-blemisht’ (FE, ) Foster cited three never-compounds in Shakespeare, which Ford can match with ‘never-fading’ and ‘never-waking’ (CBS, , ), ‘never dying’ (TPW ), and ‘never-yet-matched’ (LC ). To rank with Foster’s Shakespeare parallels for ‘fore-promis’d’ (FE, ), Ford can offer ‘foreshowing’, ‘fore-matched’, and ‘forecare’ (Fames Memoriall, , , ), ‘fore-thinke’ (CBS and GM ), and several other analogous compounds (LS, PW ). For the Elegye’s ‘clean-temper’d’ (), beside Foster’s three Shakespeare instances we can put Ford’s ‘well tempered moderation’ (GM ), ‘fine temper’d gallant’ (FCN ), and ‘well temper’d swords’ (LC ). For ‘low leveld’ (FE ), Ford can offer ‘low-bent’ (LS, BH), and ‘lowfawning’ (LS, LC). Finally, against the Elegye’s ‘best-speaking’ () Ford can offer ‘best-approved’ (FM, ), ‘best-belov’d’ (LS), ‘best lov’d’ (FCN ),
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
and ‘best skill’d’ (LM ). As far as compound words go, Ford’s claims to an affinity with ‘W. S.’ are every bit as strong as Shakespeare’s. He created numerous inventive coinages, many of which have yet to be included in the OED (Wood , pp. –). ‘There is much more that one might say concerning the affinities of diction between W. S. and Shakespeare’, Foster averred at the end of his discussion (, p. ), instancing the word ‘very’. Apparently, Shakespeare seldom used ‘very’ in his non-dramatic verse – ‘only eleven times . . . for a relative frequency of ./ words’, whereas its sole occurrence in the Elegye, the phrase ‘very vertues’ (line ), gives ‘a frequency of .’. To Foster, that statistic, like so many others produced in this ad hoc manner, appeared meaningful, as did the fact that in seven of its appearances in the poems Shakespeare used the intensifier ‘very’ not as an adverb premodifying an adjective (‘very happy’), but as a restrictive adjective (as in ‘the very man’), writing ‘very eyes’, ‘very birds’, and so forth (p. ). More statistics followed: ‘Of the thirty-six poets represented in the Cross-Sample, only John Donne and George Wither use “very” as an adjective, Donne once in , lines, Wither eight times in lines’ (p. ). Readers were evidently meant to believe that these forty poems were truly representative of the whole of Jacobean literature, and thus to accept the adjective ‘very’ as another stylistic marker proving the Shakespearian diction of the Elegye. But John Ford also regularly used ‘very’ as a restrictive adjective. In his poem to Mountjoy, Fames Memoriall, he referred to ‘that very name’ () and ‘very death’ (). In his prose work The Golden Meane () he spoke of ‘very trifles’ (NDW, p. ). In the other prose treatise, A Line of Life () he wrote of ‘the very consideration of being man’, ‘a very beast in nature’, and ‘this very word (GOOD)’ (NDW, pp. , ). Throughout his dramatic career Ford made constant use of ‘very’ as a restrictive adjective. In The Broken Heart characters refer to ‘the very act’ (..), ‘their very hearts’ (..), ‘the equity / Of very reason’ (.. –), ‘the very honey-combe of honesty’ (..), adding five other instances. In The Lady’s Trial we find ‘Her very words’ (..), ‘The very hum’s and ha’s’ (..), and even two instances of the construction in one line: ‘This verie citie, now, the very now’ (..). In The Fancies Chaste and Noble Ford is equally emphatic, describing one character’s pointed beard as making him The very quack of fashions, the very hee that Weares a Steletto on his chinne (..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In The Queen Ford used ‘very’ as a restrictive adjective three times in the play’s verse, and a further eight times in prose scenes, including ‘a very botcher’, ‘The very Jove of benignity’, and ‘the very vaines of your heart’. In the scenes Ford contributed to The Witch of Edmonton he wrote ‘this very day’ (..), ‘a very unthrift’ (..), and ‘In very deed’ (..), while in those he supplied to The Welsh Ambassador we find ‘his very heart’ (..), ‘his very brow’ (..), ‘her very frown’ (..), and ‘a very knave’ (..). Table . shows how frequently Ford continued to use ‘very’ as a restrictive adjective in his plays. Foster argued that ‘W. S.’s subordinating conjunctions’ also linked him with Shakespeare, since both used the words sith and whiles, usages which ‘suggest that the author of the Peter elegy may belong to the older generation of poets’, because ‘both words were falling out of use in the Southern tongue’ (, p. ). Accordingly, Foster included both words in his selection of seventeen tests which, he recorded, the Peter elegy successfully passed, and he took them both as ‘evidence of the poet’s advanced age’ (p. ). Such pronouncements suggest that Foster could document the growth and decay of the English language. But the only authority Foster had for his assertion concerning the obsolescence of these words seems to have been his ,-line sample of ‘Memorial Verse’, from which he solemnly deduced that ‘the median birth-date for those who use “sith” is , for those who use “whiles” ’, imagining that this constituted legitimate evidence. Clearly, it was a rash claim to make, for the Chadwyck-Healey databases show that both words continued to be used well into the Caroline period. As for Ford, although he never used sith, he made frequent use of whiles, as can be seen from table .. A simple calculation, modo Fosteri, gives a frequency in the Funerall Elegye of one instance every . lines, compared to one every . lines for Fames Memoriall, and one every . lines in Christes Bloodie Sweat. Can this correlation be coincidental? It is time that we began to talk of the affinities of diction between ‘W. S.’ and John Ford. His continuing fondness for whiles, well beyond Foster’s cut-off date of , can be seen from the usages in the plays, documented in table ., some of which were written in the late s. I count instances of whiles in his poems and plays, as against of while, a ratio of . to , compared to the ratio of to in the Funerall Elegye. Is this coincidence? Another aspect of English historical usage on which Foster was prepared to make a confident pronouncement concerned the use by ‘W. S.’ of ‘hath and doth in third-person-singular present indicative, for both notional and auxiliary use, when many poets in preferred has and does’ (, p. ). His authority here was a sound one, David J. Lake’s
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
‘monumental survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic literature’, and Foster reported that ‘fewer than half of the writers surveyed by Lake are like Shakespeare and W. S. in preferring both hath and doth’. Of course, fewer than half of Lake’s authors is still a considerable number, but what interests us here are the statistics (shown in table .) that Lake supplied for seven plays by Ford, on which Foster failed to comment: Table .. Verb forms in seven plays by Ford
The Lover’s Melancholy The Broken Heart Love’s Sacrifice ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Perkin Warbeck The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady’s Trial Totals
has
hath
does
doth
Source: Lake , p. ff, Band e
Although usages vary from play to play, on those figures Ford’s preferences clearly lay with the older form, clocking up instances of hath against of has, uses of doth against of does. Foster also overlooked Cyrus Hoy’s matching computation of Ford’s linguistic preferences (cf. Appendix III, table ), which confirms Ford’s continuing preference for hath and doth. Limiting ourselves to the older forms, again we see some interesting ‘affinities of diction’ between the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s poems. In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ uses hath times (every . lines) and doth times (every . lines) compared to Ford in Fames Memoriall, where hath appears times (every . lines) and doth times (every . lines). In Christes Bloodie Sweat, hath crops up times (every . lines) and doth times (every . lines). In this, as in other linguistic details, the Funerall Elegye is closer to the secular elegy, Fames Memoriall, than to Ford’s Christian one. But the correlation of values between the three poems is striking. As can be seen from table ., Ford used both old forms frequently in his prose works and throughout his dramatic career, yielding a total of and instances, respectively. Reading his collaborative plays, one often has the impression that Ford’s preference for hath and doth makes him appear more old-fashioned than his co-authors, and indeed the statistics bear this out.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
According to Foster, in the Funerall Elegye ‘even the grammatical “solecisms” are typically Shakespearean: “more severer” () takes its place beside “more better”, “more bigger” ’, and other instances of ‘redundancies [which are] not so commonly found in Renaissance literature as is often supposed’, for in his sample of ‘Memorial Verse – contain[ing] work by more than two hundred poets . . . only seven employ redundant –er or –est’ (, pp. –). Interestingly enough, one of these was Ford, for Foster ascribed to him the expression ‘more primer’, without giving details. It comes, in fact, from Fames Memoriall, describing Mountjoy’s fondness for ‘more primer passions of content’ (). This poem also includes the most effusive superlative describing Mountjoy, who was ‘the best, the most, most best of all’ (). In Christes Bloodie Sweat we find more instances of these supposedly rare ‘redundancies’: ‘most dearest droppes’ (), ‘most infinite’ (), and ‘how much more better’ (). In his prose work A Line of Life, Ford was equally effusive, praising Hannibal as ‘the most cunningest Wariour of his time’, and in The Golden Meane he described something as ‘more numberless’ (NDW, pp. , ). In the plays Ford, who had a weakness for hyperbole, used similar extravagances: ‘much more crueller’ (LC, ..), ‘more absolute’ (LS, ..), ‘more thriftier’ (LS, ..), ‘most matchlesse’ (LC,..), ‘most fully guilty’ (LC, ..), and – to cap it all – ‘More rudely, or more most unnaturally’ (LC, ..). At the very least, just as good a claim could be made in this respect for the diction of the Funerall Elegye having ‘affinities’ with Ford as with Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s use of the word wert is ‘especially worth notice’, Foster suggested, apparently well versed in the history of the English language, for ‘he (like Daniel and Jonson) uses wert for the indicative, when it was to be used only for the subjunctive mood, as . . . in the Authorized Version of the Bible’ (, p. ). Still, Foster claimed, ‘only a distinct minority of Jacobean poets would write, as Shakespeare does, I grant thou wert not married to my Muse . . . Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathiz’d (Son. ., )
In the Elegye, Foster continued, ‘W. S. . . . does not hesitate to do so’, twice using the form ‘thou wert’: Although I could not learne (whiles yet thou wert) To speake the language of a servile breath (–) And Limne thee to the world but as thou wert ()
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Foster failed to observe a crucial difference between Shakespeare’s use of this word and that found twice in the Elegye: as Roger Gross pointed out, none of Shakespeare’s ninety-six uses has the sense that ‘W. S.’ gives it, namely ‘were still alive’. As for the ‘distinct minority of Jacobean poets’ who used wert, John Ford is firmly among them. In Fames Memoriall we find So mayst thou knightly youth who wert his friend () Even to thy native West where thou wert bred () Thou wert a Phoenix ()
In A Line of Life Ford visualizes Brutus, having decided to commit suicide, exclaiming ‘O wretched and miserable power of man, thou wert nothing but a name, yet I imbraced thee as a glorious worke, but thou wert a Bondslave to Fortune’ (NDW, p. ). Ford frequently uses the word wert in the plays, as in this prose work, to describe a past state of existence: Thou wert a friend unmatched . . . ere thou wert born Dearer than thou wert even unto me Gonzalo told me that thou wert honest I know thou wert put on to sift me And still thou wert a Boy? thou wert wont To be as pittifull as thou wert valiant as if thou Wert the ghost of my dear love? Thou wert ordain’d my plague She tooke him for my man, love thou wert just Art thou (my sonne), that miracle of Wit Who once within these three Months wert esteem’d A wonder of thine age . . . ?
(LS, ..) (LC, ..) (LC, ..) (LC, ..) (LM, ..) (LM, ..) (Q , ..–) (WE, ..) (BH, ..) (LT, ..) (TPW, ..–)
In Shakespeare, according to Spevack’s concordance, wert appears times in over , lines of verse, to which we may compare Ford’s instances (at least) in about , lines. In this case, Ford’s usage exceeded Shakespeare’s, so that the Elegye’s ‘affinities of diction’ for wert are greater with Ford. As can be seen from table ., Ford used this word throughout his writing career. ‘Another noteworthy’ usage in the Elegye, Foster informed the world, was the ‘elliptical use of can, in which the verb is to be supplied from the context’, as in the poet’s apology for his work: ‘Though’t be not as I would, tis as I can’ (). Foster claimed that ‘there are few Renaissance
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
poets who use can in this fashion so often as Shakespeare’, and he cited six instances: ‘I can no more’, where we supply the word ‘do’, similarly with ‘all I can is nothing’. In some cases the word can corresponds to German k¨onnen, knowing how to perform something, as with ‘the priest . . . That defunctive music can’ (The Phoenix and Turtle, –), or ‘the French . . . can well on horseback’ (Ham., ..–); in others it may correspond to ‘know’, as in ‘the strong’st suggestion / Our worser genius can’ (Temp., ..–). To evaluate Foster’s claim properly, one would need to know a great deal about Early Modern English usage of modal verbs, to be sure that Shakespeare wasn’t simply using a widely available resource (OED is not very helpful here). Limiting our enquiry to Ford’s use of can in this syntactically exposed position, in Fames Memoriall occurs the line ‘And what their favours can, they vow to do him’ (). In The Queen Velasco, who has had drink forced upon him, protests: Prithee, I can no more; ’tis a profession I dare not practise, nay, I will not. (.. –)
In the opening scene of The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, Troylo Savelli satirically advises Livio to continue to ‘be wilfull, desperate’, and to use his reputation to fill his coffers, acquire honours, and so forth: All this can reputation, marry can it, Indeed what not? (..–)
At the end of one of his scenes in The Welsh Ambassador Ford makes his two heroines, Carintha and Armante, resolve to convert the King from vice to virtue: Weel joyne our councells by what art wee can To turne a greate Kinge, to a greate good man. (..–)
In The Witch of Edmonton, when Frank has murdered Susan, he first wounds himself, and then, in order to make it seem as if they are both victims, he decides ‘The best I can / To binde my self to this Tree’ (..– ). In The Laws of Candy Mochingo and Hyparcha quarrel: . Foolish woman, what wouldst thou say? thou – I know not what to call thee. . I can you, For I can call you Coxcombe, Asse, and Puppy. (..–)
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Earlier in that play Philander expressed his disbelief that Erona could show such ‘cruel tyranny’ in response to his love declaration: . I can, I doe, I will. . She is in her Moods, and her Tenses: I’ll grammar with you, And make a triall how I can decline you (..–)
(That pun shows Ford’s awareness of the grammatical forms he was using.) In The Lady’s Trial Ford extends the ellipsis through four stages, as Malfata imagines someone having an ‘affection . . . true and setled, / As ever Auria’s was, can, is, or will be’ (..–). In The Broken Heart the insanely jealous Bassanes conveys his latest moral discovery: ‘On this truth I am bold: / No woman but can fall, and doth, or would’ (..–). Ford’s use of can certainly qualifies him to be included among the ‘few Renaissance poets who use’ that word ‘so often as Shakespeare’, as can be seen from table .. The links between Ford and ‘W. S.’ become increasingly strong. This discussion of the ‘affinities of diction’ that Foster claimed to find between the Funerall Elegye and the works of Shakespeare has concentrated so far on words which recur often in that poem (although the one instance each of very as an adjective and the elliptical can make these rather minor details). But Foster also made claims for the Elegye’s ‘Shakespearean diction’ in terms of its ‘distinctive vocabulary’, in the course of a tortuous discussion of the issue, reiterating the difficulty of making such comparisons (, pp. –). However, he provided a bottom line, as accountants put it, with his table ., which offered to identify ‘those words used by W. S. that appear in either the Shakespeare or non-Shakespeare sample, but not in both’ (p. ). The ‘non-Shakespeare sample’ in Foster’s table, he informed readers, was derived from ‘the only concordances available to me at present’, namely the poems of Spenser and Jonson, the plays and poems of Marlowe, the sonnet sequences of Daniel, Drayton, and Sidney, and the complete writings of George Herbert. To these Foster ‘manually added the complete poems of William Strachey and the nondramatic verse of William Strode (since their initials are appropriate to the Elegy)’ (p. ). Foster selected words from the Elegye, which are used for a total of instances in that poem. Of these words, he declared, also appear in the Shakespeare canon, being used on occasions. Foster then set out in tabular form (p. ) the results of his search for occurrences
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
of this ‘distinctive vocabulary’ in the nine authors he had chosen for comparison. The resulting table is noteworthy for the apparent paucity of parallels. Foster could find only of these words in his sample, in extremely small quantities: ‘self-conceit’ appeared once in Marlowe, and once in Herbert; Marlowe was cited as having used ‘surrounding’ and ‘taintless’, once each; Spenser and Strachey for ‘unsteady’ (once each); Daniel for ‘unaffected’ (once); Herbert for ‘complemental’, ‘concourse’, ‘fruitlessly’ (once each), and ‘gainful’ (three times). Foster found none of his selected words in Jonson, Drayton, Sidney, or Strode. To the inexperienced eye that table may have seemed to strengthen the claimed linguistic identity between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare. To more experienced scholars, however, Foster’s discussion is problematic in several ways. First, it does not attempt to distinguish the Elegye from Shakespeare’s works by actually listing those words found in the Elegye but not in Shakespeare. (I shall attempt to provide such a list shortly.) Further, even accepting Foster’s stated reason for choosing the authors represented (the convenience of using existing concordances), it is very strange that he should have been looking for ‘parallels’ between the Elegye, written in , and works written by poets who had died many years earlier: Sidney in , Marlowe in , Spenser in . The claimed overlap between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare is based on inadequate evidence and a faulty methodology. I have taken the same list and looked for parallels in Ford, which proved to be not an easy task in the absence of a concordance. My figures in table . derive from repeated readings of his work, and from electronic databases, partly those provided by Chadwyck-Healey, partly those of my own construction, using scanned texts. The data were produced using a normal search function, and are subject to the usual inaccuracies involved in this process, exacerbated when texts are in old spelling. I have no doubt that a more reliable database will produce even more instances, but already we can see that a quite different picture emerges. From table . it can be seen that of the words in the Elegye that Foster picked out for comparison, recur in Shakespeare, for a total of uses (rejecting ‘flood’), while at least of them recur in Ford, for a total of uses. If we consider that Ford’s output was far smaller than Shakespeare’s (he wrote perhaps ten unaided plays, with shares in four others; two longish poems, and two pamphlets) his total number of verse lines, in plays and poems (about ,) being roughly a quarter of Shakespeare’s, that correlation with Ford may well be thought more impressive than with Shakespeare. But at all events, any claim that a special affinity has been established between the Elegye and Shakespeare’s vocabulary can be dismissed.
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’ Table .. Distinctive vocabulary: ‘W. S.’, Shakespeare, and Ford FE vb. to addict adj. affected adj. becoming adj. besotted adj. blemished adj. brittle cpd. clean-(word) adj. complemental n. concourse n. consummation vb. to detract adj. disgraceful adj. earthy cpd. (word)-employed n. float vb. to foreshow adv. fruitlessly adj. gainful cpd. heaven-(word) adj. helpful cpd. (word)-honored n. lapse adj. long-lived cpd. (word)-lurking n. minority n. misconstruction adj. offenseless vb. to oversway n. pawn n. priority adj. prompt adj. questionable adj. remiss n. repute adv. scantly n. self-conceit n. separation adv. sincerely n. singleness vb. to size cpd. (word)-speaking
Instances in: Shakespeare
Ford
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Table .. (cont.) FE adj. spleenful n. subject’s, s’ n. supposition adj. surrounding adj. taintless n. talker cpd. (word)-tempered adj. unaffected adj. unburthened adj. unprevailing adj. unrespected adj. unsteady adj. wintered
Instances in: Shakespeare
Ford
It is regrettable that Foster did not list the words found in the Elegye but not in Shakespeare, as any researcher would surely have done who had not already closed his mind to all other candidates. Roger Gross did compile such a list, which, with some additions, and following the spellings of the text in Appendix , pp. –, I reproduce in table .. Cumulatively, it shows that the Elegye’s vocabulary is in many respects foreign to Shakespeare. (Readers will have noted that five of these words not found in Shakespeare are un– words: ‘unremembered’, ‘unbeseeming’, ‘unfamiliar’, ‘unblushing’, and ‘unaffected’.) Professor Gross listed additional words ‘which, in some way, appear in Shakespeare but not in the way they do in the Elegye’: golden Meane () [Shakespeare never uses the phrase. He uses ‘mean’ times but never with the meaning it takes in this phrase] flote () [used only once as a noun but not with the Elegye’s meaning, i. e. ‘flood’] thanke (noun) (, ) [ uses in Shakespeare, all verbs except ‘thankfully’, adverb] hood-winkes () [FE has it with second-syllable emphasis; Shakespeare has two verse uses, both with first-syllable emphasis]
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Table .. Words in A Funerall Elegye not found in Shakespeare predestinated (, ) superlative () by-path () ridg-way () unremembered () unbeseeming () blushlesse () resuming () innated () unfamiliar () concourse () imbane () unblushing () irrefragable () s’ere () ignorantly (, ) dis-union’d () invitemen[t]s () pleasurable () immunity () over-passe () unaffected () complementall () slacker () adventers (verb) () suppositions () defamations () seeled () possibilited () prone[ne]sse () conjugall () partage () severer () imputations ()
corrupt (, )
[but ‘predestinate’once in Shakespeare] [but ‘by-paths’ once] [ but ‘rememb’red: uses] [ but ‘beseeming’: uses] [ but ‘blushing’: ; ‘blush’d’ ; ‘blush’: ; ‘blushes’: uses] [ but ‘resume’: uses; ‘resum’d’: once] [nor does ‘innate’ appear in Shakespeare] [ but ‘familiar’: uses]
[Shakespeare has ‘soe’er’ and ‘howsoe’er’] [never in any form] [but ‘pleasure’: uses] [but ‘overpass’d’ once] [but ‘affected’: uses] [but ‘complimental’: use; ‘complement’: uses] [but ‘slack’: uses] [ but ‘adventures’: uses, all nouns] [ but ‘supposition’: uses] [nor ‘defamation; but ‘defam’d’: use; ‘defame’: uses] [ but ‘seel’: uses; ‘seeling’: ; ‘sealed’: ; ‘seal’d’: uses] [ but ‘prone’: uses]
[ but ‘imputation’: uses]
[FE gives once a first-syllable emphasis and once a second; Shakespeare always gives it second-syllable emphasis except for one questionable instance in Henry VIII] Finally, Gross listed all the compounds in the Funerall Elegye that do not appear in Shakespeare (although a few of these depend on modernized spelling and punctuation):
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
never-blemisht () quick-brain’d () harvest-like () heaven-infused ()
[There are only three heaven- compounds in Shakespeare: -bred, -kissing, -moving]
clean-temper’d () well-imployed () heaven-favoured () double-honor’d () fore-shewing () [nor ‘fore-showing’] well-profited () sower-bitter () fore-promis’d () selfe conceit () close lurking () ever empty () all encompasse () Of course, the mere presence of words in an anonymous work which never appear in Shakespeare means little on its own, for the researches of Alfred Hart showed that Shakespeare regularly introduced new words in each poem or play that he wrote. The significance of these lists, however, is that they contain quite a number of words that Ford used in his poems, prose works, and plays. Moreover, some of them are idiosyncratic to Ford, or otherwise unknown. In the next chapter I present a list of more than eighty direct parallels between the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s works, arranged in the sequence of the poem, individually numbered. I shall cite there all the Elegye words not found in Shakespeare but which are found in Ford in order to prove, first, that many ‘affinities of diction’ exist between the poem and Ford’s œuvre. In addition, some of these words are so unusual that they lend support to a much stronger thesis, namely that Ford actually wrote the Funerall Elegye. - In chapter I showed that the Elegye’s diction is remarkably Latinate, far more so than any comparable passage in Shakespeare’s poems or late plays. In his poems and prose works Ford uses the vocabulary of a learned man, abounding in Latinisms, comparable to that of other products of the universities and/or Inns of Court. As yet no adequate comparative
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
studies exist of the degree of Latin-derived word-formations in English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it may well be that Ford is not unusual, compared to Burton, say, or Browne. But he uses distinctly more Latinisms than does George Herbert, for instance (Cambridge University orator and distinguished writer of Latin verse). The vocabulary of Fames Memoriall () is certainly more studied than that of A Funerall Elegye, since Ford was not there trying to crank out lines of verse in ten days. It includes some truly rare words such as ‘preconion’s virtue’ () – that of a crier or herald, from Lat. praeco, ‘herald’ (OED gives only the adjective ‘preconious’, ) – and catapotion (), which OED still omits. Many other words in this poem are not unlike the Latinisms of Peter’s elegy: ‘splendent’ (), ‘Invicted’ (), ‘Venting’ (), ‘elate spirit’ ( and ), ‘appendant’ (), ‘primer passions’ (), ‘legists’ (), ‘sanctimonious’ () – in a non-pejorative sense. Fames Memoriall also boasts such unEnglish phrases as ‘Deducted from the issue of this bloud’ (); ‘voltage of a manlike force’ on horseback (); ‘I could resolve two drops of sacrifice’ (); ‘Accosting it more fertile than before’ (); and ‘To coronize high-soar’d gentility’ (). As these examples show, Ford’s language is often abstract, a characteristic for which he has been criticized, in terms which could easily be applied to A Funerall Elegye. F. M. Burelbach wrote of Ford’s tendency to repeat words ‘which, like precedent, are Latinate, multisyllabic, and abstract’, that while ‘such words impart a slow, dignified movement to his writing’, it is at the cost of vividness or concreteness. ‘Especially in Fame’s Memorial he uses words as though they were abstractions; that is, he uses the language of emotion in an emotionless way’ (Burelbach , pp. –). That judgment could not be made of some passages, at least, in Christes Bloodie Sweat, the diction of which is less Latinate than that of the eulogy to Mountjoy, a feature which is no doubt due to Ford having steeped himself in the English Bible. One day an electronic database might enable us to calculate the exact proportion of biblical vocabulary in the poem, but even now readers familiar with the Bible will recognize whole sequences of paraphrase. Nonetheless, this poem includes a number of words that are not in OED (such as ‘impotion’d’, , and ‘overpast’, ), and several others that antedate the OED entry. And Ford could still indulge his liking for words of three, four, and even five syllables, such as mortality, affliction, customary, oblation, lamentable, unprofitable, compassion, intrusted jurisdiction, unconscionable, laborinthes, fornications,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
restoratives, consumptions, transitory, contentions, promotion, uncleannesse, covetousnesse, discontents, momentarie, sufferance, sobrietie, sacietie, desperation, perpetual, assurance, persecution, providence, sufferaunce, comfortable, sacrament, meditations, salvation, diminisht, redemptions, marchandize, bottomlesse confusion, apparant, distillations, comfortlesse, compounded, repasted, observation, devotion, experience, merriment, submission, lascivious, ingendred, temperately, distilling, inestimable, physition, intruded, represent, entertaine, unworthily, reconciled, imputation, unthankfulnesse, remembrance, dilliance, simplicitie, virginity, whoredomes, imbracements, defeature, morgage, presumption, contrition, fruition, regenerate, carnation, sinceritie, perswasions, unsollac’t, committed, commentaries, seminaries, countenancing, impostum’d, arithmeticke, eruptions, abrogate, reprobate, inventive, apprenticeships, imposition, priviledge, unrespected, dissolution. – I offer no statistics, but this is obviously a learned, academic vocabulary, very similar to that of A Funerall Elegye. Ford’s two moral essays also contain a number of recondite Latinisms, not suprisingly perhaps, given their debt to classical sources. Still, other English writers were able to draw on Cicero and Seneca without their language becoming so permeated with Latinate forms. I pick out the following instances from The Golden Meane: ‘induced’ (NDW, p. ); ‘subserted’ (p. ); ‘despection’, ‘aspertion’ (p. ); ‘compultion’ (p. ); ‘severation’ (p. ); ‘occurrents’ (p. ). In A Line of Life I instance: ‘taliarie’ (p. ); ‘dilaniate’ (p. ); ‘inductious’ (p. ); ‘offence . . . exasperated’ (p. ); ‘honourable projections’ (p. ); ‘infracted’ and ‘refractaries’ (p. ). In the plays, finally, although he had to adapt his diction to the speechsituations of a varied group of characters, Ford continued to use polysyllabic, often abstract words. The independent researches of a German, a French, and an English scholar – Eduard Hannemann, Robert Davril, and T. A. Wood – have established the remarkable prominence in Ford’s drama of trisyllabic words (over three hundred are listed by Hannemann), together with words of four and five syllables. The striking fact about these analyses of Ford’s vocabulary is that they tally at so many points with the style of A Funerall Elegye. Hannemann listed twenty-seven polysyllabic words in Ford ending with –ity, Davril’s independent list of –ity words totalled twenty-six, of which nine appear in the Elegye. Davril listed forty-six words with the termination –ion (of course, this is nothing like the complete range) which frequently recur in Ford. The Funerall Elegye includes twenty-six words ending in –ion, several of which appear in
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Davril’s list. Davril’s other examples of favourite Latinate word-endings in Ford included –ance (admittance, countenance, discontinuance), –ancy, –ence, –and, –ent, terminations which prolong the verse’s movement and give it a grave tone (Davril , pp. –). In my list of polysyllabic words in the Elegye (above, pp. –), many had these terminations. As Davril pointed out, in Ford’s plays adjectives are less frequent than nouns, and are usually used to modify an abstract substantive, again with a high preponderance of polysyllabic words ending in –ful, –able, –ing, or beginning with un– (pp. –). The Elegye uses adjectives ending in –able eleven times, six words ending in –ing, and no less than twenty-eight beginning with un–. Davril also drew attention to Ford’s fondness for compound words, occasionally employing substantives (swine-security, monster-multitude), but much more frequently adjectival compounds, using a past or present participle (feeble-winged, tempest-threatened, bastard-bearing, death-daring) (pp. –). As we have seen, the Elegye, like Ford’s poems, contains many compounds using present or past participles. Davril provided only specimen analyses of Ford’s diction in the plays, but he clearly showed the fundamental continuity in his use of Latinisms across a writing career of over thirty years. I summarize the work of these students of Ford’s vocabulary to reinforce the argument of my preceding section, that ‘affinities of diction’ shared by the Funerall Elegye and Shakespeare are actually fewer, and far less distinctive, than those it shares with Ford. But a more telling proof of their affinity is provided by considering the habits of wordformation shown by ‘W. S.’ and by Ford. In his monograph Foster tried to play down the originality of some coinages in A Funerall Elegye: ‘“Adventers”, “complemental”, “pleasurable”, and “possibilited” lack a Shakespearean precedent, though the stems in each case appear in Shakespeare . . . ’ (p. ). But obviously those stems are common: what is unusual is the formation of the past participle verb ‘possibilited’ (FE, ) from the noun ‘possibility’. Foster devoted a whole page to ‘possibilited’, calling it ‘a noun transfigured as a past participle’, a coinage which ‘is unique to this text. It does not appear either in Shakespeare or, if the OED may be trusted, anywhere else’ (p. ). Foster quoted extensively (if inaccurately) from Alfred Hart’s pioneering essay on ‘Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen’, for the observation that Shakespeare often ‘transmuted [nouns] into participles used adjectivally by adding -ed to them. Usually the “new” word so formed is an adjective, sometimes it appears to be the past participle of a “new” verb which is used in the passive voice’ (Hart b, p. ). Hart cited a number of
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
examples from Shakespeare’s late plays, concluding that ‘the habitual use of these formations seems peculiar to Shakespeare; they are almost unknown to his predecessors and I have found three only in the twelve plays of Chapman. The presence of six such “new” words in Part A’ of The Two Noble Kinsmen, Hart argued, ‘gives additional support to the opinion that Shakespeare wrote it’ (pp. –). ‘The same’, Foster coyly added, ‘may be said of “possibilited” in the Elegy by W. S.’ (Foster , p. ). However, the Shakespearian coinages cited by Hart all derive from concrete nouns, mostly rather short words (‘legg’d’, ‘twilled’, ‘token’d’, ‘helmeted’: ‘carbunkled’ is the longest), while ‘possibilited’ is an abstract, polysyllabic past participle, the kind of word-formation that an academic or learned writer might indulge in – as indeed Ford did, several times. In Honor Triumphant () Ford describes how Lucrece ‘monumented her rape with extremity of death’ (NDW, p. ), that is, turning herself into a monument or example. According to OED, this is the first recorded instance of ‘monument’ used as a verb, participial or otherwise, and it lists no emulators until . In Honor Triumphant several other nouns (and adjectives) are made to do duty as verbs in the past participial form, as when Ford attacks licentious men, ‘whose shames, were they enameled in the tableture of their foreheads, it would be a hideous visioun . . . ’ Such men also ‘import the pretexted glosse of beauties name to such are also mercenary slaves, intimated servants’ (p. ). The two Kings, James I and Christian IV of Denmark, are said to form an ‘intimated league’ (p. ). As will be seen from my detailed list of parallels in the next chapter, Fames Memoriall contains two words shared with the Funerall Elegye of this form, past participles of verbs which function as epithets: ‘innated’ (FE, , FM, ), and ‘unremembered’ (FE, , FM, ). But in the elegy to Mountjoy Ford created at least another five such formations. Mountjoy is said to be ‘Inthron’d by fame nobilitated ever’ (). This is exactly the same technique of forming a past participial verb from a noun ending in –ty, here ‘nobility’, to form a word which remains today just as foreign to OED as is ‘possibilited’. Setting off on his Irish campaign, our hero was willing to leave his livelesse carkasse as a mirror Of monumented feare to friends of error. ( –)
Ford repeated this trick of turning a noun into a past participle when explaining why he has written nine epitaphs for Mountjoy,
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
That their deserts who while they liv’d did shine Might now be monumented in their shrine. (–)
By the brilliant success of his Irish campaign Mountjoy had ripened all his hopes at full, Imparadiz’d his soule in deare content (–)
Here again Ford turns a noun into a verb, and then into a past participle. The poet also assures Mountjoy that posterity will make ‘large statues to honorifie / Thy name’ (–), once more turning a noun into a verb; and he speaks of Mountjoy’s death as being ‘A black oblivionizing of worths name’ (), this time turning a noun into a quinque-syllabic present participle. These are identical word-formations, not instances of simple plagiarism, but indications of the same mind and scholarly languagehabits at work. In his memorial poem to Ben Jonson, evidently echoing Jonson’s to Shakespeare, Ford refers to some of the planets being ‘Malignantly aspected’ (NDW, p. ). Ford’s penchant for turning nouns into verbs, and then into past participles, was not abandoned when he began writing for the stage. T. A. Wood’s close scrutiny of the language of Ford’s four best-known plays (The Broken Heart, The Lover’s Melancholy, Love’s Sacrifice, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore) revealed several other instances of this habit. As he showed, the participial adjective ‘imparadised’, first found in Sidney’s Arcadia according to OED, was used not only in Fames Memoriall, as we have seen, but in Ford’s earlier poem, Honor Triumphant (), ‘The fruition of imparadised content’ (NDW, pp. –), as well as in The Broken Heart (c. ), where Ithocles praises ‘the sweetness / Of so imparadised a comfort’ (..–). The persistence of the same verbal form, over twenty years, shows that Ford’s word-forming habits, like many elements in his style, remained constant over a long period. Dr Wood also compiled a list of words found in the chosen Ford plays which never occur in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, or Tourneur. They include two other past participles formed from nouns: ‘unlanded ’ (LS, ..), and ‘wintered’ (see chapter , no. ∗ ). Wood subsequently checked Ford’s vocabulary in these four plays against OED, finding that of more than words he examined were listed as the first recorded usage, pre-dated the first OED mention, and were not recorded at all (pp. –). Among these idiosyncratic Ford words are other past participles formed from nouns:
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
You are but whimsied yet; crotchetted, conundrumed, or so. (LM, ..–) Yet the villainy of words . . . [may] make any unspleen’d Dove Chollerick. (TPW, ..)
Our knowledge of word-formation habits in Early Modern English is slender, but we might provisionally conclude that Ford specialized in the formation of past participles from verbs, some of them – ‘possibilited’, ‘monumented’, ‘nobilitated’, ‘pretexted’ – being academic in the worst sense of the term. An equally awkward formation occurs in one of Ford’s scenes in The Spanish Gypsy, where Clara declares that in her ‘dishonour’ she discovers the justice of ‘Heaven and fate’, that by miracle Have in my weakenesse wrought a strange discovery; Truth copied from my heart is texted there. (..–; my italics)
According to OED, ‘text’ as a noun turned into a verb means ‘to inscribe, write, or print in a text-hand or in capital or large letters’, giving examples of the past participle form used by Dekker in The Whore of Babylon (), and by Heywood in Gunaikeion (). Ford was not wholly idiosyncratic in choosing this form, then, but we can see why it attracted him, and why ‘W. S.’ liked ‘possibilited’. Further proof of the fundamental ‘affinities of diction’ between Ford’s work and the Funerall Elegye can be provided by examining his verbal preferences. To begin with, I repeat MacDonald Jackson’s figures for the five function-words which he showed to occur far more frequently in the Elegye than in Shakespeare. The first figure in each column gives (in brackets) the number of occurrences, the second figure its frequency per thousand words. For Shakespeare frequency and ranges are given. That table demonstrates two phenomena frequently found in authorship studies, first the fact that within any writer’s work, stylistic markers occur at varying rates. Thus, Ford’s rate of use for by in Fames Memoriall is nearly twice as high as in Christes Bloodie Sweat, while his rate for of in the earlier poem exceeds that in the later poem by a ratio of to . The Funerall Elegye gives higher figures for in, in the, and by than do the Ford poems, but its use of with (.) is close to those poems (., .), and its rates for both to and of are close to Ford. On the other hand, although all
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Table .. Function-words in the Elegye, Ford’s poems, and Shakespeare Word length A Funerall Elegye , Fames Memoriall , Christes Bloodie Sweat , Shakespeare
in
in the
() . () .
() . () .
with
by
to
() . () . () . () . () . () .
of () . () .
() . () . () . () . () . () . plays . late plays .–. poems . poems – (.)–. (.)–. . .–.
the values here differentiate the Funerall Elegye from Shakespeare, the Shakespeare (poems) ranges for in match those for Ford’s poems, as do the figures for in the (as a compound), by, and to. The figures for with and of, however, clearly differentiate Shakespeare from both the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s poems. These comparisons establish the second well-known phenomenon in authorship studies, that not every stylistic marker will differentiate two writers. One marker that certainly does differentiate ‘W. S.’ from Shakespeare, but brings him remarkably close to Ford, is the tell-tale preposition of, which occurs in the Elegye frequently and in a rather idiosyncratic manner, as I showed in chapter . The same idiosyncrasies recur all through Ford’s work, in poetry, drama, and even in prose. Throughout his plays, whether single- or co-authored, Ford used of very frequently, often to begin a verse line, and even more often in the formula <noun + of + noun>, where at least one of the nouns is an abstraction. As in the Funerall Elegye, in Ford’s plays this formula occurs both as a normal genitive and as a partitive genitive. In the former type, expressing an appurtenance of a thing or quality to a person, the second noun is prefixed by a possessive adjective, a definite or indefinite article, or the indefinite ‘some’, as in ‘the circuit of his fortunes’, ‘a humour of some novel fancie’. (In the examples that follow this genitive of will be printed in italics.) But also, and more unusually, just like ‘W. S.’, Ford uses the partitive genitive, in which the first noun ‘in a phrase or construction . . . expresses the relationship of part to whole (partition), and having the essential form X of Y’, as in ‘delight of Youth’, ‘Night of Age’. (In the following examples this partitive genitive of will be printed
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
in bold face.) In both forms of genitive Ford frequently places the hingeword ‘of ’ at the beginning of a verse line, where it provides an unstressed foot, useful in iambic metre. Taking Ford’s nine plays of single authorship, I have computed the word’s frequency of occurrence in decasyllabic lines, the number of times the <noun + of + noun> formula occurs, and the number of occasions when this formulaic ‘of ’ comes at the beginning of a line. I have disregarded its use in titles or places, such as ‘King of France’, ‘Duke of Milan’. The figures are as follows: Table .. The function-word of in Ford’s sole-authored plays A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Total decaFrequency F as syllabic per , Of in st Every x <noun + of percentage position lines lines Total of lines + noun> of B The Laws of Candy The Lover’s Melancholy The Queen The Broken Heart Love’s Sacrifice ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Perkin Warbeck The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady’s Trial Totals Every x lines Averages
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
, ,
. .
. .
. .
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
,
.
.
.
,
, .
.
, .
.
.
The word ‘of ’ is found nearly , times in Ford’s unassisted plays, taking verse and prose together. In verse it recurs over , times, or
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
once every five lines, and forms the first word of every fortieth verse line. The formulaic < noun + of + noun> occurs over , times, or once every ten lines. In chapter I showed that the Funerall Elegye shared all three features involving of, and suggested that this offered the first major clue to the identity of ‘W. S.’ I now want to show that exactly the same phenomenon occurs in Ford’s poems and prose works. Table . sets out the results of my computations. Table .. The function-word of in the Elegye, in Ford’s poems and prose works A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Total decaFrequency Of <noun F as syllabic per , beginning Every + of + percentage lines Total of lines verse line x lines noun> of B A Funerall Elegye Fames Memoriall , Christes Bloodie , Sweat The Golden Meane – A Line of Life –
. . .
. . .
. . .
. .
In the Funerall Elegye, we recall, the preposition of occurs times in lines, or . times per thousand lines. In Ford’s unassisted plays of occurs on average . times per thousand lines, from a low of . times per thousand in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, to a high of . times per thousand in Perkin Warbeck. In Fames Memoriall Ford uses of no less than times in , lines, that is, at a rate of . times per thousand lines, surely a record for English poetry or drama. In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford used of at a rate of . times per thousand lines, an almost identical figure to that of the Funerall Elegye, . times per thousand. The rates for of beginning a verse line in the poems are remarkably consistent, between . (FE) and . (CBS), figures which compare well with those for The Lover’s Melancholy (.) and Perkin Warbeck (.). The frequencies for the other plays are lower, which may be expected, given the great many other factors that a dramatist must attend to, affecting his normal style in non-dramatic blank verse.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In his poems, as in the other works analysed here, Ford uses this preposition most often in the construction <noun + of + noun>. Again the statistics for relative frequencies are remarkably similar. The percentage of this formulaic construction within the totals for of reaches an absolute maximum in Fames Memoriall, as expected, with over percent of the total. Below that peak, we notice the striking correlation between the Funerall Elegye (.), Christes Bloodie Sweat (.) and Ford’s two prose works (. and . percent). Correlation to this degree goes far beyond coincidence. In the poems some of these formulaic <noun + of + noun> constructions are normal genitive forms, but the overwhelming proportion of these instances uses the partitive genitive construction, ‘X of Y’. Any reader alerted to this stylistic feature will soon observe the same range of usages, starting with the basic pattern, as found in Fames Memoriall: prime of hope () action of desert () impe of promise () yoakes of bondage () sleights of Sophistry () height of fame () toyes of courtshippe () devoyr of mercie () pith of valour () The reader will also have noticed Ford’s liking for abstract nouns, shown in every instance quoted there. The basic formula is easily expanded, as in A Funerall Elegye (p. above), by adding intensifying epithets: the blinded darke of swarthy night () abjected thoughts of faint servility () canons of eternall glorye () the bane of hatefull leisure () the idle shame of boundlesse pleasure () perfect rites of mutuall amitie () grave patron of sage wisedoms lore () In Fames Memoriall, as in A Funerall Elegye (p. above), the poet can place the hinge-term of at the beginning of the line: Of painted prayse Of supple passion
no disguise (–) the wrack,
passions of content, Of civill mirth and jocond merriment subjection Of servile passion
(–) (–) (–)
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
As in A Funerall Elegye (pp. – above), the formula can be expanded, spreading over two or more lines: The smicker use of court-humanity, Of rurall clownage or urbanity (–)
a mirror Of monumented feare to friends of error ( –)
Men rais’d to flote of fortune from the mud, Of low dejection and at length grown great, Forget that they are men, and scorn the blood Of meane allyance, boasting in the seat Of empire which ambition doth beget: Such not esteeme desert but sensuall vaunts, Of parasites and fawning sycophaunts. ( –)
As that last example shows, Ford was so in love with this construction that he allowed himself to use it in three or more consecutive lines, as in this account of how ‘shrill-strayn’d’ poets affright the world with the threats of horrid ills: Astonishing the chaffe of pampered men With high rear’d accents of their golden pen (–)
(Alas, it only encouraged his tendency to tautology.) Mountjoy, we remember, was supreme, excelling The common height of common stomacks merit, He lineally did thirst of worth inherit: A chronicle of lasting memory, A president of matchless souldery ( –)
To Ford this syntactical formula obviously represented a poet’s handme-down, a ready-made verbal frame which could be used in line after line, whether ‘the subject of the verse / (Unhappy matter of a mourning stile)’ were alive, or now made the theme of an epitaph: The course of time hath finished now his breath, Whom brunt of war could never force to death. Whose thirst of worth the world would not suffice, Within a bredth of earth contented lyes. (–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
If we now compare Christes Bloodie Sweat with the two other poems we find a comparable fondness for of: as we have seen, in , lines it occurs times, at the rate of . per , lines, a figure virtually identical to that for the Funerall Elegye (.), and very close to the rate in Perkin Warbeck, .. Once again we find the standard genitive forms, although more instances show the partitive genitive construction. There are perhaps fewer long or sustained sequences, a difference which can be put down to the much greater absorption of biblical language in this meditative poem. But even in the basic construction we find the same liking for abstract nouns: Heyre of promise (; and ) peace of conscience () mercie-seat of merrit () throane of peace () rocke of torment () plates of righteousnes () cloude of darke mortality () bread of teares () height of glory () bread of adversitie () weight of vengeance () bread of woe () Mirror of humility () bread of life () languages of pleasure () fastes of Miracle () sepulcher of shame () barre of judgement () baites of pleasure (; and ) worke of frailtie () sun of comfort () hope of joy () thirst of glory () law of grace () Robe of Justice () by-word of defame () forme of Law () words of mildnesse () strength of wit () rules of zeale () Marchandize of profit () weakness of beliefe () floods of strife () As in the other two poems, of can be placed at the beginning of a line; here, too, abstract nouns are common: far from any grace Of earthly majestie, of Crownes of state the awfull throne Of eminencie the heat Of cruelty the sword Of office and authority pay the fees Of lewdnes slav’d to that terror Of condemnation
( –) (–) (–) (–) (–) (–)
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’ the treasure Of never-fading joyes, of true salvation the Alter Of persecution the coulour Of lust ingendred novelties your seales Of pietie and truth the heat Of wilfull madnesse
(–) ( –) (–) (–) (–)
By adding the appropriate modifiers the formula can be expanded to fill a whole line: The idle habit of inforced sorrow The knowne defects of thy declined pride The happie tydings of eternall blisse Impostum’d ulcers of unsenced harmes (Sweete pledge of bountie, precious Scale of joyes)
() () () () ()
Ford is perhaps not quite so adept here, as in Fames Memoriall or A Funerall Elegye, in creating longer sequences sustaining the <noun + of + noun> construction over several lines. But nevertheless there are more than enough examples of his characteristic use of the same formula to heap up abstract nouns, as when the voice of God rebukes him for having ‘spent thy best of dayes’ writing ‘thriftlesse rimes’, Led with the wanton hopes of laude and praise, Vaine shadows of delight, seales of untruth ( –)
and instructs him instead to Set then the tenour of thy dolefull song, To the deepe accentes of my bloudy sweate
mixing ‘Sweete straines of Musicke . . . among / The discord of my paines’ (–). Other instances of the doubling and redoubling of this formula, proliferating abstract nouns, include: In seates of greatness and commaundes of state () So men, that in a maze of deathfull errour Did treade the pathes of miseries and woe
(–)
A damned cup, a cup of Gods fierce wrath, Of fornications, of consuming wine
(–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Whiles on the Alter of his Innocence, Ile lay the poore oblation of my heart
(–)
Men, bloodied in the feates of cruell hate, Of hatefull crueltie, and to fulfill The wrath and measure of a wofull state
(–)
Readers, now able to compare the three poems in this respect, will also see how this favourite construction encouraged Ford to a kind of easy repetition, a circling round and restatement of an idea, rather than giving it any energetic development. His mind seemed to gravitate naturally towards abstract nouns, which far exceed terms for things. Of the three, A Funerall Elegye has perhaps the highest index of abstraction (assuming that this could be computed), since William Peter’s life was uneventful, and Ford had to rely on the family’s report or on the stock career of school, university, marriage. The careers of Charles Mountjoy and Jesus Christ offered much more purchase on the real world, but even here abstractions abound. Further proof that the word of was peculiarly important to Ford is that the same verbal habits occur in his moral essays, in prose. According to my count, this preposition occurs times in The Golden Meane, of these instances being as a genitive (whether normal or partitive). The figures for A Line of Life are and , respectively. As can be seen from table ., the percentage of the preposition occurring in the genitive construction is . and . respectively, figures closely matching those for Christes Bloodie Sweat (. percent). By now it is scarcely necessary to illustrate Ford’s penchant for making one or both of the nouns he uses an abstraction, but this is certainly the dominant form in both treatises. In The Golden Meane Ford writes of men whose values are so superficial that ‘not the counsell of providence directs their steps to goe by the staffe of Discretion, but they are wholly rather carried by the violent streame of Opinion and Conceit . . . ’ (p. ). The wise man, by contrast, should need no help ‘for building a Castle of defence against the siege of adversities’ (p. ). In A Line of Life Ford lists the dangers which can deflect ‘a meere man’ from the path of virtue, ‘As the temptation of a reputed beautie, the invitement of presented honours, the bewitching of an inforced wealth, the Lethargie and disease of an infectious Court-grace . . . ’ (p. ). Kings who lead the good life excel, ‘printing the royalty of their goodnes, in an immortalitie of a vertuous and everlasting name, . . . the style of good men’ (p. ).
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Ford’s fondness for the formula ‘noun + of + noun’ is so great in these prose works that he frequently combines two instances of it into one overlapping phrase, such as ‘the payment of a due debt of thankfulnesse’ (GM, p. ), ‘the building of this excellent worke of a resolved and prepared minde’ (p. ), ‘the bettering of the estate of their reason’ (p. ). There are at least twenty instances of such a double formula in the two moral essays, and several instances of a triple formula: ‘eminent monuments of the proofes of Wisemen of former ages’ (GM, p. ; also LL, pp. , ). Indeed, Ford even extends one of formula through five stages, reflecting ‘how easie it is for any man of the choycest temper, of the soundest apprehension, of the gracefullest education, of the sincerest austeritie of life . . . to fall into many errors . . . ’ (p. ). Ford evidently used of as a key fulcrum for his thought, allowing him to give substantives, especially abstractions, a maximum presence, bringing them into a close contiguity with each other. The phenomenon we have noted in the Funerall Elegye, as in Ford’s poems and plays, that of frequently begins a line of verse, finds a curious parallel in his prose works, where many sentences begin with of. This is especially prominent in The Golden Meane (, ), where we often find a sentence beginning with a backward look at its predecessor, a resumptive habit very common in the Elegye: Of this a true Noble-man should not . . . feare ( p. ) Of these, and such imperfections of bodies . . . ( p. ) Of all other miseries . . . Of all other things ( p. ) Of all mischiefes . . . (p. ) Of all accidents . . . (p. )
My impression that the partitive genitive, or <noun + of + noun> formula, involving at least one and sometimes two abstractions, was a Fordian thumbprint was confirmed when I subsequently discovered that Robert Davril had also drawn attention to Ford’s love of abstractions. Davril’s comments are worth quoting at length: Ford’s drama, for its part, provides an example of the utilisation of the abstract word which no dramatist before him, including Shakespeare, had attempted on such a scale. The habit is so great, and so natural in Ford’s writing, that in most cases he even substitutes a noun for an adjective (which is always more concrete), and obtains expressions which are both striking and uncommon in English. Instead of a worthy wife he will say a wife of worth; instead of raw judgment he gives the rawnesse of judgment. All sorts of combinations are possible, and one could give many illustrations of this habit:
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
. . . a world of variety, oracle of truth, dulness of simplicity, excellence of qualities, thing of youth, stealth of privacy, formality of entertainement, place of trust, consequence of danger, wolf of hatred, sight of gladnesse, shadow of majesty, substance of pity, curiosity of admiration, constancy of patience, birth of bastardy, martyrdom of majesty, ecstasy of joys, etc. . . .
Removing these expressions from their context, Davril added, ‘conceals the role that they play, for they often determine the very shape of utterance: No tempests of commotion shall disquiet The calmes of my composures (The Broken Heart, ..–)
says Bassanes, in verses which want to express absolute self-control and calm’ (Davril , p. ). Discussing Ford’s preferred syntactical constructions a few pages later, Davril wrote that the most striking characteristic was the utilisation, to a truly extraordinary extent, of the preposition of to join two nouns. If we recall what has been said about the use of nouns, and about the substitution of nouns for adjectives, we will not be surprised to notice in almost every verse such structures as I have quoted to illustrate Ford’s liking for abstract ideas: The tablature of your remembrance, a madnesse of ambition, a strength of judgment, a ripeness of experience, their birth of utterance, etc . . . There are few authors in English literature (was there ever one?) who used of to such a prodigious extent, making it a kind of springboard for the second, abstract term, in order to project it more forcefully, detached from the first word. (p. )
In addition, Davril wrote, ‘the of can serve as a pivot within the parts of a clause or sentence, producing a harmonious symmetry’, as in To pour the balsam of a supplying patience Into the festering wound of ill-spent fury.
(The Broken Heart, ..–)
Davril’s acute analysis of this phenomenon in Ford’s mature drama is confirmed by the statistical data I have computed, showing its constancy within his work from the early poems and prose works, including the Funerall Elegye. One other stylistic quirk showing Ford’s great fondness for abstractions is that he frequently turned an epithet into a noun by adding the suffix –ness (in old-spelling texts as –nes and –ness(e)). (I omit from
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
this survey nouns not directly formed from an adjective, such as ‘witness’, ‘business’, and ‘likeness’.) This form of word-coinage occurs times in the lines of the Funerall Elegye, and frequently elsewhere in Ford’s poems and plays. To show the ‘affinities of diction’ between the Elegye and Ford’s two poems I shall first cite the actual nouns involved: Fames Memoriall: aptness, bitterness ( instances), blindness (), bluntness, darkness, dullness, fondness, greatness (), greediness, happiness (), kindness, lightness, looseness (), madness, meekness (), mildness (), niceness, nobleness (), sadness (), softness (), sweetness, unhappiness (), worthiness () Funerall Elegye: aptness, blessedness, blindness, goodness ( instances), greatness, happiness (), illness, kindness, madness, nobleness (), prone[ne]ss, rudeness, sadness, singleness (), sweetness, thankfulness, worthiness () Christes Bloodie Sweat: badness, baseness, blindness (), boldness, brightness, covetousness, equalness, fairness (), foolishness, fullness, goodness (), greatness (), grossness, happiness (), heaviness, lewdness (), madness (), meekness (), mildness (), pureness, righteousness (), sadness (), stillness, thankfulness, uncleanness, unthankfulness, weakness () The similarity of usage can also be established statistically, taking figures for the poems and for plays of Ford’s sole authorship (see table .). Predictably enough, the Funerall Elegye shows the highest frequency in using abstract nouns ending in –ness, once every . lines, but Fames Memoriall runs it close (.), while three of Ford’s plays rank with the Elegye: The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (.), The Lover’s Melancholy (.), and The Broken Heart (.). A fondness for abstract nouns ending in –ness is also visible in Ford’s moral essays. I count instances of it in The Golden Meane, occurrences in A Line of Life. The result, for Ford, must have been a satisfyingly abstract level of discourse, in which he could again deploy his favourite word of: ‘Hee then who now witnesseth by his moderation in those sadnesses, the courage of his Noblenesse, by the Noblenesse of his Wisdome is . . . perfectly wise . . . and . . . perfectly couragious’ (GM, p. ). We are introduced to the ‘Windes of heavinesse’ (p. ), ‘the wildernesse of opinion’ (p. ), ‘a fulnesse of miserie’ (p. ),
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Table .. Nouns ending in –ness in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems and sole-authored plays
A Funerall Elegye Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat The Laws of Candy The Lover’s Melancholy The Queen The Broken Heart Love’s Sacrifice ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Perkin Warbeck The Fancies, Chaste and Noble The Lady’s Trial Totals Average
No. of decasyllabic lines
No. of instances
, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Every x lines . . . . . . . . . . . . .
‘self-unworthinesse’ (pp. –) and ‘self-worthinesse’ (p. ), ‘the variablenesse of the Princes inclination’ (p. ), and many more. This is, of course, more than just a trick of style, for many of Ford’s most important ethical principles appear in this form, both negative – ‘the base filthinesse of an unsatisfied covetousnesse’ (p. ) – and positive: for the man who has lived a good life, death ‘is a path to blessednesse . . . a banquet of all goodnesse’ (p. ). A further feature of style which links the Funerall Elegye to the work of John Ford is the habit of beginning a verse line with a gerund. In chapter I pointed out that this occurs times in the poem’s lines, a frequency of . per thousand. Ford used the gerund to begin a verse line slightly less often in his two other poems. In Fames Memoriall I count instances in , lines (a frequency of . per thousand), while in Christes Bloodie Sweat I find it used times in , lines (a frequency of . per thousand). The figures may vary slightly, but the identity of the mind and hand behind those words should now be beyond dispute. In order to show Ford’s stylistic continuity between poems published in , , and , I print below selected lines showing this feature
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
from each poem, challenging readers to tell them apart. (Full lists will be found in Appendix II, pp. ff ). Comparing by thy death, what thou hast beene Undoing by his death the painefull webb Remembring what he was, with comfort then Remembring what his Godhead had decreed Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming Knowing Arts rule, how to chuse the meane Applying with industrious diligence Learning my dayes of youth so to prevent Thirsting to be immortall hence he went Searching the rules of Physicke, to disclose Inlarging still his theame and scope to say Wasting his best of time: but so content Contemplating the joyes of heavens content Ayming not to support, but scorne the good Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise Clearing the imputation with excuse Deluding types of honour as accurst Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt Astonishing the chaffe of pampered men Damning the simple and the poore in minde Fore-shewing what he was, and what should be Containing acts, such acts conceit do passe Confounding death that had his death procur’d
The fundamental identity of the stylistic resources used in the three poems can no longer be doubted. Ford also used gerunds to begin a verse line in his plays. Naturally, the onward movement of drama seldom allows a playwright the luxury of looking back to earlier utterances, let alone indulging in the kind of retrospective syntactical shuffle so frequently found in Ford’s poems. Nonetheless, gerunds occur sufficiently often at a line-opening for us to perceive another significant continuity in Ford’s style. I give a selection from more than a hundred instances: Waiving the private charge of your opinion (FCN, ..) Wanting a Brothers bosome to dis-burthen More griefs . . . (FCN, ..–) Hugging wise Natures lame deformity, Begetting creatures ugly as themselves (LS, ..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Children unborne, and widows . . . shall weepe whole nights, Repeating but the story of our fates (LS, ..–) He henceforth covets playne equality; Indevouring to rancke his fortunes low (LM, ..–) Wanting her presence, in whose equall love True harmony consisted (LM, ..–) Striving to cast two Wedding Rings in one, Through my bad workmanship I now have none (WE, ..) Let me blush, Acknowledging how poorely I have serv’d (BH, ..–) Such honour comes by accident, not nature; Proceeding from the vices of our passion (BH, ..–) Repining at these glories of creation (BH, ..) . . . thou grow’st upon my heart, like peace, Creating every other hour a Jubilee (PW, ..–) . . . a lasting History to time, Begetting admiration in the men, And in my owne Sex envie . . . (LC, ..–) How over-glorious art thou in thy wounds, Triumphing over infamy and hate! (TPW, ..–)
Another formulaic opening for the verse line which Ford favoured was the use of some neutral function-word, having a low semantic content, but offering the unstressed syllable needed to begin an iambic line. As I pointed out in chapter , the Funerall Elegye has an unusually high proportion of lines beginning with the words ‘as’, ‘which’, ‘that’, ‘such’, and ‘whereby’ (pp. –). In Appendix II (pp. –) I have listed all instances from the three poems, allowing readers to see for themselves how frequently Ford returned to well-tried, if uninventive devices. Further proof of the affinity between Ford’s linguistic preferences and those of ‘W. S.’ has been provided by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, whose methodology compares stylistic features in the work of two or more writers by subjecting a carefully defined corpus to computer-generated statistical analysis. Their approach relies on negative evidence, of the
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
dissimilarity between the sample text and the baseline text, and complements the various approaches that I use here. As we saw in chapter , they applied thirty-three Shakespeare-validated tests to the Elegye to check Shakespeare’s authorship, of which it failed sixteen. Recently they took Ford’s two long poems, Fames Memoriall and Christes Bloodie Sweat, which provided a ,-word baseline, to be set against a ,-word baseline of Shakespeare’s poems and late play verse. They ‘blocked’ all texts in both baselines, dividing them into blocks of roughly , words each, the size of A Funerall Elegye, and for each block size they determined Shakespeare ranges or ‘profiles’ for various distinguishing traits, fiftyone profiles for large, play-sized blocks, fourteen for smaller poem-sized blocks. Rather fewer tests could be validated for the Ford material, the baseline being much smaller, but of the twenty-nine tests applied, only one firmly rejected the Elegye as Ford’s. Elliott and Valenza then analysed the tested stylistic traits to see if they were ‘Poisson-distributed’, found that most of them were, and concluded that the odds on the Elegye having arisen by chance from one corpus or the other were at least , times better for Ford than they are for Shakespeare. Their discussion is often highly technical, describing the various statistical methods they have used, and assessing their reliability. A general idea of their results can be gained from the synthesis set out in table . (the abbreviation BoB refers to ‘Bundle of Badges’ or preferred words: see below, p. ). Table . . The Elliott–Valenza tests of the Elegye Funeral Elegye
Enclitics per , lines Proclitics per , lines Of per ,-word block Noun of Noun Noun and Noun Whiles Such as BoB In the
−
Shakespeare range
Ford range
– – – – – – – (−)–(− ) –
– – – – – – –+ (−)–() –
Source: Elliott and Valenza , p. , tables and combined
Readers wishing to follow the full argument must consult the article itself, but I would like to comment on a few of these tests. The first
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
two derive from Marina Tarlinskaja’s work on Shakespeare’s metrics, discussed in an earlier chapter (pp. ff ), which Elliott and Valenza have found to provide an excellent method for identifying and differentiating writing practices. As they remind us, ‘Enclitic and proclitic microphrases are two-word phrases in iambic pentameter verse where the first syllable, a “clinging monosyllable” stressed in normal speech, loses its stress for metrical reasons’. Figures for both types of micro-phrase are given per thousand lines, counted in ,-word blocks. Although subject to occasional variations between verse readers, who in some cases will stress words and phrases differently, the figures quoted for Ford’s verse – enclitics ranging from to instances per thousand lines, proclitics from to or more – decisively differentiate his style from Shakespeare’s (enclitics: –; proclitics: –), while at the same time showing Ford’s affinity with the style of ‘W. S.’ in the Elegye (enclitics: ; proclitics: ). No one familiar with these rigorous statistical procedures can dispute the likeness and difference documented here. The third test counts the number of times the word of occurs in the Elegye, a feature to which I have drawn attention, showing that its high frequency correlates very closely with Ford’s usage, and is distinctly different from Shakespeare’s. As Elliott and Valenza observe, ‘The average Ford block has occurrences of of, more than twice as many as the average Shakespeare block (seventy-six). There is no overlap at all between our Ford range and either of our Shakespeare ranges’– that is, for the poems or the plays. ‘Shakespeare’s highest of count was ; Ford’s lowest was . FE has an of count of , far outside Shakespeare’s range and narrowly within Ford’s’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Test examines the frequency of the <noun + of + noun> formula (‘days of youth’), where the figure for Shakespeare is far below that for the Elegye, while that for Ford correlates well. Test compares noun-pairs (‘scorn and shame’), where once again Shakespeare’s preference is far lower than Ford’s, whose usage squares well with the Elegye. Elliott and Valenza cite here Foster’s confident pronouncement that ‘one of the most distinctive features of Shakespeare’s verse is his habitual use of paired nouns coupled by and’ (, p. ), and comment: ‘Whatever the merits of this perspective on Shakespeare’s habits relative to other poets, it is the exact opposite of habits relative to Ford’s’ (p. ). Their Test compares the three baselines in terms of their use of while, whiles, and whilst, clearly differentiating Shakespeare – who ‘preferred while and whilst to whiles by more than : overall, : in his poems’ – from both Ford and ‘W. S.’,
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
who both preferred whiles to while and whilst, by ratios of to and to , respectively (p. ). As can be seen from table . above, my computation for the whole of Ford’s poems and plays found instances of whiles to of while, a ratio of . to : as Foster would put it, ‘this is right on the money’. Test counts the frequency of the phrase such as, where Ford’s range (–+) is twice as large as Shakespeare’s (–), but lower than the Elegye ( instances). Test , ‘BoB’, or ‘Bundle of Badges’, represents a ratio between both writers’ ‘badges’ or preferred words, in this case, which, who, and whom (Ford), this and that (Shakespeare) (p. , n. ), the ratios being then multiplied by for greater clarity. The results of this test also show Ford having far more affinities to the Elegye than Shakespeare did. The last test failed to show any close link between Ford and the Elegye, his use of the phrase in the being lower than that of the poem, and comparable to Shakespeare’s, ‘although it could be argued plausibly that both in and the, taken separately, are much more common in Ford’s baseline than in Shakespeare’s’ (p. ). One test that Elliott and Valenza had used in their earlier analyses concerned the abbreviation t’ (= to) preceding a verb, but they rejected it as ‘too narrow and too sparsely represented in the work of either Ford or Shakespeare to make a suitably firm rejection’ (p. ). They could find no instance of this abbreviation in Ford’s poems: but in Fames Memoriall Ford asks the deceased Mountjoy permission ‘ere I forbeare my pen, / Thy worth in what I may t’exemplifie’ ( –). The Elegye contains no less than four instances of this construction, ‘t’inlarge’ (), ‘t’enrolle’ (), ‘t’ennoble’ (), and ‘t’exceed’ (), a far greater frequency than they found for Shakespeare, who averages between one and two instances per , words (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –). A literary scholar can add to these statisticians’ conclusions some supporting evidence from Ford’s plays, for the use of t’ preceding pronouns, in the form t’ee (‘to ye/you ’), has long been recognized as one of his stylistic fingerprints, from Willi Bang in to Cyrus Hoy in , occurring times in the seven canonical plays, according to David Lake’s count (with a stunning instances in The Broken Heart). But Ford also frequently abbreviated the word to before verbs, as in ‘t’informe’ (LT ), ‘t’inrich’ (LM ), ‘t’advance’, ‘t’exchange’, and ‘t’ingage’ (LS ), ‘t’infect’, ‘t’indanger’, ‘t’apply’ (PW ), ‘t’immure’, ‘t’enjoy’ (BH ), ‘t’acquaint’, ‘t’have’ (FCN ), ‘t’acquaint’, ‘t’outlive’ (TPW ), and, in his scenes for the co-authored plays, ‘t’inherit’, ‘t’exhaust’ (SD ), ‘t’accept’ (FMI ). (I cite these instances from a search of Ford’s plays in an electronic
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
database, looking for the combination t plus apostrophe, but no doubt other instances occur in the early quartos where the printer has omitted the apostrophe.) In this respect, as in so many others, Ford’s linguistic habits are indistinguishable from those of ‘W. S.’ Elliott and Valenza’s statistical evidence, here briefly summarized, has been produced by rigorously controlled statistical analyses of linguistic data. I regard such computer-processed statistics as an essential tool in modern authorship studies. Having dedicated most of my energies to treating language as a complex product having many individual components – author, subject-matter, genre, rhetoric, word-formation, philosophical terminology – I am naturally pleased that my conclusions are supported by this independent, austere mathematical investigation, which estimates Ford’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye to be , times more likely than Shakespeare’s. The first of Montaigne’s Essays has the appropriate title, ‘By diverse means we arrive at the same end’. Turning from vocabulary and accidence to syntax, we can find other links between the Elegye and the Ford canon. One recurring syntactical construction common to all these works is a fondness for clauses or sentences beginning with if, the preposition being used to define a possible state of affairs which is sometimes confirmed by the matching term then, creating a causal sequence. In Fames Memoriall Ford used this construction in an extended sequence (–) designed to demonstrate Mountjoy’s supremacy in every way: If to be learned in the Arts of skill If to be bewtifi’de with choyce of nature, If to be guiltlesse from the soyle of ill (Save soyle of slaunder) if the perfect feature Consists in being heaven’s quaint architecture Then ever shall while dates of time remayne, The heavens thy soule, the earth thy fame contayne. (–)
The next stanza begins If to be fear’d and lov’d be humane glory, If to be dow’d with plenty of desert,
ending with the same couplet, repeated in all four stanzas, ‘Then ever shall . . . the earth thy fame contayne’ (ff ). The final stanza brings together another list of Mountjoy’s virtues:
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
If to be virtuous, zealous, valiant, wise, Learned, respective of his countries good, Upright, in case of conscience precise, Just, bounteous, pitifull, noble by blood, Be to deserve the name of lively-hood Then ever shall while dates of time remayne, The heavens thy soule, the earth thy fame contayne. (–)
(I note in passing that Ford occasionally fills out his stanza with a phrase or line of pure padding, such as , empty of meaning and anti-climactical; the eulogist of Peter suffers from the same weakness.) In A Funerall Elegye we find the If construction, combined with a modal verb (may, can) and the matching conjunction then – stated or implied – used in exactly the same way to describe the deceased’s virtues: For hee was truly good; if honest care, Of harmlesse conversation, may commend A life free from such staines, as follyes are (FE –)
Peter’s eulogist uses this If construction again in that bathetic couplet Now therein liv’d he happy, if to bee Free from detraction, happinesse it bee (–)
and more successfully, with the matching term . . . then, in that long sequence itemizing William Peter’s virtues: ‘If trim behaviour, gestures mild, . . . ’ – there follow fifteen other attributes – If these, or all of these, knit fast in one Can merit praise: then justly may wee say, Not any from this frailer stage is gon, Whose name is like to live a longer day. (–)
Peter, like Mountjoy, is placed top of the list of the virtuous dead. The highest place on that list, needless to say, is occupied by Jesus Christ, and we can instantly juxtapose a passage from Christes Bloodie Sweat where the If . . . then construction, also involving a modal verb (can, could, may), is used in a very similar way: If pleasures, honors, moneys, gifts, promotion, Physicke, restorative, repasted diet, Ease, cost, delights, cold heate, prophane devotion, Drinkes, purges, observation, courtly quiet,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Or one, or all, the soules spots could expell, [then] Great Kings had never ran so fast to hell. (CBS –)
To modern readers the semicolons in the Peter Elegye might create a slower verse movement, but the syntactical structure is identical, down even to the concluding gesture claiming an abundance of proofs: ‘Or one, or all’ of the offending King’s vices, ‘If these, or all of these’ for Peter’s virtues. The recapitulation ending that sequence – If these, or all of these, knit fast in one Can merit praise: then justly may wee say . . .
(FE, –)
can be matched with a similar pattern in A Line of Life. Celebrating James I, Ford argues: ‘But if he shall be reported in his Style to be, as in his own worthinesse hee may justly challenge; he must then be styled . . . James the Good’ (NDW, –). In Ford’s plays the same syntactical patterns recur. Robert Davril noted, many years ago, Ford’s habit of ‘giving a sentence equilibrium by a kind of syntactical balancing’, by using such disjunctive constructions as ‘though . . . yet’, and ‘if . . . then’ (Davril , pp. , –). Davril cited an apposite example from The Spanish Gypsy: If a poor Maid’s, a Gipsy Virgin’s teares May soften the hard edge of angry Justice, Then grant mee . . . (..–)
I offer a matching one from The Laws of Candy: If to bring home Long peace, long victorie, even to your Capitoll; If to secure your Kingdome, Wives, and Children, Your lives and liberties; if to renowne Your honours through the world . . . Be to deserve the approvement of my man-hood, Then thus much have I done . . . (LC, ..–)
Are these not from the same hand? The Funerall Elegye shares several prosodic features with Ford’s poems and plays, notably the use of a steady verse line. If we compare the
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Elegye with Fames Memoriall and Christes Bloodie Sweat we will find an underlying identity in the regular movement of the verse line, in which the iambic pentameter predominates, with relatively little enjambment. The actual figures for unstopped lines, and the percentages, are shown in table .. Table .. Run-on lines in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems
A Funerall Elegye Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat
No. of lines
No. unstopped
Percentage
, ,
. . .
The correlation between those figures speaks for itself. Many elements in Ford’s diction, syntax, and use of rhetoric remained constant across his writing career, from to . His prosody, however, changed as he learned to imitate living speech in blank verse. Several stylistic markers, especially the increased use of run-on lines and feminine endings, show that the verse-style in his plays differed greatly from the earlier poems. Nonetheless, several critics, including George Saintsbury, T. S. Eliot, M. Joan Sargeaunt, and Robert Davril, have described Ford’s verse in the mature plays as ‘the least flowing and varied’ of any of the Jacobean dramatists, its ‘slow solemn rhythm [being] Ford’s distinct contribution to the blank verse of the period’, seeming to have a ‘preponderance of end-stopped lines’ and a ‘regular cadence’ within ‘its rigid iambic mould’ which harks back to the generation of Kyd, the many trisyllabic endings giving the verse a stately flow. Ford never matched Shakespeare’s metrical flexibility and variety, but his dramatic verse certainly marked a great advance over his early poems, which show in a more basic form the fundamental regularity with which he used the iambic pentameter, a prosodic feature that they share with the Funerall Elegye for William Peter. We could apply to that poem the disappointment expressed by F. M. Burelbach at the ‘monotony of diction and syntax’ in Fames Memoriall, and its ‘too-rigid adherence to the end-stopped iambic line’ (, p. ). The Funerall Elegye also shares with Ford’s other two poems a comparable use of feminine endings, as table . shows. Once again, Fames Memoriall proves the most exuberant of the three texts, but their similarity is striking. A third feature related to prosody, insofar as it concerns rhyme, is the use of the pleonastic do. In chapter I showed that the Funerall
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Table .. Feminine endings in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems
A Funerall Elegye Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat
No. of lines
Total feminine endings
Percentage
, ,
. . .
Elegye contains a large number of pleonastic do forms, more than half of which were included for the sake of the rhyme. The same stylistic feature is found in Fames Memoriall, with an even higher proportion of these forms introduced for the rhyme. Indeed, Ford even used the pleonastic do in connection with both rhyming words, as ‘did approve’ /‘did ever move’ (–), ‘did not bend’ / ‘did attend’ (–), and ‘did . . . know it’, ‘doe foreslow it’ / ‘doth . . . shew it’ (, –). In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford continued to make use of the pleonastic do to create rhymes, again allowing them to form both rhyming words, as in ‘did . . . call thee’ / ‘did inthrall thee’ (, ). One oddity about did in this poem is that Ford sometimes uses it in the sense of ‘if s/he had done’, or ‘had s/he done’, as in the seven consecutive stanzas ( –) beginning with this construction, which is made even more awkward by the use of inversion: This did the Leacher sleeping in the sheetes Which reeke with lust, but thinke on, he would weepe ( –)
These constructions have been omitted from table ., in which I also recall the figures produced for the Elegye. Table .. Pleonastic do forms in the Elegye and in Ford’s poems
A Funerall Elegye Fames Memoriall Christes Bloodie Sweat
Total lines
Total do forms
Used as rhymes
Percentage
, ,
. . .
Surely all three poems are cut from the same cloth.
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
One last insight into the continuity of Ford’s style can be derived from studying his use of rhetoric. As we saw in chapter , Donald Foster gave an inaccurate account of the most frequently used rhetorical processes in the Funerall Elegye, and completely misjudged the importance of hendiadys in that poem. Where he claimed to find seventeen instances of hendiadys (a total subsequently scaled down to ten), all but two or three of these turned out to be noun-doublets, substantives linked together paratactically but without any semantic interplay. True hendiadys, as my earlier discussion showed (pp. ff ), involves the linking together of two concepts which modify each other, combining to form a complex idea in which both constituents play a role of varying importance. Given the difficulties that ‘W. S.’ had in creating a true hendiadys, it is interesting to see how Ford used the figure. Although resolutely dismissing any possibility that Ford could have written the Elegye, Foster did identify one of the few instances of Jacobean poets using hendiadys in Ford’s tribute to Overbury, attacking those ‘whose hands imbrew’d in blood, / Cropt of thy youth, and flower in the bud’ (NDW, p. ). ‘ “Youth and flower”’, Foster wrote, ‘is here a Vergilian hendiadys for “flowering youth” or “youthful flourish”’ (, p. ). The most revealing account of Ford’s use of hendiadys has been provided by Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza. Although their own quantitative methods are ‘designed to highlight differences between authors’, they draw here on the opposed – or, in my view, complementary – approach, ‘looking for rare-quirk resemblances between authors’ (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –), in order to contest Foster’s claims that the Funerall Elegye, in its use either of hendiadys or of the ‘incongruent who’, bears Shakespeare’s ‘stylistic thumbprints’ (, p. ), containing ‘rhetorical flourishes . . . [which are] something like Shakespeare’s private property’ (a, p. ). Elliott and Valenza have located a number of oddly matched doublets in Ford’s two long poems, suggesting that they have as much right to be classified as at least ‘verging on hendiadys’ as those claimed by Foster for ‘W. S.’ (p. ). To anyone who has read my account of pseudo-hendiadys in the Elegye, that fuzzy use of noun-doublets lacking the internal energy which Shakespeare imparted to this figure, the ‘affinities of diction’ between ‘W. S.’ and Ford will immediately be apparent. Here are some of the thirteen instances that Elliott and Valenza cite from Fames Memoriall: Makes reputation and beleefe her warrant Inlarging still his theme and scope to say
() ()
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Grammars Elixer, juice, and quintessence Barriers and sports of honorable grace But plots of fame and fames eternity Records of fame and characters of brasse Companion to his chamber and his bed Great Peer of worth and state The staffe and stay of your ambitious boast With all the boast and pith of honor crown’d In blessed place and soule-united rest
() () () () () () () () ()
Secondly, from the sixteen instances they find in Christes Bloodie Sweat: The written booke of debt and Hell alone
()
Poore and forsaken [every] day in daunger Of wrath and Treason
(–)
But he must feele, the curse and scourging rod
()
Heere saw he others that did keepe the sword Of office and authority, in peace
(–)
but he abates / His policy and strength Was danger of a second death and hell Our hearts and secrets then will both be knowne
(–) () ()
The pearle and the treasures which the Lord Did witnesse
(–)
But such whose lawfull thoughts, and honest heat Doth temperately move with chaste desires
(–)
bereaven / Of youth and joyes Must pompe and state renounce her wonted dutie? The wrath and measure of a woful state Of countenancing impudence and lyes The Cloude and fierie Piller that gave light
(–) () () () ()
Reading through those examples has the same tantalizing effect as in Foster’s citations from the Funerall Elegye: at times Ford approaches the fusion of ideas that truly defines hendiadys, at other times the two nouns go their separate ways. To be a ‘Companion to his chamber and his bed’ is to be intimate in two spheres of life, which fail to fuse into one complex concept. To be ‘in daunger/Of wrath and Treason’ is to be vulnerable to two separate dangers, one external perhaps, the other internal to Christ’s group of disciples – but they do not coalesce. ‘Great Peer of worth and state’ similarly lists two separate attributes, innate value and public recognition. Other instances of two separate ideas linked by and
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
include ‘countenancing impudence and lyes’, ‘abates his policy and strength’. Others are simple pleonastic synonyms: ‘theme and scope’, ‘staffe and stay’. Yet, as one reads the lists again, one begins to see certain similarities with the Funerall Elegye. With ‘Grammars Elixer, juice, and quintessence’ (FM, ) we have three words repeating the same idea, of a concentrated essence. This instantly recalls a comparable tautology in the Elegye, ‘The home of his condition and estate’ (), which repeats the same idea three times over. Compare, further, the doublet ‘bereaven /Of youth and joyes’ (CBS, –) with ‘both his Youth and Vertue’ (FE, ), two expressions far removed from the concentration of Shakespeare’s ‘That youth and observation copied there’. Compare ‘the curse and scourging rod’ (CBS, ) and ‘the sower-bitter scourge, /Of torture and affliction’ (FE, –), where Ford, like ‘W. S.’, has opted for an emotional intensification through the long vowel sounds (perhaps made even more expressive with a Devonshire accent). In both cases the accumulated nouns reiterate the sense of violent punishment, but do not achieve the effect that true hendiadys has on the reading process, by which our comprehension of the second term forces us retrospectively to redefine our understanding of the first. In Ford the two terms create separate spheres, which do not interpenetrate. In the Elegye William Peter is placed far above those who ‘purchase commendation by disgrace, / Whereto the world and heate of sinne intices’ (–). Here ‘world’ is such a huge concept that it might notionally include within it the ‘heate of sinne’, but nothing in the formulation compels us to make that link. Similarly with another form of ‘heat’ in Christes Bloodie Sweat, praising ‘such whose lawfull thoughts, and honest heat / Doth temperately move with chaste desires’ (–) – where the same idea is repeated four times over – we can relate ‘thoughts’ to the mind and ‘heat’ to the body, but they fail to cohere into one unified expression, even though Ford seems to want them to do so, having used a singular verb (‘Doth . . . move’). In general, we might say, the characteristic of Ford’s use of these paired substantives is that he accumulates or redoubles nouns in the formula ‘noun + and + noun’, rather like his favourite genitive formula ‘noun + of + noun’. With Shakespeare, by contrast, the nouns (or adjectives) modify each other with an imaginative spark that resembles metaphor. Only, whereas metaphor condenses two associations into one – ‘Now does he feel / His secret murthers sticking on his hands’ (Mac., ..–) – hendiadys leaves them separate, yet still interacting: ‘What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time? (Temp., ..–). Certainly Ford verges on hendiadys, but by a kind of blurring
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
of terms, as two abstractions seem to suggest a common denominator which we find hard to pin down. Thus ‘Makes reputation and beleefe her warrant’ (FM, ), has the reader wondering whether those two abstracts might link up at some higher level, a very similar effect to this doubling of abstractions in the Elegye: ‘Without true proofe and knowledge of a friend’ (). Sometimes Ford achieves what looks like a hendiadys by simply collapsing a temporal stage, as in this account of the ‘Four Last Things’: ‘Was danger of a second death and hell’ (CBS, ), where one must first die before going to hell, and again in ‘The written booke of debt and Hell alone’ (CBS, ), where for ‘and’ we might substitute ‘leading to’ or ‘followed by’. This compression of a time-scale might rather be a form of ellipsis. A similar effect is achieved at the opening of the Funerall Elegye: Since Time, and his predestinated end, Abridg’d the circuit of his hope-full dayes ( –)
where physical time and providential design coincide. In the line ‘Must pompe and state renounce her wonted dutie?’ (CBS, ), the use of a singular verb certainly strives towards hendiadys, only ‘pomp’ and ‘state’ are tautologous, rather than two semantically distinct terms which modify each other to create a new and more complex idea. Discussions of hendiadys in Ford tend to be inconclusive, since he seldom achieves the clarity and compression which Shakespeare brings to it. For him, as for ‘W. S.’, it remains a noun-doublet, with a reinforcing power, if vaguely expressed. But it is precisely this vagueness that forms another point of comparison between the Funerall Elegye, Fames Memoriall, and Christes Bloodie Sweat. Turning now to an area in which analysis can be more definite, the well-known figures of rhetoric, we can draw some broad parallels between the Elegye and Ford’s writing. My earlier analysis showed that the rhetorical figures used in that poem failed to achieve the proper functionality urged by Renaissance rhetoricians. The same judgment can be made of Ford’s use of rhetoric. Take, for instance, the figure articulus (or brachylogia), ‘the cutted comma’, as Puttenham called it, the omission of conjunctions between words. (It is to be distinguished from asyndeton, the omission of conjunctions between clauses.) An example cited by Sister Miriam Joseph from Romeo and Juliet illustrates the dense focus on individual words that this device can produce: . Beguil’d, divorced, wronged, spited, slain! . Despis’d, distressed, hated, martyr’d, kill’d! (.., )
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Omitting the conjunctions between single words, Renaissance rhetoricians taught, could ‘impart celerity and vehemence through brevity’. Ford uses the figure several times in Fames Memoriall, but with little of that energy: Duty, alliance, friendship, blood, and love () If to be virtuous, zealous, valiant, wise . . . Just, bounteous, pitifull, noble by blood . . . (–)
In A Funerall Elegye ‘W. S.’ uses articulus in the parallel passage itemizing William Peter’s virtue (–), quoted above, and for other sequences in which energy is notably lacking, and the utterance declines to a mere list: He was a kind, true, perfect, gentleman () Where he injoy’d his birth, life, death, and seat () . . . our grace, and strength, Youth, memory and shape, that made us fresh (–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford uses the figure frequently, but for equally unenergized lists, such as this itemization of the sacrifices that a Christian must be prepared to make: For he who follows Christ must not respect Promotion, money, glory, ease, delight: But poverty, reproofe, and self-neglect, Disgrace, teares, hunger, cold, thirst, scorne, despight . . . (–)
Ford uses articulus for other long list sequences, itemizing the evils of the world (–), or the ills that flesh is heir to ( –), and for shorter, oneline utterances. Many Renaissance writers used articulus, of course, but Ford – like ‘W. S.’ – preferred to accumulate nouns, often abstract nouns, particularly those describing facets of character or accomplishments. He did this often in the plays, also: [She] has to enrich her Blood and Beauty Plenty of Wit, Discourse, Behaviour, Carriage (SG, ..–) Disgrace, reproof, lawless affections, threats (WE, ..) Times miracle, Fames pride, in Knowledge, Wit, Sweetnesse, Discourse, Armes, Arts . . . (LM, ..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Thy Government, Behaviour, Learning, Speech, Sweetnesse . . . (TPW, .. –) So noble in his quality, condition, Learning, behaviour, entertainment, love (TPW, .. –) A begging chastity, youth, beauty, handsomenesse, Discourse, behaviour (FCN, ..–)
Given Ford’s habit of accumulating human qualities, we can see an obvious affinity between several of these instances and the Elegye’s account of William Peter’s ‘grace, and strength, / Youth, memory . . . ’. A comparable similarity or continuity between ‘W. S.’ and Ford can be seen in their fondness for the figures of repetition. In Fames Memoriall Ford made much use of plok´e, which repeats a word within a clause, sentence, or verse line, producing emphasis but failing to realize the figure’s energetic potential: Thy selfe shalt priviledge thy selfe by merit () Honour for him did honours pawne ingage () Now all but joy, now from all joy enstrang’d () Day weareth day, howre consumeth howr Years years, and age doth age devour (–)
As we saw in chapter , ‘W. S.’ used plok´e for emphasis with exactly the same heavy effect, lacking the unexpectedness which Shakespeare often displayed, and giving rise to such tautologous utterances as For private persons, in their private home () Amongst the All of all that lived there () Time would to time his honesty commend () Such, and of such condition may devise () In equall worth, Time shall to time renew’t ()
Both poets use plok´e to repeat a word from one line to the next, a carry-over effect which gives a writer time to expand his point, but also – fatally – allows him to repeat himself. In Fames Memoriall Ford frequently used this figure to link a stanza with the one following, and also deployed it within successive verse lines: For being now appendant to the court, His presence was the court to draw it to him (–)
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
He aymd at high designes, and so attaynd The high assigns to which his spirit aymd (–)
In his Funerall Elegye ‘W. S.’ used plok´e in just the same wooden manner, to carry a thought over from one line to the next, without adding much to it: May patterne out, One truly good by him For hee was truly good
(–)
Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming In knowing, but for that it was the best
(–)
In nothing surely prosperous, but hope. And that same hope, so lame, so unprevailing
(–)
Should both be like obscured in their end ? Untill which end, there is none rightly can
(–)
But the weake comfort of the haplesse Hope. And Hope must in despight of fearfull change
(–)
In these examples the rhetorical figure serves exactly the same function of reverting to a previous utterance that ‘W. S.’ – and Ford – otherwise achieved by the use of relative pronouns and gerunds. One pace on, one pace back. Ford uses a wider range of rhetorical figures in Christes Bloodie Sweat, but those involving repetition are most prominent. Plok´e is used within a line and in successive lines: Then all his sweate his sorrowes did decree him, This bloodie sweat should from his sorrowes free him. ( –) Asking for grace, shee is with grace redrest ()
Just like ‘W. S.’ in the Elegye, in Fames Memoriall Ford deployed another simple figure of repetition, anadiplosis, in which the last word of one clause becomes the first of the one following. Sometimes the figure makes a link within the verse line: As past the childish feare, feare of a stripe () Noble in all, and all in every part () By proofe as cleere as day, as day as bright () That he was sound in both, in both untoucht ()
When used functionally, this figure can extend the thought from one stage to the next, but Ford, like ‘W. S.’, too often repeats the same idea on either side of the figure, producing verbal padding or tautology
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
(in the last two examples quoted, ‘cleere’ is the same as ‘bright’, ‘sound’ is the same as ‘untoucht’). When Ford places anadiplosis at the line ending, it again acts as an unenergized link, marking time while the next clause is being marshalled into existence: Yet Mountjoy was far greater than his name. His name which stretcht beyond the boundlesse limits (FM, –) True virtues grac’d his mind, applause his name: Applause his name, which . . . (–) For ever dye, for death will all destroye. For death will all destroy as he hath donn (–) Devonshire I write of thee a theam of wonder. Wonder unto posterity succeeding (–)
‘W. S.’ uses anadiplosis in exactly the same dysfunctional manner, not to push the thought on to a new stage but rather to gain time, while he thinks of something else to say: And not opprest by wraths unhappy sinne. By wrathes unhappy sinne, which unadvis’d (FE, –) But since the summe of all that can be said Can bee but said that Hee was good ( –)
Anadiplosis figures prominently in Christes Bloodie Sweat, and with very similar effects of repetition, lacking energy or inventiveness: Death underpropp’s that life which Frailty lost, All Frailty living in the death of one, Of one, all one with all . . . (–)
Readers can compare that carry-over with the very similar echo of ‘wraths unhappy sinne’ in the Funerall Elegye, just quoted. Ford frequently used this figure to link stanzas, permitting that backward look of which he and ‘W. S.’ were so fond: Pour’d out the wonder of a bloudy sweate. Which bloudy sweate . . . (–) yet he knew no sin. He knew no sinne . . . (–)
Ford also managed to link stanzas by repeating a whole line and then adding an anadiplosis on top:
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
Strove from the day of vengeance to reclaime. Strove, from the day of vengeance to reclaime, A day of vengeance, when they shall behold . . . (–)
This is already too much repetition, many readers would think, but shortly afterwards Ford produced a second stanza which continues the anadiplosis through five consecutive lines (–), an instance of the figure gradatio or climax. Such repetitions may be justified on doctrinal grounds, given the meditative technique, but as poetry they are a dead weight. Both Ford and the anonymous elegist used the figure antimetabole, which repeats two or more words in inverted order. From the Funerall Elegye: His yonger yeares, gave comfortable hope To hope for comfort, in his riper youth ( –) His bosome and his store which did declare, That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock: A Rock of Frendship figured in his name (–)
From Fames Memoriall: Torment of mischiefe how thou grat’st my breast, Mischiefe of torment how thou rackst my soule (–) He sleepes secured and in blessed slumber’s Of peacefull rest he carelesse rests in peace ( –)
It would be difficult to tell those passages apart, competent but undistinguished as either rhetoric or poetry. Neither passage achieves the qualities of pithy and witty utterance ascribed to this figure (above, pp. –). A similar competence, without any imaginative spark, is seen in the use of antimetabole in Christes Bloodie Sweat, as in this account of Christ’s agony: Meeke in his suffraunce, did both weepe and smile: His God-head smil’d to see his man-hood weepe (–)
or of the redemptive effect of His sacrifice: Undoing by his death the painefull webb, The webb of endless paynes that Satan lay’d ( –)
The rhetorical performances of both poets would have deserved Puttenham’s rebuke, that ‘a figure is ever used to a purpose, either of beauty or efficacy’.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Both Ford and ‘W. S.’ handle in the same dogged way another figure of repetition, polyptoton, which repeats the stem of a word while varying its termination. In Fames Memoriall Ford frequently uses polyptoton in order to create emphasis: (Dear creature) thy too dearly bought distresse The better best in judging better showes Remember thou thy loss, remembring weape Distrust was turnd to trust, for in greate state Extreames even by extremityes subdu’de In mynde resolv’d, in resolution stedie With zealous reverence in zeale enshrind
() () () () () () ()
In his Funerall Elegye the anonymous poet makes a comparable use of polyptoton, as in ‘comfortable . . . comfort’ ( –, just quoted), and in other instances: By some in nothing famous but defame
()
Of true perfection, in a perfect brest
()
“And those are much more noble in the mind, “Then many that have noblenesse by kind
( –)
Untill which end, there is none rightly can Bee termed happy, since the happinesse Depends upon the goodnesse of the man
(–)
The evidence from rhetorical figures could never be sufficient on its own to prove Ford’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye, since one would have to show that Ford and ‘W. S.’ were special among Jacobean poets in their dysfunctional use of these resources. It is unlikely that anyone could ever make that claim, but I would argue that both writers, in their laboured application of the figures of repetition, quite lacking in Shakespeare’s wit and invention, produce remarkably similar forms of tautology. At all events, it does establish, by yet another route, the multiple ‘affinities of diction’ between the Elegye and Ford’s poems. Looking back over this long chapter, we can see that the unique links which Donald Foster claimed to have established between the Funerall Elegye and Shakespeare’s style has been shattered over and over. My reconstruction of Ford’s linguistic practices – far harder to pin down than Shakespeare’s, for which many efficient study aids exist (concordance, thesaurus, grammar) – has shown that they correlate with those of ‘W. S.’ to a remarkable degree. Every linguistic feature that Foster
Ford and the ‘Elegye’’s ‘Shakespearean diction’
identified as forming a special or unique link between Shakespeare and ‘W. S.’, I have shown, occurs in Ford’s writings, and in some cases to a greater extent than in Shakespeare’s. Ford was exceptionally fond of the negative prefix un–, and no less fond of the suffixes –ful and –less. He used compound words, especially those involving participial verb forms, even more often than Shakespeare did. He used very as a restrictive adjective throughout his long writing career, from to , and never lost his preference for the older forms hath and doth, or the supposedly archaic wert. He frequently used can elliptically, and was just as prone as Shakespeare to heap up redundant comparatives, such as ‘most dearest’, and ‘much more crueller’. Foster claimed that, out of a list of words in the Elegye, comprising its ‘distinctive vocabulary’, were shared with Shakespeare, who used them on occasions, a correlation far higher than with any other contemporary writer. But this result relied on concordances of writers belonging to an earlier generation than ‘W. S.’ My own correlation of the same words with Ford’s writings revealed that he used of them on a total of occasions, a far higher proportion, considering that Ford’s output was only about a quarter of Shakespeare’s. Leaving Foster’s claims behind, and developing my own approach, I showed that the polysyllabic Latinisms which occur far more frequently in the Funerall Elegye than anywhere in Shakespeare formed a high proportion of Ford’s vocabulary, especially in his early poems and prose works. In particular, the formation of a past participial verb from a noun, according to Foster a specifically Shakespearian practice, occurs frequently in Ford, in such words as ‘monumented’, ‘nobilitated’, ‘unparadised’, and others. Moving on to what is sometimes called ‘the sub-stylistic level of language’, those linguistic forms which lie below the process of a writer’s conscious thought, I analysed Ford’s use of the function-word of. In chapter I drew attention to its remarkable frequency in the Funerall Elegye, especially in the formula ‘noun + of + noun’, involving the normal and the partitive genitive, both constructions often being draped across the line-ending, so that the new verse line begins with Of. My extensive analysis of Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays in this chapter has established that they give exactly the same prominence to this preposition, the statistical correlation being far too great to be coincidental. Ford’s liking for abstractions also revealed itself in his turning epithets into nouns by adding the suffix –ness: here again the frequency of use in the Funerall Elegye correlates extremely well with that in Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays. I also pointed out that Ford’s poems, like
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
the Funerall Elegye, frequently begin a verse line with a gerund, or else with words of low semantic content, such as as, which, that, and such. Turning to larger verbal patterns, I showed that the syntactical construction frequently found in the Elegye, consisting of ‘if . . . [modal verb] . . . then’, regularly occurs in Ford’s poems, prose works and plays. The prosody of the Elegye matches that of Ford’s poems in two respects, the proportion of run-on lines and feminine endings, to a remarkable degree. In the Elegye, and in Ford’s poems, pleonastic do forms are deployed with strikingly similar frequencies in order to provide a rhyme. As for the rhetoric used in Ford’s poems, it is just as tautologous and dysfunctional as in the Elegye, with hendiadys being used in exactly the same fuzzy manner, never achieving Shakespeare’s temporary fusion of two independent terms. In this chapter I have used some twenty-five separate linguistic tests, every one of which points in the same direction, towards Ford having written the Elegye for William Peter. I believe that these analyses, covering so many different aspects of a writer’s usage, already establish that fact beyond question. If any doubts remain, the final chapter will dispel them.
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
The last stage in my argument that Ford, not Shakespeare, wrote the Funerall Elegye, will consist of citing, in one continuous sequence, more than eighty passages in that poem for which I have found parallels in Ford’s poems, prose works, and plays. (Each passage is given a number, preceded by an asterisk: (*.) In compiling it I have kept in mind the standard objection that ‘parallel passages’ may prove nothing except accidental similarity, imitation, or the use of a common stock of language available to poets in any era, and I have adopted various strategies to avoid falling into these traps. I have deliberately not based my arguments on the occurrence of single words both in the Elegye and in Ford’s work, except where it could be shown that such words never occur in Shakespeare, and that they involve rare words, or words used in an idiosyncratic way. Where I claim direct parallels between the Elegye and Ford’s writings, it is always for larger units of discourse, collocations or phrases several words long, verbal sequences that also carry with them recurring trains of thought. As the preceding discussion will have shown, I have been investigating these thought-parallels in a way rarely, if ever, pursued in the statistic-based stylistics currently used in authorship studies, by attempting to re-create Ford’s mental world or value-system, the synthesis that he, like many Renaissance thinkers, made between Christian and Stoic ethics. Very strong in his prose works and poems, traces of this synthesis can still be found in his plays. With this list I hope to complete my argument that the Funerall Elegye ‘is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical’ Ford. Throughout this sequence all italics are mine, added to point up specific verbal resemblances. I begin with the Elegye’s Dedication. As I noted in chapter , its consecration to the memory of William Peter – ‘what-soever is heere done, is done to him, and to him onely’ – imitates the dedication to Sidney’s Arcadia, a tribute
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
that Ford had twice made in poems published in . Ford dedicated to two ladies of the court his Honor Triumphant, a defence of chivalric love ‘which explanes, but what is done for you, what is done by yours . . . being to you devoted: and only to you devoted’ (NDW, p. ). That same year Ford dedicated Fames Memoriall to Mountjoy’s widow: ‘To you, (excellent Lady) it was intended, to you it is addressed’ (NDW, p. ). His dedication to the latter poem includes a passage echoed in the Funerall Elegye (as Richard Abrams kindly observed), Ford including himself among ‘Those, whom neither Mercenary hopes or servile flattery, have induced to speake but with the Priviledge of troth’ (NDW, p. ). Just so ‘W. S.’ affirms that, in performing ‘this last duty of a friend’ to William Peter, (*)
I am herein but a second to the priviledge of Truth who can warrant more in his behalfe, than I undertooke to deliver.
The language of the Elegye’s dedication, with its denial of ulterior motives, mercenary or sycophantic, echoes Ford’s dedications in other respects. In Perkin Warbeck he stated that in describing the ‘credit’ and ‘known ability’ of the dedicatee he could not be accused of ‘flattery, the authority being established by truth’ – the same two terms opposed in the dedication to Fames Memoriall, one of them recurring in the Elegye. That awkward sentence in the Elegye’s dedication, ‘Exercise in this kind I will little affect’, can be paralleled in several of Ford’s dedications. In Honor Triumphant Ford declares ‘I affect no singularity’ (NDW, p. ); in that to Fames Memoriall he affirms that he has fully exercised ‘my weake talent . . . (unusuall to this stile)’ (NDW, p. ); and in that to Love’s Sacrifice () he refers to ‘the contempt throwne on studies of this kinde’ (Sig. v ). In the dedication to Lover’s Melancholy he describes his ‘presumption of coming in print in this kind’ as a ‘compliment’ which ‘may soon grow out of fashion. A practice of which [in order] that I may avoid now’, he commends it to the dedicatees, while that to The Fancies, Chaste and Noble () contains the equally affected inversion: ‘Endeavour of being knowne to your Lordship, by such meanes, I conceive no Ambition’. The opening of the Funerall Elegye, as Abrams also noticed, closely resembles that of Ford’s Fames Memoriall: (*)
Since Time, and his predestinated end, Abridg’d the circuit of his hope-full dayes; Whiles both his Youth and Vertue did intend, The good indevor’s, of deserving praise: What memorable monument can last, Whereon to build his never-blemisht name?
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
But his owne worth, wherein his life was grac’t? Sith as [that] ever hee maintain’d the same. (FE, –)
Swift Time the speedy pursevant of heaven, Sommons to glorious virtues canoniz’d, The lasting volume where worth roves univen In brazen characters immortaliz’d; Where merit lives imbrac’t, base scorne despis’d: Linckt to untainted Truth sprong from the same, Begets his eagle-towring daughter Fame.
(FM, –)
Each poem begins with a reference to Time as an agent, which cut off all too soon both Peter’s ‘Vertue’ and all it ‘did intend’, and summoned Mountjoy ‘to glorious virtues canoniz’d’. In the Elegye the best ‘monument’ for William Peter is a life ‘grac’t [by] his owne worth’; in Fames Memoriall Mountjoy’s name will be included in ‘The lasting volume where worth [is] immortaliz’d. . . ’ Ford rhymes ‘same’ and ‘Fame’, Peter’s eulogist ‘name’ and ‘same’, while Peter’s ‘never-blemisht name’ is echoed by the later description of Mountjoy’s ‘faire unblemisht soule’ (). Mountjoy is linked with ‘untainted Truth’; a few lines later in Peter’s elegy we are told that ‘Truth doth leave / Sufficient proofe’ of his generosity (FE, –). The identity between the beginnings of these two memorial poems can be extended to the verses ‘In honorable memory of the Right noble the Earle of Devonshire’, which Ford contributed to Funerall Teares (): No sooner had the Fates pale Minister At th’high command of sterne Necessitie Seazd the terrestrial part of Devonshire And rendred his free Soule t’Eternitie: But loe th’imperfect broode of fruitfull Fame . . . (NDW, p. )
Once Ford had discovered a satisfactory formulation, he tended to use it again as occasion offered. These three beginnings each specify two agents, linking ‘Time’ and ‘predestinated’, ‘Time’ and ‘heaven’, ‘Fate’ and ‘Necessitie’. To link both Christian and Stoic agents was entirely typical of Ford’s fusing of traditions. In this opening sequence ‘W. S.’, using a rhetorical question, foregrounds the issue of William Peter’s virtue, and the memory that he deserves to enjoy: (*) What memorable monument can last, Whereon to build his never-blemisht name?
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ But his owne worth, wherein his life was grac’t Sith as [that] ever hee maintain’d the same? (–)
This connection frequently recurs in Ford’s plays. As Douglas Sedge has observed, ‘reputation after death is a prime consideration with Ford’s protagonists’. When the Prince praises Cleophila in The Lover’s Melancholy the words ‘memorable’ and ‘monument’ occur jointly, together with references to ‘piety’ and ‘desert’: The custom of thy piety hath built Even to thy younger years a Monument Of memorable Fame; some great reward Must wait on thy desert (LM, .. –)
They recur, in slightly varied form, in The Witch of Edmonton. Parting from Frank, who is to be executed for his crimes, Winifred vows her dedication after death: But since I must survive, and be the monument Of thy lov’d memory I will preserve it With a Religious care, and pay the ashes A Widows duty, calling that end best, Which though it stain the name, makes the soul blest. (WE, ..–)
Several more parallels can be cited from Ford’s plays of sole authorship, as from scenes he contributed to co-authored plays, connecting the ideas of ‘monument’, ‘memory’, ‘virtue’, and good ‘name’: In vaine they build their hopes, whose life is shame, No monument lasts but a happy Name (BH, ..–) A woman’s vertue in her life time, writes The Epitaph all covet on their tombes (LT, ..–) (The path that must conduct you to the monument Of a lost name) (WA, ..–)
The sequence in the Funerall Elegye describing William Peter’s education emphasizes his growth in virtue, using concepts and words which frequently recur in Ford’s moral essays. Those who remember what William Peter had been, ‘W. S.’ assures us, (*)
May patterne out, One truly good by him. For hee was truly good (–)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In the dedication of Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford hails the dedicatee (William, Earl of Pembroke) as an exception to the sad fact that ‘vertues [and] Noblenesse . . . in this age, doe so seldom meete in one, as most usually to bee Great, and to bee Good, is required a double person’ (NDW, p. ). In the preface to A Line of Life Ford expresses confidence that his work will achieve ‘successful acceptation’, since ‘the Patron [is] a great man good (for to be truly good is to be great)’ (NDW, p. ). In the marriage poem, ‘A Contract of Love and Trueth’, which Bertram Lloyd convincingly attributed to Ford, we are told that such accomplishments as ‘ a smooth tongue’ and ‘soft behaviour’ are but meere Deceipts of Art; Except supported by a Noble Heart. Additions then make all estate and blood Noble; when to be great is to be Good.
(NDW, p. )
In one of the scenes that Ford contributed to Dekker’s The Welsh Ambassador Carintha describes her project, to find by what art wee can To turne a great kinge, to a greate good man. (..–)
‘W. S.’ describes William Peter, in a characteristically hyperbolic phrase, as (*)
one superlative above the rest, Of many men in steddy faith (–)
In The Golden Meane Ford refers to ‘any miserie superlative’ (NDW, p. ), and uses the hyperbole three times in his plays: Her beauty is superlative, she knowes it (LC, ..) She is superlative (Q , ..) Your Beauty, So farre above all beauties else abroad, As you are in your owne, superlative (LS, ..–)
The word ‘superlative’ never occurs in Shakespeare. (*)
one superlative above the rest, Of many men in steddy faith (–)
As we saw in a previous chapter, the word steady in Ford means ‘constant’, and carries with it specific Neo-Stoic connotations attached to constantia.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
It is a word that echoes throughout the Elegye. William Peter exemplifies the truth that ‘He is steddy / Who seemes lesse then hee is, in open shew’ (–). He is also credited with ‘Clean-temper’d Moderation; steddy Trust’ ( – another tautology), a ‘constant faith, / Never untrue’ (–), having displayed the ability to ‘purchase from all hearts a steddy love’ (), which proved – to say it yet again – ‘that hee was so constant to his friends’ (). A related virtue arouses admiration, ‘being firme’ (): as a husband Peter showed ‘firme affection’ (), while Mountjoy displayed ‘firm-settled thoughts’, ‘firme Temperance’, and ‘firm allegiance’ (FM, , , ). In praising Peter’s steadiness, Ford was celebrating a key element in Neo-Stoic virtue, ascribing to him that self-control which is the proof of reason’s dominance. Quite appropriately, he had praised Mountjoy for practising the same Stoic virtues: Still be thine eares to sufferance turn’d readie In mynd resolv’d, in resolution stedie
(FM, –)
In an allegorical sequence in Christes Bloodie Sweat, ‘Remembrance’ is invited to tell that Queene of Reason (Fayre bride to Christ) the Soul her lover comes,
who declares that he craves from her No wanton dalliance in a bed of lust, Thy purenesse is the portion I would have, Artlesse simplicitie and steddy trust, And if you prove but constant to implore Vertue with goodnesse, I will aske no more (CBS, –, –)
The occurrence of the identical syntactical structure deploying these abstractions should leave no further doubt as to the identity of ‘W. S.’ and John Ford: Clean-temper’d Moderation, steddy Trust (FE, ) Artless simplicitie and steddy trust (CBS, )
In the prose works steady and its cognates echo like a chime. The Golden Meane praises ‘the ease of prescribing rules to Constancie and Steddinesse’, and proclaims its assurance that ‘when I die, my steddinesse shall give immortalitie to my life’. It celebrates ‘a steady moderation’, ‘the quiet calme of a steady resolution’, the ‘steady providence’ that belongs to wisdom (NDW, pp. , , , , ). Conversely, it denounces ‘the unsteddiness of
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
the common people’, just as A Line of Life mocks a ‘Policie so unsteddie’ (NDW, pp. , ). In Ford’s plays, as in the Funerall Elegye, steadiness is the mark of virtue and maturity, while the term unsteady characterizes immaturity, or the irrational behaviour of the mob (cf. Wood , pp. –). Sophronos complains about ‘the unsteady multitude’ (LM, ..), and Cassilane recalls how happily Roman warriors retired from public life, avoiding both ‘the clamours of the ingratefull great ones, /And the unsteddy multitude’ (LC, ..–). In The Broken Heart Ithocles admits his earlier faults, caused by the heat Of an unsteady youth, a giddy braine, Greene indiscretion, flattery of greatnesse, Rawnesse of judgement, wilfulnesse in folly . . . (..–)
These are all faults from which William Peter was conspicuously free. In The Lover’s Melancholy Menaphon makes the misogynistic resolution that he will never be so slav’d againe to woman, Which in her best of constancy is steddiest In change and scorne (..–)
But men can also show the same weakness, as Fioromonda observes: A Prince, whose eye is a chooser to his heart, Is seldom steddy in the lists of love
(LS, ..–)
Giovanni rejects religion, with its notion of sinful love, together with prayers and fasting: I find all these but dreames, and old mens tales To fright unsteddy youth (TPW, ..–)
At the play’s d´enouement, faced with his sister’s remorseful repentance, Giovanni’s Marlovian ambitions are shattered by her ‘change’: Why, I hold Fate Clasp’t in my fist, and could Command the Course Of times eternall motion; hadst thou beene One thought more steddy than an ebbing Sea. (.. –)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Ford’s fondness for the words steady, steadiness, steadiest, and unsteady, which Shakespeare never uses, is one more attribute that he shares with ‘W. S.’ Like many writers, Ford often repeated words which formed a kind of semantic cluster in his mind. The anonymous poet, praising William Peter, declares that (*)
The curious eye, of a quick-brain’d survey Could scantly find a mote amidst the sun, Of his too-shortned dayes: or make a prey Of any faulty errors he had done. (–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford affirms of our saviour that the most curious eye That saw him lead his solitary life, Whiles he was man on earth, could not espie One blemish in his actions. (–)
The same evaluative terms, positive and negative, recur throughout Ford’s writings, including the distinctively Fordian term ‘spleen’. Setting aside his use of that word in the normal medical sense (Ford, we remember, was much influenced by Robert Burton’s treatise on melancholy), we find it used rather vaguely, often connected with ‘anger’ or ‘malice’. William Peter’s virtues were great, but still not enough to preserve him from malice: (*)
Not that he was above the spleenfull sence And spight of mallice; but for that he had Warrant enough in his owne innocence, Against the sting of some in nature bad.
(FE, –)
Later in the poem ‘W. S.’ indulges in another vaguely threatening denunciation, setting out to free William Peter from the scandall of such senses As in the rancour of unhappy spleene, Measure thy course of life ( –)
– As so often in reading the Elegye, one would be hard put to give an accurate decoding of these terms. But Ford had used exactly the same language, in just the same indignant but blurred manner, a few years earlier. In Honor Triumphant () he had denounced those who displayed ‘frantick wilfulnesse’ in attacking women, ‘who in the rancorous spleenes of
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
an unprevailing rancour, durst not onelie in the mallice of their tongues to speake, but in the venome of their hearts, to copy out whole pamphlets against the dignitie of the female sex’ (NDW, p. ). Ford repeated this favourite pejorative term shortly afterwards, courtier-like expressing his horror at ‘what arrogant spleen of malediction with teeth of juyceles envie, durst to detract from the worthines of Beauty?’ (p. ). Not only the women, but all of Ford’s heroic figures are subject to anger, malice, ‘rancour’, or ‘spleen’, to which they heroically respond with increased displays of virtue. Mountjoy, also, could not escape the attention of ‘some whome emulation did enrage / To spit the venom of their rancour’s gall . . . ’ (FM, –). Penelope, Countess of Devonshire, by ignoring ‘vulgar rumors slander’, achieved saint-like status, ‘With patience bearing spleenes unjust disgrace’ (FM, – ). In Ford’s plays, as we might expect, ‘spleen’ is freely used as a short-hand term for anger or other forms of emotional disturbance: e’re the boundless spleene Of just-consuming wrath o’re-swell my reason
(LS, ..–)
the eagerness of spleene Of a suspitious rage
(LT, ..–)
that height Of arrogance and spleene which wrought the rape (BH, ..) To vent the spleene of your disordered bloods?
(TPW, ..)
Fame, as Renaissance moralists never tired of pointing out, inevitably attracted envy, malice, or defamation, and Ford concedes that his heroic figures were no exception. One way of dealing with defamation – ‘defame’ or ‘malice’ in Ford’s terminology – is to ignore it. So Ford urges Mountjoy’s widow to dismiss slanderers: let not defame, Of the rude Chaos aggravate thy woes. The multitudes blind slander is no shame . . .
(FM, –)
Mountjoy can no longer defend himself, but his eulogist can simply dismiss malicious critics: Go weake betraiers of your witless madnesse! Your malice will revert upon your breasts . . . (–)
And, as if they had magically obeyed him, the poet describes with satisfaction how
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Devonshire the issue of nobility, Avoyded rumour of such foule defame, True virtue grac’d his mind, applause his name. (–)
‘W. S.’ makes the same admission that malice had attacked his hero: Yet who is hee so absolutely blest, That lives incompast in a mortall frame? Some-time in reputation not opprest? (*) By some in nothing famous but defame? (FE, –)
And he follows it with the same tactic of dismissal, like Ford assuring Mountjoy’s slanderers that ‘Your malice will revert upon your breasts’, gesturing away such malice: Let then the false suggestions of the froward . . . Rebound grosse arguments, upon their heart; That may disprove their malice. . . . (–)
Fames Memoriall and the Funerall Elegye share the same vocabulary of righteous indignation: Penelope Rich bore ‘spleenes unjust disgrace’, scorning ‘the wordes of mallice’, just as William Peter could not avoid ‘the spleenfull sence / And spight of malice’. In Honor Triumphant Ford attacked ‘the rancorous spleenes of an unprevailing rancour’, found both ‘in the mallice of their tongues’ and ‘in the venome of their hearts’. William Peter’s reputation may be threatened by ‘the rancour of unhappy spleene’, while Mountjoy suffered from malicious men who ‘spit the venom of their rancour’s gall’. Attentive readers will have noticed that ‘W. S.’ also uses the rare word-form ‘defame’ (for ‘defamation’), as did Ford twice. He rhymes ‘frame’ / ‘defame’, where Ford rhymed ‘defame’ / ‘shame’ (FM, –), and ‘shame’ / ‘defame’ / ‘name’ (–). Shakespeare used ‘defame’ three times, but not after The Rape of Lucrece (). Ford continued to use the word in his plays. In The Spanish Gypsy Clara, who has been raped, appeals to Roderigo: ‘Thinke on the violence of my defame’ (..). Another semantic cluster recurs in the Elegye when ‘W. S.’ asks (*)
Yet who is hee so absolutely blest, That lives incompast in a mortall frame? (–)
The governing idea is of the soul, or life, being contained or ‘encompassed’ in the frame of the body. ‘W. S.’ repeats the idea, and the associated words, describing how William Peter’s many benefits
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
could not all encompasse him about, Against th’assault of death, who to relieve him Strooke home but to the fraile and mortall parts, Of his humanity (–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweate the poet records that Christ appeared to him in a vision, recalling how whiles incompast in a fleshly frame, A cloud of darke mortality I liv’d (CBS, –)
In one poem we have ‘incompast in a mortall frame’; in the other, ‘incompast in a fleshly frame’. In both the ‘frame’ is too weak to stave off death. Those who ‘defame’ others, ‘W. S.’ continues, in another semantically and syntactically incoherent sequence, are ‘in nothing famous but defame’: (*)
Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence Of what they doe, to be a speciall worke, Of singlenesse, not tending to offence ( –)
Although it is difficult to construe that sentence, and its successor, the phrase ‘smooth pretence’ echoes similar phrases in Ford’s acknowledged writings. In Honor Triumphant he attacks the ‘smooth counterfeit’ (NDW, p. ), and the ‘faining shew of smooth pretext’ (p. ). In Fames Memoriall he approves of Mountjoy for conveying to his sovereign ‘an intimation / Of feare, not mask’t in smooth dissimulation’ (–). Ford regularly associates ‘smooth’ with ‘pretence’ or ‘dissimulation’. In A Line of Life he attacks ‘smoothe imposture’ (NDW, p. ), and in Christes Bloodie Sweat he denounces those who smooth the front of sin, And maske his ugly fore-head with the coulour Of lust ingendred novelties (–)
or who strive, with ‘smooth beguiling rimes, / To paynt the grosenes of unlawfull love’ (–). T. A. Wood has shown that in his plays Ford regularly used the adjective ‘smooth’ metaphorically, ‘usually synonymous with “suspicious” and “devious” ’, citing seventeen instances from the four plays he studied (Wood , pp. –). Relevant collocations include ‘a smooth tongue’, ‘smooth perswasion’, ‘smooth formality’, ‘smooth evasion’, ‘fawning smoothnesse’, and ‘smooth / Low-fawning parasites’. Like many
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
people’s, Ford’s vocabulary of righteous indignation turns out to be quite limited. Among the representatives of vice excoriated by ‘W. S.’ were those who (*)
in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke That leades to ruine ( –)
The idea of a ‘by-path’ recurs twice in Ford’s plays, once in this wordform: Point me my Grave In some obscure by-path . . .
(SG, ..)
The other instance uses the variant form ‘by-way’, but with the same moralized conclusion, to describe a bad life ending in ‘ruine’: If my fortune Run such a crooked by-way, as to wrest My steps to ruine (BH, .. –)
The word ‘by-path’, never found in Shakespeare, otherwise occurs only in two later Caroline plays, Heywood’s A challenge for beautie (), and Thomas Fuller’s Andronicus (). In A Funerall Elegye ‘W. S.’ says of ‘men in fortunes wrackt’ that (*)
death to such gives unremembered graves ()
Exactly the same collocation of ideas recurs in Christes Bloodie Sweat to delineate an inglorious end, describing how cowards boast in time of peace, but flie When warres increase, and unremembred die. (–)
Again, in Fames Memoriall Ford asks What more yet unremembered can I say ()
This word, too, does not occur in Shakespeare. In A Line of Life (), as we saw above (*), Ford praised the virtuous patron as ‘a great man good (for to be truly good is to be great)’, exactly echoing a construction used in the Funerall Elegye (). The same trick
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
of repeating and varying the key words recurs again in these two texts, eight years apart. In A Line of Life Ford warns that hee who beginnes not in the spring of his minoritie to bud forth fruits of vertuous hopes, or hopefull deserts, which may ripen in the Summer of confirmed manhood; rarely or never yeelds the crop of a plentifull memory in his age, but prevents the winter of his last houre, in the barren Autumne of his worst houre, by making an even reckoning with time misspent, dying without any Issue to inherit his remembrance or commendation. (NDW, p. )
‘W. S.’ uses just the optimistic part of that metaphor to describe William Peter: (*) His yonger yeares, gave comfortable hope To hope for comfort, in his riper youth; Which (harvest-like) did yeeld againe the crop Of Education . . . ( –)
Both texts share a word-play on ‘hope’: ‘comfortable hope /To hope for comfort’, in ; ‘vertuous hopes, or hopefull deserts’, in . Ford had already linked the metaphors of harvest and hope years before, in ‘The Monarchs meeting’, the poem appended to Honor Triumphant (), which begins: ‘Now had the harvest of the yeare brought forth, / The blessed frute of long expected hope’ (NDW, p. ). And in one of the scenes he wrote for The Fair Maid of the Inn, Ford makes Cesario proclaim: The harvest of my hopes is now already Ripen’d and gather’d . . . (..–)
Ford’s heroes excel in both the Christian and the classical virtues. The union of mind and soul was equally marked in Mountjoy: Two speciall beauties chiefly did adorne His fair unblemisht soule and spotlesse mind, To god religious he himself hath borne, With zealous reverence in zeale enshrind, And to his prince still loyall ever kind
(FM, –)
That eulogy closely matches the anonymous poet’s account of ‘two special beauties’ which adorned William Peter: Those noble twins of heaven-infused races, Learning and Wit, refined in their kind: Did joyntly both, in their peculiar graces,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
(*)
Enrich the curious temple of his mind. Indeed a temple, in whose precious white, Sat Reason by Religion over-swayd: Teaching his other senses, with delight, How Piety and Zeale should bee obey’d. (FE, –)
‘W. S.’ presented William Peter as the model of virtue and intellectual cultivation. ‘Learning and wit’, as we have just seen, Did joyntly both, in their peculiar graces, (*) Enrich the curious temple of his mind. Indeed a temple . . . (–)
As I showed in an earlier chapter, metaphors of the body or mind as a temple are of biblical origin, and they recur in Ford’s plays, in one instance with exactly the same phrasing. In Love’s Sacrifice Philippo, Duke of Pavia, cross-questions Biancha, his duchess, to discover who (allegedly) corrupted her: What witch-craft us’d the wretch to charme the art Of the once spotlesse temple of thy mind ?
(LS, ..–)
Earlier in that play Fernando, trying to seduce Biancha, had complained at That heat of cruelty, which swayes the Temple Of your too stony breast (..–)
In Perkin Warbeck the pretender to the throne says to Katherine that It would be sacriledge to intrude upon The Temple of thy peace (..–)
while Winifred, in The Witch of Edmonton, describes her own body as A Temple hallowed to the purity Of holy marriage (..–)
In these effusive panegyrics to goodness Ford varies his style occasionally by ascribing to his heroic figures not only the possession of a virtue but the non-possession of a vice. The hero of Fames Memoriall is several
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
times celebrated with the syntactical formula ‘he practised virtue +x, not vice −x ’. So Ford describes Mountjoy’s stay at court, where He nurc’t his yonger joyes, not wholy bent To wanton, sicke, lascivious amour’s ease But to more primer passions of content, Of civill mirth and jocund merriment.
(FM, –)
Mountjoy was Nor voyd of lov’s sence, nor yoakt in subjection Of servile passion, theame for every stage . . . Nor did the pleasure of these courtly sports, Indeer him to the softnesse of such ease (–)
In other words, to say it again, he practised Not games of thriftlesse prodigality, But plots of fame and fames eternity (–)
Once he had pursued a successful military career, ‘Fame-royallized Devonshire’ began to apply ‘The fruits of dear-experienc’t pollicy’ (–), ‘Not puft with weening self-affected pride . . . ’ (–). In whatever area of life, Mountjoy avoided the vice, and practised the virtue appropriate: Not in the wrack of Prodigality Nor thriftlesse riot of respectlesse meane Did he extend his liberalitye But to his honors credit. . . . (–)
William Peter’s life was much briefer, his social status far humbler, but he, too, conformed to this ‘not vice −x but virtue +x ’ pattern, in almost identical terms: (*)
He was a kind, true, perfect gentleman. Not in the out-side of disgracefull folly, Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise; Affecting fashions; nor addicted wholy To unbeseeming blushlesse vanities . . . Not in the wast of many idle words Car’d hee to be heard talke; nor in the flote
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Of fond conceit (such as this age affordes) By vaine discourse upon himselfe to dote. (–)
Rather, he practised a ‘becomming silence’. Peter was in every respect the ideal of purposeful and rational behaviour: Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence, Wasting his best of time: but so content With Reasons golden Meane to make defence, Against the assault of youth’s incouragement (FE –)
This quality was either so marked in William Peter, or else the poet is so short of material, that he reverts to it in the second part of the poem: Though in the complementall phrase of words, He never was addicted to the vaine Of boast, such as the common breath affoords, He was in use most fast in tongue most plaine (–)
The same syntactical formula, and the same terminology, recur in Christes Bloodie Sweat, although it becomes slightly improbable to praise Christ for not having committed this or that vice, since He presumably did not suffer the same temptations that human beings do. Notwithstanding this consideration, Ford writes of Christ that His tongue for gaine was never hyr’d to lye, Or tun’d to sweare, or flatter, curse, or fawne. (–)
In the same terms, ‘W. S.’ praised William Peter for avoiding ‘the wast of many idle words’ and ‘the flote / Of fond conceit’ or ‘vaine discourse’ (–). Of Christ we are told (surely unnecessarily) that Lust could not traine his heart, or love his eye, No wanton baites of pleasure could impawne His chast desire, to forfet to delight The lawelesse issues of a banefull night. (–)
Of William Peter we learn, at greater length, that ‘this man (whiles yet he was a man)’ (FE, ) – a notably tautologous utterance, compared to the theologically correct reference to Christ, ‘Whiles he was a man on earth’ (CBS, ) – ‘ever chose / The ready way to commendation, / By
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
shunning all invitements strang’ (FE, –). I am interpreting those otherwise obscure lines as meaning ‘invitations to lust’, and it may well be that juxtaposing these two poems can help us to better understand the Funerall Elegye, crabbed and obscure as its diction often is. Peter, this long paragraph continues, avoided those people who indulged ‘their prompt desires’ and ‘their will’, giving in to ‘their fond dotage’: Hee was not so; but in a serious awe, Ruling the little ordered common-wealth, Of his owne selfe with honour to the law (–)
That theme is the subject of six whole stanzas in Christes Bloodie Sweat (–), including the details that Hee had objur’d no God, hee broke no Lawes . . .
()
His meekenes thirsted not revenge, his minde Was never set on wrath, no fruitlesse pride Travail’d new fashions curiously to finde
( –)
William Peter, analogously, followed neither ‘Affecting fashions; nor . . . blushlesse vanities’ (–), and ‘Sooth’d not the current of besotted fashion’ (). Despite Ford’s copious marginal references from the Bible, the picture of Christ which emerges in his poem is entirely human. Indeed, the virtues of Christ, which fill many more stanzas of the longer poem, seem to be condensed into the positive attributes of William Peter so densely packed into ten lines of the Funerall Elegye (–), quoted above. – That is, contrary to Donald Foster’s reading, Ford attributed Christ-like virtues to Peter, not Peter-like virtues to Christ. ‘W. S.’ also celebrated William Peter’s virtue through a double negative, (*)
Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence, Wasting his best of time (–)
This idea of misusing one’s talents is a frequent theme for moralists, of course, and duly occurs in Christes Bloodie Sweat, where Christ saw ‘in every sex . . . the mispent ryot of their Talent’ (); but at least the poem records that some prostitutes do penance for their sins ( John :), ‘with hearts all rent / Redeeme the unchast hours, they have mispent’ ( –). The concept of redeeming one’s sins recurs in the resolve, ‘let us in those sweats redeeme
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
time past’ (), and in the exhortation to a whore to ‘Redeeme the poor remainder of thy daies’ (). Similarly, in A Line of Life, where the man who has not harvested his virtue finds himself ‘making an even reckoning with time misspent, dying without . . . remembrance or commendation’ (NDW, p. ). The sense of misusing one’s talents recurs often in Ford’s plays, usually in the mouth of young men full of remorse for having wasted or ‘mis-spent’ their best years: Oh! how have I in ignorance and dullnesse, Run through the progress of so many minutes . . . . I have dream’t The folly of my daies in vaine expence, Of uselesse taste and pleasure. (SD, ..–)
If my experience hath not Trewant-like Mis-spent the time (LM, ..–)
But it can also be used by others to attack youthful prodigality: No; th’ast mispent thy hours, lavish’d fool-like The circuit of thy life, in ceaselesse riots. (SD, ..–)
Both larger and smaller verbal parallels tie the Elegye into the Ford canon. ‘W. S.’ uses the combination ‘best of . . . ’, as in praising William Peter for practising another virtue expressed in the form ‘not vice −x’: (*)
Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence, Wasting his best of time (–)
Ford uses the phrase ‘best of . . . ’ more than twenty times in his plays. Limiting ourselves to the use of abstract nouns – most of which describe some ethical good, valuable in itself – gives us this selection: in best of Loue (LS, ..) the best of peace (LT, ..) the best of my youth (LS, ..) the best of fortunes (LT, ..) best of all (LS, ..) my best of earthly joyes (LT, ..) the best of greatnesse (PW, ..) all best of comforts (LM, ..) the best of your discretion her best of constancy (BH, ..) (LM, ..) the best of plenty (FCN, ..) the best of my well-being (LM, ..) my best of joys (FCN, ..) best of thanks (TPW, ..) best of faires (FCN, ..) best of wishes (Q , ..)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
The resulting redoubling, ‘best of the best’, so to speak, verges on tautology and semantic overkill, a vice that ‘W. S.’ is particularly prone to. Another construction using of, Ford’s favourite partitive genitive, is found both in the Elegye and in the plays. William Peter, we are told, happily spent (*) his spring of dayes in sacred schooles ()
Ford varies this ‘spring + of + noun’ formula at least six times over: the full spring of youth (PW, ..) the spring of fruitlesse hopes (PW, ..) fair spring of manhood (BH, ..) the spring of nature (LT, ..) the spring of chearefull comfort (LM, ..) the spring of my continuall teares (TPW, ..)
As for the ‘sacred schooles’ in which Peter spent his time, that phrase recurs in Christes Bloodie Sweat, where Ford appeals ‘To mercy, promised in the sacred schooles’ (). It is varied in Fames Memoriall as ‘wisdoms sacred lore’ (), and again in The Lover’s Melancholy: ‘Scholes of sacred knowledge’ (..). In one of the scenes Ford contributed to The Spanish Gypsy a character is welcomed, back ‘ “From the university.” “– To a new school / Of happy knowledge” ’ (..–). William Peter, role model that he was, knew how to shun (*) the glad sleights of insnaring vice ()
He thereby avoided the devil, as Ford explains in Christes Bloodie Sweat, using the same combination of terms: The naughtie Devill slylie did intice, By sensuall sports and pitilesse deceits, Our weak fore-fathers to insnaring vice; Masking his tyrannie with wanton baites ( –)
The recurrence of ‘sensuall’ and ‘wanton’ shows how predictable Ford’s arsenal of disapproving terms could be. The idea of vice or temptation ‘ensnaring’ mankind recurs in Christes Bloodie Sweat, where evil women are said to use various ‘smiling ginnes / Wherewith they catch insnard men’ (–).
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Peter, at his ‘sacred schooles’, managed to avoid vice: Heere gave hee dyet to the sick desires, That day by day, assault the weaker man; (*) And with fit moderation still retires, From what doth batter Vertue now and than
(FE, –)
Readers may deplore that poor piece of line-filling, ‘now and than’ (= then), and may also be displeased by the odd verb ‘retires’, which is either tautologous – inasmuch as Peter is supposedly in the ‘sacred schooles’ – or (confusingly) suggests that he was exposed to vice after all. The real value of ‘retires’, of course, is to produce a rhyme with ‘desires’. Ford rhymed these two words elsewhere, in Christes Bloodie Sweat: This was that Pellican indeed, retyr’d Into the desert of a troubled breast, Who for to pay the ransome long desir’d, Consum’d himselfe to give his people rest ( –)
and again: What can he now resolve, but to retire Unto the sweat of Christ, and cleft in mind, Humbled in meek astonishment, desire Comfort in this his bloody Bath to find. (–)
In both instances the word ‘retire’ is used as awkwardly as in the Elegye. In the first case, it is Christ Himself who ‘retyr’d / Into the desert of a troubled breast’, presumably that of the pelican (whom He resembles, typologically speaking), however He managed that feat. In the second case it is ‘a sinner’ () whose best course is ‘to retire / Unto the sweat of Christ’, a notably clumsy expression, even for young Ford (aged twenty-seven at this time). Yet, however noble and virtuous Ford’s heroes are, they lived in a wicked world, riddled with vice. In these three poems, as in the prose works, vice is excoriated according to the methods of the epideictic genre, but it is never credibly depicted. Ford’s fondness for generalized abstractions is particularly damaging here, for the poet’s righteous indignation fails to evoke any individualized target, falling back on such vague terms as ‘folly’, ‘opinion’, ‘sensual’, ‘spleen’. The all-purpose term that Ford uses for these enemies of virtue is ‘folly’, or ‘follies’. William Peter is celebrated for having led
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
A life free from such staines, as follyes are (FE, )
He deserves praise for having avoided vice, Not in the out-side of disgracefull folly Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise ( –)
To say that Peter ‘was good’, ‘W. S.’ generously asserts, (*)
Includes all excellence can be displaide, In praise of Vertue and reproach of Folly (–)
The term ‘folly’, in this generalized sense, recurs throughout Ford’s works. In the epistle to Christes Bloodie Sweat, we recall, he confessed to have been ‘long caried with the doubts of folly, youth, and opinion’ (NDW, p. ). In The Golden Meane Ford described ‘Feare without hope’ as ‘the proclaimer of folly’ (NDW, p. ), denying as it does the existence of divine grace, and recommended ‘a selfe-reformation, which being sincerely performed, the follies of the past times’ can be purged (p. ), for the ‘reformation of folly is a worke of more praise than the working of folly is a cause of disgrace’ (p. ). – The motif of self-reformation, we recall, is one that ‘W. S.’ twice announces for himself. In the preface to A Line of Life Ford deplored that nowadays ‘Reason is not the mistresse, but the servant, not the directresse but the foyle to [men’s] passions. Folly is a sale-able merchandise, whose factour, youth is not so allowedly profest in young men, as pleasure in men of any age.’ Whatever the time of life, indulging pleasure leads to ‘ruines . . . calamities’ (p. ), for when the affections subvert reason they produce ‘an innovation of folly’ (p. ). In these contexts Ford seems to be equating ‘folly’ with voluptas or sensuality, that degraded notion of pleasure frowned on by classical moralists. ‘Wee were not borne . . . to traffique in follies, and to make merchandize of our sensualities’ ( pp. –), he writes, perhaps echoing Cicero. Ford saw ‘Virtue’ and ‘Folly’ as antithetically opposed, defining the spectrum of moral good and evil within which human beings act. Given that a man’s ‘own affections [passions] . . . assault and batter his Resolution in the path of Vertue’, should he manage ‘to withstand the severe assault of Folly’, this ‘is a labor wel worthy a Chronicle (and chronicled will bee in perpetuall memorie)’ (p. ) – the optimistic formula of ‘virtue rewarded’ that recurs so often in the Elegye. It is perhaps no accident that in The Sun’s Darling, one of the plays in which Ford collaborated with Dekker, the characters representing vice and temptation include Folly.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Ford’s plays, polarized as they are into the opposed extremes of vice and virtue, include many passages praising virtue (the word occurs over a hundred times), and reiterating the assurance that virtue will be rewarded. Here, too, Ford writes ‘In praise of Vertue, and reproach of Folly’ (FE, ), regularly opposing those two terms. In The Lady’s Trial one character sets out to proclaime The power of vertue, whose commanding soveraignty . . . restraines Custome of folly; by example teaches A rule to reformation; by rewards, Crownes worthy actions, and invites to honour (LT, ..–)
Ford again juxtaposed ‘virtue’ and ‘folly’ within one sentence in The Queen, where Salassa, about to be executed, sees herself as ‘an example to all fickle dames, / That folly is no shrine for vertuous names’ (..–). In a speech that he contributed to The Witch of Edmonton (it stands out as dignified verse, using philosophical terminology, in the midst of one of Rowley’s clowning scenes for Cuddy Banks), a Spirit takes on the shape of Katherine, a sweet lovely Maid Whom this Fool doats on. We can meet his folly, But from his Vertues must be Run-aways. (..–)
In the Prologue to The Sun’s Darling, very probably by Ford, summarily describing the four seasons of man, the poet tells us that in the ‘second Season’ of man’s life ‘Folly, his Squire’, forms an alliance with ‘the Lady Humor’, who leads him astray, so that in the ‘third Season’, as he weakens, ‘Folly and Humor, doth his reason breake’. Finally, in ‘the Winter, or his nonage’, just like ‘W. S.’ contemplating the mistakes of his youth, The sad remembrance of his errours wakes him; Folly and Humour, Faine hee’d cast away, But they will never leave him, till hee’s Clay. Thus Man as Clay descends, Ascends in spirit; Dust, goes to dust, The soule unto It’s Merit. (SD, Prol. –)
This moral is pointed again, with greater force, in the Sun’s final words, describing the sole course of redeeming ‘folie’ (..), namely that
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
Man should casheer his riots, His bosom whorish sweet-heart, idle Humor; His Reasons dangerous seducer, Follie. (..–)
For Ford, as for ‘W. S.’, to keep to ‘the line of life’ involves holding steadily to a virtuous resolution against the assaults of sensuality or ‘folly’. The terminology is coherent, limited, and recurs again and again. Another all-purpose ethical pejorative in Ford’s work is the term ‘opinion’. In the Funerall Elegye, William Peter is cleared of the charge of (*)
Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise ()
while ‘W. S.’ declares that hope, ‘the weake comfort of the haplesse’, must sustain him, Although perhaps I ignorantly range, And court opinion in my deep’st unrest. (–)
Ford’s moral essays follow the example of Stoic moralists, for whom (as we have seen) ‘opinion’ is the enemy of reason and virtue. In Du Vair’s treatise the role of human will is ‘to dispose our opinion, so that it . . . shal cleave fast unto’ the truth (Du Vair , p. ), counteracting opinion, which uses ‘the cruellest instruments . . . cosoning and beguiling us’ (p. ). If we forsake the realms of reason, virtue, and self-autonomy, ‘wee . . . fasten the rest of our minds upon the opinion of the vulgar sort of people, and so voluntarily renounce our liberties, to serve the humours and passions of other men’ (p. ). Lipsius warns with equal vehemence against ‘the smoake of Opinions’ (Lipsius , p. ), urges us to ‘pluck aside the vaile of Opinions’ (p. ), and to remember that ‘a high and loftie mind’ will despise ‘the weake linke of Opinion . . . ’ (p. ). To Ford, as to his Stoic mentors, ‘opinion’ is an erroneous or depraved worldly judgment that corrupts not only our perception of the world but goodness itself. In The Golden Meane he describes ‘the miseries of mortallity’, which include ‘the wildernesse of opinion and judgement wasted by the cause, and comfortlesse in the effects of folly’ (p. ): the same ethical terms recur over and over. Ford sees ‘the violent streame of Opinion and Conceit’ as inimical to ‘Discretion’ (p. ), warns of ‘the danger of Opinion’ (p. ), wishes men to be freed from ‘the Jayle of Opinion’ (p. ). In A Line of Life, similarly, he disclaims any interest in the ‘courtship of applause’, by which he might attain ‘a higher pinnacle of opinion’ (p. ). As
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
we saw in chapter , Donald Foster placed great emphasis on the phrase to ‘court opinion’, claiming it as a link between the Funerall Elegye and Shakespeare, although he could not cite any instances of Shakespeare using it (Foster a, pp. –). In fact, this phrase forms another link between that poem and Ford. The passage I have just quoted from A Line of Life sees ‘the courtship of applause’ as leading to the ‘pinnacle of opinion’, which already links the two notions. The exact phrase, to ‘court opinion’, recurs in Perkin Warbeck, where that pretender to the throne praises Lady Katherine for her constant love in a passage that sums up so many of Ford’s preoccupations, the possibility of moral perfection, female virtue, and fame as the reward of virtue: Fayre Angell of perfection; immortalitie Shall rayse thy name up to an adoration; Court every rich opinion of true merit; And saint it in the Calendar of vertue (..–)
In several other places Ford uses the construction ‘verb + opinion’ in exactly the same way as ‘W. S.’ does: may purchase / Opinion ( FCN, ..–) if ought of my endeavours / Can produce kinde opinion (LT, ..–) have grounded / Opinion of unfitting carriage (LT, ..–) The nightly languish of my dull unrest / Hath stampt a strong opinion (LS, ..–) To gaine you / The opinion of some wit (LC, ..–)
Indeed, the frequency with which Ford used the verb ‘to court’, according to T. A. Wood, is one of the marks of his style distinguishing him from Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, and Tourneur. In the four plays that Wood studied the verb occurred seventeen times (a total which could be increased if one included the remaining works of single and co-authorship), whereas in Shakespeare ‘the verb appears . . . only fourteen times in ten different plays’ (Wood , pp. –). If we look at the whole of Ford’s dramatic production it is interesting to see how often he uses ‘court’ together with other abstract nouns, like ‘opinion’: ‘court the world’ (BH, ..); ‘court your entertainment’ (FCN, ..); ‘court no mans dutie’ (FCN, ..); ‘courted / A newer pleasure’ (LT, ..–); ‘court / Ambition’ (LT, ..–); ‘court both death and dangers’ (LC, ..); ‘thou dost court calamity’ (SG, ..); ‘court the madnesse of the times’ (LM, ..); ‘court mine own distraction’ (LM, ..); ‘court proud danger’ (PW, ..); ‘courts your amitie’ (PW, ..); ‘courts this holy contract’ (PW, ..); ‘courts affliction’ (PW, ..); ‘courts his friendship’
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
(PW, ..); ‘courtings / Of gratitude’ (SD, ..); ‘courted time’ (FMI, ..); ‘courted the great example’ (FMI, ..). A similar usage occurs in Ford’s Christian meditative poem, Christes Bloodie Sweat: ‘courts the season’ (). Such a fondness for the verb ‘to court’ is truly a valuable stylistic marker, pointing to Ford’s authorship of the Elegye. In Ford’s ethical discourse, as throughout the Renaissance, blushing was the sign of shame and hence of virtue (Francis Bacon frequently quoted the proverb rubor est virtutis color). Appropriately enough, ‘W. S.’ assures us, William Peter was not (*)
addicted wholy To unbeseeming blushlesse vanities (–)
The poet–Christian persona who narrates Christes Bloodie Sweat accuses himself, in the name of mankind, as the ‘most unhappie mee, who did provoke / With blushlesse sinnes, the cause for which he dies’ (–). Shakespeare never uses the word ‘blushless’. One word used by Ford in a truly unusual sense was ‘flote’ (‘float’), not as a verb but as a noun, meaning ‘flood’, as contrasted with ‘ebb’. H. D. Sykes, ascribing The Spanish Gypsy to Ford, was the first to draw attention to this, ‘one of the most distinctive words in Ford’s vocabulary’, recording that ‘Nowhere else, outside Ford’s dramatic works, have I found “float” in this sense’. Already in , in Fames Memoriall, Ford had described a ‘Man rais’d to flote of fortune from the mud’ (). In A Funerall Elegye William Peter is said to have shunned (*)
the flote Of fond conceit (such as this age affordes) (–)
In The Golden Meane Ford uses the word twice, each time with an abstract noun, as in the Elegye: ‘the float of prosperitie’, and ‘the float of their greatness’ (NDW, pp. , ). The word recurs five times in Ford’s plays, in four of those occurrences as the formulaic construction <noun + of + noun>, which we observed so frequently in the Elegye, and in two of them with the same line-division, making Of the first word. In addition, characters in Ford’s plays use the metaphor to describe some force antipathetic to reason and virtue, be it ‘fortune’, ‘fond conceit’, or sexual desire. So Giovanni in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore rejects the Friar’s appeal to reason, since his incestuous love for Annabella has already reached an uncontrollable stage: It were more ease to stop the Ocean From floates and ebbs, than to disswade my vowes
(TPW, ..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In Love’s Sacrifice Fernando rebukes himself for his adulterous desire for Biancha, wife to his friend, Duke Philippo: Traytor to friendship, whither shall I runne, That, lost to reason, cannot sway the float Of the unruly faction in my blood
(LS, ..–)
Later in the play, having declared his love and been rejected by the virtuous wife, who scorns his ‘lawlesse love’, Fernando vows that though the float Of infinite desires swell to a tide Too high so soone to ebbe
– yet he will never again declare his ‘griefes’ (LS, ..–, –). Another importunate male, Roderigo, abducts Clara but finds that her ‘commanding majesty of chaste . . . virtue’ did not More check my rash attempt than draw to ebb The float of those desires, which in an instant Were cool’d in their own streams of shame and folly (SG, ..–)
In an exchange resembling that between Giovanni and the Friar, the Priest of the Sun rebukes young Raybright: ‘Contein your float of spleen in seemly bounds’ (SD, ..). ‘Float’ in this sense is otherwise nowhere to be found in English drama between and . Since Ford regularly uses ‘float’ as a metaphor describing human sexuality, we could add a related expression, in the jealous Duke’s (ungrounded) suspicions of his wife having followed a ‘tyde / of triviall wantonnesse from youth to youth’ (LS, ..–). Gilles Monsarrat, in a note confirming Ford’s authorship of Christes Bloodie Sweat (, p. ), has adduced some more instances of this variant metaphor, including this powerful passage: The tide of killing Sinnes was swollen high And could not be abated to an ebb, Before the blessed Son of God must dye
(CBS, –)
In The Golden Meane Ford describes the fate of men who die suddenly, ‘taken . . . in the high tide of acting unlawfull pleasures or abuses’ (NDW, p. ), while Alphonso uses the image to release his vicious misogyny against the Queen: ‘the tyde / Of thy luxurious blood is at the full’ (Q , ..–).
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
As we have seen, several of Ford’s poems and prose works praise outstanding human virtue in hyperbolical terms, often using the term ‘perfect’ (from the Latin perfectus, meaning ‘complete’, rather than in the modern sense, ‘without fault’). ‘W. S.’ describes William Peter in these terms: (*) He was a kind, true, perfect, gentleman. (FE, )
Ever within himselfe free choyce resuming Of true perfection, in a perfect brest ( –)
Peter’s grave, ‘W. S.’ pronounces, ‘shall not intombe, / His pleading best perfections as neglected’ (–), and he reluctantly bids farewell to Peter’s ‘perfect graces’ (). In Fames Memoriall Ford’s admiration for Mountjoy regularly expressed itself in hyperbole: ‘a perfect courtier’ () he was, Mountjoy (the mounting joy of heaven’s perfection) (FM, ) A perfect noble mind’s trew document ()
Mountjoy honoured his friends ‘with perfect rites of mutuale amitie’ (–); he was ‘perfect temperate’ (), ‘a perfect saint’ (), showing ‘perfect zeale’ () – a detail that Ford even repeats (). To cap it all, Mountjoy was ‘Clad in the perfect mould of angell feature’ (). His widow’s beauty also included ‘perfections’ (), indeed, Ford assures her, Courtiers but Counterfeit thy Rarity For thy perfections brook’t no parity. (–)
Ford was prone to scattering around these highest-praise terms like confetti: ‘perfect’ and its cognates occur over thirty times in The Golden Meane (NDW, pp. –), and with more restraint, only eight times in A Line of Life (pp. –). Ford was equally reckless in attaching it to his patrons and dedicatees: the two noble ladies who received Honor Triumphant in were greeted in these terms: ‘Where perfect honour is ennobled with accomplisht perfection, Beauty is not scant’ (NDW, p. ). In the two dedications of Fames Memoriall to Penelope, Countess of Devonshire, Ford proclaimed himself ‘the honourer and lover of your noble perfections’ (NDW, pp. , ), while Lord Haye received A Line of Life in from ‘a servant to your perfect and right accomplished virtues’ (p. ). One could follow the epithet ‘perfect’, often linked to ‘nobleness’ or ‘virtue’, as it recurs throughout Ford’s plays.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ (*) And though his qualities might well deserve Just commendation
(FE, –)
The notion that a virtuous life will be acclaimed with deserved praise is a basic ideal in Renaissance ethics, both secular and Christian, and is repeatedly emphasized in the Funerall Elegye. Unlike those men whose bad deeds made them ‘purchase commendation by disgrace’ (FE, ), Peter ‘ever chose / The ready way to commendation’ (–) – that is, by following virtue. In The Golden Meane Ford asserts his belief that the Neo-Stoic sapiens or ‘Wiseman’, enduring misfortunes, ‘shall deserve the commendation of a Noble spirit’ (NDW, p. ), for, as the companion treatise puts it, when surrounded with ‘Mischiefe . . . to live well is a Crowne of immortal commendation’ (LL, p. ). As we saw in chapter , the idea of virtue receiving due commendation echoes throughout Ford’s moral treatises. It is used, naturally enough, to celebrate Mountjoy, who (like Julius Caesar) might have written ‘Whiles as he liv’d his own acts commendation’ (FM, ). In his youth, ‘grave discretion did convert / It selfe in commendation’ (), and his concern for public prosperity earned ‘shares of commendation’ (). After his death, one of the nine epitaphs Ford provides sees him Urging the great in emulation, Of his true honours commendation. (FM, –)
Ford’s patrons, it goes without saying, were all virtuous, and may be praised in the same terms. He dedicated Christes Bloodie Sweat to William, Earl of Pembroke, ‘beeing wonne hereto by the generall commendation of your merit’ (NDW, p. ). Other writers may receive the same recognition. His dedicatory poem to Barnabe Barnes’s Foure Bookes of Offices () is entitled ‘John Forde in commendation of his very good friend the Author’, and begins: ‘Not to adorne, but to commend this Frame’ (NDW, p. ). Another metaphor that ‘W. S.’ uses to praise William Peter’s virtuous studies is to describe them as ‘furnishing’ or ‘fashioning’ the mind: (*)
his furnisht mind Such harmony of goodnesse did preserve, As Nature never built in better kind (FE, –)
Ford’s moral treatises, incessantly inculcating the need to educate oneself in virtue, make frequent use of this traditional metaphor. In The Golden
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
Meane Ford asserts that ‘The furniture of the minde, is the man himselfe’, and exclaims ‘O the furniture of the minde . . . indeed the true lasting and onely best riches’ (NDW, pp. , ). In A Line of Life he exhorts us to prepare for the ‘faire building of a mind nobly furnisht’ (p. ), and celebrates ‘the furniture of nature, . . . the noble indowments of the mind’, ‘the whole furniture of an enriched soule’ (p. ), and ‘the best of Natures furniture’ (p. ). This metaphor recurs frequently in Ford’s plays, always in connection with the virtues: Where gratitude Has harbor, other furniture becoming Accomplish’d qualities must needs inhabit. (LT, .. –) One, whom . . . for the fashion of his minde, Deserves a deare respect (LM, .. –) no beauty so adornes The composition of a well-built mind, As pittie (LS, ..–) the inward fashion of my mind (BH, ..) fashion of his mind (BH, ..)
Even in Giovanni’s specious arguments justifying his incestuous love for his sister in ’Tis Pity she’s a Whore the connection survives, as he invokes the philosophical ‘principle’ that the Frame And Composition of the Minde doth follow The Frame and Composition of the Body: So where the Bodies furniture is Beauty, The Minde’s must need be Vertue (TPW, ..–)
In the Elegye, as in Fames Memoriall, we find the word ‘mimic’ used pejoratively. Mountjoy ‘scorn’d the mimick thoughts of base condition’ (FM, ), while William Peter could not (*)
disgest as some loose Mimicks can, An empty sound of over-weening passion (FE, –)
The word occurs once in Shakespeare (MND, ..) but without the strongly pejorative associations with the theatre displayed by Ford, the young moralist not yet having found his dramatic vocation. As Katherine Duncan-Jones has commented, the moral condemnation here
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
exceeds even Shakespeare’s negative images from the theatre – of which there was a long tradition. In praising William Peter’s perfection, ‘W. S.’ illustrated it with an analogy between the mind and the body and the guests who lodge in an inn: (*)
true perfection, in a perfect brest: So that his Minde and Body made an In, The one to lodge the other, both like fram’d For fair conditions; guests that soonest win Applause . . . (FE, –)
Precisely the same analogy occurs in A Line of Life, describing death as ‘the parting of a precious Ghest from a ruinous Inne, the soule from the bodie’ (p. ). This metaphor also occurs in Honor Triumphant (), where Ford discusses the relationship between the body and the mind, arguing that ‘as the outward shape is more singular, so the inward vertues must be most exquisite . . . Beautie is but a fair Inne to lodge more fairer guests within’ (NDW, pp. –). ‘W. S.’ shares with Ford a liking for a particular kind of word-formation, turning epithets into past participles. Compare A Funerall Elegye: (*)
Delightfull love, innated from his birth ()
with Fames Memoriall: ‘A Style of honour to his blood innated’ (). As we have seen (*), ‘W. S.’ used the traditional ethical belief that blushing was a sign of shame, and hence of virtue, pronouncing William Peter innocent of any ‘unbeseeming blushlesse vanities’ (). He repeated the idea, linking it to the old proverb veritas filia temporis, to celebrate (*)
Time, the Father of unblushing Truth ()
Ford uses the term ‘unblushing’ (which occurs nowhere in Shakespeare) twice in his plays, to describe harmless mirth – ‘to discourse / In an unblushing merriment of words’ (FCN, ..), and to recall the virtuous republic of Sparta, in whose time vices gasp’d for breath, whose whole Commerce Was whipp’d to Exile by unblushing verse
(BH, Prol. –)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In that play Ford, like ‘W. S.’, associated the proverb with the vindication of virtue, when Penthea asserts that her ‘fame’, or reputation for virtue, is By scandal yet untouched. This I bequeath To memory, and Times old daughter Truth
(BH, ..–)
In ‘W. S.’ piously expressed the wish (*)
to right the hopes of my indangered youth (FE, )
In the dedication to Christes Bloodie Sweat () Ford piously wished that the poem might ‘right the Authour in his hopes’ (NDW, p. ). Verbal habits, as all self-aware writers know, can persist over many years, so it comes as no surprise to find Ford repeating quite trivial phrases. In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ looks forward to (*)
Purchasing credit in the place I lost it. Even in which place . . . (–)
In The Golden Meane Ford describes how evil men, ‘although they bee banished from the place where they have committed villanie, yet they doe but goe from it, they cannot forget it’ (NDW, pp. –). In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford describes hearing a voice from heaven giving him ‘new taskes’, adapting his song ‘to the deepe accentes of my bloudy sweate’ (–): Which bloudy Sweate, for that it is a theame, (The happie matter of a moving stile) . . . (–)
In the Funerall Elegye the poet describes Peter in a periphrasis, as ‘the subject of the verse’, and adds a hasty parenthesis referring to his own poem: (*) Even in which place, the subject of the verse (Unhappy matter of a mourning stile) Which now that subjects merits doth rehearse (–)
The verbal formulation is identical, but in the meditative poem the parenthesis fits coherently, expanding the term ‘theame’. In the Peter elegy it repeats the trick, this time enlarging on ‘verse’, but unfortunately
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
repeats the word ‘subject’ before and afterwards, drawing attention to an awkward tautology. In Fames Memoriall Ford appeals: ‘O who will lend me som deep-moving stile?’ (). ‘W. S.’ describes how, while at Oxford, William Peter (*)
had wonne repute Amongst the All of all that lived there (FE, –)
In Perkin Warbeck King Henry VII describes the traitor Sir William Stanley (in another dense instance of the Ford formula, ‘noun + of + noun’) as having been The pleasure of my court, my bosome friend, The charge, and the Controulement of my person: The keyes and secrets of my treasurie; The all of all I am: I am unhappie: Miserie of confidence (..–)
One of the strategies cultivated by William Peter’s elegist was to emphasize the pathos of the young man’s death, as it will affect those who recount it in later years. ‘W. S.’ succeeded in arousing sympathy in this passage – which Foster claimed to be derived from Richard II: For should he lye obscur’d without a toombe, Time would to time his honesty commend. (*) Whiles Parents to their children will make known, . . . How such a man was sadly overthrowne . . . Whiles such as doe recount that tale of woe, Told by remembrance of the wisest heades, Will in the end conclude the matter so, As they will all goe weeping to their bedds. For when the world lies winterd in the stormes Of fearefull consummation . . .
(FE, –)
Ford certainly knew Richard II, but whether or not he drew on it for the Elegye we find similar collocations of ideas in his poetry and plays. In his smaller memorial to Mountjoy in Funerall Teares, Ford again reviews the envy and malice his hero endured, before affirming: To latter ages let this tale be told Which is by fame for ever verified.
(NDW, p. )
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In his memorial poem to Sir Thomas Overbury, Ford exclaims at his ‘cruell slaughter’ and asserts that ‘times unbred / will say’ that he epitomizes all who were unjustly killed (NDW, p. ). In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford places himself in the past, at the time of Christ’s suffering, and wonders how future ages will recall it, reusing several elements from the Elegye: In after-times, when in the winters cold, Folkes use to warme them by their nightly fires; Such Parents as the time of life termes old, Wasting the season, as the night requires: In stead of tales, may to their children tell, What to the Lord of glorie once befell. (–)
This idea leads to one of the most successful sequences in that poem, as Ford retells the main events of Christ’s life in the simple language appropriate for a child (–), culminating in His crucifixion: Heere now, may bee, the prettie childe will weepe, And aske his parents why they us’d him so . . . (–)
At which point, with a dismissive transition – ‘Much might be added more, to spend the howers, / In better leasure then an anticke tale’ ( –) – Ford returns to the penitential theme of the poem’s concluding section. That is one of many striking parallels between the Christian and the secular poem. In his plays Ford also repeated this idea of a person’s life becoming a ‘tale of woe’. At the d´enouement of Love’s Sacrifice, Duke Philippo, having brought about the deaths both of his wife and his best friend, Fernando, urges that whoever mentions their names in future should let each letter in that tragicke sound Beget a sigh, and every sigh a teare: Children unborne, and widows whose leane cheeks Are furrowed up by age, shall weepe whole nights, Repeating but the story of our fates; Whiles in the period, closing up their tale, They must conclude . . .
– how the guilty man killed himself (LS, ..–). The play’s conclusion assures us that No age hath heard, nor Chronicle can say, That ever here befell a sadder day. (..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Annabella begins the last Act with a soliloquy taking farewell of the world: Thou Precious Time, that swiftly rid’st in Poast Over the world, to finish up the race Of my last fate; here stay thy restlesse course, And bear to Ages that are yet unborne, A wretched woefull womans Tragedy. (..–)
And in one of the scenes he contributed to The Witch of Edmonton Ford makes the penitent Frank reveal his misdeeds to Winifred, his wife: Sit thee then down; And when th’ast heard me speak, melt into tears: Yet I to save those eyes of thine from weeping, Being to write a Story of us two, In stead of Ink, dip’d my sad Pen in blood. (..–)
In this pathos-arousing sequence in the Funerall Elegye, predicting some future state of desolation in which William Peter’s virtues will stand out all the more clearly, ‘W. S.’ anticipates such a time, (*)
when the world lies winterd in the stormes Of fearefull consummation; and layes downe, Th’unsteddie change of his fantastick formes, Expecting ever to be over-throwne ( –)
Two rare words there, ‘winterd’ and ‘unsteddie’, recur in Ford’s works. In The Lover’s Melancholy Eroclea complains that she is so worne away with feares and sorrowes, So wintered with the tempests of affliction (..–)
– a passage which has exactly the same associations of storms and evil fortunes. The word ‘unsteady’, never used by Shakespeare, recurs at least three times in Ford, as we have seen (cf. Wood , pp. –). Continuing his apocalyptical vision, ‘W. S.’ envisages that future point, at the end of the world: (*)
Then in a booke where every worke is writ, Shall this man’s actions bee reveal’d; to shew The gainfull fruit of well-imployed wit, Which payed to heaven the debt that it did owe
(FE –)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
This Doomsday scene is evoked in Christes Bloodie Sweat: When to the barre of judgement we shall plead, And holde up guiltie hands, and sue for grace, A booke shall be brought forth thereon to read A miserere mei . . .
But ‘our sins will so deprave us’ that the book will come too late (–): by so much did the virtuous Master Peter excel normal humanity. In the plays Ford’s characters invoke this ‘booke where every worke is writ’: as Constanza affirms, in The Spanish Gypsy, Our plighted troths are Chronicl’d In that white Booke above, which notes the secrets Of every thought and heart . . . (..–)
And in The Witch of Edmonton Frank comforts Winifred with the reassurance that there is a payment Belongs to goodness from the great Exchequer Above, it will not fail thee . . . (..–)
A common argument in the traditional consolatio mortis was that life should be seen as a loan from nature, or God, so that death was merely the appropriate repayment of that debt. ‘W. S.’ presents William Peter’s death in these consoling terms: (*)
Which payed to heaven the debt that it did owe (FE, )
Ford was well acquainted with this idea, as Gilles Monsarrat has shown (). The identical phrasing occurs in The Broken Heart, when Calantha makes the consoling remark that those that are dead, Are dead; had they not now dy’d, of necessity They must have paid the debt they ow’d to nature One time or other. (..–)
This sentence is echoed verbatim in Love’s Sacrifice (..–) and The Queen (.., ..–). In The Golden Meane Ford refers to ‘the sureness of paying a debt (which cannot be excused) to death’ (NDW, p. ). In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ repeats the point that he had made in the dedication, affirming that the poem is a ‘last act of friendship’, and that
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Although I could not learne (whiles yet thou wert) (*) To speake the language of a servile breath: My truth stole from my toung into my hart (–)
an affirmation of sincerity and good will that he repeats a few lines later, having been Not hir’d, as heaven can witnesse in my soule . . . Nor servile to be lik’t; free from controule (–)
In the dedication to Fames Memoriall Ford described himself as one of ‘those, whom neither Mercenary hopes or servile flattery, have induced to speake but with the Priviledge of troth’ (NDW, p. ), an affirmation also repeated in the body of the poem: Let merit take his due, unfeed I write, Compel’d by instance of apparent right (–)
‘W. S.’ and Peter shared this attribute with Christ, whose tongue for gaine was never hyr’d to lye, Or tu’nd to sweare, or flatter, curse, or fawne
(CBS, –)
Ford’s heroes are so outstanding that they can be used as a pattern or model for others to emulate. Mountjoy’s ‘pearlesse merite’, which ‘could not brooke / To have his equall’ (FM, –), made him A Chronicle of lasting memory, A president of matchlesse souldery (FM, –)
As F. M. Burelbach pointed out, ‘certain patterns of expression recur throughout [Ford’s] works, from first to last. One of these, perhaps reflecting his legal training, is his frequent use of the noun precedent; this word appears more than twenty times in his works and is almost a hallmark of his writing’ (Burelbach , p. ) – invariably with the spelling ‘president’. So Ford praises Mountjoy again in these terms: He whom we treat of was a president, Both for the valiant and judicious (FM, –)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
Recognition of Mountjoy’s exemplary status makes Ford conscious of his responsibility as Mountjoy’s eulogist: But oˆ give leave ere I forbeare my pen, Thy worth in what I may t’exemplifie, And set thee as a president to men, The due of thy desert to amplifie. . . . ( –)
Similarly the anonymous eulogist of William Peter declares the same intent, in the same terms, and using the same rhyme, ‘pen’/‘men’: I tooke this taske upon me, To register with mine unhappy Pen, Such duties as it owes to thy desert; (*) And set thee as a President to Men (FE, –)
For Foster this is simply a plagiarism; to me it rather shows the same mind going through its habitual processes, using its habitual words. Ford and the anonymous eulogist of William Peter share a double aim: on the one hand, accuracy in representing their subject; on the other, a desire to provide an improving spectacle for their readers. ‘W. S.’ describes his wish to (*)
Limne thee to the world but as thou wert. (FE, )
The same aims, and the same words, recur in Christes Bloodie Sweat, where Ford celebrates Christ as a ‘Rare president of value . . . ’ (), and at the end of the poem, where he records Christ’s ‘whyspering voyce’ (), which now approves his work: For since thou hast with such modest care, (Although thy verse doe want the grace of words) Limn’d out my wounds, and told them as they are (CBS, –)
In The Spanish Gypsy Ford also used this rather unusual word ‘limn’ in connection with depicting someone truthfully: What’s Beauty but a perfect white and red? Both here well mixt, limne truth so beautifull . . . (..–)
Of Mountjoy Ford tells us that
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Such private exercise which limn’d the way To publique reputation was his scope (FM, –)
In A Line of Life Ford writes that, for a public man, ‘a very faire and large Line is limned out . . . that leades to a vertuous Name’ (NDW, p. ). In all these instances ‘limn’ is connected with truth and virtue. The fundamental identity of linguistic resources in the Funerall Elegye and Ford’s whole œuvre is becoming ever more clear. ‘W. S.’, loyal to his deceased friend, has written the Elegye to keep (*) My constant and irrefragable vow (FE, )
In Honor Triumphant Ford argues that a ‘Truly loving knights libertie ought to be inchained, to the disposure of his ladie: her will must be to him a law, and that law, not penall, but irrefragable’ (NDW, p. ). The word ‘irrefragable’ does not occur in Shakespeare. As we read the Funerall Elegye in parallel with Ford’s poems we find other convergences. Both ‘W. S.’ and Ford use the modesty topos, apologizing for their ‘unhappy’ (FE ) or ‘unable’ (CBS ) pen. Ford’s pen makes Christ, no less, excuse the poet for having Limn’d out my wounds, and told them as they are, So lively as thy simple skill affords: Ile take thy meaning in the better part. (CBS, –)
– that is, make the best out of it. So Peter’s eulogist, avowing that he has no ‘merit strong enough’, and that the deceased would have had a ‘well-abled quill’ to sing his own obsequies, offers up to him (*)
The value of my tallent . . . Though’t be not as I would, tis as I can: “In minds from whence endeavor doth proceed, “A ready will is taken for the deed. (FE, –)
As I showed in chapter , ‘W. S.’ was here echoing a passage from Maccabees, the narrator’s apology that ‘if I have spoken slenderly and barely, it is that I could’. In Fames Memoriall Ford detaches himself from anyone Who by preconion’s virtue doth impose A taske upon our quill, not what we would, Doe we inferr but what in right we should (–)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In slightly differing ways, then, both poets claim literal accuracy for themselves, and excuse the deficiencies of their verse on the grounds that they have laboured honestly in a worthy cause. As we saw in chapter , one of the many linguistic habits that ‘W. S.’ shared with Ford is the elliptical use of the auxiliary can, in which the main verb is supplied from the context. Another instance of this habit, remarkably close to the Elegye’s ‘Though’t be not as I would, tis as I can’, occurs in a scene that Ford contributed to The Witch of Edmonton, in the final speech by Old Carter: ‘So let’s every man home to Edmonton with heavy hearts, yet as merry as we can, though not as we would’ (..–). One distinctive feature of the Funerall Elegye is the deliberate gesture with which the poet dedicates his composition to William Peter’s memory. At the first, premature conclusion ‘W. S.’ declares: (*)
Heere then I offer up to Memory, The value of my tallent ( precious man) ( –)
In the dedication of Fames Memoriall Ford declares that ‘as much in the reache of my weake talent lay (unusuall to this stile) I have endevored to register his memory’ (NDW, p. ). Towards the end of Christes Bloodie Sweat (another premature conclusion, as it turns out, the poem having over lines to run) Ford dramatically declares: Take heere the tribute of my mourning heart . . . Fit earnest of my death-desiring smart . . . (–)
Similar decisive-sounding handing-over gestures recur in Ford’s plays. At the d´enouement of Love’s Sacrifice the Duke, deceived into believing that his wife has been unfaithful to him, kills her, only to discover that he has been duped. In his anguish he tries to kill himself: ‘Chast, chast, and kild by me; to her / I offer up this remnant of my – ’ – ‘life’, he may have intended to say, as he ‘offers to stabbe himselfe, and is stayed’ (..–, stage-direction). An elaborate funeral procession soon follows, the Duke once more using the phrase ‘offer up’ to express his remorse at Biancha’s tomb: Behold, I offer up the sacrifice Of bleeding teares, shed from a faithfull spring; Roaring oblations of a mourning heart. To thee, offended spirit, I confesse . . . (.. –)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Wanting to see Biancha once more, ‘untimely’ dead – William Peter was ‘untimely lost’ (FE, ) – the Duke orders his attendants to ‘set ope the Tombe, that I may take / My last farewell, and bury griefes with her’ (LS, ..–). This echoes the gesture of ‘W. S.’ to William Peter: (*)
Yet ere I take my longest last farewell, From thee, faire marke of sorrow (FE, –)
which is in turn echoed by the traitor Stanley, being led away to death: ‘Once more / To all a long farewell’ (PW, ..–). These gestures of farewell, made in the middle of the Elegye, lend a sense of anticlimax to much of what follows. The plays use them more successfully. When ‘W. S.’ begins the second part of his poem, ‘ere I take my longest last farewell, / From thee’, he resolves to (*) frame / Some ampler work of thanke
(FE, –)
The singular ‘thanke’ is indeed unusual (if it is not a printer’s error), but the whole phrase occurs twice in Ford’s poems. In Fames Memoriall Ford describes how British posterity will regard Mountjoy’s exploits in Ireland as A worke of thankes in strengthening the force Of such an intire Empire now secure (–)
And in his commendatory poem to Barnabe Barnes’s Foure Bookes of Offices (), Ford wishes . . . solace to thy labours to impart: A worke of thankes, out-living terme of fate (NDW, p. )
In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ moralized (*) “So in his mischiefes is the world accurst, “It picks out matter to informe the worst. (–)
In the same moralizing tones, and using the same rhyme, Ford wrote in Christes Bloodie Sweat: For so is prone mortalyty accurst, As still it strives to plot and woorke the woorst. (–)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
An adverb of which ‘W. S.’ was fond, since he used it twice in the Funerall Elegye, was ‘ignorantly’: (*) Makes them most ignorantly exercise ()
Although perhaps I ignorantly range ()
It occurs twice in Ford’s plays, but never in Shakespeare: I cannot barke impudently, and ignorantly enough (FCN, ..–) worthy son, That (questionlesse) has ignorantly offended (LC, ..–)
As we have seen, the Elegye, like several works by Ford, used the metaphor of a guest at an inn to describe the relation between the soul and the body. That contrast is often referred to, in common parlance, in terms of an outer and an inner space. ‘W. S.’ uses the dichotomy to describe how people all too often give in to their passions, (*)
Whereby the candle, and the bodies light Darken’s the inward eye-sight of the mind ( –)
In The Golden Meane, similarly, Ford argues that men must learn to adapt to misfortune: ‘Hereunto not the outward actions of the bodie, but the inward temper of the minde must be framed, since the first are but handmaids to the latter’ (p. ). In Love’s Sacrifice the unscrupulous lecher Ferentes is allowed a hypocritical sententia, declaring that ‘time, like a turne-coat, may order and disorder the outward fashions of our bodies, but shall never inforce a change on the constancy of my minde’ (..–). Both ‘W. S.’ and Ford, my previous discussion showed, used figures of rhetoric like plok´e, repeating a word for emphasis. A related effect can be achieved by alliteration, repeating the initial sound, together with assonance, as in these instances emphasizing what phoneticians call ‘a voiceless plosive’ [k]. In Fames Memoriall Ford expresses the wish that, like Julius Caesar, Mountjoy had written Whiles as he liv’d his owne actes commendation, In fluent Commentaryes us’d to cote Eche hazards conquest by a trew probation (–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Peter’s elegist also uses alliteration on the [k] sound, including the polysyllabic word ‘commentaries’, to denounce ignorant slanderers: (*)
Hence conster they with corrupt Commentaries, Proceeding from a nature as corrupt
(FE, –)
and to describe My countries thanklesse misconstruction; cast Upon my name and credit (–)
In A Line of Life Ford hunts the same sound, urging the good man who is considering a course of action to hold ‘A consultation . . . for determining of the commoditie, conveniencie and commendation of such actions . . . ’(NDW, pp. –). Throughout this memorial to Peter, ‘W. S.’ indulges at length his indignation over human vice, especially foul report, such as those ‘corrupt Commentaries’ producing (*)
The text of malice; which so often varies, As ’tis by seeming reason under-propt. (FE, –)
That unusual verb recurs in Christes Bloodie Sweat, meditating on the ‘ransom’ of the Redeemer’s blood: Deare ransome, dearer bloud, most dearest droppes, Whose price is life, which life, death underproppes. Death underpropp’s that life which Frailty lost (–)
That verb recurs in Ford’s moral essays, ‘propt up in honours’ (GM, p. ), and ‘to proppe their greatnesse’ (LL, p. ). In all these instances the verb is coupled with an abstract noun: ‘reason’, ‘death’, ‘honours’, and ‘greatnesse’. Ford’s denunciations of vice depend on several all-purpose pejorative terms, such as ‘spleen’, ‘malice’, ‘folly’, and ‘opinion’. One of these is ‘sensual’, which ‘W. S.’ regards as a term of great abuse, praising his hero for not becoming a (*)
servant to the base, And sensuall aptnesse of dis-union’d vices: To purchase commendation by disgrace, Whereto the world and heate of sinne intices. (FE, –)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
That passage is a good example of Ford’s tendency to pile up negative abstractions, obscuring any reliable decoding of what he actually means. The word is used in an equally tautologous manner in Honor Triumphant, where Ford denounces ‘sensuall lust’ (NDW, p. ), and even more vaguely in Fames Memoriall, where Ford complains that men who have reached eminence from humble origins boast of their success, and do ‘not esteeme desert but sensuall vaunts, / Of parasites and fawning sycophaunts’ ( –). – How on earth, the reader wonders, does the poet get from ‘ambition’ to ‘sensuall’ in the same sentence, and what are ‘sensuall vaunts’? A comparable piling-up of disapproving moral terms occurs in the poem’s conclusion, consoling us with the claim that Mountjoy was more fitte for heaven than to survive Amongst the chaffe of this unseason’d age, Where new fantasticke joyes doe seek to thrive By following sensuall toyes of follyes rage, Making the glosse of vice true vertues badge.
(FM, –)
In all such passages of indignant moralizing Ford’s language becomes clotted, obscure. But the consistency of moral attitude and verbal expression can be seen in some of Ford’s other uses of the word ‘sensual’. (It may seem to us a rather common word, but Shakespeare only used it four times.) In his long religious poem Christ is said to have ‘sweated blood’ for mankind, including those who so profane By courses indirect and lawes un-even, Of will and sensuall lust, the law . . .
(CBS, –)
This is a similar overkill (‘will and sensual lust’ repeats the same idea three times) to that in the Funerall Elegye, where Peter refused ‘to be made servant to the base, / And sensuall aptnesse of dis-union’d vices’ (–), another line of moral indignation leading to obscurity. In Ford’s plays, more appropriately perhaps, ‘sensual’ recurs as an all-purpose term of disapproval: looke perjurd man on her Whom thou and thy distracted lust have wrong’d, Thy sensuall rage of blood . . . thy unsated change . . .
(TPW, ..–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ Blush sensuall follies, Which are not guarded with thoughts chastly pure.
(LM, ..–)
In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ writes that William Peter (*)
ever chose The ready way to commendation (–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford describes how the Egyptians ‘through the Red Sea tooke the readie way’ (). Shakespeare never uses this expression. In the Elegye Peter is praised for (*)
shunning all invitements strang ()
In A Line of Life Ford includes among the temptations from virtue ‘the invitement of presented honors’ (p. ). Shakespeare does not use this word. Among the many traditional ideas called on in the Funerall Elegye is that of the human body as a ‘commonwealth’ or microcosm of the universe. Where other men, indulging
(*)
the free commission of their ill, Were even as boundlesse as their prompt desires: Only like Lords, like subjects to their will, Which their fond dotage ever-more admires. Hee was not so; but in a serious awe, Ruling the little ordered common-wealth, Of his owne selfe (–)
This metaphor is used again in The Golden Meane, at greater length, but with exactly the same contrast between the order resulting from selfcontrol and the chaos that follows from being ruled by one’s own ‘will’ and ‘desires’: ‘For as every man is a little Common-wealth in himselfe, well ordered, if his actions and intents be ordered by a disposition of doing and meaning well: so is every one where libertie of pleasing his owne indiscretion overmaistereth him, a Common-wealth turned upside down, rude, and contemptible’ (p. ). An epithet which occurs in the Funerall Elegye, but not in Shakespeare, is ‘pleasurable’, used to describe William Peter enjoying the fruits of law-abiding, namely
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
(*) sweet content / And pleasurable rest (–)
It recurs in Ford’s The Fancies, Chaste and Noble: ‘but to women, / How ever pleasurable, no way cunning’ (..–). The success with which William Peter practised constantia is described in specifically Stoic terms: (*)
His observation and discreet discerning, Had taught him in both fortunes to be free (FE, –)
In his Neo-Stoic treatise, The Golden Meane, Ford described how the wise man squares ‘his resolution in resolved steadinesse to both fortunes’ (NDW, p. ). The virtue of William Peter was such that (*)
hee would no occasion over-passe, Which might make knowne his unaffected care
(FE, –)
The word ‘over-passe’ occurs once only in the Chadwyck-Healey corpus of English Verse Drama, in Ford’s Perkin Warbeck: ‘Great Sir, this fit I over-passe in silence’ (PW, ..). It is also found in Christes Bloodie Sweat: ‘thus must we over passe / The wars of frayltie, lusts sacietie’ (–). ‘W. S.’ describes the deceased as (*)
A Rock of Frendship (FE, )
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Christ suffers on ‘A rocke of torment’ (). William Peter’s good qualities, so often described in the formula ‘he practised virtue +x, not vice −x’, also included the – by inversion awkwardly expressed – characteristic that (*) Though in the complementall phrase of words, He never was addicted to the vaine Of boast . . .
(FE, –)
In his poem to Henry Cockeram, printed with that author’s English Dictionarie: or, An Interpreter of hard English Words (), Ford advised readers that they would no longer need to travel abroad ‘to learne new fashions / Of complementall phrases, smooth temptations / To glorious beggary’ (NDW, p. ). Ford twice uses the word ‘complementall’ in his plays, once in a stage direction to Love’s Sacrifice, where characters make ‘complementall
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
offers of courtship’ (s. d. following ..), once in The Lover’s Melancholy, where the gulled Cucolus ‘is laught at / Most complementally’ (..–). Shakespeare never used the word ‘complemental’. ‘W. S.’, like Ford, was prone to draw attention to the moral lesson being displayed with the verbal formula ‘Lo’ or ‘look here’. Already in Fames Memoriall we find Ford appealing for our attention as he celebrates Mountjoy’s virtues: Lo heere the pith of valour moulded fast . . . Lo here the monuments which ever last . . . (–)
In the Funerall Elegye the poet exclaims: (*)
Loe heere a lesson by experience taught . . . ()
while in Christes Bloodie Sweat we are invited: ‘Loe heere the view of soules condemn’d to hell’ (). Ford was fond of compound epithets, coining many for the first time. Peter’s eulogist describes how the saints in heaven (*)
tasted of the sower-bitter scourge, Of torture and affliction, ere they gained, Those blessings which their sufferance did urge
(FE, –)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat that unique compound recurs, as Ford describes how human evil Drew comfort from the sower-bitter Gall Of his afflictions, therein to set free [Those] soules from bondage . . . (–)
The simple epithet ‘sowre’ also occurs in that poem, in the phrase ‘sowre passion’ (). Roger Gross added the important observation that ‘sour’ in Ford is disyllabic, whereas in Shakespeare, out of thirty-six instances, it is monosyllabic all but once. Other Ford scholars have noted his fondness for disyllabic stress, as on ‘girl’ and ‘pearl’: he probably retained something of his Devonshire accent. In the Funerall Elegye () ‘W. S.’ looks back, as so often, to sum up a sequence of argument: (*)
Such, and of such condition, may devise, Which way to wound (–)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In The Golden Meane (, ), Ford begins a sentence with exactly the same sequence of words: ‘Such and of such conditions were . . . ’ (NDW, p. ). These are neither concidences, nor instances of imitation, but phrases derived from a single (limited) linguistic stock. Attacking Peter’s enemies once more, ‘W. S.’ accuses them of devising (*) Which way to wound with defamations spirit, . . . His taintlesse goodnesse, his desertfull merit. (FE, –)
Ford used the identical rhymes several times in Fames Memoriall, first in an apostrophe to Mountjoy, urging him to overtake ( Thy selfe shalt priviledge thy selfe by merit) Thy soules-united Essex for whose sake, Thou didst advance thy love, which did inherit The deere reversion of his elate spirit (–)
Ford repeated that triple rhyme in praising Mountjoy’s bravery in the ‘wars of Belgia’ in –, where he displayed heroique spirit, Incomparable height which did excell, The common height of common stomacks merit, He lineally did thirst of worth inherit (–)
Ford used the triple rhyme, once again, for another of his fulsome celebrations of Mountjoy’s Penelope, who shared with him a noble contract of undoubted merit . . . A creature of a more than female spirit, Concord of musick did thy soule inherit . . . (–)
Ford contented himself with the basic rhyme ‘spirit’/‘merit’ in several laudations of Mountjoy: Noble he was, witnesse his elate spirit . . . Noble he was, witnesse his peerlesse merite . . . (–)
The two terms did duty again in a sententious couplet commenting on Mountjoy’s virtue:
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ “True noblenes with breth sucks noble spirits “When bastard broods conceit but bastard merits (–)
and they made another appearance to conclude a series of phrases describing the effect of death (a passage which shows once more Ford’s obsession with virtue and reputation): A relique consecrated to defame . . . A black oblivionizing of worths name: A razer out of memory, the merit Of many noble peers and peerlesse spirit. (–)
Ford reused the rhyme in Christes Bloodie Sweat, describing how Christ foresaw that his deeds would be traduced by the Jews: All those the Lord foresaw, and gron’d in Spirit . . . That so his precious passion, blameless merit, Should be abus’d . . . (–)
The Prologue to The Sun’s Darling instructs us that Thus Man as Clay descends, Ascends in spirit; Dust, goes to dust, The soule unto It’s Merit.
These three words, ‘spirit’, ‘merit’, and ‘inherit’, must have chimed in Ford’s aural memory, so to speak, for two of them appear in close contiguity, but this time not rhyming, in a scene he contributed to The Fair Maid of the Inn, where Cesario argues that while inherited nobility Shares chiefly that our Ancestors desir’d What we inherit . . . that man whose actions Purchase a reall merit to himself . . . Creates his own advancement. (..–)
Among William Peter’s many virtues ‘W. S.’ includes (*) His taintlesse goodnesse (FE, )
The word ‘taintless’, never used by Shakespeare, is applied in Fames Memoriall to celebrate Mountjoy, who improved on all the natural gifts he received, and was
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
A penitentiall contrite votary, To sanctimonious taintlesse purity. (–)
(Ford used the word ‘sanctimonious’ here in its older, non-pejorative sense, ‘possessing sanctity, holy in character’.) William Peter was also noted for (*) his desertfull merit (FE, )
The word ‘desertfull’, never used by Shakespeare, occurs at least seven times in Ford’s plays, always in connection with masculine virtue. In The Lover’s Melancholy, Menaphon, cast in the same mould as William Peter, is described as in qualities desertfull, grac’t With Youth, Experience; every happy gift That can by nature, or by Education Improve a Gentleman. (..–)
In The Broken Heart Prophilus is said to be in ‘every way desertfull’ (..), while in The Fancies, Chaste and Noble Troylo Savelli introduces Livio as ‘a gentleman / Desertfull of your knowledge’ (..–). In The Lady’s Trial we learn that Auria ‘shewes himselfe desertfull of his happiness’ (..). In The Laws of Candy a Senator acknowledges that however much the state thanks its soldiers, ‘The due reward of your desertfull glories / Must to posterity remain’ (..), while Fernando tells Annophill how ‘much I tender / Your sons desertfull vertues’ (..). In Perkin Warbeck the pretender, being led to execution, gives his wife a parting kiss and wishes that whoever shall unkisse This sacred print next, may he prove more thriftie In this worlds just applause, not more desertfull (..–)
In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ made one of several gloomy references to (*)
The Grave, that in his ever empty wombe, For ever closes up the unrespected (–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford described ‘The ever empty swallow of the grave’ (). Shakespeare never used the phrase ‘ever empty’.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In another passage of jejune moralizing, ‘W. S.’ contrasts the state of ‘honour, glory, and command’, an elevated state, yet lacking proper values, with the peaceful existence of a simple man, satisfied with few things, who (*) Feeds on the bread of rest (FE, )
As I suggested above, this phrase is modelled on many biblical expressions, such as those used in Christes Bloodie Sweat, with the exact biblical references given in the marginal notes: ‘The bread of honest gayne’ (), ‘bread . . . of Affliction’ (), ‘bread of teares’ (), ‘Bread of adversitie, and bread of woe’ (). This strand of imagery, which runs parallel with another derived from God’s punishment of Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread’ (Gen. :; cf. CBS, –) culminates, appropriately enough, in a reference to the eucharist. Christ ‘doth hourely bleed / Our wofull soules with bread of life to feed’ ( –). In the second part of the Elegye ‘W. S.’ moralized on many points at some length, including this laborious analogy (from falconry), between the man enjoying ‘popular applause and power’s commission’ and the pigeon whose eyes have been stitched up to make it climb higher: (*)
But one in honour’s like a seel`ed Dove, Whose inward eyes are dim’d with dignity; Do’s thinke most safety doth remaine above, And seekes to be secure, by mounting high: “Whence when he fals, who did ere while aspire, “Fal’s deeper downe, for that he climed higher. ( –)
In The Broken Heart, Ithocles enters and delivers himself of a soliloquy defining ambition which uses the identical analogy: Ambition? ’tis of vipers breede, it knawes A passage through the wombe that gave it motion. Ambition? like a seel`ed Dove, mounts upward Higher and higher still to pearch on clouds, But tumbles headlong downe with heavier ruine.
As Ithocles comments on his own speech, . . . Morality appli’d To timely practice, keepes the soule in tune, At whose sweet musicke all our actions dance
(BH, .. –, –)
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ attacks (*)
The prone[ne]sse of this age, to error ()
In A Line of Life Ford laments ‘the pronenesse and proclivitie of our frailtie’ (NDW, p. ), while in The Broken Heart Orgilus wonders If a pronenesse, Or custom in my nature, from my cradle, Had beene inclin’d to fierce and eager bloodshed. (..–)
Shakespeare never uses this word. Fames Memoriall is echoed twice in the Elegye in passages praising friendship and marriage. Mountjoy, we are told, deserves to be remembered for his loyal and constant friendship, as by Sir William Godolphin, whom Ford directly addresses: So mayst thou knightly youth who wert his friend, Companion to his chamber and his bed, His lov’s much largesse did to thee extend . . . Ah do not him forget who honourd thee With perfect rites of mutuall amitie. (FM, –)
This passage echoes our anonymous poet’s allusion to William Peter’s wife, she who those nine of yeares (*) Liv’d fellow to his counsailes, and his bed;
who is described as now bereft of The chaste imbracements of conjugall love, Who in a mutuall harmony consent (FE, –)
It also echoes his praise of the deceased’s outstanding quality, his ‘unaffected care’ () for his friends: (*)
. . . and he dischargd the same, In every act of perfect amitye (–)
Similar patterns of language recur in Ford’s plays: in Love’s Sacrifice Biancha recalls how her husband ‘took me to his bed and bosome’ (..),
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
and after the play’s tragic ending one character chooses chastity: ‘I here dismisse / The mutuall comforts of our marriage-bed ’ (..–). That strange phrase describing the length of time that Margaret (n´ee Brewton) had been married to William Peter – (*) she who those nine of yeares
uses the word of in an unShakespearian way (Wells , p. ). As I have observed, the strangeness of the expression may be due to the way the numeral ‘nine’ is treated as if it were a noun, in another partitive genitive formula, ‘X of Y’. In several passages in Ford’s plays we meet again this superfluous of in combination with numbers (also used for metrical reasons, to form the weakly stressed syllable in an iambic foot): To rob me of a glory which I fought for A halfe of hundred years (LC, ..–)
two hundred fiftie thousand Of English subjects (PW, ..–)
In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford describes how, ‘whiles in a ravish’t spirit, / Faire meditations summoned to appeare’ (–), he heard a voice, as if from God, telling him to abandon his ‘thriftlesse rimes (sweete baytes to poyson Youth)’: Now I impose new taskes uppon thy Pen, To shew my sorrowes to the eyes of Men. Set then the tenour of thy dolefull song, To the deepe accentes of my bloudy sweate . . . (–)
Ford echoed the phrase in propria persona: ‘And here . . . I close the musicke of my weeping song’ (–). Near the end of his elegy ‘W. S.’ again addresses his poem to Peter: (*) Now run’s the method of this dolefull song, In accents breefe to thee, O thou deceast!
(FE, –)
The parallel expressions in Christes Bloodie Sweat are part and parcel of the whole poem, whereas in the Funerall Elegye they seem hastily stuck in, and rather awkwardly joined to the references to Peter. In Christes Bloodie Sweat it is entirely appropriate to talk of the ‘deepe accents’ of His suffering; to discuss Peter ‘In accents breefe’ seems an instance of a phrase being
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
taken over by association with ‘dolefull song’, and having the epithet varied, but awkwardly. Earlier I drew attention to a similarly awkward sequence referring to Peter, ‘the subject of the verse / (Unhappy matter of a mourning stile)’ (–), a periphrasis only exceeded in banality by this piece of padding, the pleonastic address ‘O thou deceast! ’. Other ‘doleful songs’ occur in Ford’s plays. One of the tragic resolutions of The Broken Heart is the suicide of Penthea, who asked for music ‘to tune a farewell / To life and griefes’. Philema records: ‘I wept the funerall song’ (..–). And in The Lover’s Melancholy Menaphon records the death of a song-bird, ‘Musick’s first Martyr’, defeated in a singing-contest: It was the quaintest sadnesse, To see the Conqueror upon her Hearse, To weepe a funerall Elegy of teares. (..)
Among the several rare words found in the Funerall Elegye but not in Shakespeare is ‘partage’, literally meaning ‘a part, portion, share, lot’, and by extension ‘the act of dividing’. ‘W. S.’ uses it to express his regret that he cannot recall William Peter from the dead; if he could, (*)
Undoubtedly thou shouldst have partage now, Of life with mee; and heaven bee counted just (FE, –)
In The Golden Meane Ford again uses this rare word to make the same link between sharing and justice, complaining that ‘now-a-dayes . . . [men] will not acknowledge desert, to have equalitie and partage with Authoritie’ (p. ). F. L. Lucas was the first to identify this rare word as characteristic of Ford, commenting on one of Ford’s scenes in the collaborative play The Fair Maid of the Inn, where Mariana urges Baptista ‘to grant a partage / Of this estate to her who ownes it all’ (.. –). Lucas cited two parallels for this rare word ‘partage’ in Perkin Warbeck: ‘his providence, in hope / Of partage in the use on’t’ (..), and ‘that I had mist / Some partage in these tryalls’ (..). But he was evidently unaware just how rare this word is, for according to the Chadwyck-Healey English Verse Drama database, the word only occurs four times in Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Caroline drama, each time in a play by Ford. Three instances we have seen: the fourth is from ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: I know my brother in the love he beares me Will not denye me partage in his sadnesse (..)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
The first instance cited here refers literally to inheritance, and the division of property, but in the remaining instances, as T. A. Wood pointed out, Ford’s use ‘is clearly metaphorical’ (Wood , p. ). That this word, cited by Wood as another example of Ford’s distinctive vocabulary, should recur in the Funerall Elegye, places that work still more firmly in his canon. A striking link between the Elegye and Ford’s Christes Bloodie Sweat occurs in sequences marking the poet’s awareness that he has nearly finished his poem. First, Ford: And here, my God, the glorious Sonne of peace, I close the musicke of my weeping song . . . (CBS, –)
And now, my God, if I discharged have, This imposition of thine heavenly taske, Some token of thy being pleas’d I crave, Some certaine knowledge of thy will I aske. (–)
Secondly, ‘W. S.’, taking leave of his subject with a very similar gesture: (*)
And now if I have level’d mine account, And reckon’d up in a true measured score, Those perfect graces which were ever wont To wait on thee alive, I aske no more. (FE, –)
In the religious poem the address to God is part and parcel of the poem’s structure, as we saw from the opening situation of the poet hearing a voice from God, whom he now asks to be discharged of his task. In the secular elegy the same idea comes in and goes out, rather suddenly. The Ford passages in the signed poem have their own independent rationale. In the Elegye ‘W. S.’ resolves that he will in future (*)
Immure those imputations I sustaine ()
In Fames Memoriall Ford rejects the tongues of malice which cannot ‘shadow imputations of unrests’ (), and denounces their ‘imputation black as hell’ (). In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford praises anyone brave enough to defend a friend from malice, ‘Clearing the imputation with excuse’ (), and in A Line of Life Ford itemizes the ‘alledged imputations’ made of Socrates’ vices (p. ).
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
In his second, and even more obscure complaint about the setback experienced in his ‘days of youth’ (–), ‘W. S.’ refers to the unfortunate person suffering from ‘dimme misfortune’, who (*)
ha’s none other prop, / Whereon to leane and rest . . . / [ but] Hope
(FE, –)
The phrase ‘none other’, found nowhere in Shakespeare’s work, occurs several times in Ford. In The Golden Meane life is described as ‘none other but a journey to death’, and behaviour is said to be ‘none other . . . with some’ people (NDW, pp. , ; also ‘none otherwise’, p. ). In A Line of Life a man is ‘knowne by none other note’ (p. ), and a good man’s ambition ‘climbes to none other cure than to heale the wounded’ (p. ). In The Broken Heart Bassanes tells Penthea that ‘every wondering eye / Shall crave none other brightnesse but thy presence’ (..–), and in another play a character admits, ‘My mistresses / They are. I have none other’ (FCN, ..–). My earlier discussion of rhetoric established a fundamental similarity between the use of rhetorical figures made by Ford in his poems and by ‘W. S.’ in the Elegye, without amounting to a proof of Ford’s authorship of that poem. One final instance of rhetoric that does, however, provide such a proof concerns a special form of polyptoton used by both Ford and Peter’s eulogist, where the words chosen for repetition and variation are ‘life’, ‘death’, and the related forms ‘die’, ‘live’, sometimes combined with ‘love’ in its variant forms. In Fames Memoriall Ford showed himself to be especially fond of this word-play, starting with his opening appeal to find a poet capable of doing justice to Mountjoy, now elevated to epic status, able to mourn Our deare Achilles losse, of life depriv’d, Who living, life in dangers death did tosse. (FM, –)
In Mountjoy’s life, Ford tells us, ‘Thus loving all he liv’d belov’d of all ’ (), so it is only appropriate that in the nine separate ‘Epitaphs’ that he writes for Mountjoy, matching those for the Nine Worthies, he should ring the changes on this word-play: In this his life and death was countervaild, He justly liv’d belov’d, he dy’d bewaild
(–)
Here lies he dead who living liv’d in Fame Consumd in body, fresh reviv’d in name
(–)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ He in his name will live renewd againe. And so though death his life deprive, His life in death will new revive
(–)
Who lives even after life, now being dead
()
Renowned in his life, blest in his end
()
In the Funerall Elegye ‘W. S.’ uses the same word-play, first to affirm his belief that those who, like William Peter, have practised virtue will be remembered for ever, whereas the grave of oblivion (*)
For ever closes up the unrespected, Who when they dye, dye all
(FE, –)
– that is, die for ever after, lacking Christ’s redemption. He reverts to it to affirm that Peter will reap the reward of all virtuous people: His flourishing and faire long-liv’d deserts, Above fates reach, his singlenesse was such. So that he dyes but once, but doubly lives, Once in his proper selfe, then in his name (–)
‘W. S.’ uses polyptoton again for his futile wish that he could bring Peter back to life, so that ‘heaven’ might bee counted just: If to a supplicating soule, it would Give life a new, by giving life againe Where life is mist (–)
And ‘W. S.’ reverts to the figure once more in the concluding couplet of the Elegye for William Peter, Who herein hast for ever happy prov’d, In life thou liv’dst, in death thou dyed’st belov’d. (–)
That the identical mind and hand wrote Fames Memoriall and the Funerall Elegye should now be indisputable. But further instances of this polyptotic word-play on ‘life’ and ‘death’ can be cited from other poems by Ford, from his prose works, and even his plays. In his tribute to ‘the
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
best of English Poets, Ben: Jonson, Deceased’ (), Ford reassured readers that Hee (in his truth of Art, and that in him) Lives yet, and will, whiles letters can be read. The losse is ours; now hope of life is dead. Great men, and worthy of Report, must fall Into their earth, and sleeping there sleepe all. (NDW, p. )
This curious syntactical formula, ‘verb + verb + all’ (or ‘. . . + ever’) is found in the Funerall Elegye and in four other works by Ford. In Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford describes the brief existence of those people who simply live for pleasure, ‘covet age, which being come is hated: / Whose end is death’, for in any case ‘time . . . brings them to the grave’ ( –): And here they die, and dying once die all, Die al as they unworthily have liv’d, No part of them survives, but feeles the thral Of life in death, and death of life depriv’d: Thus then the promise of al the worlds desire, Beares life to die, then dies to life intire.
(CBS, –)
That is exactly the same idea, and in the same words, as in the affirmation by William Peter’s eulogist that The Grave . . . in his ever empty wombe, For ever closes up the unrespected, Who when they dye, dye all . . .
(FE, –)
Whereas the ‘due deserts’ of that good man are summed up in this sentence, ‘Hee dy’de in life, yet in his death hee lives’ (). Two other instances of this word-play occur in Christes Bloodie Sweat, a single line, ‘And ever as I liv’d, I died alive’ (), and a longer sequence describing Christ’s twofold agony: That as the first before his death diminisht Deathe of the soule, this in his death that finisht. He di’d indeed not as an actor dies To die to day, and live againe to morrow (–)
In The Spanish Gypsy the virtuous Clara, who has been raped, reflects that, despite her lifelong abhorrence for
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’ immodest folly; Yet have I fallen, thoughts with disgraces strive, And thus I live, and thus I die alive. (..–)
In Ford contributed a funeral elegy to the eighth edition of Overbury’s character-book, A Wife, entitled ‘A Memoriall, Offered to that man of virtue, Sir Thomas Overburie’ (NDW, p. ). This twenty-eight line poem begins with another reworking of the idea that death cannot extinguish a virtuous man’s fame: Once dead and twice alive; Death could not frame A death, whose sting could kil him in his fame. He might have liv’d, had not the life, which gave Life to his life, betraid him to his grave. ( –)
Still scattering tautology, Ford ends this brief tribute to Overbury with another antithesis: Sleep in thy Peace: thus happier hast thou prov’d, Thou mightst have dy’de more knowne, not more belov’d. (–)
This obvious echo of the Funerall Elegye, (*)
In life thou liv’dst, in death thou dyed’st belov’d ()
can now be seen not as a borrowing, but as a self-reminiscence. Ford’s fondness for this antithetical coupling of life and death, given more point by polyptoton, displayed itself again in A Line of Life (), where, as in the Elegye but at greater length, Ford draws exactly the same contrast between ‘to live, and to live well’: All men covet the former, as if it were the totall and sovereigne felicitie of a humane condition: And some few pursue the latter, because it gives an eternity to their blessednesse. The difference between those two is, Life desired for the only benefit of living, feares to dye; for such men that so live, when they dye, both dye finally and dye all: But a good Life aymes at another mark; for such men as indeavour to live well, live with an expectation of death, and when they dye, dye to live, and live for ever. (NDW, p. )
The fundamental continuity of thought and style across Ford’s writings – and between them and the Funerall Elegye – should now be evident. It is
The ‘Funerall Elegye’ in its Fordian context
confirmed by a single passage in Ford’s play The Queen, where Velasco tells Salassa to learn, bad woman, what it is, how foul, By gaining of a life, to lose a soul. The price of one soul doth exceed as far A life here, as the sun in light a star. Here though we live some threescore years, or more, Yet we must dye at last, and quit the score We ow to nature. But the soul once dying, Dyes ever, ever . . . . (..–)
I stop at this point, not because I think that I have discovered every significant parallel between the Elegye and Ford’s authentic work – Gilles Monsarrat () has noted many that I missed, and doubtless more will be found – but because I believe that, taken together with the linguistic analyses in the preceding chapter, these are enough to establish his authorship of this poem. I conclude with the laconic formula for the peroratio recommended by Aristotle: ‘I have done. You have heard me. The facts are before you. I ask for your judgment.’ I hope that the wide range of analytical categories I have used, my detailed studies of Ford’s linguistic habits, and my copious quotation of the many parallels between the Funerall Elegye and the poems, prose works, and dramas of John Ford will convince the candid, open-minded reader that Ford, not Shakespeare, wrote the memorial elegy for William Peter. After all the publicity, media exposure, and unrelenting hype from supporters of Shakespeare’s authorship, we can congratulate Donald Foster, as Richard J. Kennedy put it, on having ‘discovered a new poem by John Ford’. The last word should be given to Professor Leo Stock, one of the leading authorities on Ford’s non-dramatic works, whose considered judgment is that ‘Were the “new” piece published anonymously, I would unhesitatingly ascribe it to Ford. Despite the initials, I see nothing in the work that would suggest Shakespeare.’
The Politics of Attribution
I introduce the term ‘politics’ in recognition of the fact that success in attribution studies, as in all other areas of research, is awarded not by the individual researcher but by the scholarly community. Readers who have followed my detailed analysis of the claims advanced by Gary Taylor and Donald Foster that their ‘discoveries’ should be admitted to the Shakespeare canon may have been struck by the gap between those claims and the paucity of evidence to support them. The question naturally arises, ‘How did it all happen?’ How did their case get accepted in the first place, and by what methods has it been maintained? Something truly unusual must have occurred for two such alien creations to have gained a provisional place in the Shakespeare canon, if we can grant such a status to the four one-volume editions concerned. The Norton Shakespeare, as we have seen, was obliged to include ‘Shall I die?’, since it had bought in the Oxford text, and justified its inclusion in the most perfunctory manner. As for the Funerall Elegye, we might expect that editors would have shown good reason for taking such a momentous step, having carefully weighed up the evidence. But it seems that no independent scholarly evaluation took place, and we are left surmising that commercial factors carried the day. In the newly launched Norton Shakespeare had to compete in a market for college editions dominated by G. B. Evans’s Riverside edition (Houghton Mifflin; first edition, ), and David Bevington’s update of the Hardin Craig edition (Addison Wesley Longman; third edition, ). Norton stole a march on its rivals by including both ‘Shall I die?’ and A Funerall Elegye, a radical step that attracted much media attention. The senior editor of this production, Stephen Greenblatt, announced that ‘the Norton team’ had invited Donald Foster to edit A Funerall Elegye, ‘a poem . . . that raises important questions about the attribution of works to Shakespeare’ (Greenblatt, et al., , p. xi). Whatever those questions were, Greenblatt failed to address them, assuring readers that Foster’s
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
introduction would present ‘some of the arguments for and against this attribution’ (p. ). Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, Foster reported none of the many arguments already made against the attribution, simply giving another glowing account of how, in January , the Elegye ‘became global news in response to mounting evidence that the W. S. who wrote it was William Shakespeare’ (p. ), a process which accorded celebrity status to this ‘repetitive and rather dull’ tribute: ‘Transfigured as a Shakespeare poem, that same elegy has gained worldwide attention . . . ’ (p. ). – If a mediocre poem could be ‘transfigured’ simply by a modern critic’s ascription, that would truly be an instance of ‘Counterfeiting Shakespeare’. – Giving no space to the counter-arguments, Foster recycled only his ‘evidence’ for attributing it to Shakespeare, including the impressive-sounding assertion that ‘W. S.’s vocabulary has been tested against a comprehensive sample of early modern texts in electronic form – an archive of more than twelve million words (from to )’. Now many new and unsuspecting readers are assured that ‘among hundreds of contemporaneous texts and writers, W. S.’s diction most closely matches that of Shakespeare, including more than a dozen rare words for which there is no precedent except Shakespeare’ (p. ; my italics) – whatever those words might be. I have italicized the new statistics to draw attention to the ever greater degree of hyperbole that Foster deployed to suggest that a comparison based on such an enormous database cannot be wrong. But of course they remain mere numbers unless the works and authors concerned are specified, and however big the sample may have been, it evidently did not include John Ford. Foster then repeated his now-familiar litany of stylistic markers supposedly unique to ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare – the distinctive preferences for old-fashioned word forms (whiles, hath, doth, wert), coinages of ‘verbs from nouns (“necessited” [Shakespeare], “possibilited” [W. S.])’. Both poets are said to ‘share quirky habits of grammar and syntax that were not identified as distinctively “Shakespearean” until or later’, such as ‘the exceptional and frequent use of “who” for inanimate, unpersonified antecedents . . . , which is typical of W. S. and Shakespeare but rare elsewhere. W. S. also makes habitual use of the “Shakespearean hendiadys”’, with ‘a dozen examples’, and his verse shows an ‘extraordinarily high rate of enjambment (with run-on lines approaching per cent), unequalled in except by Shakespeare . . . ’ – and so on. Nothing has changed since Foster first assembled these claims in his dissertation: nothing that he has read in the intervening years, none of the published critiques of his methodology, none of the evidence for Ford’s authorship, have altered
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
his early conclusion that the poem is Shakespeare’s. In allowing Foster to restate his claims, without subjecting them to independent examination, the Norton editors endorsed what I have shown to be a completely groundless attribution. In my opinion, they failed to perform an editor’s prime duty of ascertaining whether the text in question is authentic or not. The Norton editors’ endorsement of Foster’s claims put their rival editions in a difficult position. Both capitulated over the Elegye, while declining ‘Shall I die?’. David Bevington, a considerable textual scholar, also apparently did not subject the attribution to any independent test. In his introduction to the Elegye he seemed to endorse both positions, affirmative and negative: The case for Shakespeare’s having written this funeral elegy rests on its use of the initials ‘W. S.’ in the title, on Donald Foster’s statistical documentation of word patterns through computer analysis, and on the poem itself (as analyzed also by Richard Abrams). Its density of metaphor and its complexity of phrasing (such as its use of hendiadys), even in the expression of philosophical and religious commonplaces, is considerable. To those who support a place for this poem in the Shakespeare canon, its style seems consistent with that of the mature Jacobean Shakespeare . . . To skeptics, on the other hand, A Funeral Elegy remains too piously conventional in its treatment of the great themes of slander, death, and immortality through poetry to be attributable to Shakespeare even as an occasional piece. Not all tests of vocabulary uniformly endorse his authorship. The attribution remains uncertain. (Bevington , p. )
Bevington accepted the reliability of Foster’s ‘statistical documentation of word patterns through computer analysis’, evidently unaware how fragmentary the evidence and how tendentious Foster’s interpretations of it were, and he passively endorsed those misguided claims for hendiadys. Bevington might have thought differently had he had more time to check Foster’s data – but perhaps not. The uncomfortable fact is that Foster displayed apparent expertise in areas which traditional Shakespeare scholars have scandalously neglected – Renaissance rhetoric, the history of the English language, the study of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, all of which have been left to ‘experts’ or ‘specialists’. But if this book carries one major lesson, it is that Shakespeare scholarship, especially in authorship studies, cannot leave the study of the arts of language – without which, arguably, the great achievements of Renaissance literature would have been impossible – to others, especially when fundamental matters involving the canon are at stake. Shakespeare scholars must endeavour to understand every aspect of his work, so that they can at
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
least evaluate such claims. (For a contribution to Shakespeare authorship studies, emphasizing the wide range of linguistic data that needs to be used, see Vickers .) When the remaining publisher, Houghton Mifflin, decided that it could not afford to omit the Elegye from its revised Riverside edition, the associate editor J. J. M. Tobin followed Bevington’s example by reporting the claims made, without apparently testing them for himself. Tobin dutifully summarized twelve of Foster’s arguments, including ‘the similarity “in language and format” of the dedication’ to that to Lucrece; the high rate of enjambment; the syntax, ‘which demonstrates a fondness for hendiadys . . . as well as an unusual habit of using “who” as a relative with inanimate objects . . . ’; ‘thematic and verbal affinities’ between the Elegye and Richard II; and even William Peter’s absences from college at times when the King’s Men were acting in Oxford (Evans , p. ). If any experienced authorship scholar could have been found to test these claims, Foster’s case would have soon collapsed. But his reputation was high, and time was short. Tobin’s presentation of the case for Shakespeare’s authorship is not without dissentient undertones, reporting that those unconvinced by it find the poem lacking in ‘the philosophical tolerance and psychological profundity that we expect in Shakespeare’s work’, and having ‘none of the metaphoric genius’ that we associate with him. As for Richard Abrams’s argument that the poem is deliberately unimaginative, expressing Shakespeare’s sympathy with the deceased, an attempt to solve ‘the problem of the prevalence of quite undistinguished verse’, Tobin reported the dissentient description of it as ‘memorable casuistry’ (p. ). Tobin was unenthusiastic about the poem, but he did not reject the ascription. The fact that it was included in the Riverside edition represented, in many people’s eyes, the final seal of approval from American Shakespeare scholars. How are we to explain the decision by such eminent textual scholars as Bevington, Evans, and Tobin to accept this work into the canon? It seems to me that neither edition would have included it had not Foster’s newly assertive stance in – attracted such a flurry of attention in the media. Foster’s attribution was carried into these editions on the crest of this media-generated excitement, as a few American and Canadian academics – Stephen Booth, Lars Engle, Richard Abrams, Ian Lancashire – came out in support of Foster’s claims. Some of these endorsements were made in newspaper interviews, without any scholarly argument, but Ian Lancashire subsequently published an essay
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
supporting Foster’s attribution. Despite Lancashire’s credentials as an editor and lexicographer, he failed to subject the claims made by Foster and Abrams to sufficient critical scrutiny. He believed Foster’s assertion that the phrase ‘[to] court opinion’ (FE, ) ‘is only found once elsewhere in this period, in Lewis Theobald’s redaction of Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio’ – three erroneous statements; he believed that ‘Foster correctly identifies many similarities between the writing of the poet [‘W. S.’] and of Shakespeare, orthographical, grammatical, and especially lexical . . . ’ (Lancashire , p. ); and he believed that ‘Abrams is surely right’ to argue that parallels between the Elegye and Richard II show that ‘Shakespeare, as W. S., is deliberately quoting himself ’ (pp. , ). Lancashire’s own contribution (pp. –) was to juxtapose a passage from the Elegye (–) with lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, arguing that ‘collocational clusters’ of words found in both prove common authorship, as between ‘For when the world lies winterd in the stormes’ (FE, ) and ‘Against the stormy gust of winters day’ (Sonnet .). But, as Gilles Monsarrat points out (), the phrase ‘ “winter’s day” is extremely common, even banal, whereas “wintered”, a much less usual word, is not in the sonnet’. As I showed above (p. ), Shakespeare uses the word ‘wintered’ in the sense ‘adapted or used in winter’, while ‘W. S.’ – just like Ford – uses it to mean ‘exposed to the influence of winter’. Of another unique verbal parallel that Lancashire claimed to find, between ‘Which payed to heaven the debt that it did owe’ (FE, ), and ‘Since what he owes thee, thou thy selfe doost pay’ (Sonnet .), Monsarrat points out that the proximity between ‘owe’ and ‘pay’ is extremely common, but that the sonnet lacks ‘the significant word, “debt”’, which here means death. As we have seen (above, p. ), Ford used several times that common motif in the consolatio tradition, of life being merely a loan which we repay by dying, and Monsarrat cites several close parallels to this line in the Elegye, notably Calantha’s words in The Broken Heart, ‘They must have payd the debt they ow’d to nature’ (..). These parallels with Ford are truly no coincidence. Other supporters of Foster’s case developed an interesting tactic responding to the poem’s generally acknowledged dullness. Foster, like Gary Taylor earlier, attempted to dismiss any notion that the quality of a literary work formed a relevant criterion in attribution studies, claiming that ‘aesthetic impressions have scarcely any evidentiary value’ ( ., Mar. ). His supporters turned this argument around, presenting as an attractive new option the possibility that at times Shakespeare wrote bad poetry, and that it would be the sign of
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
an enlightened generation, liberated from an earlier age’s bardolatry, to accept an anonymous poem as being both bad and also – or even, therefore – Shakespearian. As Richard Abrams argued, ‘only bardolatry would insist that Shakespeare never had his off-days, and most readers would agree in principle that a work need not be good to be his’. Stephen Booth summed up this approach by describing the Elegye as ‘a long, dull poem by William Shakespeare’. Booth reported Richard Abrams’s complementary strategy, which argued from what used to be called ‘imitative form’: ‘William Peter, a dull plodding man who lived a dull, plodding life, was a good man. The dull, plodding Funeral Elegy is imitative of its dull, plodding subject, and is, if looked at in that light, a good poem’ (Booth , p. ). Actually, Abrams went much further down this road, telling a newspaper reporter that ‘the poem avoids the language of the imagination because, in the poet’s mind, imagination is strangely implicated in the murder of his friend. Shakespeare was deliberately writing this way.’ This line of argument is obviously casuistical, ‘full of exercises in chop logic’, as Booth put it (p. ), but it all helped to sustain the level of media excitement. Twelve years earlier, Gary Taylor’s ascription of ‘Shall I die?’ had also attracted great attention in the English and American media, entirely negative, as we have seen, yet the fuss certainly drew attention to the forthcoming Oxford edition. In both cases, I believe, it was media exposure, rather than careful and disinterested scholarship, which played the crucial role in getting these ascriptions accepted, a process that deserves some attention. In his recent autobiography Foster commented that the response to Taylor’s ‘Shall I die?’ ascription illustrates the surprising degree to which scholarship gravitates toward the media rather than vice-versa. Shakespeareans generally take interest in the Shakespeare dubia (uncertainly attributed texts) only in brief flashes, on those rare occasions when a debatable attribution appears in the news. There is a tendency to respond more directly to the publicity than to the evidentiary case and to lose interest as soon as the academic community has moved toward evident consensus one way or the other. (Foster , pp. –)
If true, this is a sad comment on the extent to which media reception has usurped scholarly values, in some areas at least. Any scholar who makes an ascription will normally publish it, hoping to arouse agreement, but the form which publication takes can vary
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
enormously. At the most basic, and most usual level, a scholar writes an essay and submits it to a learned journal. That essay will be evaluated by the editors and (usually) one or more anonymous referees, and should it pass this peer-review process it will be published and thus made available to the scholarly community. A typical example of this procedure would be the essay submitted by William Ringler and Steven W. May to the Journal Modern Philology, and published in under the modest title ‘An Epilogue Possibly by Shakespeare’. Ringler and May, two of the foremost students of Elizabethan manuscript poetry in modern times, editors of an invaluable Bibliography and Index of English Verse published between and , found this epilogue, ‘To the Queen, by the players, ’, in a commonplace book (now in Cambridge University Library) kept by Henry Stanford between and . In Stanford was a member of the household of the second Baron Hunsdon, who was patron of Shakespeare’s company from , and became Lord Chamberlain in . The epilogue, from a play probably performed at court on Shrove Tuesday, February (New Style), reads as follows (in my modernized text): As the dial hand tells o’er The same hours it had before, Still beginning in the ending, Circular account still lending, So, most mighty Queen, we pray, Like the dial, day by day, You may lead the seasons on, Making new when old are gone; That the babe which now is young, And hath yet no use of tongue, Many a shrovetide here may bow To that empress I do now; That the children of these lords, Sitting at your council boards, May be, grave and aged, seen Of her that was their father Queen. Once I wish this wish again, Heaven subscribe it with Amen.
Ringler and May pointed out that every word in this epilogue occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works, with the exception of ‘circular’ (line ). They showed that the grammar is consistent with Shakespeare’s usage, including ‘which’ as a relative pronoun for animate antecedents (line ),
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
and the uninflected genitive ‘father Queen’ (line ) – compare ‘my father house’ (Ant. ..–). Although too short to permit any quantitative study, the epilogue is witty, gracious, and has an easy verse movement that recalls several of Shakespeare’s authentic lyrics. As they observed, ‘the epilogue is composed in trochaics, and to this extent is similar to the trochaic epilogue spoken by Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This rhythm was a favourite with Shakespeare, who used it in more than twenty songs and poems in his plays, from the earliest to the latest’ (p. ). I cite this epilogue not to urge that it be added to the Shakespeare canon (although it would be a much more likely candidate than ‘Shall I die?’), but to show the normal way in which attribution studies reach the academic public. Published in a major journal, this article was no doubt listed in the annual Shakespeare bibliographies, but it otherwise attracted little attention, and can be found tucked away in an appendix towards the back of the Riverside edition. How different was the media buzz surrounding the ‘discoveries’ made by Taylor and Foster, truly unusual for attribution studies. Foster and Taylor were also unusual – at any rate, judged by established scholarly traditions. Most European, and many American scholars would be amazed and disconcerted to be pursued by journalists, interviewers, and TV stations, but Taylor and Foster both seemed to thrive on media attention. When the Sunday Times first published ‘Shall I die?’, the front page carried a photo showing ‘Gary Taylor, , regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant Shakespearian textual analysts’, seated at a table in the Bodleian Library with the bound manuscript volume open on a book-rest before him. The poem was published simultaneously in the New York Times on that day, although Taylor disclaimed any part in the publicity: ‘the story had been picked up by journalists’. Foster, more extrovert, posed Hamlet-like, holding and contemplating a skull, wearing either jeans and a baseball cap, or jeans and an academic cap and gown. These props appeared in photographs published in the Italian magazine L’Espresso (which set the photo-call in a graveyard), the French journal L’Express, the American bi-monthly Lingua Franca, and even on Foster’s website at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie. The media attention that both scholars enjoyed turned them into celebrities within the academic community, and this high profile undoubtedly helped them to become known as scholars working on attribution studies. Indeed, it could be argued that media attention contributed substantially to their claims becoming accepted by those American Shakespeare editions. The other element, without which they could not have succeeded, was institutional support.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
In Taylor’s case the institution may have been more important. As he recorded in his ‘General Introduction’ to the OxfordTextual Companion, on behalf of the other editors, ‘we have been specifically employed by a major international publisher . . . We have been provided with computers, with clerical help, with financial support . . . Despite the scale of investment involved, the publisher has not tried in any way to influence our editorial decisions’ (TxC, pp. –). It was right of Taylor to acknowledge the source of the ‘privileged circumstances of its editors’, and to declare their scholarly independence, yet it was inevitable that their work should be thought to carry the imprimatur not only of its publisher but also that of a great university. Indeed, some reviewers expressed unease at the degree of ‘authority’ which innocent readers might ascribe to this edition. As Peter Davison wrote, the Oxford editors’ ‘unduly magisterial tone’ in their introductions to the plays and poems, together with their ‘unqualified nature’ – not reporting other scholarly views – ‘contrived to impose an authority which to generations of relative newcomers to Shakespeare may seem little short of absolute’ (Davison , pp. –). The great advantage that Taylor enjoyed was that, supported by the senior editor, Stanley Wells, he could simply include ‘Shall I die?’ in The Complete Works, not – as many scholars thought he should have done – under ‘some such heading as “Poems Doubtfully Ascribed”’ (Davison , p. ), but as the leading item in Shakespeare’s ‘Various Poems’, immediately following the Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. If possession is nine points of the law, in attribution studies publication in the Oxford edition must rank just as high. As for the media, the attention that Taylor’s work received in England and the USA was intense. Oxford University Press (New York) even issued ‘Shall I die?’ as a separate broadsheet, entitled Shakespeare’s Long Lost Lines, ‘identified by Gary Taylor, joint editor with Dr Stanley Wells of The Oxford Shakespeare’. To Taylor this attention was initially very welcome, as he admitted in the New York Times Book Review on December . Having recorded how on November, he had ‘found the literary equivalent of Sleeping Beauty, a nameless poem awakening from the ancient sheets in which it had lain undisturbed for centuries’, he declared that ‘Within hours of my trying to find a publisher for a scholarly article on the poem, the story had been picked up by journalists, and the poem was published on November by The New York Times. Public reaction to the discovery has been generous and enthusiastic . . . ’ Three years later, however, Taylor showed himself less happy with the media, contributing to the same newspaper a bitter article on the parallels
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
between the treatment he had received and that meted out to Peter Levi. Levi had just published a pamphlet called A Private Commission. New Verses by Shakespeare, containing a poem he had found in the Huntington Library signed ‘W. Sk.’ Unfortunately Levi misread the signature as ‘W. Sh.’, rushed into print to announce his discovery, only to be immediately refuted by James Knowles, who showed that the verses in question were in fact by William Skipton. Taylor then drew several parallels between his ‘discovery’ and Levi’s: ‘Both discoveries were announced in newspapers, rather than academic journals; both precipitated firestorms of skepticism, scholarship, and personal abuse’ (Taylor , p. ). In both cases, he alleged, ‘a scholarly debate about the authenticity of a poem quickly degenerated into a concerted attack on one scholar’s integrity and authority’ (p. ). But those critics, from all over the world, who commented on Taylor’s claims over the next two years were hardly ‘concerted’, and none of the published critiques could be described as abusive. Taylor then complained that The Observer had telephoned other scholars to gain some reactions, with the result that ‘one professor of English literature, having had the poem read to him over the phone late Saturday night, immediately declared that it wasn’t by Shakespeare . . . This man was not a specialist in attribution, and he had seen none of the evidence for the poem’s authenticity’, but he was willing to give an opinion – based, perhaps, on many years’ familiarity with Shakespeare. Here Taylor betrayed what I would call ‘the guild mentality’, the fallacy that only a fully certified attribution expert is licensed to utter an opinion on a poem ascribed to Shakespeare. But of course any informed reader may do so, even on a first reading of the poem, after which all depends on what Taylor (three years on) is still calling the ‘evidence for the poem’s authenticity’. For Taylor, this all showed that ‘Journalists can destroy academic reputations so easily because academics cheerfully collaborate in the destruction’, and the sub-editor dutifully added the headline ‘The press can make scholars famous or, just as easily, infamous’ (p. ). Many readers might feel that wherever Taylor’s reputation may stand in respect of ‘Shall I die?’, it is due to his claiming the poem as Shakespeare’s, not to whatever the press did to, or for him. As to the process by which he became involved with the media, Taylor now altered his previous testimony. In he claimed that journalists got hold of the story without his agency; but three years later he gave a different account, according to which he and Stanley Wells realized that ‘the authenticity of the poem could not be tested at all’ until their edition appeared in several months’ time, at which point some crucial evidence they had overlooked might come to
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
light. Therefore, they consciously decided to use the media in order to gain some feedback. So we published the poem in order to solicit a rapid burst of skeptical scholarship. We risked our necks to save our butts. That strategy worked better than we could have foretold. Publication of the poem precipitated a blitz of criticism. In a matter of months the authenticity of ‘Shall I die?’ was investigated more thoroughly than that of any other short poem in the Shakespeare canon. (Taylor , p. )
This account is misleading in that it describes the ‘blitz of criticism’ while leaving out its outcome, the unanimous rejection of their ascription by every scholar who addressed the issue. But to Taylor in , as in , all criticism had been in vain, for although ‘many people tried to discredit the attribution’ they failed to shake the foundation of his belief, the fact that the Oxford manuscript ‘attributes the poem explicitly to “William Shakespeare”, spelling out his name in full, and no one could assign it to any other author’. Three years on Taylor was still clinging to these two fallacies, that the poem, since nobody could attribute it conclusively to some other named author, must be by Shakespeare, and that it can only be by him because a copyist wrote Shakespeare’s name on it some time in the s. As for the cogent objections, supplied in remarkably short order by a number of scholars (as we saw in the Prologue), they apparently did not constitute ‘crucial evidence’, and could be ignored. Refusing to address counter-arguments brings about the death of scholarship. In the case of Foster’s attribution of the Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare, the media attention was far more intense, helping to arouse institutional support. As described by one of his admirers, Professor Leo Daugherty, a respondent to Foster’s paper at the MLA session in Chicago on Saturday December , On the day of the MLA session, a longish front-page feature story appeared on it in the Chicago Sun–Times. About two weeks later, another story on it appeared in the LA Times. Then came the front-page coverage in the New York Times, which in turn seems to have generated all the subsequent stories – AP, Reuters, the major TV network and cable news programs, the PBS ‘News Hour’, NPR, AP Network News (radio), People magazine, and so on. Today, three months after the panel, ‘mainstream’ interest has of course subsided, and the scholars/critics are beginning to go to work seriously on the evidence underlying the authorship claim.
In his recent autobiography Foster added more detail of ‘the media snowball’, as he calls it, starting from the Chicago Tribune, and taking in
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
the Times of India, ABC World News Tonight (who sent a film crew), followed by television stations from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, and Zimbabwe (Foster , pp. –). Needless to say, the level of many of these reports was disappointingly low. On the front page of the New York Times (national edition) for January , under the heading ‘A Sleuth gets his Suspect: Shakespeare’, the journalist William H. Honan wrote that ‘For those who accept the attribution, the poem provides a treasure of biographical information about Shakespeare, including his lack of religious conviction, his disenchantment with theatrical excess and the possibility, hinted at in his sonnets and long noted by scholars, that he was bisexual’ (pp. , ). – Of course, journalists simplify what scholars tell them, and in reporting a ‘lack of religious conviction’ in the Elegye Honan was merely echoing Foster’s consistent trivialization of the poem’s religious content. Still, the episode shows that, once a scholar becomes involved with popular media he finds that he has descended into an area having a different agenda, over which he has little control. As Foster also recorded, describing the media frenzy aroused by his attribution, ‘when reporters called, the first question was usually “Does the elegy truly show that Shakespeare was a homosexual?”’ (Foster , p. ). But here again, Foster had led them in that direction, for he had suggested that the past scandal mentioned by ‘W. S.’ (FE, –) could support Joseph Pequigney’s supposedly ‘close reading of the sonnets’ to argue ‘that Shakespeare ca. was denounced for homosexual conduct of some sort’ (Foster , pp. –). Although the media coverage was useful to Foster’s authorship claim, as it had been to Taylor’s, both scholars had problems with the fact that contact with the media is a two-way process. Newspapers and other communication channels help to publicize such claims, but they also give space to scholars to comment on them. Here the crucial issue − not just a matter of scholarship, but involving the politics of reputation and the ethics of controversy − is how the Shakespeare claimant responds to critics. In Taylor’s case, as we have seen, the extensive – not just ‘skeptical’ but frankly disbelieving – response by other scholars caused him to remove some of the most trivial passages he had cited as showing parallels with Shakespeare, but did not otherwise change his ascription. Taylor simply dismissed his critics by cultivating what I have called ‘the rhetoric of impersonality’, as if there were no case to answer. Donald Foster, however, chose to challenge his critics directly, becoming involved in three long-drawn-out disputes between and , which give an illuminating but also disturbing picture of the methods that one attribution
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
scholar used, in order to protect his claim and to preserve or enhance his reputation.
When scholars publish their work, they usually do so after a prolonged period of study, having focussed on a particular issue and interpreted the evidence according to what seems to them the most likely hypothesis. Naturally, we all tend to favour our own creations, and take unkindly to their being criticized. But it is also natural that others who have studied the same evidence should produce differing interpretations, at which point discussions take place, which may become heated. When these exchanges of opinion are held in a public forum, such as a newspaper or journal, it is clearly the editor’s responsibility to give each side a fair hearing, and to make sure that none of the parties concerned oversteps the boundary of civilized debate. Those are, no doubt, unexceptionable propositions, but in recent years authorship and attribution disputes have proved particularly troublesome. In some cases proponents of an attribution have become intemperate, descending to personal attacks on their ‘opponent(s)’, at which point good editors simply suspend the controversy. I deplore such behaviour, since I hold that an attribution scholar, almost more than anyone else, is duty bound to take note of contrary interpretations of the evidence, and to do so in a self-controlled manner. An extension of this confrontational stance is to regard the expression of a dissenting opinion as an intended slur on one’s scholarly reputation, a personal attack. This is to reduce the issue from the scholarly plane of evidence and its inevitably conflicting interpretation to that of personalities, which supposedly legitimizes a response in kind. Some attribution scholars have attempted to protect their own reputation by destroying that of their opponents, as if an authorship debate constituted what games theorists call a ‘zero-sum game’, in which there is one winner, one loser (+ − = ). But it must surely be a basic principle in all human debate that others are free to disagree with us without our regarding them as personal enemies. We should attend to their arguments, counter them with other arguments, and treat the people concerned with respect. Likewise, the duty of the editors moderating our discussion is to preserve fair play for both sides. These are my personal beliefs, but I hope that they are widely shared. In the three disputes which I shall now describe, concerning Donald
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
Foster’s ascription of the Funerall Elegye, these principles were not always observed. The first of these disputes took place in a new forum for Shakespeare studies, S, the ‘Shakespeare Electronic Conference’, a listserv discussion group founded in and edited since by Professor Hardy Cook of Bowie State University. S is a discussion group with members in fifty countries, some of them full-time university teachers, others theatre people and ‘amateurs’ interested in Shakespeare. It is a valuable forum for ‘professional’ Shakespearians to exchange views with people outside the academic world, and constitutes a kind of microcosm of the world of Shakespeare studies at any one time. Its postings are widely discussed within the Shakespeare community, and the ease of electronic communication allows members to transmit discussions to anyone who might be interested – which is how I first came to hear of it. In it provided the arena for a spirited debate on the Funerall Elegye, which runs to more than a hundred pages when printed out. Foster opened the discussion on January , invited by the editor to comment on press reports of that MLA meeting at which he had presented his case for Shakespeare’s authorship, supported by Richard Abrams and others. The tone of his contribution was intended from the outset to arouse confidence in the ascription. Now claiming that he deliberately ‘floated’ his monograph ‘with as little fanfare as possible, in order to avoid the explosive publicity that had attended “Shall I die?” (and other such momentany flashes in the Shakespearean pan)’, Foster announced that a ‘compelling case . . . can now be made for a firm attribution’ ( ., Jan.). Like The Tempest, he wrote, the Funerall Elegye ‘is also valedictory . . . deeply personal, one of the few extant texts in which Shakespeare writes in the first person’. In addition, it ‘contains some internal biographical evidence that will prove of interest. For example, the poet refers elliptically to a past scandal, “a taste of knowing shame” (etc.), while offering some hints that this “thankless misconstruction” may possibly be identical with that “vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow” mentioned in the Sonnets’, namely his homosexuality. Foster ended by claiming to have ‘a whole web of conclusive new evidence of Shakespearean authorship’. The following day Foster posted the text of the poem on the list, and encouraged members to look forward to ‘the months ahead as the full case for Shakespearean authorship is laid out in all of its astonishing detail’ (, Jan.). He professed his willingness to weigh up contrary evidence, claiming that ‘of those Shakespeareans who have seen the evidence laid out in full I do not know of anyone who is still
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
supposing that someone other than Shakespeare may have written FE (if you’re out there, please speak up . . . . I’d be happy to see criticism of any kind, including even the less sophisticated, “ooh, it’s yucky”, variety of reader response)’ (, Jan.). Although framed in populist terms, and apparently ready to embrace any form of discussion, Foster’s appeal to ‘those Shakespeareans’ who had seen this new material – a very small number – and had endorsed his claims reads like an attempt to pre-empt criticism. Three months later, once he was sure that the editors of three American college Shakespeares would include the Elegye, Foster could be categorically assertive: ‘Given the pervasive evidence of Shakespeare’s hand in the poem, “A Funeral Elegy” will have a place hereafter in the canon . . . Forthcoming essays by Professor Abrams and myself will make clear how decisively the case for Shakespeare’s authorship has changed since . . . ’ (, Mar.). Foster was probably referring to the essays by himself and by Richard Abrams, then under consideration by journals, but as far as S was concerned, the ‘months ahead’ brought him much disagreement. His most persistent critic was Richard J. Kennedy, who vigorously voiced his disbelief that Shakespeare could have written such a bad poem, and in a series of postings cited detailed linguistic evidence from the Sonnets to argue that the Elegye’s diction was in many respects unShakespearian. Kennedy also pointed out several similarities between the Elegye and Ford’s work, including Fames Memoriall, Christes Bloodie Sweat, and his memorial poem to Sir Thomas Overbury. Further, he drew attention to the close biographical links between Ford’s family and that of William Peter, as established by Foster, but which were now being omitted from discussion of ‘the Shakespeare elegy’, as Foster had begun calling it. Ironically, perhaps, Kennedy was put on to these parallels by Foster himself, both in the monograph and in the hand-outs that Foster circulated in a lecture he gave at the UCLA conference on the poem ( February ), probably the same list of parallels that he set out in the paper published by PMLA in December . For Foster the parallels simply proved that Ford had plagiarized from ‘W. S.’, but Kennedy turned that argument round, arguing that Ford had written the Elegye. Anyone who still believes in Matthew Arnold’s ideal of literary criticism, or humanistic discussion in general, as being a disinterested attempt to establish the truth, will be rather disappointed by Foster’s response. Instead of addressing the issue properly, as a matter involving evidence and its interpretation, with both stages being subject to inaccuracy, misdeduction, and all the other errors that can occur in any form of
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
argument, Foster first reduced the debate to the level of ‘facts’, in which only two positions were possible: he was right, his critics wrong. Foster set the tone early on, rebuking both Richard Kennedy for his critical remarks on the Elegye and Stanley Wells, who had just published a sceptical piece in the TLS (Wells a): ‘It is always a good idea, of course, to make sure that one knows what one is talking about before going on record’ (., Feb.). Gabriel Egan had also criticized Foster’s attribution methods for relying too much on the occurrence of rare words, and Egan cited other ‘stylistic’ features of the poem that are demonstrably unlike late Shakespearean verse, such as the incidence of feminine endings in the Elegye of . percent, far below Shakespeare’s norm for the period –, over percent (., Feb.). At first David Kathman answered on behalf of Foster, but when he entered the discussion Foster pronounced Egan’s argument to be ‘simply mistaken’ (., Mar.). In addition to dismissing his critics as simply wrong, Foster introduced some personal comments about them. Richard Kennedy is not an academic but a distinguished, prize-winning author of children’s books, short stories, and musicals. He is also, apparently, one of those who believe that Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s works. – That is his affair, we might think, for it certainly never emerged as an issue in his contributions to the S discussions. Foster, however, made it the starting-point of what looks like an attempt to discredit Kennedy, alleging that ‘various ideological issues have come into play in recent discussion’, for Kennedy ‘and his fellow anti-Stratfordians have a huge stake in dismissing the Elegy: the earl of Oxford in Feb. was too dead to have written it’ (, Mar.). – Of course, the fact that de Vere died in has never diminished the Oxfordians’ certainty that he had somehow written all of Shakespeare’s plays, including those performed up to . But to label someone as an Oxfordian in a forum of committed Shakespearians is a sure way of putting them in an unsympathetic light, and in some eyes it would be enough to discredit them altogether. A few days later Foster repeated the insinuation: if Kennedy wants people ‘to take seriously his view that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, then he should get his facts straight before he speaks – or remain silent’ (, Mar.). But Kennedy never mentioned the Oxford authorship theory, concentrating all his attention on arguing that the Elegye was not Shakespeare’s, but Ford’s. It was completely irrelevant of Foster to introduce, and insist on this factor, as if such an ulterior motive constituted Kennedy’s sole reason for disputing Foster’s claim for Shakespeare’s authorship. Foster and his supporters dismissed Kennedy
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
as a nuisance, a self-appointed ‘gadfly’ (, Mar.), whose contributions were stigmatized as being unnecessarily abusive. His postings are ‘badly written, shrill in tone and factually inaccurate’, Foster wrote (, Mar.), a generalized attempt to disqualify his critic. Many readers must have felt some sympathy for Kennedy’s protest at the way in which Foster and his associates had reduced the debate to a personal level, with their ad hominem comments and belittling talk. I am a ‘co-religionist’, joined in ‘nonsense’ and ‘perverse disregard’ for facts (no examples given), and shrill besides, having nothing to offer the group but ‘anti-Stratfordian static’. Is this civil discourse, consideration of another’s opinion, the sort of comment we’d expect from a scholar and a gentleman? . . . Let us set aside our beliefs of the other’s stupidity, and suspicions of private motives, and set our study to the subject at hand, fairly distributing our proofs, be they even subjective or aesthetic. (, Mar.)
True to this resolve, Kennedy pointed out that in the Funerall Elegye lines begin with of, whereas in the first lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnets only two lines do so. Foster had announced that he was not going to take part in further discussion until his and Abrams’s essays had been published. But when Kennedy produced such telling statistics concerning the unShakespearian frequency with which the Elegye used of to begin a verse line, clearly another valid linguistic detail showing the great difference in style between ‘W. S.’ and Shakespeare, Foster could not resist breaking his vow: ‘Just when I say that I’ll try to avoid arguing with Richard Kennedy, he again bites his own foot’ (, Mar.). A frequent tactic in Foster’s polemic is to claim that his critics are only damaging themselves, not him. In his response Foster refused to discuss the fresh linguistic evidence Kennedy had cited but retreated to an autocratic position, expressing displeasure that a ‘non-scholar’ should challenge his Shakespearian attribution. As he pointedly ended this post, ‘I will gladly assist any fellow scholar who hopes at this late juncture to build a case against Shakespeare’s authorship of the elegy’ (, Mar.; my italics). That remark seems to indicate Foster’s hope that interested parties would refer to him rather than uttering dangerous thoughts in a public forum, and of course it suggests that the discussion is all but closed. Foster was especially upset with Kennedy for turning his argument that Ford had plagiarized the Elegye into one that Ford had actually written the poem. Convinced that his interpretation of the Ford–Elegye parallels was the only correct
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
one, and indeed constituted ‘the facts’, Foster berated Kennedy for not ‘having understood the first thing about John Ford’s relations with Will Peter and William Shakespeare’ (, Mar.) – which is of course to beg the question whether Ford had any relations with Shakespeare – for having ‘simply misstated the facts’ (, Mar.), and for having ‘spoken without first checking his facts’ (, Mar.), as if the complexities of argument in his Elegye attribution could be reduced to ‘facts’ pure and simple. Faced with the persistent Richard Kennedy, whose efforts to define and differentiate the style of the Elegye from Shakespeare’s, Foster opined, ‘cannot in the long run do any harm either to me or to Shakespeare studies’, he threw out this scrap of information to someone who was not ‘a fellow scholar’: Having already studied the Ford–Peter–Shakespeare connection, I can happily give Mr Kennedy extra ammunition, which he may then shoot in my direction at his leisure. For example: here are a dozen words from the Elegy that appear at least once in John Ford’s verse but nowhere (not once – zilch! – zippo!) in Shakespearean texts: desertful (ad.), ensnaring (ad.), ignorantly (adv.), invitement (n.), irrefragable (ad.), partage (n.), rarely (adv., meaning infrequently), superlative (ad.), unremembered (ad.), ever-empty (ad.), and sour-bitter (ad.). (, Mar.)
With the dismissive gesture of a matador who walks away from a bull too befuddled to attack him, Foster passed on, or passed over, a highly significant piece of information. Instead of being so rude to non-scholars, he would have been better advised to consider what this vocabulary discrepancy might mean. Had Foster not closed off his mind long before, many of the materials inviting a new evaluation of Ford’s possible authorship were under his nose. The critics expressing divergent opinions in the postings of S could be dealt with relatively easily. The editor, we must presume, had allowed Foster to repeat his insinuations about Kennedy’s alleged ‘ideological’ motives for disputing Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye, and to ridicule Kennedy’s status as a scholar. In that relatively informal medium Foster could easily control the discussion. But when articles were published in learned journals criticizing his work, that constituted a far more serious problem. The first critics were Ward Elliott, a Professor of Government, and Robert Valenza, a distinguished mathematician and statistician. Between and these unlikely collaborators had organized the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Clinic’ at the Claremont Colleges, whose goal was to test the non-Stratfordian claimants for the
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Shakespeare plays and poems. They developed over fifty quantifiable tests which conclusively rejected all of the claimants, confirmed the authenticity of the Shakespeare canon while raising doubts about Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, and Henry VI, and incidentally confirming the findings of MacDonald Jackson and David Lake about the Middleton canon. They have made a genuine contribution to the Shakespeare authorship problem, and their work has been treated with respect by others working in this field. Throughout, in each of their periodic reports, they were very candid about the successes and failures of their methodology – indeed, it would be easy (but also pointless) to find faults with their earlier efforts, since they worked pragmatically, in a process of trial and error. In addition to these reports, which were freely available to anyone interested, they published two detailed accounts of their work in the much-respected ‘Official Journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities’ (affectionately abbreviated as CHum), ‘A Touchstone for the Bard’, vol. (), pp. –, and their final report, ‘And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants’, vol. (), pp. –. As they record, Elliott and Valenza had enjoyed a long correspondence with Donald Foster, who served as adviser-in-chief to their clinic from onwards, and they had in turn provided him with many of their own machine-readable texts of Elizabethan drama for his Vassar electronic text archive. Foster himself had given a favourable account of their work in S as late as January , introducing Elliott as ‘a political scientist not a professional Shakespearean, but that should not be held against him; anyone who gives Prof. Elliott a fair hearing will be impressed by what he and his students were able to accomplish in a few short years’. Shortly afterwards, however, cordial relations between Poughkeepsie and Claremont were shattered. By December , as we have seen, Foster had gone out on a limb in affirming the poem to be definitively Shakespeare’s composition, and on February a conference was organized at UCLA on the Funerall Elegye, which (as one of his interviewers recorded) ‘was meant to be a victory celebration of sorts’ for Foster (Crain , p. ). According to Foster’s published account of this meeting, his ‘moment of weariness set in’ when ‘Ward Elliot [sic] . . . arose during the Q & A session. While two assistants passed out summary reports from the Shakespeare Clinic, Elliot proceeded to give an unscheduled talk on the “big Shakespeare authorship questions”’ (Foster b, p. ). According to Foster, when asked whether his statistical approach had ever been tested, Elliott ‘remarked, “We just want to throw our stuff out
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
here, and let other people see if our tests are any good”’ (ibid.). In this account Foster attributed to Elliott remarkably gauche behaviour, making an unscheduled intervention in the debate, and concluding with that incoherent and unscholarly utterance. Elliott’s published account of the incident, however, differs in every respect. As recently stated,∗ Elliott had approached both Foster and the conference director with an offer to give a ten-minute summary of the Clinic’s contrary evidence. Both agreed, but in an email on February Foster asked for details of their case. These were provided, showing that the Elegye failed five tests that would support Shakespeare’s authorship. Then, as Elliott and Valenza recorded in their Shakespeare Quarterly essay, Foster informed them ‘that () FE was “Shakespeare’s beyond all reasonable doubt”; () all our tests rejecting FE were “not just doubtful, but certainly wrong”; () none of our work was ready for publication; and () any attempt to publish our findings or present them at conferences on FE would destroy our reputation and besmirch his by association’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Toward the end of the meeting, the chairman invited Elliott to make his mini-presentation. According to his recent statement, ‘I handed out our FE-related findings, and tried to summarize them from the rostrum. But Foster was in no mood to let me proceed. He obstructed stridently, vigorously and continuously, noisily challenging every point, and he did succeed in slowing me down and muddying the water’. Disheartened, ‘rather than trying to slug it out’ with Foster, Elliott ‘withdrew ignominiously in the middle of the abortive presentation’. In an interview given after the publication of their essay, Foster repeated his allegation that, without prior agreement, Elliott stood up during a question-and-answer period and passed out thick, chart-filled copies of his clinic’s latest report – with its critical assessment of Foster’s Elegye attribution. It was a breach of academic decorum that alienated some of the scholars present. Foster’s patience snapped. Soon after, he would cease to correspond with the Claremont team and arrange with the editors of CHum to publish a rebuttal in the same issue that featured Elliott and Valenza’s work. (Crain , p. )
(The word ‘arrange’ there is strange. Normally scholars submit an article for editorial consideration, not being in any position to ‘arrange’ its publication.) Thus, Foster twice described Elliott’s behaviour at the UCLA conference as having been so offensive as to legitimize the attacks that he subsequently made on Elliott and Valenza’s ∗
Personal communication, Sept. , quoted with permission.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
scholarly work. Foster’s reaction seems to exemplify the dangers I have described, when participants in a scholarly dispute, instead of focussing on the issues involved, feel that their reputations are being attacked. Throughout this episode Elliott behaved trustingly, if somewhat na¨ıvely, imagining that good relations could be restored despite their fundamental disagreement as to the Elegye’s authorship. According to his testimony, he wrote a substantial letter to Foster on – April , setting out their case in more detail, and specifying which of Foster’s criticisms they could accept, and which not. A week later, instead of replying Foster submitted a posting to S, saying that two members of that list had asked him to respond to certain press reports concerning the Claremont–McKenna ‘Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable’, headed [by] Prof. Ward Elliott, a political scientist and quondam anti-Stratfordian who seems to have been convinced by his research that Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare . . . Because Prof. Elliott has had trouble getting his study published except as a privately distributed xerox, few members of S will be familiar with his work . . . ( , Apr.)
Once again, as with Richard Kennedy, Foster personalized the dispute, casting his critic as another ‘anti-Stratfordian’, and even suggesting that Elliott couldn’t get his work published. Perhaps Foster counted on members of this list being unaware of Elliott and Valenza’s long essay in CHum for , or of their many publications elsewhere, although some of these had recently been favourably described by D. J. Kathman in that forum. Foster then made criticisms of Elliott’s methodology, to which we must return, ending his letter to this section of the academic polis on this note: ‘Those Sians who would like more information . . . may write me directly’. This rather seems as if Foster wished to control discussion of the Funerall Elegye. Elliott and Valenza’s long essay on ‘Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants’ had been accepted for CHum in October , having been read by three external referees, and was scheduled for the April issue. However, after reports of an upheaval between the publishers and the editor (who resigned), that issue did not appear until January . Normally, in academic journals, articles take about two years to be evaluated, accepted, and published; replies to articles may be hurried through more quickly, but seldom earlier than within about a year. Foster’s reply to Elliott and Valenza, however, appeared in the same issue of that journal, a remarkable fact. As we have seen, an interviewer recorded Foster’s
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
claim that, as a result of the UCLA meeting, he decided to ‘arrange with the editors of CHum to publish a rebuttal in the same issue that featured Elliott and Valenza’s work’ (my italics). Normally, replies to essays in academic journals are also vetted by external referees, and the author(s) of the original essay are shown the reply before it is published. In this case, however, neither Elliott nor Valenza was consulted, the upshot being, in their words, that Foster ‘had somehow, without our knowledge and apparently without a go-ahead or a scholarly review from either CHum’s old editor or its new ones, managed to get our article repackaged as a “debate” with him’. In his ‘rebuttal’ Foster repeated the tactic with which he had tried to discredit Richard Kennedy, claiming that Elliott and Valenza were linked to the ‘association of anti-Stratfordians’, even alluding to the Claremont ‘Clinic’s anti-Stratfordian roots’ (Foster b, pp. –, ) – although he knew that their work had decisively eliminated all of the so-called anti-Stratfordian ‘claimants’. Foster then gave a scathing account of the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic, claiming that he ‘finally withdrew’ from it, ‘exasperated that problems with accuracy and with the validity of testing were never addressed, only multiplied’ (p. ). But, as we have seen, only a few months previously Foster had publicly praised Elliott’s work, and he well knew that the Clinic’s various reports discussed these issues at great length. One cannot help surmising that the real reason for Foster’s resignation was his discomfiture with their rejection of the Funerall Elegye. As Elliott and Valenza pointed out, of their fifty-four tests ‘Foster attacked ten’, which, ‘to no one’s surprise, include all five of our tests which rejected FE, plus three . . . which did not reject FE, but whose invalidation, if demonstrated, would further undermine the validity of [one other] test which did reject FE’ (Elliott and Valenza , pp. , ). In this hastily arranged essay Foster delivered a ferociously ad hominem attack on Elliott and Valenza, indicting them for having used ‘undependable’ figures, derived ‘entirely from subjective judgments’ (Foster b, p. ), for ‘playing with a stacked deck’ (p. ), for producing figures which ‘are wrong so often as to be worthless’ (p. ), and for being guilty of ‘methodical madness’ (p. ). Any readers unfamiliar with the methodology of attribution studies, or who had not read ‘Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants’ carefully, might well conclude that the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic (a word that Foster kept harping on) was intended for the insane. Elliott and Valenza, having seen how violently Foster reacted to their critique of his Elegye attribution, which formed only a small part of their ‘Winnowing the Claimants’
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
essay, decided to publish a full-scale version of their findings, which the editor of Shakespeare Quarterly quickly accepted. In it they subjected the Funerall Elegye to a larger group of tests that would validate Shakespeare’s authorship: of twenty-two it failed thirteen. As for Foster’s devastating attack on them, published by Computers and the Humanities, they had to wait two long years before that journal published their self-defence, which was commendably restrained, focussing clearly and honestly on the scholarly points at issue, and conceding the few (and minor) errors that Foster had found (Elliott and Valenza ). It came as no surprise – but certainly as a matter for regret – that in the very same issue of that journal, Foster was allowed to publish another immediate ‘rebuttal’, called ‘The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic: How Severe are the Problems?’ (pp. –). Foster now professed to be unconcerned by the Elliott and Valenza rejection of his Funerall Elegye ascription (Foster , pp. , ) – a claim hardly borne out either by his contribution to S or by his rebuttal, which was mostly directed against that goal. This, his latest attack, is divided into sections with titles such as ‘The Mud’ (pp. –), ‘The Madness’ (pp. –), and ‘The Method in It’ (pp. –). In the first section Foster accused Elliott and Valenza of having ‘fired off an assaultive article, full of invented quotations, depicting me as a bitter, vindictive adversary’ (pp. –, n. ). That article, published in Shakespeare Quarterly, far from being ‘assaultive’, bent over backwards to be nice to Foster (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –). Whether or not Foster is portrayed as ‘bitter, vindictive’, readers of the article must judge for themselves. As for the charge of ‘invented quotations’, Elliott and Valenza replied: ‘he has had three chances to tell us which of our quotations are “invented” and what he thinks he actually did say, but he has never seen fit to do so. Why has he been so persistently evasive?’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Until Foster substantiates it, this remains an unjustified allegation. The aim of this second article, Foster averred, was ‘to show why the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic has been dismissed as madness by scholars who served as its literary advisors’ (Foster , p. ), and to ‘ensure competency in quantitative text analysis, not to start a public spat’ (p. ). However, most of his energies were devoted to repeating his previous indictment in even more violent terms. The Claremont project, he pronounced, was marked by ‘massive sloppiness’, an ‘arbitrary and chaotic handling of the gathered data’ which turned it into ‘a fiasco’ (p. ) – indeed, it ‘began toddling toward a precipice from day one’ (p. ). It had based itself on ‘wildly irregular copytexts and careless
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
tabulation of data’, never having ‘commonized’ its texts – that is, modernized spelling and punctuation (p. ). The successive publication of their results shows that data have been ‘quietly altered’ without explanation (pp. –). Their work is vitiated by ‘methodological sloppiness’ (p. ), ‘erroneous data’ (p. ), carelessness (p. ), use of ‘impossibly cumbersome’ tests, such as Marina Tarlinskaja’s analysis of enclitics and proclitics (pp. –). In short, ‘the Clinic’s badly gerrymandered regime’ (p. ) rendered their work worthless. Of course, Foster insinuated, this is not surprising given ‘its raison d’ˆetre – the pursuit of someone other than Shakespeare as the author of “Shakespeare”’ (pp. –), its hope to ‘identify one of the anti-Stratfordian “Claimants” as “Shakespeare”’ (p. ). The innocent reader of this journal might have concluded that Elliott and Valenza were hopelessly unscholarly – although, oddly enough, a previous editor and three outside reviewers had approved the publication of their two essays. That reader would also expect Foster to produce ample evidence from Elliott and Valenza’s published work, in order to justify his diatribe. In fact, as anyone can see who reads Elliott and Valenza’s replies, both that of and the one recently posted on their website (Elliott and Valenza ), Foster’s case against them turns out to be a strange jumble, criticizing errors they had long since corrected, crudely misrepresenting their work, and transparently failing to understand the sound statistical methods they had employed. Apparently bent on discrediting Elliott and Valenza once and for all, Foster now drew on papers which the Clinic had addressed to its advisers, including unpublished letters of Elliott, and Marina Tarlinskaja’s notes on her prosodic analysis of the Elegye. Having received this material ‘as a literary advisor to the Clinic’ (Foster , p. ), Foster had no compunction in using it against them. But the tactic backfired on him, for his attempt to show that the Clinic’s interim reports reveal a ‘silent and extensive alteration of data’ (p. ) was refuted by Elliott and Valenza in another dignified reply. As they put it, the changes they made from year to year ‘are exactly what you should expect to happen if you continue to recheck data, look for errors, redundancies, imprecisions, and inconsistencies, and correct them . . . We did this rechecking relentlessly throughout the Clinic . . . and may well continue to do so.’ Readiness to check one’s findings, they retorted, ‘should be cause for congratulation, not condemnation’ (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –). Perhaps the Claremont Authorship Clinic was too open about its learning process. At any rate, their willingness to correct errors was and is exemplary.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
Some readers may feel that is just another academic disagreement, which can be safely left to yellow in university libraries’ book stacks, but it raises several important issues. First, Foster’s attacks go far beyond what the situation called for. Secondly, it involves not just the ethics of controversy but the whole practice of authorship studies. As Elliott and Valenza have repeatedly observed, should Foster be right about Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye it would mean that their methods were seriously flawed – as indeed would be those of MacDonald Jackson, D. J. Lake, Jonathan Hope, or myself. This issue cannot be avoided in a book investigating the methodologies used to argue Shakespeare’s authorship of ‘Shall I die?’ and the Funerall Elegye, and the process by which those ascriptions have achieved some success. If it is not addressed here, Foster might be able to claim that he had disproved Elliott and Valenza’s objections to his thesis, as Richard Abrams had supposedly dismissed MacDonald Jackson’s. I acknowledge the practical problem that a thorough treatment of this dispute would be too lengthy, but I also wish to be fair to both sides, citing them where possible in their own words. In order to balance both considerations I shall adopt a mixture of summary and quotation, giving enough documentation in the footnotes for readers to be able to check for themselves, and I shall number the main headings. . Having simply recycled his earlier comments on their work, Foster made the error of accusing Elliott and Valenza of methodological faults which they had corrected years earlier. In he described them as being ‘in hot pursuit of “authorship” tests that no one had ever tried before – “o” vs. “oh”, the participial endings ’d vs. –ed, or the frequency of exclamation points. But such variants are largely determined by editors’ (Foster , p. ). But Foster seems have overlooked work published by MacDonald Jackson in which successfully used the Oh/O test to differentiate Shakespeare’s share of Timon of Athens from Middleton’s. Equally, the variation in the pattern of –t/ –’d /ed endings of preterites and past participles formed one detail in J. K. Walton’s important work on the text of Othello, which showed that the Folio printers and editors sometimes changed –t to –’d / ed, but never changed –’d / ed to –t, clearly differentiating their preferences from Shakespeare’s practice in his ‘foul papers’. . In Elliott and Valenza consulted Foster on the Shakespeare canon, and he advised them to omit the Fletcherian parts of Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Acts and of Pericles, but also the whole of Henry VI and Timon of Athens (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –,
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
n. . – Many scholars would object that it is possible to make a fairly accurate computation of Shakespeare’s share of the last two plays.) In his diatribe, however, Foster actually accused them of ‘conveniently exiling’ these texts from their core canon (, p. ), an untruth that they exposed (, pp. –). Apparently undeterred by this public exposure, in Foster repeated the claims, accusing Elliott and Valenza of standing ‘with a raised hatchet – ready, at a nod, to lop the Shakespeare dramatic canon at both ends’, since early and late works ‘do poorly on the Clinic’s regime’ (, p. ). To attack scholars for doing what you yourself advised them to do is disingenuous, to say the least. And in claiming Titus Andronicus as a wholly canonical play, Foster seems to have been unaware of many scholarly discussions identifying Peele as the author of Act , and (probably) three further scenes. . Foster consistently misrepresents Elliott and Valenza’s work. He claims they have dismissed Henry VI as a doubtful or collaborative play (, p. ): ‘we haven’t’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). He claims that they neither ‘commonized’ (modernized) nor edited their texts (, p. ), an ‘absurdly misconceived’ charge, as they describe it, since ‘gathering and commonizing the necessary texts was among the greatest labors of the Clinic’ (, p. ) – including all those they had given Foster for his Vassar electronic archive. . Foster has seriously misunderstood Elliott and Valenza’s work. His method differs greatly from theirs: he looks for ‘thumbprints’, supposedly unique resemblances between Shakespeare and the sample text, while they look for ‘rejections’, instances where the sample text does not resemble Shakespeare and falls outside his normal profiles. Neutral observers will see advantages and disadvantages in both procedures, and would expect proponents of the one to understand and recognize the validity of the other. Foster, however, never understood the importance of not basing arguments on small samples, nor did he realize the value of standardizing sample sizes. When objecting to one of their tests (rates for no/not), he cited two passages in Shakespeare which were only , and words long, far ‘too short to compare meaningfully with ,-word samples’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Equally, his repeated allegations that Elliott–Valenza tests ‘validated for large samples collapse like a “house of cards” when applied to small ones . . . show a basic confusion’ on this fundamental point, as they observe (pp. , ), since – as is well known, not only to statisticians – differences of sample size do affect computational accuracy.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
. Foster challenged many of their statistics, but made errors himself. He rebuked them for miscounting the number of not’s in the Funerall Elegye, but his own count () was wrong, since he included two instances from the prose dedication (p. ). Foster complained that they had miscounted the number of times the contraction I’m appears in Henry VIII, ‘four occurrences (not eight) . . . ’ (Foster , p. ), but their published figures are not raw figures, but rates per , words and clearly and repeatedly identified as such . . . Our computed rates of eight I’m’s per , words for Fletcher’s part of the play (not the whole play, as Foster misdescribes it), and three for Shakespeare’s part, are accurate as published. (Elliott and Valenza , p. )
Elliott and Valenza documented more than thirty errors, major and minor, in Foster’s attack on them, but two years later Foster persisted in reading their figures as if they were raw numbers, complaining that ‘Elliott and Valenza misreport “” Harks in The Tempest’, instead of , showing that their ‘figures are wrong so often as to be worthless’ (b, pp. , ; , p. ). In fact, they ‘actually reported hark adversions per , words’, which amounts to a total of or in The Tempest (, p. ). These and other gaffes show that Foster, although always accusing others of error, is perfectly capable of making them himself. . Foster tried to discredit the quantitative metrical analysis pioneered by Marina Tarlinskaja. As we saw in chapter (pp. –), her test for ‘leaning micro-phrases’, enclitic or proclitic, produced results placing the Elegye well outside the norms for Shakespeare. Foster gave a brief account of this test, criticized much of the detail, and contemptuously rejected it as ‘at best, dubious, and at worst, foul vapour’ (Foster b, pp. –), so revealing a seeming unfamiliarity with modern prosodic studies. Dismissing this test in , Foster made at least five major errors: Elliott and Valenza did not ‘disregard prosody and genre. All our samples were iambic pentameter, and are so identified’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Secondly, Foster missed the whole point of the test, ‘which is not to count instances of normal stress, but instances where a “clinging” monosyllable loses its normal stress for metric reasons’ (p. ). Thirdly, Foster claimed that their base lines were taken from ‘just two plays and three . . . poems’: in fact, they included percent of Shakespeare’s poetry, and two plays, Richard II and The Tempest, which they had chosen ‘after consulting with both Foster and Tarlinskaja’ (p. ). Fourthly, and even more inaccurately, Foster criticized Elliott and Valenza for computing the ratios between enclitic and proclitic micro-phrases: in fact
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
they never used that test, basing their profiles ‘on frequency rates of microphrases per thousand lines’. Fifthly, Foster (again misunderstanding their use of standard units of measurement) mocked them for expressing their results for ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ and the Funerall Elegye in terms of ‘the frequency of such phrases “per thousand lines” . . . though neither poem is even lines long’ (Foster b, p. ). But of course, they politely explained to him, ‘rates per thousand are no different from rates per hundred carried to one more decimal’. Their ‘baseline or comparison blocks for verse tests’ may have fewer than , lines, being standardized for size (,-word blocks) but they all have ‘frequency rates per thousand lines’ (Elliott and Valenza , pp. –). A scholar having less self-confidence, or more humility than Foster, might have conceded his errors and misconceptions at this point. But in his second attack, unrepentant – or perhaps unaware how serious his errors were – Foster reverted to Tarlinskaja’s quantitative prosody, making a series of reckless accusations: ‘Elliott and Valenza clearly misunderstand even what it was they were testing’; ‘Tarlinskaja is too often mistaken in her assumptions about Elizabethan scansion’ (Foster , p. ). But anyone who has read Tarlinskaja’s monumental volume, English Verse. Theory and History (The Hague, ), which analysed more than , lines of English poetry in the closest detail, her extraordinarily detailed book on Shakespeare’s prosody, or her many other studies (Tarlinskaja , p. ) will disagree. Foster went on to reveal unsuspected depths of confusion in attempting to explain micro-phrases: ‘certain monosyllabic modifiers “cling” to the substantive, and retain or lose stress’, he claimed, but ‘it is principally in the act of oral reading, not in the act of composition, that monosyllables “cling” to the word following’ (p. ). Tarlinskaja, however, correctly defined micro-phrases as ‘syntactically and semantically linked words’, and showed that they involve far more than substantives, but include ‘subject + predicate, modifier + modified, verb + adverb, adverb + adverb (adjective), verb + object’, and so on (, pp. –). And whether or not the effect of ‘clinging’ is apparent to the poet in composition, it is certainly perceptible in the act of silent reading (unless Foster habitually reads aloud). Having displayed his misunderstanding of this ‘cumbersome test’, Foster finally dismissed its ‘arcane mysteries’ as ‘much ado about nothing’, while expressing indifference to the fact that the Elegye failed this test (, p. ). In these two episodes Foster dealt with his critics – Kennedy, and Elliott and Valenza – with a combination of irrelevant insinuation
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
(‘anti-Stratfordians’), misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and a refusal to properly reconsider his own work. Once Foster had published in PMLA the paper he had given to the Chicago meeting of the MLA on December , two further critics emerged, the brothers Charles W. and A. Kent Hieatt, experienced scholars in Renaissance literature, with a special interest in the statistical approach to authorship problems. Normally, as we have seen, articles take up to two years to get published in academic journals, but once again Foster’s appeared with remarkable speed, in PMLA’s issue of December . It was prefixed with an introductory note concerning the ‘review process’ for Foster’s essay: Because of wide-spread news reports about Foster’s work on A Funeral Elegy, the identity of the author of this essay could not be concealed during the refereeing process. Therefore, the editor sought and received approval from the MLA Executive Council to deviate from the journal’s author-anonymous reviewing policy in this instance, with the understanding that this exception would not constitute a precedent. The essay was evaluated by a member of the Advisory Committee, by a specialist in textual editing, and by the Editorial Board. (Foster a, p. )
Whoever those ‘specialists’ were, this announcement was tantamount to the MLA – the most powerful academic institution in the USA – putting its seal of approval on the essay in which Foster made his categorical claim for Shakespeare’s authorship, and adduced ‘new evidence’ from ‘an enormous lexical database’ he had compiled, called ‘Shaxicon’. As we saw in chapter , the claims Foster made concerning this tool were criticized on several heads, and its promised public release has not materialized. In this article Foster claimed that ‘Shaxicon’, which listed in chronological sequence all the ‘rare’ words in Shakespeare (words occurring twelve times or fewer in his canon), provided conclusive evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye (a, pp. –). The next issue of PMLA (May, ) included in its ‘Forum’ section some dissenting letters, including one each from Charles and Kent Hieatt, who had been working since with ‘Shaxicon’ version ., loaned them by Foster. Charles Hieatt reported having found ‘consistent discrepancies’ in Foster’s results, possibly caused by ‘confusion between the two halves of a divided screen that appears when one combines word lists in Word Cruncher, the database program used by Shaxicon’. He recorded that when he had followed the directions supplied he came up with consistently different results from Foster’s, although the small number of words involved made the findings ‘statistically trivial’ in any
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case (Hieatt b, p. ). Kent Hieatt complemented his brother’s critique by pointing out another error, namely that Foster had given ‘in one numerator a total of rare words including all their repetitions but in both denominators totals of rare words excluding their repetitions. And in fact Foster finally multiplies instead of dividing as his formula asks’ (Hieatt a, p. ). This second observation produced a correction from the Editor, who took the blame for ‘the denominator being accidentally inverted and the key misreported’, publishing an erratum (pp. , ). As we have seen (above, p. ), Hieatt also criticized Foster for basing his attribution of the Funerall Elegye to Shakespeare on ‘statistically trivial’ lexical evidence. Foster began his reply ad hominem, alleging that ‘the Hieatts misunderstand the use of Shaxicon. They have struggled since with just five pages of instructions, and the problems they describe arise from their inexperience.’ Further, he claimed, ‘both Hieatts are confused about the significance of particular character distributions’ (Foster , pp. –). Not addressing either of their objections, Foster fell back on unsupported descriptions of Shakespeare’s linguistic preferences (‘he uses permutatio . . . more often than most poets of his time, gerunds less often, and participial adjectives more frequently than many other writers’: such statements, lacking evidence, are of little value). Foster reaffirmed his belief that ‘the identification of WS with William Shakespeare stands unshaken’ (p. ). Unable to comment further, since PMLA does not publish counterrebuttals, and dissatisfied that Foster had answered neither his nor his brother’s criticism, A. K. Hieatt wrote a letter to the S list, still being edited by Hardy M. Cook. In it he reiterated Charles Hieatt’s point, that ‘all of Foster’s percentages, in his Elegy article and everywhere else’, are wrong, since he ‘consistently started with the wrong half-screen in matching two texts’. Foster’s calculations of the percentage of words used by Egeon in The Comedy of Errors and supposedly reused in Henry VIII and the Funerall Elegye were incorrect by and percent, respectively, but ‘in at least one other case his figure is off by percent’. Foster replied briefly, alleging ‘unfortunate misrepresentations’ by Hieatt, but then posted an enormously long, six-part reply, ‘Foster on Shaxicon’ (.–, Feb.), running to some seventeen closely printed pages, over , words. This was by far the longest contribution ever published in this forum, in which most letters average to words. Foster was fortunate to be accorded so much space in which to defend himself, but much of his reply simply avoided addressing the issue, indulging in digressions on how to use electronic databases, further attacks
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
on those who had disputed Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegye (this time Katherine Duncan-Jones), an extremely unhelpful excerpt from Shaxicon, and patronizing explanations of the difference between types and tokens. Looking again at Foster’s reply, I was reminded of Paul Grice’s celebrated William James Lectures, given at Harvard in , in which he discussed ‘conversational implicatures’, those unstated conventions in normal human conversation which are not random and undirected but rather ‘cooperative efforts’, in which each participant recognizes ‘a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction’. Grice argued that a ‘Cooperative Principle’ underpins all human exchange, setting up expectations that communication will be truthful, coherent, relevant, and able to be understood. Discussing the ‘quantity of information to be provided’ in a conversational exchange, Grice suggested that in most human interaction speakers obey ‘the following maxims’: . Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange) . Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Whatever Foster intended the ‘purposes of the exchange’ to be, his reply was over-informative and irrelevant, not properly addressing either of the issues that the Hieatts had raised. It resembled, more than anything else, a filibuster, and culminated with a swingeing attack on Kent and Charles Hieatt, including selective reprinting of their letters to Foster, solely citing passages where they revealed uncertainties about these new electronic resources. The tone of Foster’s attack, once again, was ad hominem and condescending – ‘the Hieatts did not consciously gerrymander their data’, he wrote, but they just naturally suffer from ‘confusion’; their objections to his computations are ‘pure rubbish’, and they should have accepted his offer ‘to teach them the basics’ of software programs. Here Foster had placed himself in the optimal position for a controversialist of his type, since he alone had access to Shaxicon, making it impossible for anyone else to verify his arguments until that database is published. Further discussion would be fruitless, but in any case the crucial point about this reply was its length. Here was another unfortunate editor who had given Foster leeway, only to find the proceedings getting out of control, as the pages mounted up, and the expense grew. Kent Hieatt was allowed a brief reply ( ., Feb. ), in which he drew attention to the fact that Foster had still failed to answer the two criticisms, and recorded his frustrating experiences with the copy-editors at PMLA, who had repeatedly altered his text so as to eliminate any criticism of Foster, ‘to the extent of warping or completely
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contradicting my meaning’. The editor then closed the issue, indeed banished for ever any discussions of the Shakespeare authorship question from this forum, where they remain forbidden to this day. ‘Apr`es moi’, Foster might have said, ‘le n´eant.’ Although Foster has affirmed that I welcome scrutiny of my own work, have always encouraged free debate of attributional problems, and shall continue to assist my fellow scholars when asked to do so, irrespective of their beliefs or tests concerning A Funeral Elegy (Foster , p. )
there would seem to be much evidence to the contrary. In the three episodes I have described five reputable scholars made specific criticisms of Foster’s methods and findings, which he did not fully address, attempting rather to discredit his critics by ad hominem methods. In each forum – the Shakespeare Electronic Conference, Computers and the Humanities, PMLA – Foster received favourable treatment, being allotted much more space and editorial freedom, while his critics found it difficult to get a fair hearing. In each case the issue was polarized, Foster emerging as the apparent victor. This polarization also affected the journalists who have interviewed Foster, and who have echoed his hostility towards his critics. In an interview Foster gave in to an American journal, Lingua Franca, the interviewer (Caleb Crain) described Ward Elliott as concluding the ‘Clinic’s report . . . with his usual amiable goofiness’ (Crain , p. ). Those scholars – ‘old-guard Shakespeareans’, needless to say – who debated his ascription in ‘the Letters column of the Times Literary Supplement’ produced merely ‘shrill hysterics’ (Foster , p. ). Foster has consistently avoided discussing the valid points his critics made, while denigrating their work. Throughout these controversies it is remarkable the extent to which Foster’s intermediaries – journalists, interviewers, editors – present his work at his own most favourable self-estimate. When Nancy Ide, the new editor of Computers and the Humanities, composed an online puff for the delayed issue (vol. , no. ), she described it as including a debate on the controversial topic of statistical methods for authorship attribution, which has recently received unprecedented coverage in the international press: first, concerning the controversy over Richard Abrams’ and Donald Foster’s assertion of Shakespearean authorship of an obscure elegy . . . The debate presented in this number . . . includes an attack by Elliott and Valenza on statistical methods used in Shakespearean authorship studies, and Donald Foster’s detailed rebuttal of their claims.
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
But of course that account reverses the real position. In no sense did Elliott and Valenza attack ‘statistical methods used in Shakespearean authorship studies’, since they are among the leading exponents of such methods. And it would be a sad state of affairs if, as Ide went on to affirm, Foster’s methods really are ‘a mainstay of humanities computing’. When the admirable World Shakespeare Bibliography summarized Elliott and Valenza’s paper, ‘Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants’ (), it did so in the briefest manner, but allowed Foster’s ‘Response’ a quotation: ‘[he] finds many of the tests “deeply flawed, both in their design and execution” ’. The truth is exactly the opposite. It is a commonplace that ‘nothing succeeds like success’. Foster’s rise to celebrity status also shows the role played in the scholarly world, as elsewhere, by reputation. Once someone has achieved the status of an expert, many people who lack the necessary expertise themselves are likely to accept what they say or write as authoritative. The higher the level on which this acceptance takes place, the greater that person’s influence. The American Council of Learned Societies, truly a leading body in the academic community, recently published its ‘Occasional Paper No. ’, surveying ‘Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship: Achievements, Prospects, and Challenges – the United States Focus’. This anonymously authored document surveys the growing number of valuable electronic resources, such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae from the University of California (Irvine), the Dictionary of Old English at Toronto, the Dartmouth Dante Project and the Wesleyan Confucian Project. The survey includes this paragraph: Donald Foster recently received national attention for his work in establishing, with wide critical acceptance, the author of a little-known Renaissance elegy to be William Shakespeare. The hermeneutic facet of his research cannot be minimized, but the stylistic analysis performed by the computer was integral to his conclusions. Foster performed a frequency-of-use match of words in the elegy against the full corpus of Shakespeare’s writings and other contemporary authors. From this analysis Foster could conclude that selected words and their contextual phrasing were unique to Shakespeare; enough of these appeared in this ‘lost’ elegy to strongly suggest the Bard’s authorship.
Unfortunately, that description of Foster’s computational analysis is erroneous. He did not make use of a ‘full corpus of . . . other contemporary authors’, only a small and unrepresentative sample, taken from a far too brief historical period. The ‘selected words and their contextual phrasing’ were by no means ‘unique to Shakespeare’, since many more
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
of them can be found in the writings of John Ford. Foster’s computer did not perform ‘a stylistic analysis’ – how could it? – but only counted the incidence of matching words in an already narrowly defined database. Such endorsements merely show that the methodology of authorship studies is not yet understood. ‘ ’ One unfortunate consequence of the specialization of knowledge over the last half-century has been the emergence of distinct disciplines, often extremely complex, which gradually become too technical for all but a few specialists. In addition to cutting themselves off from a general audience, practitioners of these disciplines risk losing awareness that they are still subject to the constraints affecting all research. Authorship studies has suffered from both developments. The use of ever more complex statistical methods, often generated by high-powered computers, together with the increasing focus on ever more minute details of language and style, has caused many scholars of Elizabethan drama to be afraid or distrustful of stylometry, convinced in advance that such studies can be neither understood nor trusted. One aim of this book is to try and remedy the increasing isolation of authorship studies within a specialized enclave, and to show that its methods are perfectly comprehensible and – when properly practised – reliable. The other risk which I have diagnosed, the forgetting that all research is subject to some inalienable constraints, has taken an especially unfortunate form in authorship studies, in which some practitioners claim certainty or even infallibility. Gary Taylor several times declared that ‘Shall I die?’ must now ‘be regarded as Shakespeare’s until proved otherwise’, and that it ‘must be included in any edition of Shakespeare’s works that claims to be “complete” ’ (Taylor a, p. ). Donald Foster consciously echoed Taylor’s formulation, declaring that ‘A Funeral Elegy belongs hereafter with Shakespeare’s poems and plays . . . because it is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare. Substantially strengthened by historical and intertextual evidence, that web is unlikely ever to come unravelled’ (Foster a, p. ). These were provocative utterances, no doubt, but both claims seem to have forgotten the questionable status of certainty in all forms of research. Even in the natural sciences, with their extraordinary attention to detail, using measurement techniques and mathematical calculations of stunning accuracy and complexity, wise researchers know
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
that while their interpretation of the evidence may be the best one possible, it is still only provisional. The history of science in our time offers abundant instances of the revision or displacement of theories when new concepts and new evidence have come into play. Researchers in the humanities should be even more careful about making categorical claims, considering that their work is based on the interpretation of language, a far more hazardous enterprise, at a much lower level of computational accuracy. As I have shown, Taylor and Foster each neglected many sources of evidence, and misinterpreted others, making their attributions worthless. Taylor’s disinclination to engage in debate with his critics meant that the controversy surrounding ‘Shall I die?’ disappeared from view relatively quickly, and he was able to devote himself to a wide range of scholarly activities in the field of editing and textual criticism, many of which have proved valuable. Foster, by contrast, has devoted himself almost exclusively to authorship studies, and has kept himself in the public eye thanks to his involvement in some cases which aroused great public interest. The considerable media attention paid to his Shakespeare ascription of the Funerall Elegye led to his being invited by New York magazine to try and identify the author of Primary Colors (), a satirical fiction with resemblances to Bill Clinton’s electoral campaign. The magazine provided Foster with a machine-readable text of the novel, together with a large ‘electronic archive of writings by possible suspects’ (Foster , p. ), mostly political commentators having the necessary inside knowledge. Then, equipped with a Macintosh text-retrieval utility, ‘Retrieve It!’, Foster set to work, confident that Anonymous could be identified, since, as he modestly put it, ‘the prominent features of his language and prose style were easily observed’ (p. ). After eliminating four candidates, he fell on Joe Klein, a political columnist for Newsweek, and instantly found numerous parallels between ‘Anonymous’ and Klein’s journalism (pp. –). Klein repeatedly denied the ascription, but it was confirmed when a proof copy of the novel turned up with corrections in Klein’s handwriting matching his hand in signed documents. This deserved success convinced some scholars that because Foster was right about Primary Colors he must be right about the Funerall Elegye. However, as James Hirsh has pointed out, the two cases are profoundly different. In the Primary Colors case the writing sample that was the basis of Foster’s computer calculations was a novel of at least , words. In the Elegy case all Foster had to work with was a ,word poem, a writing sample only three per cent the size of Primary Colors. A pollster who successfully predicted the result of an election by interviewing
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
, prospective voters and who then attempted to forecast the result of the next election by polling only thirty voters would not be taken seriously. (Hirsh , p. n. )
– And of course, the Elegye also involves such complex factors as prosody, rhetoric, syntax, grammar, the history of the English language, and much else. Although it proved nothing about the Elegye, Foster’s success with Primary Colors brought him enormous attention from the US media, and he attained celebrity status, being inundated with requests for interviews and radio and television appearances. In his university (Vassar College) received , emails for him ( .), a figure also given as , (Foster , p. ). In November of that year he became involved in the Unabomber case, being invited by the FBI to support their remarkably detailed linguistic analysis identifying Ted Kaczynski as the sender of parcel bombs. Foster submitted a written affidavit supporting their case against appeal, but without performing any textual analysis. However, from the mere fact that he had been consulted his reputation grew, and he was asked to testify in a series of criminal cases, as chronicled in his recent autobiography (Foster ). One might argue that Foster became the victim of his own success, in that it may have caused him to forget the provisional nature of all scholarship, especially when working with purely linguistic evidence. The Stoics recognized two types of fortune, good and bad, both equally threatening to the pursuit of wisdom and virtue. In their perspective, success must be regarded as a danger, in that it can induce an unwary belief that one success will lead to another, and that everything one does is right. Foster has always been keenly aware that his successes in the ‘extra-curricular’ world of civil and criminal disputes could have a positive effect on his academic pursuits, retrospectively declaring that if he succeeded in identifying the author of Primary Colors it ‘would demonstrate that the methodology can be effective not only on Renaissance texts but for virtually any English text’, and that this would have additional ‘academic value by providing a touchstone to the new “Shakespeare” poem’ (Foster , pp. –; my italics). The fact that he did succeed seems to have convinced him that the methodology was indeed infallible. As late as the summer of he could tell one interviewer that he had never made a mistake: Foster admits he doesn’t have much room for error. All I need to do is get one attribution wrong ever, and it will discredit me not just as an expert witness in civil and criminal suits but also in the academy. He smiles nervously: So far, I’ve got a fine record going. (Crain , p. ; my italics)
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
As the italicized words declare, Foster has explicitly claimed that successes with his methodology in his ‘extra-curricular’ activities legitimize its application in the academic world of literary authorship studies (witness the Funerall Elegye). Conversely, as he admits, any failure he should experience with his methodology in the public sphere of ‘extortion letters, pseudonymous tips and ransom notes’ would call in question its applicability to the considerably more complex case of a short Renaissance poem using (by comparison) highly sophisticated literary language, and observing the rhetorical conventions appropriate to mourning and consolation, in a now remote linguistic idiolect. The uncomfortable fact for Foster’s methodology is that, by the time he had given that interview, he had made two colossal errors in authorship identification connected with the murder of JonBen´et Ramsey. This tragic and so far unsolved murder has generated unprecedented media interest in the USA – in addition to thousands of newspaper articles and TV broadcasts, several books have been published about it, and by March the internet carried nearly , items related to the murder, with more than websites specifically devoted to it. In order to understand Foster’s involvement with this case, a minimal outline may be helpful. On Christmas night, , the six-year-old beauty pageant queen, JonBen´et, was murdered in her house, while her parents and brother were sleeping. Numerous features of this case were unusual. There were no tracks in the snow around the house, and no sign of a break-in; neighbours alleged that they had heard a child screaming at a.m., but did nothing. Her parents contacted the police next morning, reporting that their child had been kidnapped, and that they had discovered a ransom note. This note, as Joyce Carol Oates described it, ‘in fact a lengthy letter written in a manic Hollywood-thriller mode’, was two and a half pages long, ‘written by someone with a good deal of time and no worry of being surprised while writing it’ (Oates , p. ). But JonBen´et had not been kidnapped; her body was discovered in the cellar, the kidnappers and their ransom note turned out to be fictitious, and in many people’s eyes the parents became prime suspects. In particular Mrs Ramsey was suspected of having written the ransom note. Many things connected with this case remain locked in obscurity, but from accounts published in newspaper articles, transcripts of TV shows, books, and internet websites, it seems that Donald Foster intervened in it twice, entirely on his own initiative, and that his authorship methodology twice produced an erroneous identification. He entered the fray in May , having discovered a posting on the internet signed ‘Jameson’
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
which affirmed that ‘The Ramseys are innocent’ and that the murderer was an intruder and ‘a sexual predator’. (The author of these postings engaged in a great deal of morbid speculation about the murderer’s sexual proclivities.) Intrigued, Foster hunted down other postings with this signature, and came to the conclusion that this was an alias for JonBen´et’s -year-old half-brother, John Andrew Ramsey, whom he came to suspect of the murder. Foster read hundreds of pages of the online writings of ‘Jameson’, and on May began an email correspondence with this person, using the resulting texts as material through which ‘the perpetrator’ would define himself further (a procedure Foster recommends to other investigators), and feeding his steadily growing conviction that ‘Jameson’ was the murderer. However, in speculating about the identity of ‘Jameson’ Foster had moved altogether out of the realm of authorship studies. Normally, attribution scholars try to identify the author of an anonymous work by analysing samples of writing by known authors who might have written it. But Foster had, so far as I know, no samples of John Andrew Ramsey’s writing, and had no idea where he was on the night of the crime. (It transpired that he was in Atlanta, Georgia, and was never a suspect.) Unfortunately, Foster’s conviction that the author of these postings was a -year-old male was rudely shattered when a journalist assured him that ‘Jameson’ was a middle-aged woman. Foster emailed ‘Jameson’, requesting a telephone conversation, and on June he received a forty-nine-minute telephone call from said ‘Jameson’, who disclosed that she was in fact a -year-old housewife called Susan Bennett from Hickory, NC. In her profuse documentation of this episode on several internet websites, as well as in a television appearance, Susan Bennett recounted how he refused to give up his theory that ‘Jameson’ was an alias for the murderer, John Andrew Ramsey, even when he had discovered her true identity. His authorship identification disproved, Foster decided that Mrs Bennett must be a female relative harbouring the young Ramsey and allowing him to use her computer and email address. According to her testimony, on June he actually sent her a three-page registered letter, citing state laws about being an accessory and offering to help her turn herself in for her part in the crime, an offer which she understandably refused. In July the aggrieved Mrs Bennett, disturbed by these accusations, sent all the Foster material to the Boulder District Attorney, who apparently put it in a drawer for ten months. This whole sequence of events only became public on April , when Bennett appeared on the CBS TV show Hours and described her interaction with Foster,
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
also displaying a fax from Foster to his literary agent on June , announcing that he had solved this Colorado crime. In terms of authorship studies, Foster’s first sally into the Ramsey murder mystery failed because he had absolutely no documents to work with. His second effort involved the ransom note, of which the investigating detectives had so far only released excerpts. Nevertheless, Foster felt sufficiently confident that he could divine the psyche of a criminal in these excerpts, and on June , concurrent with his ‘identification’ of ‘Jameson’, he wrote to Mrs Ramsey to announce that his reading of them had exonerated her from suspicion – even though, once again, he had no other writings of Mrs Ramsey with which to compare them. He affirmed his belief in her innocence, on which he was ready to stake his professional reputation. Foster described his credentials as an authorship scholar, mentioning Primary Colors, the Unabomber, and other cases, and continued: I have also correctly identified the author of documents as short as two pages, and I have been able to detect lies or misstatements or concealed information in more instances than I can count. In the years that I have done scholarly text analysis, I have never made a substantive error; if I’m not sure, I bite my tongue or else offer multiple possibilities. In short, no one does what I do as well as I do it.
This letter was released by Mrs Ramsey’s lawyers in September , and published in several newspapers, a facsimile even appearing on the internet. It has been widely discussed in the North American press, including recent reviews of Foster’s autobiography. My diagnosis that Foster’s undoubted successes may have made him not immune to the temptations of considering himself infallible is, I think, confirmed by that remarkable claim, ‘I have never made a substantive error’, while the mention of ‘ years’ suggests that he had a completely infallible track record going back to – that is, when he completed his dissertation on the Funerall Elegye. Further evidence of Foster’s reputation for infallibility comes from an account of the Ramsey murder case published by a detective, Steve Thomas, in which Thomas expressed his admiration for Foster in terms strikingly close to his own self-estimate: ‘He was the best in the country at what he did’ (Thomas , p. ). Thomas added that Foster possessed a ‘sterling reputation and a track record of – in deciphering anonymous writings . . . ’ (p. ). Thomas may have derived this score of to zero from Foster, or he may have made it up himself. Either way, it shows that Foster’s belief in his infallibility was shared by others.
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
However, that reputation had already been severely dented. In June Foster had submitted ‘extensive notes on the ransom letter’ to the District Attorney of Boulder County, Colorado (Prestin , p. ), who did not reply until January , when he sent Foster a complete copy of the ransom note ‘and the writing samples of various people’ (Thomas , p. ). As he studied these documents, Foster apparently realized that, despite his earlier confidence in Mrs Ramsey’s innocence, the complete ransom note seemed to bear every sign of her authorship. According to Detective Thomas, Foster reported back to the investigators in March , claiming to have established a series ‘of “unique matches”’ between the note and other writings by Mrs Ramsey, including ‘her penchant for inventing private acronyms, spelling habits, indentation, alliterative phrasing, metaphors, grammar, vocabulary, frequent use of exclamation points, and even the format of her handwriting on the page’ (p. ). The District Attorney’s office then apparently remembered the material Mrs Bennett had sent them the previous July, and pointed out that the astonishing reversal by which Foster had first pronounced Mrs Ramsey innocent, then guilty, made him a useless prosecution witness (p. ). In July the District Attorney’s office formally dismissed him, telling him ‘that he was through doing this kind of work. Citing his internet comments to Jameson when he knew nothing about the case, they declared that his later conclusions, when he knew everything, were unreliable’, and that in fact ‘he would be open to impeachment on that one issue’ (p. ). What are we to make of Foster’s double error, first suggesting Susan Bennett as the murder suspect, then pronouncing Mrs Ramsey innocent before he had seen the full text of the ransom note, but suspect once he had studied it? By his own admission, ‘all I need to do is get one attribution wrong . . . and it will discredit me not just as an expert witness in civil and criminal suits but also in the academy’. It may be that his second opinion on Mrs Ramsey’s authorship of the ransom note is correct, but a discussion of this issue on the website of the Department of Forensic Linguistics at Birmingham University raised the objection that Foster’s mode of ‘textual analysis’ only succeeds ‘when there is a large database of written works for comparison, as in the complete works of Shakespeare: Foster had only a limited subset of writings by Mrs Ramsey (apparently only some Christmas cards or letters collected by a single friend)’. The real truth may never be known. In his recent autobiography Foster has briefly commented on this episode, claiming that, as he moved from Shakespeare to ‘actual homicides
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
. . . it was perhaps inevitable that I should make a mistake, and I did’ (Foster , p. ). Foster does not disclose his conflicting views concerning Mrs Ramsey, and alludes in a cryptic manner to his other error, concerning the identity of ‘Jameson’. But he goes on to castigate Mrs Bennett for her ‘despicable activity on the internet’, her ‘months-long obsession with the . . . killing of JonBen´et . . . too vile in its voyeuristic description to be a prank, too well informed to be madness, too full of seeming relevance to be ignored’, finally ascribing to the police the dismissal of ‘Jameson’ as a ‘code six wingnut’ (pp. –). This violent verdict will leave readers unfamiliar with the events that I have summarized here more puzzled than enlightened. Although Foster now admits that his ‘beginner’s mistake’ – whatever it was – ‘impressed upon me a sense of limit when venturing from the safe world of academic debate into the minefield of criminal investigation’, he does not remember his earlier admission that failure in the one area would have damaging implications for his work in the other. In a recent interview ( January ) another journalist recorded the triumphs by which Foster has become ‘the nation’s most recognized literary shamus’, together with the envy that his success has brought him. When he attributed the Elegye to Shakespeare, readers of Book. The Magazine for the Reading Life are informed, he ran afoul of a number of Shakespearean scholars, some of whom lambasted Foster’s methods in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘I’m sort of the Salman Rushdie of Shakespeare studies over in the UK’, Foster says. ‘I’m exaggerating, but they are very protective of the English Shakespeare and they jumped on the bandwagon to save Shakespeare. But they kept on getting it wrong.’
The chief drawback of such claims is that they induce a state of complacency: the conviction of infallibility means that the initial arguments are insulated from discussion, any subsequent counter-evidence simply dismissed. The result, in Francis Bacon’s pithy summation, is that ‘The opinion of plenty is amongst the causes of want’: that is, an issue dismissed as closed remains gapingly open. As Gilles Monsarrat () has commented, ‘it is a great pity Foster became (partly) aware of the strong link between Ford and the elegy only after he had attributed its authorship to Shakespeare. By then positions had become entrenched and this led him to a complete misreading’ of the evidence. Foster’s example, closing down enquiry once a satisfactory interpretation had been reached, underlines my point that authorship studies are subject to the same constraints as all other areas of research. John M. Ellis has recently restated a principle that is surely universally accepted, namely that ‘the
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
one indispensable factor in first-rate research is intellectual curiosity – a willingness to follow wherever the facts and the argument lead’. Once that openness has been lost, ‘research degenerates into a search for more reasons to believe what was already believed’. The proper procedure, Ellis holds, is that ‘when a researcher has arrived at what seems to be a viable explanation of the phenomenon being studied, he or she must next look at other conceivable explanations and weigh as dispassionately as possible the case for those alternatives’ (Ellis , p. ). Ellis argues that a key characteristic of open-minded research is that it welcomes adverse criticism, for ‘researchers need the clash of opposing viewpoints to help them advance’. Where some scholars regard hostile critics as personal enemies, open-minded researchers know that challenging critiques will make them abandon weak points in their case or find stronger ones: ‘Researchers don’t like criticism any more than anyone else does, but they know that without it they will die intellectually’ (pp. –). Ellis juxtaposes the ideal of open-minded research with the political activism so common in universities recently, polarized around the ‘social agendas’ of race, gender, and class. To the social activist any critic is a political enemy, and he regards those who oppose him as immoral people whose lack of moral worth is the reason for their disagreement. Because nothing is to be learned from such people, he allows himself the dangerous luxury of believing that counterarguments need not be heeded . . . There is nothing left to check a slide into slackness, self-indulgence, and wishful thinking and no pressure to refine and rethink. (p. )
To the open-minded researcher, however, Adverse criticism, however unwelcome, is indispensable to the health of any intellectual enterprise; without it, weaknesses endure instead of being exposed and discarded. It is a necessary discipline. Hostile critics are like predators. They harass their prey, but they also pick off the weaker elements in a species and keep it strong; without them, the species degenerates. Intellectual enemies also pick off weak and unconvincing elements in research and so make it stronger. Politics is quite unlike research in this respect; in politics, people who oppose you stand in the way of what you want to do, but in research contexts opponents ultimately help. (p. )
This is perhaps a difficult principle to recognize in the heated moments of academic debate, but it does seem to be true. No one should pretend that authorship studies can be an exact science, or that the last word has been spoken. It remains, like so many subjects in
John Ford’s ‘Funerall Elegye’
the humanities – and indeed, some in the natural sciences – a discipline in which a scholar collects evidence, and then interprets it. In both stages, as we know only too well, that person’s assumptions or theory can guide, but also distort the process of collecting and evaluating material. These are inevitable drawbacks of the interpretative process, and scholars must constantly make themselves aware of what they are doing, realizing that the form in which they pose a question will affect the answers, and so on. Susan Haack, a distinguished philosopher and critic of some recent wrong turns in the human sciences, has formulated the distinction between scholarly evidence and the individual’s evaluation of it in helpful terms: ‘The quality of the evidence for a claim is objective, depending on how supportive it is of the claim in question, how comprehensive, and how independently secure. A person’s judgments of the quality of evidence, however, are perspectival, depending on his background beliefs.’ Every scholar should be aware that those ‘background beliefs’ can become an obstacle to our evaluating evidence dispassionately. Given this need for critical awareness, perhaps the greatest disservice that Taylor and Foster made to authorship studies was the example they gave of absolute certitude, rejecting differing interpretations and dismissing criticism. No one can afford to practise attributional scholarship in this dogmatic way, since other scholars will simply avoid entering into such discussions, and the subject will wither, polarized around a few extreme positions which discourage disinterested enquiry. To my mind, the intellectual qualities needed by scholars working on authorship attributions have been admirably set out by Susan Haack in describing ‘the untidy process of groping for truth’ in all areas of research: Inquiry can be difficult and demanding, and we very often go wrong. Sometimes the obstacle is a failure of will; we don’t really want to know the answer badly enough to go to all the trouble of finding out, or we really don’t want to know, and go to a lot of trouble not to find out. I think of the detective who doesn’t really want to know who committed the crime, just to collect enough evidence to get a conviction . . . and of my own disinclination to rush to the library to check out the article that might oblige me to redo months of work. (Haack , p. )
For Haack, an indispensable quality in all human enquiry is the ‘fallibilist’ attitude, the recognition that we can all be in error, but that by self-awareness and self-criticism we can overcome our errors and move nearer to the truth. Haack quotes C. S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, acknowledging the fallibilist viewpoint: ‘ “Out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, all
Epilogue. The politics of attribution
my philosophy has always seemed to grow”’ (p. ). One advantage of the fallibilist position is the recognition – which I hope my critique of Foster’s thesis has established, given its wide reception among the higher levels of the American academic community – ‘that what passes for truth, known fact, strong evidence and well-conducted inquiry is sometimes no such thing, but only what the powerful have managed to get accepted as such’. It follows that a major obstacle to the growth of knowledge is ‘excessive confidence that what you take to be true is true – the “blight of cocksureness”, in Peirce’s phrase . . . ’ (p. ). In Haack’s words, respect for evidence requires not only a disposition to give up a belief in the face of contrary evidence and to proportion the degree of your belief to the strength of the evidence, but also a willingness to envisage the possibility that you have been going about a question in the wrong way altogether, or that it isn’t a legitimate question after all – and to acknowledge when you simply don’t know. ( p.)
As Haack reminds us, in this as in every area of knowledge, ‘there are no grounds for complacency’ (p. ). The correct attitude was exemplified by E. H. C. Oliphant, an outstanding attribution scholar from an earlier generation, in his study of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon: ‘I trust that in this work I am displaying no spirit of unwarranted cocksureness and showing no tendency to absurd dogmatism.’ I share these sentiments, and can only hope that this book may encourage future scholars to make authorship attributions as accurately as possible, using existing and inventing new methodologies, always aware of the possibility of error.
Appendices
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
A Funerall Elegye In memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter of Whipton neere Excester. By W. S. Imprinted at London by G. Eld. . TO MAISTER John Peter of Bowhaye in Deuon. Esq.
The loue I bore to your brother, and will doe to his memory, hath crau’d from me this last duty of a friend; I am heerein but a second to the priuiledge of Truth who can warrant more in his behalfe, then I vndertooke to deliuer. Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am lesse adicted to, but there must be miracle in that labour, which to witnesse my remembrance to this departed Gentleman, I would not willingly vndergoe: yet what-soeuer is heere done, is done to him, and to him onely. For whom, and whose sake, I will not forget to remember any friendly respects to you, or to any of those that haue lou’d him for himselfe, and himselfe for his deserts. W. S.
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Since Time, and his predestinated end, Abridg’d the circuit of his hope-full dayes; Whiles both his Youth and Vertue did intend, The good indeuor’s, of deseruing praise: What memorable monument can last, Whereon to build his neuer blemisht name? But his owne worth, wherein his life was grac’t? Sith as [that] euer hee maintain’d the same. Obliuion in the darkest day to come, When sinne shall tread on merit in the dust; Cannot rase out the lamentable tombe Of his Short-liu’d desert’s: but still they must Euen in the hearts and memories of men, Claime fit Respect; that they, in euery lim, Remembring what he was, with comfort then May patterne out, One truly good by him. For hee was truly good; if honest care, Of harmlesse conuersation, may commend A life free from such staines, as follyes are; Ill recompenced onely in his end. Nor can the toung of him who lou’d him least, (If there can bee minority of loue, To one superlatiue aboue the rest, Of many men in steddy faith) reproue His constant temper, in the equall weight Of thankfulnesse, and kindnesse: Truth doth leaue Sufficient proofe, he was in euery right, As kinde to giue, as thankfull to receaue. The curious eye, of a quick-brain’d suruey, Could scantly find a mote amidst the sun, Of his too-shortned dayes: or make a prey Of any faulty errors he had done. Not that he was aboue the spleenfull sence And spight of mallice; but for that he had Warrant enough in his owne innocence, Against the sting of some in nature bad. Yet who is hee so absolutely blest, That liues incompast in a mortall frame? Some-time in reputation not opprest? By some in nothing famous but defame? Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
Of what they doe, to be a speciall worke, Of singlenesse, not tending to offence. Whose very vertues are not to detract, Whiles hope remaines of gaine (base fee of slaues) Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt, But death to such gives vnremembered graues. Now therein liu’d he happy, if to bee Free from detraction, happinesse it bee. His yonger yeares, gaue comfortable hope To hope for comfort, in his riper youth; Which (haruest-like) did yeeld againe the crop Of Education, betterd, in his truth: Those noble twins of heauen-infused races, Learning and Wit, refined in their kind: Did joyntly both, in their peculiar graces, Enrich the curious temple of his mind. Indeed a temple, in whose precious white, Sat Reason by Religion ouer-swayd: Teaching his other senses, with delight, How Piety and Zeale should bee obey’d. Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence, Wasting his best of time: but so content With Reasons golden Meane to make defence, Against the assault of youth’s incouragement: As not the tide of this surrounding age, (When now his Fathers death had freed his will) Could make him subject to the drunken rage, Of such whose onely glory is their ill. Hee from the happy knowledge of the wise, Drawes vertue to reprooue secured fooles; And shuns the glad sleights of insnaring vice, To spend his spring of dayes in sacred schooles. Heere gaue hee dyet to the sick desires, That day by day, assault the weaker man; And with fit moderation still retires, From what doth batter Vertue now and than. But that I not intend in full discourse, To progresse out his life; I could display, A Good man in each part exact; and force The common voyce to warrant what I say. For if his fate and heauen had decreed, That full of dayes hee might haue liu’d to see The graue in peace; the times that should succeed Had been best-speaking witnesses with mee.
Appendices
Whose conuersation so vntoucht, did moue Respect most in it selfe, as who would scan His Honesty and Worth, by them might prooue, He was a kind, true, perfect gentleman. Not in the out-side of disgracefull folly, Courting Opinion, with vnfit disguise; Affecting fashions; nor addicted wholy To unbeseeming blushlesse vanities: “But suting so his habit and desire, “As that his Vertue was his best Attire. Not in the wast of many idle words Car’d hee to be heard talke; nor in the flote Of fond conceit (such as this age affordes) By vaine discourse vpon himselfe to dote. For his becomming silence, gaue such grace To his iudicious parts; as what hee spake Seem’d rather answers (which the wise imbrace) Then busie questions, such as talkers make. And though his qualities might well deserue Iust commendation, yet his furnisht mind Such harmony of goodnesse did preserue, As Nature neuer built in better kind. Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming In knowing, but for that it was the best: Euer within himselfe free choyce resuming Of true perfection, in a perfect brest: So that his Minde and Body made an In, The one to lodge the other, both like fram’d For fair conditions; guests that soonest win Applause, in generality well fam’d, If trim behauior, gestures mild, discreet Endeauors; modest speech; beseeming mirth; True friendship; actiue grace; perswasion sweete; Delightfull loue, innated from his birth; Acquaintance vnfamiliar; carriage iust; Offencelesse resolution; wisht sobriety; Clean-temper’d Moderation; steddy Trust; Vnburthen’d conscience; vnfain’d Piety; If these, or all of these, knit fast in one Can merit praise: then justly may wee say, Not any from this frailer stage is gon, Whose name is like to liue a longer day. Though not in eminent courts, or places great, For popular concourse; yet in that soile Where he inioy’d his birth, life, death, and seat,
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
Which now sits mourning his vntimely spoile. And as much glory is it to be good; For priuate persons, in their priuate home; As those descended from illustrious bloud, In publick view of greatnesse: whence they come. Though I rewarded with some sadder taste, Of knowing shame; by feeling it haue prou’d My countries thanklesse misconstruction; cast Vpon my name and credit, both vnlou’d By some, whose fortunes sunck into the wane Of Plenty and Desert, have stroue to win Justice by wrong; and sifted to imbane My reputation, with a witlesse sinne, Yet Time, the Father of vnblushing Truth, May one day lay ope malice which hath crost it: And right the hopes of my indangered youth, Purchasing credit in the place I lost it. Euen in which place, the subiect of the verse (Vnhappy matter of a mourning stile) Which now that subjects merits doth rehearse, Had education, and new beeing: while By faire demeanor, he had wonne repute Amongst the All of all that liued there: For that his actions did so wholy sute With worthynesse, still memorable here. The many houres till the day of doome, Will not consume his life and haplesse end: For should he lye obscur’d without a toombe, Time would to time his honesty commend. Whiles Parents to their children will make known, And they to their posterity impart, How such a man was sadly ouerthrowne, By a hand guided by a cruell heart. “Whereof as many as shall heare that sadnesse, “Will blame ye ones hard fate, the others madnesse. Whiles such as doe recount that tale of woe, Told by remembrance of the wisest heades, Will in the end conclude the matter so, As they will all goe weeping to their bedds. For when the world lies winterd in the stormes Of fearefull consummation; and layes downe, Th’vnsteddie change of his fantastick formes, Expecting euer to be ouer-throwne: When the proud height of much affected sinne Shall ripen to a head, and in that pride,
Appendices
End in the miseries it did begin, And fall amidst the glory of his tide: Then in a booke where euery worke is writ, Shall this man’s actions bee reueal’d; to shew The gainfull fruit of well-imployed wit, Which payed to heauen the debt that it did owe: Heere shall be reckoned vp the constant faith, Neuer vntrue, where once he loue profest; Which is a miracle in men (one saith) Long sought, though rarely found: and he is best “Who can make friendship, in those times of change, “Admired more, for being firme then strange. When those weake houses of our brittle flesh, Shall ruin’d bee by death; our grace, and strength, Youth, memory and shape, that made us fresh Cast downe, and vtterly decay’d at length: When all shall turne to dust from whence we came, And we low leueld in a narrow graue, What can we leaue behind vs but a name? Which, by a life well led may honor haue? Such honor, oˆ thou youth vntimely lost, Thou didst deserue and hast; for though thy soule Hath tooke her flight to a diuiner coast, Yet here on earth thy fame liues euer whole. In euery heart seald vp, in euery toung Fit matter to discourse; no day preuented, That pitties not thy sad and suddaine wrong, Of all alike beloued and lamented. And I here to thy memorable worth, In this last act of friendship, sacrifice My loue to Thee; which I could not set forth In any other habit of disguise. Although I could not learne (whiles yet thou wert) To speake the language of a seruile breath: My truth stole from my toung into my hart, Which shall not thence be sundred, but in death. And I confesse my loue was too remisse, That had not made thee know, how much I pris’d thee: But that mine error was, as yet it is, To thinke loue best in silence: for I siz’d thee By what I would haue been; not onely ready In telling I was thine; but beeing so, By some effect to show it: He is steddy Who seemes less then hee is, in open shew. Since then I stil reseru’d to trye the worst,
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
Which hardest fate and time thus can lay on mee. T’inlarge my thoughts, was hindered at first, While thou hadst life: I tooke this taske vpon me, To register with mine unhappy Pen, Such duties as it owes to thy desert; And set thee as a President to Men, And Limne thee to the world but as thou wert. Not hir’d, as heauen can witnesse in my soule, By vaine conceit, to please such ones as know it; Nor seruile to be lik’t; free from controule; Which paine to many men, I doe not owe it. But here I trust, I haue discharged now (Fair louely branch too soone cut off ) to Thee, My constant and irrefragable vow, As had it chanc’t thou might’st haue done to mee. But that no merit strong enough of mine, Had yeelded store to thy well-abled quill: Whereby t’enrole my name, as this of thine, How s’ere inritched by thy plenteous skil. Heere then I offer vp to Memory, The value of my tallent ( precious man) Whereby if thou liue to Posterity, Though’t be not as I would, tis as I can: “In minds from whence endeauor doth proceed, “A ready will is taken for the deed. Yet ere I take my longest last farewell, From thee, faire marke of sorrow; let me frame Some ampler work of thanke, wherein to tel What more thou didst deserue, then in thy name, And free thee from the scandall of such senses, As in the rancour of vnhappy spleene, Measure thy course of life (with false pretences) Comparing by thy death, what thou hast beene. “So in his mischiefes is the world accurst, “It picks out matter to informe the worst. The wilfull blindnesse that hood-winkes the eyes Of men in-wrapped in an earthy vayle, Makes them most ignorantly exercise, And yeeld to humor, when it doth assaile; Whereby the candle, and the bodies light Darken’s the inward eye-sight of the mind: Presuming still it sees, euen in the night Of that same ignorance which makes them blind. Hence conster they with corrupt Commentaries, Proceeding from a nature as corrupt,
Appendices
The text of malice; which so often varies, As ’tis by seeming reason vnder-propt. O! whether tends the lamentable spight Of this worlds teen-full apprehension? Which vnderstands all things amiss; whose light Shines not amidst the darke of their dissention? True ’tis, this man (whiles yet he was a man) Sooth’d not the current of besotted fashion: Nor could disgest as some loose Mimicks can, An empty sound of ouer-weening passion: So much to bee made seruant to the base, And sensuall aptnesse of dis-vnion’d vices: To purchase commendation by disgrace, Whereto the world and heate of sinne intices. But in a safer contemplation, Secure in what he knew, he euer chose The ready way to commendation, By shunning all inuitements strang, of those Whose illnesse is the necessary praise, Must waite vpon their actions: onely rare In beeing rare in shame, which striues to raise Their name by dooing what they do not care. As if the free commission of their ill, Were euen as boundlesse as their prompt desires: Only like Lords, like subjects to their will, Which their fond dotage euer-more admires. Hee was not so; but in a serious awe, Ruling the little ordered common-wealth, Of his own selfe with honour to the law, That gaue peace to his bread, bread to his health. Which euer hee maintaind in sweet content, And pleasurable rest; wherein he ioyd A Monarchy of comforts gouernment, Never untill his last to be destroyd. For in the Vineyard of heauen-fauoured learning, (Where he was double-honor’d in degree) His obseruation and discreet discerning, Had taught him in both fortunes to be free. Whence now retir’d home; to a home indeed; The home of his condition and estate; Hee well prouided gainst the hand of need, Whence yong-men some time grow vnfortunate. His disposition, by the bonds of vnity, So fastned to his reason; that it stroue, With understandings graue immunity,
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
To purchase from all hearts a steddy love. Wherein not any one thing comprehends, Proportionable note of what hee was, Then that hee was so constant to his friends, As hee would no occasion ouer-passe, Which might make knowne his vnaffected care, In all respects of triall, to vnlock His bosome and his store which did declare, That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock: A Rock of Frendship figured in his name, Fore-shewing what he was, and what should be, Most true presage, and he dischargd the same, In euery act of perfect amitye: Though in the complementall phrase of words, He neuer was addicted to the vaine Of boast, such as the common breath affoords, He was in vse most fast in tongue most plaine, Nor amongst all those virtues, that for euer, Adorn’d his reputation, will be found One greater then his Faith: which did perseuer, Where once it was protested alway sound. Hence sprung the deadly fuell that reuiu’d The rage which wrought his end; for had he been Slacker in loue, he had beene longer liu’d, And not opprest by wraths unhappy sinne. By wrathes unhappy sinne, which vnaduis’d Gaue death for free good wil and wounds for loue Pitty it was that blood had not beene pris’d At higher rate, and reason set aboue Most vniust choller, which vntimely Drew Destruction on it self: and most vniust, Robd virtue of a follower so trew, As time can boast of both for loue and trust, “So henceforth all (great glory to his blood) “Shall be but Seconds to him being good. “The wicked end their honor with their sinne, “In death, which only then the good begin. Loe heere a lesson by experience taught, For men whose pure simplicity hath drawne, Their trust to bee betrayd by beeing caught Within the snares of making truth a pawne. Whiles it not doubting whereinto it enters, Without true proofe and knowledge of a friend, Sincere in singlenesse of heart, aduenters To giue fit cause, ere loue begin, to end.
Appendices
“His vnfain’d friendship where it least was sought, “Him to a fatall time-lesse ruine brought. Whereby the life that purity adorn’d With reall merit, by this sudaine end, Is in the mouth of some in manners scorn’d, Made questionable, for they doe intend, (According to the tenour of the Saw Mistooke, if not obseru’d, writ long agoe) When men were onely led by Reasons law, That such as is the end, the life prooues so. Thus Hee, who to the vniuersall lapse Gaue sweete redemption, offring vp his bloud, To conquer death by death; and loose the traps Of Hell, euen in the triumph that it stood: Hee thus, for that his guiltlesse life was spilt By death, which was made subject to the curse; Might in like manner bee reprou’d of guilt, In his pure life, for that his end was worse. But oˆ farre bee it, our unholy lips Should so prophane the Deity aboue: As theerby to ordaine reuenging whips, Against the day of Iudgment and of Loue: The hand that lends vs honour in our dayes, May shorten when it please; and iustly take Our honor from vs, many sundry wayes, As best becomes that wisedome did vs make. The second brother who was next begot, Of all that euer were begotten yet; Was by a hand in vengeance rude and hot, Sent innocent to be in heauen set. Whose fame the Angels in melodious quiers, Still witnesse to the world; then why should hee, Well-profited in excellent desires, Bee more rebuk’d, who had like destiny? Those Saints before the euer-lasting throne, Who sit with crownes of glory on their heads, Washt white in bloud, from earth hence haue not gone, All to their ioyes, in quiet on their beds; But tasted of the sower-bitter scourge, Of torture and affliction, ere they gained, Those blessings which their sufferance did vrge. Whereby the grace fore-promis’d they attained. Let then the false suggestions of the froward Building large Castles in the empty ayre, By suppositions fond and thoughts vntoward,
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
(Issues of discontent and sick despaire) Rebound grosse arguments, vpon their heart; That may disproue their malice: and confound Vnciuill loose opinions, which insert Their souls into the roule, that doth vnsound Betraying pollicies: and shew their braines Vnto their shame ridiculous: whose scope Is enuie, whose indeuors fruitlesse paines, In nothing surely prosperous, but hope. And that same hope, so lame, so vnpreuailing, It buries selfe conceit in weake opinion; Which beeing crost, giues matter of bewayling Their vain designes, on whom want hath dominion. Such, and of such condition may deuise, Which way to wound with defamations spirit, (Close lurking whispers hidden forgeries) His taintlesse goodnesse, his desertfull merit. But whiles the minds of men can iudge sincerely, Vpon assured knowledge: his repute And estimation, shall be rumor’d cleerly, In equall worth, Time shall to time renew’t. The Graue, that in his euer empty wombe, For euer closes vp the vnrespected, Who when they dye, dye all; shall not intombe, His pleading best perfections as neglected. They to his notice in succeeding yeeres, Shall speake for him, when Hee shall lye below; When nothing but his memory appeares, Of what hee was; then shall his vertues grow. His beeing but a priuate man in ranke, (And yet not rank’t beneath a Gentleman) Shall not abridge the commendable thanke, Which wise posteritie shall giue him than: For Nature, and his therein happy Fate, Ordain’d that by his quality of minde, T’ennoble that best part, although his state Were to a lower blessednesse confin’d. Blood, pompe, state, honour, glory and command, Without fit ornaments of disposition, Are in themselues but heathnish and prophane, And much more peacefull is a meane condition, Which vnderneath the roofe of safe content, Feeds on the bread of rest: and takes delight, To looke upon the labours it hath spent, For it’s owne sustenance, both day and night.
Appendices
Whiles others plotting which way to bee great, How to augment their portion and ambition, Do toile their giddie braines, and euer sweat, For popular applause, and power’s commission. But one in honour’s like a seel`ed Doue, Whose inward eyes are dim’d with dignity; Do’s thinke most safety doth remaine aboue, And seekes to be secure, by mounting high: “Whence when he fals, who did ere while aspire, “Fal’s deeper downe, for that he climed higher. Now men who in a lower region liue, Exempt from danger of authority, Haue fittest times in Reasons rules to thriue, Not vext with enuy of prioritie. “And those are much more noble in the mind, “Then many that haue noblenesse by kind. Birth, blood, and ancesters, are none of ours, Nor can we make a proper challenge to them: But vertues and perfections in our powers, Proceed most truly from vs, if we doe them. Respectiue titles or a gracious stile, With all what men in eminence possesse, Are, without ornaments to praise them, vile: The beauty of the mind, is noblenesse. And such as haue that beauty, well deserue Eternall characters, that after death Remembrance of their worth, we may preserue, So that their glory die not with their breath. Else what availes it in a goodly strife, Vpon this face of earth heere to contend, The good t’exceed the wicked in their life, Should both be like obscured in their end? Vntill which end, there is none rightly can Bee termed happy, since the happinesse Depends vpon the goodnesse of the man, Which afterwards his praises will expresse. Look hither then, you that inioy the youth Of your best dayes; and see how vnexpected Death can betray your iollity to ruth? When death you thinke is least to be respected? The person of this modell here set out, Had all that youth & happy days could giue him: Yet could not all encompasse him about, Against th’assault of death, who to relieue him Strooke home but to the fraile and mortall parts,
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’
Of his humanity: but could not touch His flourishing and faire long-liu’d deserts, Aboue fates reach, his singlenesse was such. So that he dyes but once, but doubly liues, Once in his proper selfe, then in his name: Predestinated Time, who all depriues, Could neuer yet depriue him of the same. And had the Genius which attended on him, Beene possibilited to keepe him safe, Against the rigour that hath ouer-gone him, He had beene to the publick vse a staffe: Leading by his example in the path, Which guides to doing well, wherein so few The pronesse of this age, to error hath Informed rightly in the courses trew. As then the losse of one, whose inclination Stroue to win loue in generall, is sad, So specially his friends, in soft compassion Do feele the greatest losse they could haue had. Amongst them all, she who those nine of yeares Liu’d fellow to his counsailes, and his bed; Hath the most share in losse; for I in hers, Feele what distemperature this chance hath bred. The chaste imbracements of coniugall loue, Who in a mutuall harmony consent; Are so impatient of a strange remoue, As meager Death it selfe seemes to lament. And weep vpon those cheeks, which nature fram’d To be delightfull orbes, in whom the force Of liuely sweetnesse playes, so that asham’d Death often pitties his vnkind diuorce. Such was the separation here constraind, ( Well-worthy to be termed a rudenesse rather) For in his life his loue was so vnfain’d, As hee was both an husband and a father. The one in firme affection, and the other In carefull prouidence, which euer stroue With ioynt assistance to grace one another, With every helpfull furtherance of loue. But since the summe of all that can be said Can bee but said that Hee was good: which wholy Includes all excellence can be displaide, In praise of Vertue and reproach of Folly: His due deserts, this sentence on him giues, He dy’de in life, yet in his death hee liues:
Appendices
Now run’s the method of this dolefull song, In accents breefe to thee, O thou deceast! To whom those paines do onely all belong, As witnesses I did not loue thee least. For could my worthlesse braine find out but how, To raise thee from the Sepulcher of dust; Vndoubtedly thou shouldst have partage now, Of life with mee; and heauen bee counted iust: If to a supplicating soule, it would Giue life a new, by giuing life againe Where life is mist: whereby discomfort should Right his old griefes, and former ioyes retaine. Which now with thee are leapt into thy toombe, And buried in that hollow vault of woe: Expecting yet a more seuerer doome, Then times strickt flinty hand will let ’em know. And now if I haue leuel’d mine account, And reckon’d vp in a true measured score, Those perfect graces which were euer wont To wait on thee aliue, I aske no more. But shall heereafter in a poore content, Immure those imputations I sustaine, Learning my dayes of youth so to preuent, As not to be cast downe by them again: Only those hopes, which fate denies to grant, In full possession to a captiue hart: Who if it were in plenty, still would want, Before it may inioy his better part: From which detain’d, and banisht in th’exile Of dimme misfortune, ha’s none other prop, Whereon to leane and rest it selfe the while, But the weake comfort of the haplesse Hope. And Hope must in despight of fearfull change, Play in the strongest closet of my brest: Although perhaps I ignorantly range, And court opinion in my deep’st vnrest. But whether doth the streame of my mischance Driue me beyond my selfe: fast friend, soone lost, Long may thy worthinesse thy name aduance, Amongst the vertuous, and deseruing most. Who herein hast for euer happy prou’d, In life thou liu’dst, in death thou dyed’st belou’d.
FINIS.
The text of ‘A Funerall Elegye’ Note: Apart from modernizing the long , and expanding contractions, the original spelling and punctuation have been retained. A few obvious errors have been corrected (‘Sat’ for ‘Sot’, line ; ‘good’, line ). The emendation in line (‘that’ for ‘it’) was suggested by G. B. Evans.
Verbal parallels between ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems
‘Fames Memoriall’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Planting hir gorgeous throne upon the crest Astonishing the chaffe of pampered men Venting concealed virtue now apparent Diving into the depth of hidden art Adding within our hearts historiall Raising your deeds to fames which never end Inlarging still his theame and scope to say Alotting in his urne nobility Applying with industrious diligence Inritching his ritche knowledge doth it sute Containing acts, such acts conceit do passe Cloking your soules in sins obscurity Reviving dulnesse of a wit forlorne Presenting conquests of well mastred spight Deluding types of honour as accurst Making large statues to honorifie Inriching Brittayn with this happy gaine Keeping Contempt of virtue in subjection Contemplating the joyes of heavens content Thirsting to be immortall hence he went Pittying the sorrow which our danger crowds ‘A Funerall Elegye’
. Remembring what he was, with comfort then . Despising chiefly, men in fortunes wrackt
Verbal parallels: ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wasting his best of time: but so content Courting Opinion, with unfit disguise Affecting fashions; nor addicted wholy Knowing the best, and therefore not presuming Purchasing credit in the place I lost it Expecting ever to be over-throwne Comparing by thy death, what thou hast beene Proceeding from a nature as corrupt Ruling the little ordered common-wealth Fore-shewing what he was, and what should be Building large Castles in the empty ayre Betraying pollicies: and shew their braines Expecting yet a more severer doome Learning my dayes of youth so to prevent ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Remembring what his Godhead had decreed Ayming not to support, but scorne the good Wounding or sparing with a watchfull hand Mayntayning up-start sectes which all with-stood Searching the rules of Physicke, to disclose Undoing by his death the painefull webb Breaking the cursed Dragons head a sunder Offring to all in heart contrite and broken Despising Preachers, and nicke naming those Confounding death that had his death procur’d Clearing the imputation with excuse Implying his sinceritie and truth Knowing Arts rule, how to chuse the meane Weeping and bleeding for offending men Returning to his Father that had sent him Damning the simple and the poore in minde Consuming wrath, and soule-devouring woe Surpassing all the splendour of the Sun Wasting the season, as the night requires Masking his tyrannie with wanton baites Teaching the silly hearers how the powers Beseeching that thy Spirit may be strong
Appendices -
(Figures are provided for total occurrences; those within brackets are for line-openings.) As Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Fames Memoriall’ . . . . . . . . . .
As Sol the tincture of the meanest star As a ritch relic of memoriall As noble by his wit as by his blood As may, yet will not tast earth’s paradise As Centaures were both horse and man: so he As much grave patron of sage wisedoms lore As being loath to goe, yet go they must As Caesar led his captive slaves to Rome As oft as James the monarch of our peace As for the guifts we have we are ungratefull ‘Funerall Elegye’
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As kinde to give, as thankfull to receaue As not the tide of this surrounding age As those descended from illustrious bloud As they will all goe weeping to their bedds As, had it chanc’t thou might’st have done to mee As in the rancour of unhappy spleene As if the free commission of their ill As hee would no occasion over-passe As time can boast of both for loue and trust As theerby to ordaine reuenging whips As best becomes that wisedome did us make As then the losse of one, whose inclination As meager Death it selfe seemes to lament As hee was both an husband and a father As witnesses I did not love thee least ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
. As if Gods voyce had spoke, seem’d to invite . As against Nature chang’d my sweate to bloud
Verbal parallels: ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
As he was set much lower then the base As t’was but like the ruins of a face As but the Jewish malice was too heady As scant is one amongst a thousand good As still it strives to plot and woorke the woorst As if they were but messengers of hell As they condemn’d, He sweated bloud for such As some superiour person should commaund As they had heap’t, by subtill weight and measure As they pretend, for benefit of health As to persever in their mischiefe still As tis almost impossible to change As well he witnest twas the bread of teares As Esay promisd to the faithlesse Jewes As then the sweat in getting of our bread As then our booke will come too late to save us As date-lesse as are their all-scorning paines As he did once scorne him, he scorns him now As t’is all one to suffer life or death As like a barren ground they drinke the pleasure As well as in thy prime, and he will beare As welcome in thine age, as in thy youth As to gaze upon his wounds without repenting As my offences did my Saviour peirce As I will neede no other condemnation As said the one, the other echo’d so As for his enemies he groned then As knowing Christ was come, yet still they dreamt As serves their lusts, Blinde guides to lead the blinde As did the eyes of cruell men but view As by the Holy Spirit are allow’d As they did nights and dayes in pleasure passe As hee would never chide, but rather chose As if he had not bin by men esteem’d As if my spirit were now transported whole
Not Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Fames Memoriall’ . Not daunted with this hazard or that crosse . Not games of thriftlesse prodigality
. . . . . . . . . .
Appendices Not to be taxt with fictions, Ideots sin Not tyrant-like in bloodshed boast agayne Not with the Brunt of warrefare more annoyde Not lookes of graver nicenesse, nicer sadnesse Not puft with weening self-affected pride Not in the wrack of Prodigality Not relishing the vanity of tumour Not he who daies of easie softnesse sought Not to the solace of my yonger mind Not for his sake but for our haplesse owne ‘Funerall Elegye’
. . . . . .
Not fruitlesly in prodigall expence Not in the out-side of disgracefull folly Not in the wast of many idle words Not any from this frailer stage is gon Not hir’d, as heaven can witnesse in my soule Not vext with envy of prioritie ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
. . . . . .
Not foode not Manna, that shall perish, waste Not springs of Meribath, or floods of strife Not measur’d by compulsion, but free will Not like the fawning of some subtile queane Not like the Crocadile, life to deprive Not fearing God, or loving man, giv’n ore
Such Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Fames Memoriall’ . . . . . .
Such is his sounding notice all do know it Such his desert nor time nor malice term’d it Such petty apes of silke want reasons measure Such private exercise, which limn’d the way Such poorer in desert than ritch in woorth Such but disgorge lanck indiscretion forth
Verbal parallels: ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems ‘Funerall Elegye’ . . . . . .
Such in the By-path and the Ridg-way lurke Such harmony of goodnesse did preserve Such honor, oˆ thou youth untimely lost Such duties as it owes to thy desert Such, and of such condition may devise Such was the separation here constraind ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
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Such thoughts as those, whiles in a ravish’t spirit Such Parasites as knew to flatter most Such bread is our bread, and be sweated so Such must we be, thus must we over passe Such is the case, who till the day draw neare Such find no doubt in union made so even Such find the pastures of their soules and hearts Such, like a nose of waxe, doe wrest the word Such wretched creatures, from inchanting sin
That Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Fames Memoriall’ . . . . . . . . . .
That is with homage to adore thy name That being nobly borne he might persever That any soyle firm-setled thoughts should move That verie name did prostitute the heart “That is true prudence when devoyd of feare That man is perfect temperate whose life That he was sound in both, in both untoucht That royalty to merit could impart That stones, great Devonshire could enclose That their deserts who while they liv’d did shine ‘Funerall Elegye’
. That lives incompast in a mortall frame . That leades to ruine; in a smooth pretence
. . . . . . .
Appendices That day by day, assault the weaker man That full of dayes hee might have liv’d to see That pitties not thy sad and suddaine wrong That had not made thee know, how much I pris’d thee That Christ was his, and he was Frendships Rock That such as is the end, the life prooues so That may disprove their malice: and confound ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
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That now I challenge from thy sacred dreame That the true way to happines should bee That he might offer upp to God his heart That with more leysure hee might freely pray That I must thy severe decree fulfill That from his ashes may spring up a younger That many in his only death may rise That they who to the world are poore in show That booke will witnesse how we did disdaine That with a gratious mildnesse shall provoke That must renew us in the time of need That use of sinne doth feed as sinne begot That might have else bene sav’d, they day and night That leads to pleasures in their birth abortive That plighted promise she had made before That even the winter of thine age shall finde That wilfull, and eschues to be confirmd so That from his love she may behold distilling That I might sue for grace, from grace cast downe That God is mercifull ’tis true, so must That saw him lead his solitary life That every one might be redeem’d from hell
Whereby Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Funerall Elegye’ . Whereby t’enrole my name, as this of thine . Whereby if thou live to Posterity . Whereby the candle, and the bodies light
Verbal parallels: ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems . Whereby the life that purity adorn’d . Whereby the grace fore-promis’d they attained ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’ . Whereby those poor weake soules in earth cast downe . Whereby those bloodie streames of sweat did staine . Whereby, as water sav’d the Lords Elect Wherein Total instances: FM ; FE (); CBS () ‘Funerall Elegye’ . Wherein not any one thing comprehends ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’ . Wherein we must surrender up the right . Wherein his sorrowes sadly did abound . Wherein my Soule long slept, and felt the terrour Which Total instances: FM (); FE (); CBS () ‘Fames Memoriall’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Which hir with thoughts prophane shold entertain Which stain’d competitours, witnesse his rare Which seing did not more disdain than pity Which way to manage an untamed horse Which sorow shold out-sigh or grief implies Which wrought the downfal of his worthiest friend Which hast with trechery sent troups to death Which was by feare inthral’d, by doubt discust Which by the trumpe of glore was lowdly blowne Which long had boyld in stern rebellious treason Which he had guarded with his swordes applause Which dropt upon themselves and made the stage Which in his person were essenciall Which bewtified the value of our land Which now by imputation black as hell
Appendices
. . . . . . . .
Which did allay the further feare of harme Which was refulgent by his Lordly power Which will consume itselfe, what dolefull knell Which misseth none, hits home still to the hart Which Ireland felt, and feeling did it rue Which they shall ever count a shrine Which hordeth glories ritch invalued treasure Which he in perfect zeal had long time spent ‘Funerall Elegye’
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Which (harvest-like) did yeeld againe the crop Which now sits mourning his untimely spoile Which now that subjects merits doth rehearse Which payed to heaven the debt that it did owe Which is a miracle in men (one saith) Which, by a life well led may honor haue Which shall not thence be sundred, but in death Which hardest fate and time thus can lay on mee Which paine to many men, I doe not owe it Which understands all things amiss; whose light Which their fond dotage ever-more admires Which ever hee maintaind in sweet content Which might make knowne his unaffected care Which beeing crost, gives matter of bewayling Which way to wound with defamations spirit Which wise posteritie shall give him than Which underneath the roofe of safe content Which afterwards his praises will expresse Which guides to doing well, wherein so few Which now with thee are leapt into thy toombe ‘Christes Bloodie Sweat’
. . . . . .
Which most above the rest his will with paine Which trickling downe my cheekes uppon the grasse Which bloudy Sweate, for that it is a theame (Which being man he knew not to commaund) Which from his passions drew a sweate of blood Which eates, and feedes, and onely feedes and eates
Verbal parallels: ‘A Funerall Elegye’ and Ford’s poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Which reeke with lust, but thinke on, he would weepe Which brings the poore captived soule in thrall Which follow me, must not be understood Which bloody sweat, when every helpe doth faile Which one day they will find was nothing so Which is prepar’d for those which will not live Which proud mortalitie presumes it hath Which boiles both in the body and the mind Which hath in sinne or thought, or spoke, or writ Which mercy could not win, nor mildnesse urge Which then against the butcher griefe affords Which wrought the subject of my weeping eyes Which must absolve mee, and his Love my shrift Which answer’d every accent of his woe Which by such dead securitie it hath Which wofull creatures were to undergoe Which issues from his Water and his Blood Which burning Pillar, and which shining Cloud Which both was fram’d, and colourd by the Devill Which sayes; Good conscience is a daily feaste Which with such sweet content departed thence
Establishing Ford’s canon
As explained in chapter , in order to provide the fullest possible archive of John Ford’s writings, I have drawn not only on the seven plays canonically ascribed to him – Love’s Sacrifice, Perkin Warbeck, The Broken Heart, The Fancies, Chaste and Noble, The Lady’s Trial, The Lover’s Melancholy, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore – but also on two plays written by him alone, The Queen and The Laws of Candy, and five extant co-authored plays: The Witch of Edmonton (with Dekker and Rowley), The Spanish Gypsy, The Sun’s Darling, The Welsh Ambassador (all three with Dekker), and The Fair Maid of the Inn (with Massinger and Webster). It seems all the more urgent to set out the case for his participation in these co-authored plays since the relevant scholarship has been lost from view in recent discussions of his work. In the authoritative-seeming Dictionary of Literary Biography Paul Cantor dismissed ‘scholars [who] have tried to ascribe to Ford works credited to other playwrights, such as The Spanish Gypsy, published originally as a work by Middleton and Rowley’, not disclosing that those scholars were among the leading authorities in the field, nor discussing the criteria they used. Cantor never mentioned The Laws of Candy, apparently unaware of the certain identification of Ford’s hand in it, and observed dismissively that his authorship of The Queen has been claimed ‘on the basis of a few verbal parallels and a general resemblance to the situation in a number of Ford’s plays’, adding: ‘One wonders why anyone would go out of his way to include the play in the Ford canon: it adds nothing to our understanding of his art or to our appreciation of his skill or range as a playwright’ (Cantor , p. ). This comment betrays a total failure to understand the rationale of authorship studies. The useful collection, John Ford. Critical Re-Visions (Neill ), sadly ignores Ford’s co-authored plays, as well as The Laws of Candy and The Queen, and none of these works (with the exception of The Witch of Edmonton) is covered in a recent survey of scholarship up to .
Establishing Ford’s canon
It seems as if a major gulf has opened up in the discussion of Ford’s work between critics and scholars, due perhaps to the uncertainty surrounding authorship studies, and to the blanket disapproval of any arguments based on internal, stylistic evidence expressed in the influential work of G. E. Bentley and Samuel Schoenbaum. Nevertheless, a number of reliable scholarly studies have attributed all or part of these plays to Ford with some certainty. Here I wish to document the discussions of these ascriptions as briefly as possible, and to apply to the co-authored plays two of the tests I have newly devised for the rest of Ford’s work. I quote all information given on the title-pages of the first editions, together with brief details of the plays’ known performance dates, and theatre company affiliations. () The Queen, or the excellency of her sex: an excellent old play found out by a person of honour, and given to the publisher Alexander Goughe (London, ). Published without any indication of authorship, this play was claimed as Ford’s by Willi Bang in . His ascription was confirmed by several other Ford scholars: S. P. Sherman, H. Dugdale Sykes, M. Joan Sargeaunt, H. J. Oliver, Douglas Sedge, and D. K. Anderson, Jr, and was even accepted by G. E. Bentley ( JCS, . ). () The Laws of Candy, in Comedies and tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, gentlemen, never printed before, and now published by the authors originall copies (London, ). The Laws of Candy, almost lost from view in the fifty-odd plays forming the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, was identified as Ford’s by the two outstanding authorities on that canon in the twentieth century, E. H. C. Oliphant and Cyrus Hoy. () The Witch of Edmonton: a known true story composed into a tragicomedy by divers well-esteemed poets: William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford etc, acted by the Princes servants often at the Cock-Pit in Drury-lane, once at Court (London, ). Written in , and performed at court (Whitehall Palace) on December.
Appendices
In addition to the pioneering essay by F. E. Pierce (b), the excellent edition of Dekker by Fredson Bowers, together with the separately published introductions by Cyrus Hoy, form the best authority for this and other Ford–Dekker collaborations. () The Welsh Ambassador, or A Comedy in Disguises (c. ), by Dekker; first published by H. Littledale and W. W. Greg in the Malone Society Reprints (Oxford, ). Ford’s contribution to The Welsh Ambassador was identified by Bertram Lloyd, and accepted by Cyrus Hoy. () The sun’s darling, a moral masque, as it hath been often presented at Whitehall by their Majesties servants, and after at the Cock-pit in Drury Lane, with great applause, written by John Ford and Tho. Decker gent (London, ). Licensed March : ‘For the Cockpit Company; The Sun’s Darling; in the nature of a masque by Deker, and Forde’. In addition to F. E. Pierce’s pioneering essay (a), Bowers and Hoy have (largely) established the authorship division. () The Spanish gipsie, as it was acted at the privat house in Drury-Lane, and Salisbury Court, written by Thomas Midleton and William Rowley, gent (London, ). Acted at Whitehall, November , by the Cockpit company. Scholars have long doubted the ascription to Middleton and Rowley, and the attribution to Ford made by H. Dugdale Sykes has been accepted – with qualifications concerning the presence and identity of the coauthors (Dekker? Rowley?) – by Sargeaunt, Oliver, Lake, and Jackson. () January : The Fair Maid of the Inn, by John Fletcher; acted at the Blackfriars Theatre; in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio, . Ford’s hand in The Fair Maid of the Inn, alongside that of Massinger, Webster, and (perhaps) Fletcher, was identified by William Wells; the general division of the play made by H. D. Sykes and F. L. Lucas was confirmed by Cyrus Hoy. : The most basic criterion used in these ascriptions has been the broad similarity of subject-matter, treatment of characters, moral and social
Establishing Ford’s canon
attitudes, an approach used convincingly for The Queen (Bang ; Sedge , pp. x–xix). F. E. Pierce used similarities of plot, characterization, and diction to make a broad division of the respective shares of Ford and Dekker in The Sun’s Darling (a, pp. –), and in The Witch of Edmonton (b, pp. –). The next most widely used criterion has been the presence of verbal parallels, since Ford is notorious for the degree to which he repeated phrases, clauses, indeed whole sentences from one play to another. While not alone in this respect – Massinger was another culprit – Ford created a vast series of intertextual links between his plays, and between them and his poems and prose works, as we saw in chapter . Every scholar who has written on Ford has documented these self-quotations. Ronald Huebert, accepting the case made by Bang and others for the many resemblances in themes and characterization between The Queen and other Ford plays, added that ‘many of Ford’s characteristic verbal patterns occur in [it]. This last point could be expanded indefinitely, but two examples must suffice. With “married Batchelor” (Queen, ..) compare “married Bachelours” (BH, ..). With “new revive”, “new marry”, and “new torment” (Queen, .., , ), compare “new reviv’d” (PW, ..), “new marry” (BH, ..) and “new kisse” (LS, ..)’ (Huebert , p. , n. ). Similarly, Martin Butler has pointed out that ‘the line “Brother unkind, unkind” appears in three plays’, with slight variations, namely ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (..), The Broken Heart (..), and The Lady’s Trial (..). The profusion of intertextual links within Ford’s work has overwhelmed some scholars. When ascribing The Queen to Ford, Willi Bang devalued this approach, citing over parallels, many of which turn out to be Jacobean and Caroline commonplaces. Fortunately, Douglas Sedge, in a detailed discussion of the play’s authorship (, pp. –), made a more searching evaluation of these parallels. Sedge rejected many, but usefully grouped the convincing ones into thematic categories, so satisfying the criteria laid down by attribution scholars that such parallels should not be commonplace expressions but distinctive collocations, also involving parallels in thought and attitude. So many close parallels, extending across whole groups of phrases, cannot be dismissed as coincidence, imitation, or plagiarism. A similar approach was used for The Laws of Candy by E. H. C. Oliphant and Cyrus Hoy, who established many unmistakeable parallels with Ford’s work, and differences from Fletcher’s. In attributing The Spanish Gypsy to Ford, H. D. Sykes identified several striking collocations repeated elsewhere in his work, such as the frequently expressed conception of guilt being a pollution as intense as
Appendices
leprosy, which can nonetheless be washed off by remorse (Sykes , p. ). This association of ideas occurs here (SG, ..–), in the Friar’s exhortation to Giovanni (TPW, ..–) – and, we can add, in Christes Bloodie Sweat (–). Sykes identified another verbal collocation, too long to form part of conventional poetic diction and too close to have been imitation, linking The Spanish Gypsy with two of Ford’s undoubted plays, the phrase ‘undertake . . . a voluntary exile’ (SG, ..; BH, ..;LM, ..–). In two of these instances, Sykes showed, a man undertakes the exile either to escape from a woman or at her bidding (, pp. –). Sykes noted further that the post-Petrarchan elevation of woman common in Ford’s plays leads to his heroines being described ‘by their worshippers as “temples” or “shrines”’ (p. ), a detail linking this play with others by Ford (cf. SG, ..–, ..–; LS, ..–; BH, ..–). Sykes cited other parallels supporting Ford’s authorship of The Spanish Gypsy, of which I can only mention one (pp. –), a verbal association between the traditional colours of a woman’s complexion and the unusual word ‘limn’, or paint, which occurs here (..–), in The Lady’s Trial (..–), and, as we saw above (p. ), in the Funerall Elegye and in Christes Bloodie Sweat. A more specific form of verbal parallel is the use of rare words, or common words in unusual senses. As Sykes showed (pp. –), the idiosyncratic Ford usage of the word ‘float’, in the sense of ‘flood’, is found in The Spanish Gypsy (..–), Love’s Sacrifice (..–) – and, we can now add, the Funerall Elegye. As we saw in chapter , the word ‘partage’ in the Funerall Elegye reappears in one of Ford’s scenes for The Fair Maid of the Inn (.. –), and in Perkin Warbeck (.., ..) – indeed, Ford was the only dramatist in the period – to use it. Another authorship criterion used all too seldom for Ford involves his verse-style. The first – and, in effect, still the only – serious analysis of Ford’s prosody was made in by F. E. Pierce, studying the Ford– Dekker collaborations. Pierce analysed the metre of Ford’s seven plays under four main categories: double endings, rhyme, run-on lines, and triple endings. Unfortunately, Pierce’s computations were based on the editions by Dyce and Grosart, with modernized punctuation, and need to be done again from the original texts. His results established little of a distinctive nature in Ford’s use of rhymed or run-on lines, but his figures for double endings, ranging from . to a maximum of . percent (in The Fancies), might be useful, if they proved accurate (Pierce a, p. ). Pierce’s most surprising statistic was for triple endings, of which he counted instances in Love’s Sacrifice, in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,
Establishing Ford’s canon
in The Lover’s Melancholy, in The Lady’s Trial, in Perkin Warbeck, in The Broken Heart, and in The Fancies, Chaste and Noble. Unknown to Pierce, the full extent of Ford’s fondness for triple endings had been revealed in , in a little-known dissertation by Eduard Hannemann, who described him as ‘the English dramatist who makes most use of trisyllabic endings’, and provided a list of all the different words Ford used in this position, amounting to over . Pierce showed that in Dekker’s verse ‘triple endings are exceedingly rare’, but that he used rhyme very freely, a majority of his scenes having a rhyme average of over percent (Pierce a, p. ). The high incidence of triple endings in Acts and of The Sun’s Darling, then, pointed to Ford’s sole authorship, and would also assign him part of Act (p. –). In The Witch of Edmonton, similarly, Pierce judged that the frequent use of triple endings in several scenes (., ., ., ., .) pointed to Ford’s authorship (b, p. ). When F. L. Lucas edited The Fair Maid of the Inn he analysed the verse-styles of all three contributors, endorsing the share assigned to Ford by H. D. Sykes and William Wells (., ., and .) on other grounds. His figures for feminine endings were: Massinger, . percent; Webster, . percent; and Ford, . percent. Lucas pointed out that ‘in all [Ford’s] collaborated work’ he used a metrical style ‘abounding in . . . double and triple endings . . . The high percentage of feminine endings in . need cause no difficulty: in parts of The Fancies I have found as many as % of double (and % of triple) endings’ (p. note). The accuracy of this authorship division for The Fair Maid of the Inn was confirmed many years later by Ants Oras, who studied the placing of pauses within the blank verse of over Renaissance plays. Oras converted his statistics into frequency polygons, which clearly show three different styles in this play (Oras , p. ). , The systematic study of Ford’s vocabulary was begun by F. E. Pierce, using the ‘three-syllable Latin word test’ with which he had differentiated Dekker’s share in co-authored plays from Webster’s (Pierce ). Pierce counted the number of polysyllabic, Latinate words in each scene of ten plays by Dekker and seven by Ford, and calculated the ratio between that figure and the number of ‘solid lines’ a scene would have ‘if written as one solid, continuous block of prose’ (a, p. ). This may seem a strange procedure, but, as he rightly said, ‘the value of any criterion depends largely on the consistency with which’ it is used (p. ), and
Appendices
Pierce was certainly consistent. The ratio for Dekker extended from . to ., while that for Ford – with the exception of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which scored unusually low (.) – extended from . to . (p. ). In other words, Ford’s lowest rate of polysyllabic Latinisms exceeded Dekker’s highest. Applied to The Sun’s Darling, this vocabulary test confirmed the results of Pierce’s verse test, assigning Acts , , and to Ford (with rates of ., ., and .), Acts and to Dekker (., .). For The Witch of Edmonton Pierce found the word test ‘practically worthless in separating the work of Dekker and Rowley’ (b, p. ), who used an equally low proportion of Latinate words, but it confirmed the ascription to Ford of the scenes assigned him by the verse tests (p. ). Although needing painstaking work, this test is certainly valid within limits. Later Ford scholars did not follow Pierce’s lead, preferring to study his linguistic idiosyncrasies. The first detail that revealed Ford’s hand in anonymous or collaborative plays concerned the characteristic abbreviation ‘d’ee = do ye/you, t’ee = to ye/you’, which Willi Bang found in The Queen and throughout Ford’s work (Bang , pp. viii, ). H. D. Sykes identified five instances of these abbreviations in The Spanish Gypsy (Sykes , pp. –); Joan Sargeaunt accepted these forms as significant stylistic markers, adding the important observation that where other dramatists used them for comic characters, Ford did so nearly always for serious characters (Sargeaunt , pp. –). F. L. Lucas noted the significance of the t’ee and d’ee forms in . of The Fair Maid of the Inn, a scene given to Ford on other grounds (Lucas , p. ), and in Bertram Lloyd showed that in the two scenes that Ford contributed to The Welsh Ambassador, t’ee occurs twice and d’ee three times (Lloyd , p. ). The whole discussion was elevated to a much more accurate level by Cyrus Hoy, who analysed Ford’s characteristic linguistic preferences in the seven canonical plays (Hoy , pp. –, , ). In table I summarize his findings (adding Hoy’s data for the ’ee abbreviation). Unexpectedly, Hoy found no ’ee forms in The Laws of Candy – probably Ford’s first play, the product of unusual care – which otherwise shows every sign of his hand (p. ). But Hoy was able to confirm the ascription to Ford of the three scenes of The Fair Maid of the Inn, made by Wells, Sykes, and Lucas in the s. Purely on the basis of linguistic evidence, Hoy assigned ., ., and . to Ford. In these three scenes ’ee contractions appear times, and nowhere else in the play; ye and ’em are used infrequently; altogether absent are i’th’, o’th’, and ’s for his. The ‘pattern
Establishing Ford’s canon
of linguistic usage’ is that of ‘Ford’s unaided work’. David J. Lake drew on Hoy’s work when ascribing The Spanish Gypsy to Ford, adding other linguistic evidence (Lake , pp. –). Independently, MacDonald Jackson also accepted the case for Ford’s authorship of The Spanish Gypsy, showing that the data for Ford’s linguistic preferences collected by Cyrus Hoy correspond to the pattern in this play ( Jackson , pp. –). Table . Ford’s linguistic preferences
ye hath doth ’em i’th’ o’th’ h’as ’s (his) ’ee
LC
LM
BH
LS
TPW
PW
FCN
LT
Source: Hoy , p.
I should like to extend this approach by applying to Ford’s collaborative plays the two tests I developed for identifying his authorship of the Funerall Elegye, first the use of the preposition of. As we have seen, Ford made enormous use of this function-word, often to begin a verse line, and very often in the formula <noun + of + noun>, in either a genitive or a partitive construction. (As in my earlier discussion, of in the genitive will be printed in italics, of in the partitive in bold face.) Since this stylistic marker was constant across the twenty-or-so years of Ford’s career as a dramatist, then it ought to be visible in his collaborations, and might help to identify his work. To do so, it would have to fulfil both positive and negative requirements, identifying the writer concerned, and distinguishing him from his co-authors. My computations produced the results in table . As those figures show, Ford used of frequently in his collaborative plays, if at a lower overall rate than in his unassisted work, an average of . times per thousand lines (or once every . lines) here compared to an average of . (or once every . lines) there. (This discrepancy is completely in line with other quantitative linguistic studies of collaborative plays, in which the style of each author is found to display fewer of his normal features than in his sole-authored work.) However, Ford deployed the <noun + of + noun> formula with even greater frequency
Appendices Table . The function-word of in Ford’s collaborative plays A
B
C
D
E
F
G
Total decaFrequency <noun + F as a syllabic Total per , Of in st Every x of + percentage lines of lines position lines noun> of B The Witch of Edmonton Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes Rowley scenes
,
. . . .
. . .
. . . .
The Spanish Gypsy Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes
, ,
. . .
. .
. . .
The Welsh Ambassador Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes
,
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. .
. . . .
The Fair Maid of the Inn Totals , Ford scenes Massinger scenes Webster scenes
. . . .
. . . .
. . . .
The Sun’s Darling Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes Others
throughout his collaborations. The percentage of of forms used in this formula remained quite constant, from . percent in The Sun’s Darling to . percent in The Spanish Gypsy, . percent in The Fair Maid of the Inn, and . percent in The Witch of Edmonton. These figures are higher than the average of . percent for the now-canonical nine plays, a detail which suggests that Ford emphasized some linguistic habits (whether consciously or not) in his collaborations. Significantly, his scores are appreciably higher than those for Dekker in The Welsh Ambassador (. as against . percent) and in The Sun’s Darling (. as against . percent), but the difference between the two writers is smaller in The Witch of Edmonton (. as against . percent) and The
Establishing Ford’s canon
Spanish Gypsy (. as against . percent), suggesting that Dekker may have adjusted his style to Ford’s, in a process of closer collaboration. A clear divide separates Ford’s fondness for of from Rowley in The Witch of Edmonton (. percent), and from the other collaborators on The Fair Maid of the Inn. Similarly, Ford placed of first in the line much more frequently than did his co-authors in The Fair Maid of the Inn (once every . lines, as against their average of once every lines), The Sun’s Darling (once every lines as against no instances for Dekker, and once every lines for the unidentified author of the passage added to Acts –), and The Spanish Gypsy (once every . lines as against no instances in Dekker). The essential uniformity of Ford’s style over a long period helps us to identify his hand in works of joint authorship. This function-word test not only identifies Ford’s predilection for the preposition of, but it also links up with his fondness for abstract nouns. As I showed in chapters and , the Funerall Elegye shares with all of Ford’s poems and plays a fondness for making abstract nouns out of an epithet by adding the suffix –ness. Applying the same approach to the collaborative plays yielded the data shown in table . The figures for Ford and Dekker are very similar for The Witch of Edmonton, another detail pointing to a closer degree of collaboration in that play than elsewhere, but they are also surprisingly close for The Welsh Ambassador, which is different in other respects. In The Spanish Gypsy, however, Ford uses such nouns twice as often as Dekker, and in The Sun’s Darling nearly twenty times more often, and five times more often than the unidentified author of the scene opening Act . In The Fair Maid of the Inn my computation clearly differentiates Ford’s contribution from that of Massinger and Webster. As for Ford’s usage of –ness nouns throughout the co-authored plays, instances in , decasyllabic verses gives a frequency of once every . lines, compared to once every . times in the poems and sole-authored plays, surely a satisfying correlation. The results of these two enquiries suggest that both the <noun + of + noun> formula, and the frequency of nouns ending in –ness, are valid tests of Ford’s authorship. This point may also be brought home by quoting some examples of both stylistic features in the co-authored plays. In The Spanish Gypsy both markers recur over a hundred times, often jointly: ‘this deed of wickednesse’, ‘as rich a seat / Of sweetnesse’, ‘the strangenesse of your importunity’, ‘the happiness of friendship’, ‘a man of wretchednesse’, ‘the shaddow / Of abus’d greatnesse’, ‘some feeling / Of tendernesse’. As those instances well show, Ford’s use of the
Appendices Table . Nouns ending in –ness in Ford’s co-authored plays Total decasyllabic lines
No. of instances
Every x lines
The Witch of Edmonton Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes Rowley scenes
,
. . .
The Spanish Gypsy Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes
, ,
. . .
The Welsh Ambassador Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes
,
. . .
. .
,
. . . .
The Sun’s Darling Totals Ford scenes Dekker scenes Others The Fair Maid of the Inn Totals Ford scenes Massinger scenes Webster scenes
<noun + of + noun> formula predominantly favours abstract nouns. Dekker’s use of the same construction favours concrete nouns, things that one can see, hold, touch, eat: ‘the nose of any Goose quil’ (..), ‘store of grain’ (..). In The Witch of Edmonton, similarly, we can distinguish Rowley’s use of the <noun + of + noun> formula from Ford’s. Rowley, like Dekker, prefers to link concrete nouns, involving things and people, creating vivid movement: ‘a bed of serpents’; ‘a crew of villains’; ‘a knot of bloody Hang-men’ (..–). In Ford’s contribution we find the by now familiar weight of abstractions, adding extra seriousness to each stage of this tragic plot. At its beginning Winifred expresses to Sir Arthur Clarington, who has made her pregnant and married her off to Frank Thorney, her regrets that she must deceive her husband: Then were my happiness, That I in heart repent I did not bring him
Establishing Ford’s canon The Dower of a Virginity. Sir, forgive me; I have been much to blame. Had not my Laundress Given way to your immoderate waste of Vertue, You had not with such eagerness pursu’d The error of your goodness. (..–)
There we find three –ness forms within seven lines, two partitive genitives, and three abstract nouns. Frank dutifully agrees to marry Susan, the Carter heiress, only for his father to charge him with being already married. Frank then affirms his virtuous hope for ‘the blessedness of life / Hereafter’, his respect for his soul, ‘the glory of Creations work’, declaring that mine innocence Needs not a stronger witness then the cleerness Of an unperish’d conscience (..–)
At the play’s d´enouement, after Frank’s murder of Susan has been discovered, the penitence that he shows before being executed comforts Winifred with the hope that their souls in ‘eternity’ might there enjoy what earth denied us, Happiness. But since I must survive, and be the monument Of thy lov’d memory, I will preserve it With a religious care . . . (..–)
In The Fair Maid of the Inn we can instantly recognize Ford’s way of using these formulae to combine abstract nouns: ‘a wish of any deerer happinesse’; ‘an injury to sweetnesse’ (which echoes ‘injury to goodness’, LT, ..); ‘conceit of scorne or curious rudenesse’; ‘The roughnesse of our justice’; ‘roughnesse / Of disposition’; ‘the unfruitful barrennesse of youth’; ‘such greedinesse / Of expectation and delight’; ‘a mothers piety and weaknesse / Of a Soul trembling wife’; ‘the fires of greatnesse’; ‘hopes of greatnesse’; ‘cause of joy or sadnesse’. In longer sequences, too, we can recognize Ford’s hand, as in Cesario’s specious declaration that Their hearts are married Whose enterchange of pleasures and embraces, Soft kisses, and the privacies of sweetes, Keeps constant league together; when temptation Of great mens oathes and gifts shall urge contempt, Rather than batter resolution. Novelty
Appendices Of sights, or taste of new delights in wantonnesse, Breeds surfeit more than appetite in any Reserv’d to noble vowes (..–)
The same combination, of with abstract nouns, the of being regularly placed at the beginning of a line, gives dignity to the widow Mariana’s appeal to the Duke of Tuscany: Though divided, I stand between the laws of truth and modesty, Yet let my griefes have vent: Yet the cleernesse Of strange necessity requires obedience To nature and your mercy. In my weeds Of mourning, emblems of too dear misfortunes, Badges of griefes, and Widdowhood, the burthen Of my charg’d soule must be layd downe before you. (.. –)
The two scenes that Ford contributed to Dekker’s Welsh Ambassador show the same fondness for abstractions and the <noun + of + noun> formula. We recognize it in the wronged Queen’s appeal to the King’s new love, Carintha: Oh as you are a woman The daughter of a mother, as you can Pertake the sence of passion (greefes and pitty) The torments of contempt (disgrace and ruin) The miseries of honor (scorn and basenes) (..–)
We see it again in Carintha’s answering assurance that My purpose is to entertaine the kinge With all the fulnes of his hopes, nay urge him To speede the hight of his desires . . . (..–)
and so to cure him of his folly. The same formulae recur in the King’s recognition of the virtue of his son, come to plead on behalf of his rejected mother: Here’s a white forehead Of innocence whose allabaster sweetnes Rebates my cruelties (..–)
Establishing Ford’s canon In Ford’s scenes for The Sun’s Darling Raybright speaks like this: I envie not The pomp of your high office; all preferment Of earthly glories are to me diseases, Infecting those sound parts which should preserve The flattering retribution to my thankfulness, The times are better to mee; there’s no taste Left on the pallate of my discontent To catch at emptie hopes, whose onely blessed ness Depends on beeing miserable. (..–)
(That passage included two normal genitives, governed by the possessive adjectives ‘your’ and ‘my’.) In Dekker’s scenes Raybright has a much looser style, with fewer abstractions, mostly lacking both the <noun + of + noun> formula and abstract nouns ending in –ness: My admiration wastes it self in longings To see this rare piece, I’le see her; what are Kings, were not their Pleasures varied; shall not mine then? should day Last ever, ’twould bee loath’d as night. Change is the sawce that sharpens appetite; The way, I’le to her. (..–).
Dekker’s Raybright uses a more broken verse-style (indeed at times bewilderingly loose, with lines of or even syllables), expressing far more down-to-earth concerns. The difference between the two writers’ styles is striking, and nowhere greater than in the Sun’s closing speech. Here Ford adopts a style of high seriousness, in which, as the Sun denounces the four seasons of human frailty, the many noun phrases (both partitive and normal genitives) help create a genuine weight of utterance: Thy sands are numbred, and thy glasse of frailtie Here runs out to the last; here in this mirror Let man behold the circuit of his fortunes; The season of the Spring dawns like the Morning. Bedewing Childhood with unrelish’d beauties Of gawdie sights; the Summer, as the Noon, Shines in delight of Youth, and ripens strength To Autumns Manhood, here the Evening grows, And knits up all felicitie in follie; Winter at last draws on the Night of Age; Yet still a humor of som novel fancie
Appendices Untasted, or untry’d, puts off the minute Of resolution, which should bid farewel To a vain world of wearinesse and sorrows. (..–)
In the Sun’s -line speech there are fifteen instances of the <noun + of + noun> formula (nine of them partitive genitives, six of the normal form), four of which occur across the line-break, a high proportion, but typical of Ford. The constancy of this formula throughout his career may help to settle the question of who wrote the inserted sequence (..– ..), dealing with the Northern rebellion of . (Ford was probably still alive at this time, so he could have written it; Dekker had died in .) In its lines I count instances of the <noun + of + noun> formula within a line, and only one where of begins a line, a proportion of percent, compared to Ford’s average of . percent for the rest of the play. This may be slender evidence, but it suggests that Ford did not write the insertion. These two new tests, computing the frequency and usages of the function-word of, and the use of nouns ending in –ness, confirm Ford’s share in these five co-authored plays. They reinforce evidence drawn from large elements – similarities of plot, characterization, social and moral attitudes – and small ones, including prosody and minute linguistic preferences. Both tests, then, may be accepted as relevant stylistic markers for identifying Ford’s hand throughout his writing career – including the Funerall Elegye.
Notes
. ‘Shakespeare’s New Poem: a Scholar’s Clues and Conclusions’, NYTBR, December , pp. –, at p. . First-Line Index of Manuscript Poetry in the Bodleian Library, vols. (Oxford, ). Taylor a, p. ; ‘A New Shakespeare Poem? The Evidence . . . ’, TLS, December , pp. –. Henry Woudhuysen, an authority on English Renaissance manuscripts, discussing Taylor’s claim that ‘the compiler of a private miscellany has no motive for deliberately lying about the authorship of a poem’, objected that ‘compilers of miscellanies who put names or initials to the poems they collected were not acting under oath: ascriptions might be added, deleted, or changed for a variety of reasons’. The copyist ‘could be making an educated guess, or he could merely be indulging in wishful thinking’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts – (Oxford, ), p. . William Shakespeare. A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (Oxford, ), p. . Donald W. Foster, Letter to the Editor, NYTBR, January , p. . Cf. letters by Donald Foster and Peter Beal, TLS, January , pp. –. A date in the mid-s was suggested by Donald W. Foster, ‘“Shall I Die” Post Mortem: Defining Shakespeare’, ShQ , (): –, at p. ; Beal stated that ‘the manuscript unquestionably dates from the s’, and that ‘most of the poems belong to the period –’ (Letter to the Editor, TLS, January , p. ). I. A. Shapiro, in a letter to the Editor (TLS, December , pp. , ), suggested that ‘the manuscript must date from or later’. Joseph Lelyveld, ‘A Scholar’s Find: Shakespearean Lyric’, NYT, November , p. . Simon Freeman, ‘Oxford Find May be Lost Shakespeare Love Poem’, Sunday Times, November , p. . ‘Attribution by Statistics: A Critique of Four Recent Studies’, Revue informatique et statistique dans les sciences humaines, (): –, at pp. –. The fifth and sixth of Smith’s principles are: ‘Only works of known authorship
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are suitable as a basis for attributing a disputed work’, and ‘There are no short-cuts in attribution studies’ (p. ). In addition to the critiques cited here, see John F. Andrews, ‘Taylor-Made Shakespeare? Or is “Shall I Die?” the Long-Lost Text of Bottom’s Dream?’, in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: , ed. Jean N. Ross (Detroit, ), pp. –. Henry Woudhuysen, having examined the manuscript, concurs with my analysis: ‘The scribe’s changing way of copying the poem suggests characteristic indifference to what was in his copy-text and its lay-out: he was clearly trying to keep it within the ruled frame’ (personal communication, July ; quoted by permission). Professor Woudhuysen will be including ‘Shall I die?’ in his forthcoming Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Poems (simply as an early ascription, however implausible), and informs me that he will be adopting the stanza layout which I propose. Erica Sheen and Jeremy Maule, Letter to the Editor, TLS, January , p. . William A. Ringler, Jr (ed.), The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, ), pp. –, ‘Table of Verse Forms’. David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse – (London, ), pp. –. Poem (pp. –) is classified as ten-line, but has in fact eight-line stanzas. See Munzer Adel Absi, ‘Verse Form in English Renaissance Poetry: a Catalogue of Stanza Patterns’, PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow, , p. . Printed with kind permission of the Keeper of Western Manuscripts, the Bodleian Library (Bodleian Rawl. poet. MS. , fols. r –r ). I thank Henry Woudhuysen for making the transcription. In all subsequent quotations from critical discussions, line references to the poem will correspond to this text. Letter to the Editor, TLS, January , p. . Beal a, p. . ‘The Non-Shakespearian Language of “Shall I Die?”’, RES, n. s. (): –, at p. . Foster , p. . George T. Wright, ‘The Meter of “Shall I die?”’, Eidos. The International Prosody Bulletin, (): , , , at p. . I thank Professor Wright for providing me with a copy of his paper, which has never been cited in the discussions of this poem. Wright’s ‘quick survey’ suggested that Greene and Lodge ‘had used cretic lines, occasionally with internal rhyme, in songs composed around , and Shakespeare himself included them in songs or in songlike tetrameter passages. They appear in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Thou for whom Jove would swear” (..); in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Here she comes, curst and sad” (..), and “Trip away; make no stay” (..); in The Merchant of Venice: “So be gone, you are sped” (..); and even in Macbeth: “There
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to meet with Macbeth” (..). But apparently neither he nor they nor any other poet I know of composed a whole stanza of such feet, not to speak of a poem made up of nine such stanzas.’ Wright wondered whether the poem might be the work of some contemporary of Shakespeare who was ‘more interested in adapting classical meters to English’ ( Wright , p. ). We need to know much more about the history of English metrics. ‘A New Shakespeare Poem? . . . The Counter-Arguments’, TLS, December , pp. –, at p. . For a survey of these conventions see Frederic W. Ness, The Use of Rhyme in Shakespeare’s Plays (New Haven, CT, ). Sunday Times, November , p. . M. St C. Byrne, ‘Bibliographic Clues in Collaborate Plays’, Library, th s., (): –, at p. . ‘“Verbal Tests” for Peele’s Plays’, SP, (): –, at p. . I. A. Shapiro expressed an experienced scholar’s astonishment at ‘the vulnerability and fundamental fallacies of an argument for Shakespeare’s authorship based on similarity of [the poem’s] vocabulary, word-collocations and rhyme-words. The great frequency with which all these can be found in hundreds of love poems written between and . . . invalidates . . . the attempt to ascribe this poem to any particular author. If it could be claimed that the poem’s vocabulary and other characteristics could be paralleled only, or even almost only, in Shakespeare’s acknowledged works, we would then have to weigh seriously the ascription in Rawl. poet . But such a claim will immediately be laughed at by anyone familiar with the verse and drama of –’ (Shapiro , p. ). Taylor, ‘“Shall I Die” Immortalized?’, TLS, January , pp. –. (That ironic title was very probably supplied by a TLS editor.) Frederick Crews, Sceptical Engagements (Oxford, ), p. , citing Marshall Edelson, Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis (Chicago, ). Sheen , p. . The co-signatory to this letter was the late Jeremy Maule, who (as he informed me) supplied the sceptical arguments concerning ‘authority’. Sheen claimed the song lyric parallels for herself in a letter to Shakespeare Quarterly: see note below. In his summing-up article for the TLS Taylor dismissed Peter Beal’s suggestion that ‘Shall I die?’ ‘reads . . . very much like a song lyric. Might such a song (using perhaps only three or four of the stanzas) have been introduced in some early-seventeenth century stage performances . . . ?’ extremely brusquely: ‘Beal’s conjecture is implausible, untestable, and irrelevant’ (Taylor , p. ), largely because no other lyric is as long as this. But obviously ‘Shall I die?’ falls into two halves, the first three stanzas constituting a complete poem of twenty-four lines, a perfectly normal length. Taylor never deigned to consider Erica Sheen’s constructive suggestion for understanding the poem’s lineage, and he also dismissed Robbins’s example of standardizing sample size, given that Spenser’s canon is smaller than Shakespeare’s. But this is accepted statistical practice.
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E. H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse –, rd edn, revised and enlarged by F. W. Sternfeld and D. Greer (Oxford, ), pp. –. Petrarch’s influence on English poetry can be seen in the s, in Wyatt and Surrey, and again in the s, in Sidney (‘our English Petrarke’). ‘Shall I die?’ draws on both phases. W. L. Godshalk, in a letter to the TLS ( March , p. ), pointed out a Petrarchan source for the description of the lady’s ‘cheekes’ in which is ‘displaid, beawties banner’ (lines –), namely Rime , in which love takes residence on the poet’s forehead: ‘Amor . . . / Talor armato ne la fronte v`ene, / Ivi si loca, et ivi por sua insegna’. Two translations of this sonnet appeared in Tottel’s Miscellany, one by Surrey (no. ), who renders the line ‘Love . . . / Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.’ A closer parallel is Wyatt’s version (no. ), in which ‘The longe love . . . / Into my face presseth . . . / And there campeth, spreading his banner.’ This sonnet is one of many in which the poet presents himself as the timid lover, ‘terrified’ by the beloved’s anger or disapproval. Sometimes he is tongue-tied, wanting someone to ‘shatter the stone about my heart, so that at least I can pour myself forth as I used to do’, unable to utter his feelings (.–, tr. R. M. Durling, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems (Cambridge, MA, ), p. ). At other times his ‘excessive delight, which is an obstacle to my tongue, does not have the daring to show forth what she is like enthroned within [my heart]’; (.– , ibid. p. ). As Tony Mortimer has observed ( personal communication, October ), later Petrarchists turned these extremes of blocked desire and fear of utterance into a dilemma, what I call the ‘Catch-’ situation. Other poems posing the ‘Shall I . . . ?’ question include one from Rosseter’s collection: ‘Shall I come if I swim? Wide are the waves you see. / Shall I come if I fly, my dear love to thee?’ (EMV, p. ); and one from Thomas Campion’s Third Booke of Ayres (c. ): ‘Shall I then hope when faith is fled?’, where at least the poet rejects his faithless mistress: ‘Her vows are broke, and I am free, / She lost her faith in losing me’ (EMV, p. ). Madrigali Italiani in Inghilterra. Storia, Critica, Testi (Milan, ), pp. –, notes pp. –. R. A. Rebholz (ed.), Sir Thomas Wyatt. The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth, ), pp. –. Angelo Solerti (ed.), Le Rime de Torquato Tasso, vols. (Bologna, –), . –; in his numbering, poems [] – [] . The first of the three poems appeared in the edition (Venice), the second in the edition (Venice), the third in the edition (Ferrara). The Rime were frequently reprinted during the next two decades. I quote from Richard McCabe’s edition, Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems (Harmondsworth, ), pp. , . See also Veselin Kostiˇc, ‘Spenser’s Amoretti and Tasso’s Lyrical Poetry’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, (): –, at pp. –, and Spenser’s Sources in Italian Poetry (Belgrade, ), pp. –. Tasso may have been the inspiration for Guarini: see next note. Tony Mortimer ( personal communication, Feb. ) has identified another poem in the ‘Shall I die?’ genre, in the collection of Songs for the Lute Viol
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and Voice () by John Daniel, brother of the poet and dramatist Samuel Daniel. The first stanza describes the poet’s divided existence: ‘I Dye when as I doe not see / Her’, but ‘when I see her yet I dye, / In seeing of her crueltie’. The second expresses the dilemma in terms of speech or silence: ‘Or shall I speake or silent greeve, / Yet who will silencie releeve. / And if I speake I may offend, /And speaking not, my heart will rend: / So that I see to mee it is all one, / Speake I or speake I not, I am undone’: Lyrics from English Airs –, ed. Edward Doughtie (Cambridge, MA, ), p. . Doughtie (pp. –) identified Daniel’s source as two madrigals by G. B. Guarini, from his Rime ( Venice, ), the first stanza corresponding to Madrigal LV, ‘Mirar mortale’: ‘Io mi sento morir quando non miro / Colei ch’`e la mia vita. / Poi se la miro anco morir mi sento, / Perche del mio tormento / Non h`a piet`a la cruda . . . ’ Daniel’s second stanza draws on Guarini’s Madrigal LIIII, ‘Amante poco ardito’, which may well have been the source for many of these ‘Shall I die?’ poems: ‘Parlo, misero, o taccio? / S’io taccio, che soccorso haur`a il morire? S’io parlo, che perdono haur`a l’ardire? / Taci: che ben s’intende / Chiusa fiamma talor da chi l’accende. / Parla in me la pietate, / E dice quel bel volto al crudo core, / Chi pu`o mirarmi, e non languir d’amore?’: Opera di Battista Guarini, ed. M. Guglielminetti (Turin, ), p. . The more firmly we place the timid lover’s anatomy of his Catch- situation in the late Petrarchan lute-song and madrigal tradition, the more foreign it becomes to Shakespeare. Ringler , pp. –, . See Brian Vickers, ‘The “Songs and Sonnets” and the Rhetoric of Hyperbole’, in A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne. Essays in Celebration (London, ), pp. –. See, e.g., Max J. Wolff, ‘Petrarkismus und Antipetrarkismus in Shakespeares Sonetten’, Englische Studien, (): –; Donald L. Guss, John Donne, Petrarchist. Italianate Conceits and Love Theory in the Songs and Sonnets (Detroit, ). Cf. the ‘Exchange, “Shall I Die?” Again’, ShQ , (), p. , in which Sheen pointed out that in the TLS for January ‘I made the following suggestion . . . ’ concerning this ‘brand new mini-genre’. Foster replied that he was ‘blissfully ignorant’ of her letter to the TLS, although, strangely enough, he had a letter printed there the week following ( January, p. ), and referred to other letters that had appeared in previous issues. Underwoods, ; cf. Brian Vickers (ed.), English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford, ), pp. –. Foster suggested that the first word forms part of the blazon, and should read ‘Then’. In the Oxford Complete Works the line was further emended, to read ‘Of all their culled commendations’. Peter Davison, review of S. Wells and G. Taylor, et al. (eds), William Shakespeare: The Complete Works and Textual Companion, Library, th s., (): –, at p. . In Encounter, (): , and in his collection, Late Pickings (), p. .
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This last note refers to an essay by Taylor, said to be forthcoming, on ‘Scholarship and the Media: the Case of “Shall I die?”’. Although we can guess its contents without difficulty, this essay had not apparently been published by the end of . Paul Hammond, in a challenging ‘Review Article: the Oxford Shakespeare’, noted how Taylor reduced a scholar whose views he disgreed with (Philip Edwards) to a ‘butt’, whose textual hypothesis for Pericles ‘is derided as “selfcontradictory, unsubstantiated, unparalleled, and unlikely” (TxC, p. ). The reader of the Textual Companion is likely to be alienated by the selfcongratulatory tone which tends to creep into Mr Taylor’s reports of his own work, the scorn or pity accorded to the generations of editors who walked in darkness, and the silent rejection of alternative views’: The Seventeenth Century, (): –, at p. n. . When reviewing the Textual Companion (RES, (): –), I also noted Taylor being ‘violent in dismissing other scholars’ views’ (p. ). Review article, CahiersE, (): –, at p. . The Norton Shakespeare. Based on the Oxford Edition (New York, ). ‘ . . ’ ‘ ’ Don Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York, ), pp. –. Foster’s memory misled him here, for this ‘rebuttal’ contained nothing offensive. Elsewhere, however, this autobiography displays a lingering animus against those who have crossed him, particularly Stanley Wells (whom Foster identified as the publisher’s reader who had advised Oxford University Press not to publish his monograph), and who is the butt of two gratuitous jibes (Foster , pp. , ), and Joe Klein, whom Foster identified as the author of Primary Colors: see my review, TLS, July , p. . One interviewer’s admiring account repeats the standard Fosterian version of how ‘Attribution studies suffered a blow . . . when Gary Taylor wrongly assigned the ditty “Shall I die?” to Shakespeare . . . A string of erroneous Shakespeare finds followed Taylor’s, scaring reputable presses away from attribution studies in general. Among the most vehement critics of the Oxford mistake was Foster, a fresh PhD, who worried that the British gaffe would render his own book unpublishable, and himself unhirable’; Caleb Crain, ‘The Bard’s Fingerprints’, Lingua Franca, July/August : –, at p. . Donald W. Foster, Elegy by W. S. A Study in Attribution (Newark and London, ). Donald W. Foster, ‘A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare’s] “Best-speaking Witnesses”’, PMLA, (): –, at p. . In addition to his contributions to the original discussion, cf. Foster , p. : ‘After a brief debate, the attribution [of ‘Shall I die?’] was widely discredited and the poem all but forgotten. Yet the controversy was not altogether without profit if it served to remind us of how little progress has
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been made in testing the accuracy of doubtful ascriptions’ (also pp. –, , ); and: ‘Today’s great discoveries too often become tomorrow’s embarrassments’ (Foster a, p. ). Perhaps the same comments apply to the Funerall Elegye. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book ; in Brian Vickers (), p. . Foster did not hesitate to make use of ‘the rumor that Shakespeare fathered William Davenant’, son of John, although he added that it ‘has never been widely credited’ (, p. , n. ). One wonders how much belief should be attached to Aubrey’s jottings about Shakespeare. Considerable scepticism was recorded by Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives. New Edition (Oxford, ), pp. –. Commenting on the theories of Arthur Acheson and others, Schoenbaum stated that ‘there is no certainty that the W. S. of Willobie His Avisa really stands for Shakespeare, or that in the poem he is in love with Avisa . . . ’ (p. ). ‘In Memory of Master William Peter. The Difficulties of Attributing A Funeral Elegy to Shakespeare’, TLS, January , p. . Richard Abrams, ‘In Defence of W. S. Reasons for Attributing A Funeral Elegy to Shakespeare’, TLS, February , pp. –, at p. . Wells, Letter to the Editor, TLS, February , p. . MacDonald P. Jackson, review of Foster , ShS, (): –, at p. n. . That is, John Horden (ed.), Samuel Halkett and John Laing, A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language. Third (revised and enlarged) edition, – (London, ). ‘Renaissance Names in Masquerade’, PMLA, (): –. F. B. Williams’s researches produced that invaluable reference tool, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before (London, ). Franklin B. Williams, Jr, ‘An Initiation into Initials’, SB, (): –, at p. . In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement of March (pp. –) (‘Whose Thumbprints? A More Plausible Author for A Funeral Elegy’) I argued the case for Wastell having written the Elegye. My aim was to show that, on Foster’s criteria, he could not be excluded. Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, PBA, (): –, at pp. –. Letter of April , .. All the Works of John Taylor The Water Poet (London, ; facs. repr. Menston, ), Sig. ee, p. . C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha. Being a Collection of Fourteen Plays Which Have Been Ascribed to Shakespeare (Oxford, ; repr. ), p. viii. Baldwin Maxwell, Studies in the Shakespeare Apocrypha (New York ; repr. New York, ), pp. –. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare. A Study of Facts and Problems, vols. (Oxford, ), . .
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One instance that may suggest another intended piracy is the entry in the Stationers’ Register for January /: ‘Eleazar Edgar. Entred for his copye under the hands of the Wardens. A booke called Amours by J. D. with certain other sonnetes by W. S.’ In her edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London, ), Katherine Duncan-Jones simply assumed that the initials ‘W. S.’ here referred to Shakespeare, and speculated that the ‘J. D.’ might have been Sir John Davies, whose Epigrams appeared in in a joint volume with the dead Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores (pp. –). Regrettably, DuncanJones failed to record Baldwin Maxwell’s conclusion, that ‘it is impossible to say whether the sonnets in the lost volume which was entered upon the Stationers’ Register in January /, “A booke called Amours by J. D., with certain other sonnetes by W. S.” were indeed sonnets by Shakespeare or were derived from the sequence by William Smith which had been published a few years before, Chloris; or, The Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard, . What is interesting is that when a selection from Chloris appeared in The Phoenix Nest (), it was assigned to “W. S., Gentleman”, and that in England’s Helicon () a song from Love’s Labour’s Lost is reprinted with the ascription to “W. Shakespeare”, while a poem from Smith’s Chloris, “Corin’s Dream of his Fair Chloris”, is assigned merely to “W. S.”’ (Maxwell , p. .) This is further evidence supporting Maxwell’s claim that the initials ‘W. S.’ were never used for any authentic work by Shakespeare. See W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio. Its Bibliographic and Textual History (Oxford, ), pp. –; L. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts (Cambridge, ), p. . David L. Frost, The School of Shakespeare (Cambridge, ). MacDonald P. Jackson, Studies in Attribution. Middleton and Shakespeare (Salzburg, ), pp. –. Shakespeare and the Stationers (Columbus, OH, ), p. . See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Really Unauthorized?’, RES, n. s., (): –, and her edition of the Sonnets, pp. –. ‘The Copyright of Hero and Leander’, Library, th series, (): –, at pp. –, reprinting the complete epistle at pp. –. H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers, – (Cambridge, ), p. . Gerald D. Johnson, ‘Thomas Pavier, Publisher, –’, Library, th s., (): –, at p. . Gilles D. Monsarrat, ‘A Funeral Elegy: Ford, W. S., and Shakespeare’, RES, vol. , no. (May, ). Cf. E. H. C. Oliphant,‘The Authorship of The Revenger’s Tragedy’, SP, (): –, at pp. –; Richard H. Barker, ‘The Authorship of The Second Maiden’s Tragedy and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, SAB, (): –, –, at pp. –, –, –; Richard H. Barker, Thomas Middleton (New York, ), pp. –, –. Cyrus Hoy, in his authoritative studies
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of authorship problems in the Fletcher canon, repeated the caveats concerning the dangers of ‘parallelography’ (e.g., Cyrus Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (IV)’, SB, (): –, at p. ), but went on to make judicious use of this resource (pp. –, –). David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays (Cambridge, ), p. . Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. –, –. I only demur from Barish’s explanation of Jonson’s style in terms of Morris W. Croll’s theories of ‘baroque’ prose: for counter-arguments see Brian Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (Cambridge, ), pp. –, –, and Robert Adolph, The Rise of Modern Prose Style (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. – and passim. Brian Vickers, The Artistry of Shakespeare’s Prose (London, ; repr. ). For further analysis see Vickers , pp. –. In his recent autobiography Foster avers that he has ‘looked at thousands of book dedications and prefatory epistles’ (Foster , p. ). Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Who Wrote A Funerall Elegie?’, ShStud, (): –, at p. . Sidney’s epistle apologizes for ‘this idle work of mine . . . this child which I am loath to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now it is done only for you, only to you; if you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned . . . ’; The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford, ), p. . L. E. Stock, Gilles D. Monsarrat, Judith M. Kennedy, and Dennis Danielson (eds.), The Nondramatic Works of John Ford (Binghamton, NY, ), p. – an invaluable collection. H. O. White, Plagiarism and Imitation during the English Renaissance. A Study in Critical Distinctions (Cambridge, MA, ; New York, , ). See, e.g., G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ , (): –; Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (Oxford, ), an outstanding study: see my comments in MLR, (): –; Vickers , pp. –. Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, ), p. . Jonson, The Complete Poems, ed. G. Parfitt (Harmondsworth, ), p. . J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (London, ), pp. –. In the passages quoted I have expanded contractions, regularized the spelling, and added inverted commas to mark off Gullio’s pretended address to his mistress. Reviewing the monograph, Richard Proudfoot judged that ‘the worst section offers “Thematic and Verbal Affinities” between the elegy and Shakespeare of which this reviewer finds a mere four or five that reflect likely true affinity against a vast majority consisting of no more than instances of the use of the same word or two (not always in the same contexts)’: review of Foster in TLS, – June , p. .
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English Verse Drama, the full text database, Chadwyck-Healey, . A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, the ninth edition (London, ), p. . Chadwyck-Healey, English Verse Drama (); Chadwyck-Healey, English Poetry –, the full text database (). Cf. also John R. Mulder, The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England (New York, ). The main source is Daniel’s Civil Wars (): Thou sit’st at home safe by the quiet fire And hear’st of others harmes, but feelest none; And there thou telst of kinges and who aspire, Who fall, who rise, who triumphs, who doe none: Perhappes thou talkst of mee . . .
(Book , stanza )
Cf. G. Bullough (ed.), Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. (London, ), p. . Another possible source is Sidney, Astrophil and Stella: Then thinke my deare, that you in me do read Of Lover’s ruine some sad Tragedie: I am not I, pitie the tale of me.
Cf. Ringler , p. . I thank Charles Forker, editor of the forthcoming New Arden edition of Richard II, for help on this point. Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, ‘Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare’, ShQ , (): –, at p. . I have also consulted the Chadwyck-Healey database, The Bible in English (), and wish to thank Mr Arend K¨uster for help in using it. For the Geneva Bible I quote from the printing by Robert Barker (STC ). Cf. Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible – How Acquired’, ShStud, (): –. See Brian Vickers, ‘Shakespearian Consolations’, PBA, (): –, at pp. –. John E. Booty (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer . The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville, VA, ), p. . The Language of the Book of Common Prayer (London, ), p. . I find only four brief references: , pp. , –. I provide dates of plays from the generally reliable records compiled by Alfred Harbage, rev. Samuel Schoenbaum, Annals of English Drama – (London, ); Supplements – (, ). Richard II, Arden, ed. Peter Ure (London, ), p. ; Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Use of the Bible (London, ), pp. –.
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Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Newark and London, ); Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Newark and London, ); Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark and London, ). These three works were collected as Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark and London, ), including a new section on the late plays. Cf. Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Volume – (London and Boston, ), pp. –, –. Peter Ure, ‘A Note on “Opinion” in Daniel, Greville, and Chapman’, MLR, (): –, at p. . England’s Parnassus: or the choysest Flowers of our Modern Poets, with their Poeticall comparisons . . . (London, ); ed. C. Crawford (Oxford ). The English Verse Drama database records c. , instances of the word ‘opinion’ for the period to . I have not pursued them. I do not give full finding information for each of these quotations, which can be retrieved from the English Poetry database and from its Bibliography. But in this instance I pass on the reference: The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, ed. L. E. Kastner and H. B. Charlton ( vols., Edinburgh and London, , ), . (‘The Fifth House’, stanza ). This vast database permits us to fill one lacuna in Charles Crawford’s admirable edition of England’s Parnassus, where this quotation (no. ) appears, signed I. M. but ‘untraced’. It comes from Gervase Markham’s Aretae Lachrimae. Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies. And Other Pieces of Research into the Elizabethan Drama (Melbourne and London, ; repr. New York, , ), p. . London ; rev. edn, Edinburgh, . Warren B. Austin, ‘A Computer-Aided Technique for Stylistic Discrimination. The Authorship of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit’ ( Washington, DC, ), p. . Examples of such unusual formations in Chettle include ‘unadvantageable, unhaunted, unmatchable, unmisdeeming, unmundified, unreprovable, unreverent, untaken, and unwilful ’. J¨urgen Sch¨afer, Documentation in the OED. Shakespeare and Nashe as Test Cases (Oxford, ), pp. –. These included ‘unexhaustible, a.’; ‘unflattered, ppl. a.’; ‘unhabit, v.’; ‘unmeritorious, a.’; ‘unprivileged, ppl. a.’; ‘unregenerate, a.’; and ‘untrusted, ppl. a.’. I have substituted ‘letters’ for ‘syllables’ in the original, an obvious misprint. Richard Abrams, ‘Breaching the Canon. Elegy by W. S.: the State of the Argument’, ShN, no. (): –, . ‘W. S.’s style seems virtually indistinguishable from Shakespeare’s’; ‘the Peter elegy has a prodigious incidence of % unstopped lines, a rate which among contemporaries is regularly equalled only by late Shakespeare’; ‘No other author of the period uses hendiadys with Shakespearean regularity except for W. S.’; ‘Equally remarkable is W. S.’s and Shakespeare’s use of the relative pronoun who/m to refer to impersonal, unpersonified antecedents. In the
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Cross-Sample, incongruent who/m occurs only once. Undoubtedly other instances lurk in the literature of the period but they must be rare. Thus, with a confidence born of extensive computer searching, Foster can proclaim that almost no one but Shakespeare uses this form with regularity – no one but the author of the Peter elegy. An astonishing % of the whos and whoms in Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works are curiosities on the order of “thing who”, “knees whom” . . . a form that also occurs frequently in the last plays (whence these examples) . . . ’ (Abrams , p. ; my italics) – and so forth. J¨urgen Sch¨afer, Shakespeares Stil. Germanisches und romanisches Vokabular (Frankfurt, ), p. note. Sch¨afer pointed out that the ratio of new words in the poem ( per , words) would represent an absolute peak for Shakespeare. Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, ‘And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants’, CHum, (): –, at pp. –; , pp. –. MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Function Words in the Funeral Elegy’, ShN, (), no. : , . In the summer of Foster gave a long interview to the American journal Lingua Franca. The Review of Academic Life, which rehearsed the whole history of his advocacy of Shakespeare’s authorship of the Funerall Elegye in wholly favourable terms. The interviewer gave a tendentious account of this exchange, reporting MacDonald Jackson’s rebuttal of Abrams in these terms: ‘To defend himself, Jackson countered that Shakespeare’s poems alone were too scant a sample to justify Abrams’s suggestion of trends, which data from the plays did not support’ (Crain , p. ). Whether the interviewer had read Jackson’s reply or not, that simply leaves out all the discomfiting detail which collapsed the Foster–Abrams case. As for their current position, the interviewer recorded: ‘Asked about the exchange today, Abrams is apologetic. “I feel bad about not letting Mac off the hook,” he says. Disinclined to renew the battle, Abrams suggests the elegy’s case can withstand the four prepositions’ negative testimony. “Don should have included those [in his essay] and given the dismal news,” Abrams says. But Foster is not ready to concede that the prepositions work against him. A few days after I ask about them, Foster hands me three pages of recalculated stats. They resurrect Abrams’s hypothesis of prepositional trends.’ Those remarks suggest that neither Foster nor Abrams really understood the finality with which Jackson had disproved their case. The interviewer recorded that ‘Foster is itching to leave the elegy behind him by writing about it one last time – “I will be declaring victory and getting out” . . . ’ (p. ). The announcement would be premature. : ‘ ‘‘ ’’ ’
A. C. Partridge, A Substantive Grammar of Shakespeare’s Nondramatic Texts (Charlottesville, VA, ). Lines , , , (not a complete list).
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Lines , , (not complete). Relative Constructions in Early Sixteenth-Century English. With Special Reference to Sir Thomas Elyot (Uppsala, ). Cf. J¨urgen Sch¨afer, Early Modern English Lexicography, vols. (Oxford, ), of which the second volume provides Additions and Corrections to the OED, together with his earlier study (Sch¨afer ). For useful surveys see, e.g., Barbara M. H. Strang, A History of English (London, ); Charles Barber, Early Modern English (London, ; rev. edn, Edinburgh ); Manfred G¨orlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge, ); Roger W. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume III. – (Cambridge, ). O. Fischer, ‘Syntax’, in Norman Blake (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume II. – (Cambridge, ), pp. –, at p. . Mats Ryd´en, ‘The Emergence of Who as a Relativizer’, Studia Linguistica, (): –. For other discussions of the late appearance of ‘who’ as a relative, see Xavier Dekeyser, ‘Relativizers in early Modern English: a dynamic quantitative study’, in J. Fisiak (ed.), Historical Syntax (Berlin, ), pp. –; X. Dekeyser and M. Ingels, ‘Socio-Historical Aspects of Relativization in Late th Century English: ca. –’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, (): –; X. Dekeyser, ‘Wh- and That: Two Competing Strategies in the History of English Relative Clause Formation’, Leuvense Bijdragen, (): –. Matti Rissanen, ‘Syntax’, in Lass , pp. –, at p. . I am grateful to Dr Juhani Klemola (University of Helsinki), a historical dialectologist, who has found no evidence that <who + impersonal> could be dialectal, since the relative who is very probably a feature of the written language. I am grateful to Professor David Daniell for help on this point. Janet M. Bately, ‘Who and Which and the Grammarians of the th Century’, ES, (): –; see also her ‘Dryden’s Revisions in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy: the Preposition at the End of the Sentence and the Expression of the Relative’, RES, (): –. J. A. Kemp, in his useful edition and translation, John Wallis’s Grammar of the English Language (London, ), unfortunately decided to exclude ‘the Praxis Grammatica – grammatical comments on the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed . . . ’ (p. v). Hans Peters, ‘Early Modern English Who: Discourse Function and Standardization’, NOWELE, (): –. See Matti Rissanen, Merja Kyt¨o, and Minna Palander-Collin (eds.), Early English in the Computer Age: Explorations through the Helsinki Corpus (Berlin, ). A related, equally adventurous project, also emanating from Helsinki, is The Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), consisting of about . million words, and covering the period –: see Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language History. Studies based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, ).
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See Spectator, nos. and ( May and June ). Alfred Kr¨uger, ‘Studien u¨ ber die Syntax des englischen Relativpronouns zu Beginn der sp¨atenglischen Zeit’, PhD dissertation, Universit¨at Giessen, , pp. –. Translations are mine. Cf. J. Grizenhout, ‘The Change of Relative That to Who and Which in Late Seventeenth-Century Comedies’, NOWELE, (): –, and Bately , pp. ff. In Dryden still found it necessary to correct William Walsh’s grammar, reproving him for failing to make ‘“a due distinction between that and who: a man that is not proper; the relative who is proper. That, ought always to signify a thing; who, a person”’ (quoted in Bately , p. ). ‘A Diachronic Study of Relative Markers in Spoken and Written English’, Language Variation and Change, (): –, at p. . See also her earlier essay, ‘Relative Pronouns in it-clefts: the Last Seven Centuries’, Language Variation and Change, (): –. E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar. An Attempt to illustrate some of the differences between Elizabethan and modern English (London, ; rev. edn; first edn ), paragraphs , ; Wilhelm Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik, th edn, retitled Die Sprache Shakespeares In Vers und Prosa (Halle ; earlier editions –), §, pp. –. ‘Der Gebrauch des Pronomens, Artikels u. Verbs bei Thomas Kyd im Vergleich zu dem Gebrauch bei Shakespeare’ (Kiel, ). Needless to say, all such studies need to be done again in the light of modern textual scholarship. ‘Spensers Relativsatz’, PhD dissertation (Berlin, ). The Grammar of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Philadelphia, PA, ). Linguistic Studies in some Elizabethan Writings. I. An Inquiry into Aspects of the Language of Thomas Deloney (Copenhagen, ). Studies in the Syntax of Ben Jonson’s Plays (Cambridge, ). It is curious that Foster should have used Partridge’s other books, and even claimed that Jonson never used the incongruent who in his poems, without consulting this classic study. I am grateful to Professor Matti Rissanen for supplying some seventy examples. The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann (Oxford, ), p. . Lukas Erne, in his Oxford DPhil dissertation, A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (), argues cogently for Kyd’s authorship of this play. Personal communication, March . , , - E. Capell, ‘A brief ESSAY on VERSE, as of Shakespeare’s modeling: its Principles, and its Construction’, in his Notes and Various Readings to Shakespeare, vols. (London, ), II.ii.–, repr. (with slight abbreviations) in and quoted from Brian Vickers (ed.), Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage. Volume VI, – (London and Boston, ), pp. –, with introductory comments at pp. –; [Charles Bathurst], Remarks on the Differences in Shakespeare’s Versification in Different Periods of his Life (London, ); F. G. Fleay, ‘On
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Metrical Tests as applied to Dramatic Poetry. Part I. Shakespeare’, TNSS, (): –, –; J. K. Ingram, ‘On the “weak endings” of Shakspere, with some account of the history of the verse-tests in general’, TNSS, (): –; F. S. Pulling, ‘The “Speech-ending” test applied to twenty of Shakespeare’s plays’, TNSS, (): –; G. K¨onig, Der Vers in Shaksperes Dramen (Strasbourg and London, ); Hermann Conrad, ‘Metrische Untersuchungen zur Feststellung der Abfasszeit von Shakespeares Dramen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, (): –; David L. Chambers, The Metre of Macbeth. Its Relation to Shakespeare’s Earlier and Later Work (Princeton, N J, ); P. W. Timberlake, The Feminine Ending in English Blank Verse. A Study of its Use by Early Writers in the Measure and its Development in the Drama up to the Year (Menasha, WI, ); A. Oras, Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. An Experiment in Prosody (Gainesville, FL, ); H. Suhamy, Le Vers de Shakespeare (Paris, ); Marina Tarlinskaja, Shakespeare’s Verse. Iambic Pentameter and the Poet’s Idiosyncrasies (New York, ); George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ). Foster himself criticized this couplet: ‘The syntax here is convoluted, the phrasing repetitive, the thought unnecessary, and the rhyme “pushed over” into the line succeeding, so that the second line rhymes with itself (“Free . . . be”)’ (, p. ). The same criticisms would apply to much of the Elegye. Cf. Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York, ; repr. ), pp. –, –, and Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Feeling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare Today: Directions and Methods of Research, ed. K. Elam (Florence, ), pp. –, at pp. –. Compare, in Appendix I, pp. ff, lines –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –. Vendler, ‘Reading, Stage by Stage: Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in R. McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare Reread. The Texts in New Contexts (Ithaca, NY, ), pp. –, at p. . See also her full study, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. xiv–xv, –, and passim. Ness also recalled that F. G. Fleay, as long ago as , had diagnosed in Shakespeare’s career ‘not only a gradual lessening of rhyme lines in general: but also a gradual dying out’ of alternate rhymes in quatrains (Ness , pp. –; bibliographical reference, p. ). See also Percy Simpson, ‘Shakespeare’s Versification: a Study of Development’, in his Studies in Elizabethan Drama (Oxford, ), pp. –, at –, counting quatrains in Act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, in Act , and in Act . ‘The prologues to Acts I and II of Romeo and Juliet and the epilogue to King Henry V are in this form. It is used in King John and in King Richard II, but as a rule it is a metre of comedy. It is not used after As You Like It () . . . ’ (p. ). But this is to forget Cymbeline. See also J. E. Bernard Jr, The Prosody of the Tudor Interlude (New Haven and London, ; repr. Hamden, CT, ), who recorded a rapid disuse of ‘all complicated measures . . . with the advent of prose and blank verse about ’ (pp. x, –, –, –).
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Murray, A Study of Cyril Tourneur (Philadelphia, PA, ), pp. –, quoted in Anthony Graham-White, Punctuation and its Dramatic Value in Shakespearean Drama (Newark, N J, and London, ), p. . Graham-White cited two further scholars, George R. Price and Fredson Bowers, who were ‘similarly unable to distinguish between Eld’s compositors’ in their treatment of colloquial contractions and spellings (p. , n. ). Albert C. Baugh, ‘A Medieval Survival in Elizabethan Punctuation’, in J. W. Bennett, O. Cargill, and V. Hall, Jr (eds.), Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (London, ), pp. –, at p. . Quoted in Samuel Schoenbaum, Internal Evidence and Elizabethan Dramatic Authorship (London, ), p. . M. Parkes, Pause and Effect. An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (London, Berkeley and Los Angeles, ), p. . Carlo Bajetta, ‘Ralegh’s Early Poetry and Its Metrical Context’, SP, (): –. W. W. Greg, ‘An Elizabethan Printer and his Copy’, in Greg, Collected Papers, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, ), pp. –; originally in Library, (): –. Simpson, Shakespeare’s Punctuation (Oxford, , ), p. . In an epistle to the reader, entitled ‘A Premonition’, Wither declared that ‘it is above two yeares since I laboured to get this Booke printed; and it hath cost me more mony, more paine, and much more time to publish it, than to compose it: For, I was faine to imprint every sheet thereof with my owne hand, because I could not get allowance to doe it publikely . . . ’ (Sig. r – v ). The late D. F. McKenzie demonstrated that the compositor employed by Thomas Pavier to set the second quarto of The Merchant of Venice in (known as Compositor B, he was one of the five or more compositors employed in type-setting the First Folio), took his text from a copy of the first quarto (), but made considerable alterations. His ‘general tendency was clearly to punctuate heavily’, and he had a particular ‘preference for heavier pointing at the ends of verse lines ( commas are inserted within verse lines, at the ends) . . . ’. See ‘Shakespearian Punctuation. A New beginning’, RES, (): –, at pp. –; repr. in Vivien Salmon and Edwina Burgess (eds.), A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, ), pp. –, with an additional note. See also McKenzie, ‘Compositor B’s Role in The Merchant of Venice ()’, SB, (): –. Michael J. Warren, ‘Repunctuation as Interpretation in Editions of Shakespeare’, ELR, (): –, at pp. –. See E. A. J. Honigmann’s review of Foster’s monograph, NQ , (): –, at pp. –; Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and the Funeral Elegy’, Letter to the Editor, TLS, February , p. . Stanley Wells (b) suggested that line might also be considered a hexameter. Ingram , p. . Ingram took this term from the German scholar Hertzberg, who had used it in his preface to Cymbeline, in Ulrici’s edition
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of the Schlegel–Tieck translation (), describing the many weak endings in that play as ‘proklitische Formw¨orter’. The word ‘proclitic’, which OED traces from , is used in Greek grammar to describe ‘a monosyllabic word that is so closely attached in pronunciation to the following word as to have no accent of its own’, and is applied generally to a similar word in any language. Jonathan Hope, The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays. A Socio-Linguistic Study (Cambridge, ). : ‘ ‘‘ ’’ ’ An exception is Partridge , p. , perhaps Foster’s source, who writes that ‘the interchange of grammatical forms, characteristic of Shakespeare, was a rhetorical figure, known in Latin as permutatio, but also called enallage’. Cf. , p. , with Joseph , p. (on permutatio) and p. (on anthimeria). Interestingly, Sister Joseph (p. , n. ) noted that Vera L. Rubel, in her Poetic Diction in the English Renaissance (New York, ), had confused the same two figures. Cf. , p. , citing Puttenham: ‘the maid that soon married is, soon marred is’; George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, (Cambridge, ; repr. ), p. . I cite brief entries from T. F. Head (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, ). Shakespeare: His World and His Work (London, ). William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, ; first edn ), p. . George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA, (): –, at p. . Peter von M¨ollendorf, ‘Hendyiadyoin’, Historisches W¨orterbuch der Rhetorik (T¨ubingen, ), vol. , cols. –, at col. . Wright (, p. ) translated ‘we drink from cups and gold’, but of course the verb libare means ‘to pour out in honour of a deity, to make a libation of any thing’. In his helpful edition and commentary, Virgil. Georgics, vols. (Cambridge, ), Richard F. Thomas identified eleven further instances of hendiadys in the poem: ., .–, . –, ., ., .–, ., .–, ., .–, .–. Quoted in Gottlieb Hatz, Beitr¨age zur lateinischen Stilistik. (Zur Hendiadys in Ciceros Reden) (Schweinfurt, ), p. . I am responsible for translations from German and French. Schmalz, ‘Lateinische Stilistik’, in I. von M¨uller (ed.), Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, (Munich, ), p. . Dictionnaire de Po´etique et de Rh´etorique (Paris, ; th rev. edn, ), s. v. On the use of hendiadys in classical texts see, e.g., C. F. W. M¨uller, ‘Ueber das sogenannte hen dia dyoin im lateinischen’, Philologus, (): –; E. Adelaide Hahn, ‘Hendiadys: is There Such a Thing?’, The Classical Weekly, (): –, and her doctoral dissertation, Coordination of Non-Coordinate Elements in Vergil (Geneva, NY, ); Hatz on Cicero (above, n. ). For Ovid see, e.g., E. J. Kenney (ed.), Ovid Heroides XVI–XXI
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(Cambridge, ). For its use in the Bible see, e.g., E. W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech used in the Bible: Explained and Illustrated (London, ; Grand Rapids, MI, ), pp. –; W. B¨uhlmann and K. Scherer, Sprachliche Stilfiguren der Bibel (Fribourg, ; rev. edn Giessen, ); W. G. E. Watson, Classical Hebrew Poetry. A Guide to its Techniques (Sheffield, , ); A. M. Honeymans, ‘Merismus in Biblical Hebrew’, Journal of Biblical Linguistics, (): –; H. A. Brongers, ‘Merismus, Synekdoche und Hendiadys in der Bibel-Hebr¨aischen Sprache’, Old Testament Studies, (): –. Erich Schulze, ‘Das Hendiadyoin und Hendiatrion in Shakespeares dramatischen Werken’, PhD dissertation, Friedrichs-Universit¨at HalleWittenberg (Halle an der Saale, ), pp.; Erich Kerl, ‘Das Hendiadyoin bei Shakespeare’, PhD dissertation, Universit¨at Marburg, , pp. (I am grateful to the Universit¨ats-Bibliothek, Marburg, for making a copy available.) All translations are mine. Walter Nash, ‘Paired Words in Othello. Shakespeare’s Use of a Stylistic Device’, English Studies, (): –; Johan Geritsen, ‘More Paired Words in Othello’, ibid., pp. –, with a ‘Postscript’ by Nash, pp. –. None of the discussions mentioned in this note was known to Wright when he published his essay in . Kerl quoted Othello’s resolve to murder Desdemona directly: ‘I’ll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again’ (..–); Edmund’s lying to Edgar about Gloucester’s anger against him: ‘I have told you what I have seen and heard; but faintly, nothing like the image and horror of it’ (..–); and Polonius’s aside on Hamlet’s ‘pregnant replies’: ‘A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be deliver’d of ’ (..–). Kerl , p. , observes that in his speeches Cicero frequently combines clamor with related concepts. M¨uller , p. , commented on Tacitus’ double use of the hendiadys ‘clamor et gaudium’, in which the feeling and its expression, source and consequence, are fused into one. Apart from a general account by Granville Baker in the first of his Prefaces to Shakespeare (), which did not identify the figure by name (Wright , pp. –). See note above. Wright describes hendiadys as ‘a figure whose structure expresses the mystery of things’ (p. ); it has a ‘syntactical complexity that seems fathomable only by an intuitional understanding of the way the words interweave their meanings, rather than by painstaking lexical analysis’ (p. ). It is one of ‘those stylistic devices that make for elusiveness . . . ’; [it is] ‘too confusing, too disorderly’ for rational analysis (ibid.). It achieves ‘an interweaving, indeed sometimes a muddling of meanings, a deliberate violation of clear sense’ (p. ). Readers can easily imagine how this presentation of hendiadys as ‘mysterious and elusive’ can be used to legitimize ‘its general appropriateness to the story and setting of Hamlet’ (p. ), a point developed at some predictable length (pp. –). My objection to this sequence is, first, that the figure has been given a false description in order to make it fit a rather obvious reading of this
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and other plays; and, secondly, that it is illicit to turn a rhetorical figure, which merely affects the placing, syntax, or reiteration of words, not their meaning, into an interpretative tool defining the play’s significances. Wright himself admits as much, recording that in the rhetorical handbooks ‘hendiadys is treated as a figure, not as a trope, for its point lies in its peculiar syntax, not in the alteration of meaning that is usually felt to be the mark of a trope . . . But to find in the figure such extensive meanings as the present essay proposes is, in effect, to suggest that hendiadys has the force of a trope and helps in some measure to organize the meanings of the play’ (p. , n. ; my italics). Students of Shakespeare’s rhetoric may have mixed feelings that this essay should have been awarded a prize by the MLA: glad that attention has been given to an individual rhetorical figure, but disappointed that it was not better understood. Among the examples Foster quoted (, p. ), unfortunately, was one from the Prologue to Henry VIII, which all reliable authorities ascribe to Shakespeare’s co-author, Fletcher. In his presentation of the poem in the Norton Shakespeare, Foster again reduced his claim: ‘W. S. also makes use of the ‘Shakespearean hendiadys’, or false doublet [sic]. The elegy’s dozen examples . . . ’ (Greenblatt et al., , p. ). It is very odd that Foster should cite these two instances of that key theological concept and fail to conclude that the author of the poem may have been a Calvinist Protestant. He claims that ‘the Peters . . . of Devonshire appear to have remained mostly Catholic’ (a, p. n.). Katherine Duncan-Jones has drawn attention to the ‘adverse connotations’ of the word ‘mimic’, or ‘burlesque actor’ (OED), which is typical of moralizers attacking the theatre, but hardly of Shakespeare (, p. ). Our confidence in Foster’s understanding of the text is weakened when we discover that he originally glossed ‘disgest’ as: ‘. (to) stomach, or . (to) bring slowly to a state of perfection’ (, p. n.).
‘Reconstructing Shakespeare’, ShN, (): –, –; ‘Shaxicon ’, ShN, (): , , . ‘Shaxicon and Shakespeare’s Acting Career’, ShN, (): –, , with a reply by Foster, pp. –, and a further reply by Price, ShN, (): , . In his monograph Foster claimed that the Funerall Elegye had special connections with Henry VIII (pp. –, , –). For commentary on the lack of similarity in two of these claims – the supposed pun on ‘endeavors’, divided into ends + ever – see above, p. , and on the claimed parallel in the use of ‘twins’ and ‘learning’, see ch. , n. . W. L. Godshalk has objected to others, describing Foster’s parallel between the fall of the ‘seel`ed dove’ (FE, –) and the fall of Lucifer (H, ..–) as ‘forced’. A further claimed parallel between Henry VIII (.. –) and the poem, with its metaphor of ‘the stream of my mischance’ (FE, –), which
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Foster described as an image ‘derived from hunting’, Godshalk judged, is simply ‘incorrect’: ‘it seems to me to be a water image – and I find a parallel in Hooker’s Laws’ ( ., May ). A detailed analysis of these claims would be devastating for Foster’s thesis. See A. K. Hieatt, Short Time’s Endless Monument: The Symbolism of the Numbers in Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ ( New York, ); A. K. Hieatt, C. W. Hieatt, Anne Lake Prescott, ‘When Did Shakespeare Write Sonnets, ?’, SP, (): –; A. K. Hieatt, T. G. Bishop, E. A. Nicholson, ‘Shakespeare’s Rare Words: Lover’s Complaint, Cymbeline, and Sonnets’, NQ , (): –. Charles W. Hieatt, ‘Attributing A Funeral Elegye’, Letter to the Editor, PMLA, (): –, at p. . A. Kent Hieatt, ‘Attributing A Funeral Elegye’, Letter to the Editor, PMLA, (): –, at p. . Donald W. Foster, ‘Attributing A Funeral Elegye, Reply’, PMLA, (): –, at p. . Personal communication ( March ). Anthony Kenny invoked in this connection ‘the central limit theorem’ of statistical theory, which ‘states that test statistics tend to be normally distributed even when the samples which provide the statistics, and the populations from which they are drawn, are not normally distributed. But the sampling distribution is a close approximation to the normal distribution only when the number N, the sample size [of stylistic markers], is relatively large. If N is relatively small (say, less than ) then the sampling distribution is not necessarily normal . . . Since in literary studies however there is commonly no difficulty in assembling samples of larger than for any significance test’, smaller samples should be avoided (The Computation of Style. An Introduction to Statistics for Students of Literature and Humanities (Oxford, ), p. ). Jonathan Hope reported that in his own work on Shakespeare’s five co-authored plays he had avoided basing arguments on any sample below , and had taken N = as a reliable sample size – some Elizabethan drama texts yield up to samples (Hope , pp. , ). G. Udny Yule, ‘On Sentence Length as a Statistical Characteristic of Style in Prose, with Applications to Two Cases of Disputed Authorship’, Biometrika, (): –; Yule, The Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary (Cambridge, ); C. B. Williams, ‘A Note on the Statistical Analysis of Sentence Length as a Criterion of Literary Style’, Biometrika, (): –; Williams, Style and Vocabulary: Numerical Studies (London, ). Williams’s paper was reprinted, with an afterword and additional bibliography, in L. Doleˇzel and R. W. Bailey (eds.), Statistics and Style (New York, ), pp. –, together with a critique of it by K. R. Buch (pp. –). See Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author (Oxford, ). Gustav Herdan, ‘Discussion on the Paper by Mr Morton’, following A. Q. Morton, ‘The Authorship of Greek Prose’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series , (): –, at p. . See also Herdan, Type-Token Mathematics (The Hague, ), section ..
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Readers using these tables should note an unfortunate error on pp. –, which has not been corrected by Foster in his subsequent publications. The last five columns (nos. –), synthesizing Foster’s computations, have had their headings interchanged between pages and the two following. On pp. – the data given in column actually refer to material previously included in column ; thereafter col. = col. ; col. = col. ; col. = col. ; col. = col. (previously). I think this is right. Elliott and Valenza , pp. , –; , p. . Cf. Derek Rowntree, Statistics Without Tears. A Primer for Non-mathematicians (Harmondsworth, ), p. , observing that the median value (the centre of a distribution) is statistically preferable ‘in distributions where there are a few extreme (high or low) values observed. These are called “ ”. Their effect would be to distort the mean, pulling it too far away from the centre of the distribution.’ Cf., e.g., one statistician’s reminder that ‘the strategy of hypothesis testing is to accumulate enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis, rather than to try to support any of the possible alternative hypotheses directly . . . It is extremely important to realise that we can never prove conclusively that the null hypothesis is incorrect, or that any alternative hypothesis is correct. There is always a chance (maybe a very small one) that the differences we observe are indeed due to sampling variation and not to the independent variable. All we can do is try to show that the probability of this being so is very small’: Christopher S. Butler, Statistics in Linguistics (Oxford, ), p. ; also Rowntree , pp. –. Elliott and Valenza, ‘The Professor Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Problems with the Foster “Response”’, CHum (): –, at pp. –; also , p. . In an attempt to discredit Elliott and Valenza, Foster offered examples of the non-dialogic ‘Chorus’ parts of Henry V and Romeo and Juliet to claim ‘that no’s are scarce in non-dialogic Shakespeare’, and therefore in FE, too (Foster, ‘Response to Elliott and Valenza, “And Then There Were None”’, CHum, (): –, at p. ). But Foster cited two short texts, of only , and words, not standardized for size, as against the ‘,+ words of poem and play verse’ analysed by Elliott and Valenza, which are ‘not limited to one role, and well standardized for size’ (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). As they put it, ‘Abrams’s “unlumping” amounts to tampering with Foster’s rules retroactively and selectively, with no allowance for trends in the plays, with no controls for sample size, and using Lover’s Complaint as if it were an indisputably Shakespearean data point. None of these is convincing . . . Unlike Abrams, Jackson was not making up new, biased rules as he went along, and we consider Jackson’s points still valid’ (, p. note). ‘Crow’s Law’ was a favourite of Professor R. V. Jones, a key figure in air intelligence during the Second World War, as reported in his obituaries, The Independent, and December . John Crow (–) taught for many years in the English Department at King’s College, London. He
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had an enormous knowledge of English Renaissance Literature, which he generously shared with other scholars, but published little. ‘ ’ For some of the background to consolation in the Renaissance, see Vickers . To begin with, Foster described the poem as ‘a mystery’ in that ‘most Renaissance elegies, if not written for wealthy patrons, were penned for great celebrities. William Peter was neither’ (, p. ). Subsequently Foster claimed that ‘One of the first things worth noting about W. S.’s Elegy for William Peter is that the poem is almost entirely without precedent . . . There is . . . only one example, prior to the Peter elegy, of anyone having printed as an independent quarto a memorial for a virtual unknown like William Peter’ – namely, a devotional tract by John Davidson on the death of two worthy Christians (Edinburgh, ). But then Foster had to qualify this assertion: ‘In addition, George Whetstone in published A Remembraunce of George Gaskoigne, in tribute to a man of no rank who had nevertheless been one of England’s most influential and popular poets’ (p. ). That already sounds like a significant exception, but Foster was forced to modify still further his claim that ‘the poem is almost entirely without precedent’ – that is, as a separate publication: ‘There are, finally, a few instances of broadside (single-sheet) epitaphs for London merchants and other persons of no rank having been printed at private expense. But apart from these few exceptions, there were no independent publications, prior to , in memory of anyone below the rank of knight, or, in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, below the rank of bishop’ (pp. –). But the list was still not complete; some more exclusions had to be made before Foster could produce a sufficiently imposing assertion, namely, that ‘If we exclude also memorial tributes to important public officials and to a few famed knights like Drake and Sidney, and a brief volume of epitaphs, privately printed, in memory of Sir William Buttes, no such work in English had ever before been printed for anyone outside the peerage’ (p. ; my italics). This is a demonstrably false claim, as the instance of Surrey’s epitaph on Wyatt will show. Foster also argued that the Elegye was privately printed, another significant point to him: ‘Of some two hundred separate publications of elegiac verse during [–], only thirty-four lack the usual marks of a book offered for public sale.’ Nevertheless, in is still percent, ‘only a small portion’ in Foster’s eyes, but quite considerable to others. The closest analogy he could find was The Muses Mourning (), a set of Funerall Sonnets for the Death of John Moray, Esq., by John Taylor. ‘Like the Peter elegy, Taylor’s poem is a rare exception in having been written for a person of no rank or fame’ (p. ). It now begins to seem as if there were quite a number of these ‘rare exceptions’. The strategy behind these assertions was obviously to attribute a special status to the Funerall Elegye, perhaps to imply that behind the scenes some powerful figure was at work (such as a poet rich enough to pay the printing costs of a twenty-one page pamphlet).
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But Foster’s straining to ascribe the greatest possible significance to the Funerall Elegye confused its publishing history with questions of genre and social context. It turns out that many elegies were published to commoners, and that many more were privately printed, of which all traces have disappeared. See Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic ( Madison, WI, ), especially part , ‘The Laureate Hearse, the Funeral Elegy and SeventeenthCentury Aesthetic’ (pp. –), with a valuable Appendix reprinting eleven elegies (pp. –); O. B. Hardison, Jr, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC, ); Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind. Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, ); G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, ); W. H. Race, Classical Genres and English Poetry (London, ); A. L. Bennett, ‘The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy’, SP, (): –; A. J. Murphy, ‘The Critical Elegy of Earlier Seventeenth-Century England’, Genre, (): –; C. W. Jentoft, ‘Surrey’s Five Elegies: Rhetoric, Structure, and the Poetry of Praise’, PMLA, (): –. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, ed. F. P. Wilson, third edn (Oxford, ), p. . The Colloquies of Erasmus, tr. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago, ), p. . Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiasticall Polity, Book V, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA, ), pp. –. E. M. Simpson and G. R. Potter (eds.), The Sermons of John Donne, vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, –), . –. Page references are incorporated in the text. I have normalized italics, except for Latin quotations. See the outstanding edition by Harry Caplan in the Loeb Classical Library, [Cicero] Ad C.Herennium De Ratione Dicendi (London and Cambridge, MA, ), .–.. The basic topics for the epideictic writer are three, concisely put: ‘To External Circumstances belong such as can happen by chance, or by fortune, favourable or adverse: descent, education, wealth, kinds of power, titles to fame, citizenship, friendships, and the like, and their contraries. Physical Attributes are merits or defects bestowed upon the body by nature: agility, strength, beauty, health, and their contraries. Qualities of Character rest upon our judgement and thought: wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, and their contraries’ (..). See Bennett , pp. –, and the excellent edition by Peter Medine: Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric () (University Park, PA, ). Vickers contains selections. On the conventions of the consolatio see Vickers . See, e.g., the commentary on this passage in the New Variorum Edition of As You Like It by Richard Knowles (New York, ), pp. –. I do not think it worth examining Richard Abrams’s tortuous attempt, by citing biblical parallels for the phrase ‘days of youth’, to prove that at forty-seven Shakespeare could still be considered young (Abrams a, p. ). See, e.g., Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, ). See, e.g., R, .., ; H, ..–; H, .., , .
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In the Norton Shakespeare () Foster’s footnote glossing line – ‘and loose the traps /Of Hell’ – reads: ‘break open the gates, open up the snares; containing, perhaps, a suggestion that Christ provides a release from sinful ensnarements, including the poet’s own past attachment to the stage – a symbolic bursting of the trapdoors to the understage, called “Hell”’ (p. ). This note is completely inappropriate, trivializing the poem’s serious Christian concerns. Compare Milton’s vision of the deceased Edward King, now in heaven, ‘In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love. / There entertain him all the Saints above, / In solemn troops, and sweet Societies / That sing, and singing in their glory move, / And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes’ (–). Terry Ross enthused over the Funerall Elegye’s ‘wonderful, almost Miltonic description of Christ’ ( ., Feb. ). J. J. M. Tobin, in the revised Riverside edition, commented: ‘This heavenly choir and the saints washed white in the blood of the Lamb are rather pre-Miltonic’ (Evans , p. ); and for the Elegye’s ‘Look hither then, you that injoy the youth / Of your best dayes; and see how unexpected / Death can betray your jollity to ruth!’ (–), he cited Lycidas, –: ‘Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth. / And O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.’ Cf. Shaheen , p. , and , pp. –. The Authorized Version of this passage varies slightly: ‘if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto’. This rhetorical apologia was cheekily alluded to by Donne, at the end of his fourth Satire: ‘though I yet / With Macchabees modestie, the knowne merit / Of my worke lessen: yet some wise man shall, / I hope, esteeme my writs Canonicall’ ( –). Cf. C. A. Patrides (ed.), The Complete English Poems of John Donne (London, ), p. . ‘On the face of it the elegy is the pious labour of an amateur academic or clerical poet’ (Proudfoot , p. ); ‘I . . . harbour a suspicion that W. S. was . . . perhaps a curate with literary aspirations’ ( Wells a, p. ). Foster blithely announced that in his modernized edition ‘the frequent and unnecessary use of italics in the Quarto . . . has been abandoned’ (, p. ). Bryan A. Garner, ‘Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologisms’, in Salmon and Burgess , pp. –, at p. ; from ShStud, (): –. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s ‘Small Latine and Lesse Greeke’, vols. (Urbana, IL, ). Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (London, ), p. . A. H. King, The Language of Satirized Characters in ‘Po¨etaster’, a Socio-Stylistic Analysis – (Lund, ). Shakespeares Stil. Germanisches und romanisches Vokabular (Frankfurt, ). F. E. Pierce, The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker (New Haven, CT, ; repr. Hamden, CT, ). In his original contribution, . ( Mar. ), Professor Gross counted four-syllable words. In subsequent correspondence he has modified his total, which still differs slightly from mine. He counts the
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rhyme words at lines / ‘apprehension’ as five syllables, not four, and ‘dissention’ as four syllables, not three; he does the same with the rhymes at /, ‘contemplation’, ‘commendation’, both of which he takes to be five syllables, not four. Further, some of the compound words he identifies as polysyllabic depend on Foster’s modernized spelling. However, the differences between his total and mine would only make the Elegye’s diction even more Latinate. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Margrit Soland in compiling this list. This phenomenon has been explained by ‘accommodation theory . . . which suggests that in any interaction the usages of the participants are likely to shift towards each other, without necessarily meeting’: Hope , p. , citing R. J. Street and H. Giles, ‘Speech accommodation theory: a social and cognitive approach to language and speech behaviour’, in M. E. Roloff and C. E. Berger (eds.), Social Cognition and Communication (Beverley Hills, CA, ), pp. –. See also Marco Mincoff, ‘Henry VIII and Fletcher’, ShQ , (): –, and Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author. Cf. J. Smith, ‘The Language of Leontes’, ShQ , (): –, and Sch¨afer , p. and note. Cf. Brian Vickers, ‘Shakespeare’s Use of Rhetoric’, in K. Muir and S. Schoenbaum (eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge, ), pp. –, at pp. –; repr. in Salmon and Burgess , pp. –. Again I thank Margrit Soland for her help in checking my figures. We have used T. F. Hoad (ed.), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Etymology (Oxford, ). Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (Oxford, ), pp. –. See also R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, and J. Svartvik, A Grammar of Contemporary English (London, ), pp. –, , –. ., Mar. . ., Mar. . Stanley Wells has also noted this idiosyncratic usage, citing six instances in the Elegye of ‘this stylistic quirk’ involving ‘of ’, and commenting ‘I have found no usage parallel to “nine of years” (with any numeral) in Shakespeare’ (Stanley Wells, ‘A Funeral Elegy: Obstacles to Belief ’, ShStud, (): –, at p. ). Colin Burrow, who is editing Shakespeare’s sonnets for the Oxford Shakespeare, independently communicated to me his rejection of Foster’s attribution of the Funerall Elegye on several grounds, including its ‘distinctive and not evidently Shakespearian penchant for a partitive genitive form (“best of time”, “spring of days”, “nine of years”) . . . But it also seems to me that the frequency of of in the poem is also remarkably high, and contributes a great deal to its monotony: of occurs about twice as frequently in the Elegy (about .% of its words are of ) as it does in Shakespeare’s known nondramatic verse . . . The formula “[noun] of [noun]” is frequent in the poem, and is frequently enjambed so that the Of provides the unstressed first syllable of the line . . . [eight examples quoted]. The author of the Elegy is also fond
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of the formulae [noun] | of [adjective] [noun]” and “noun | Of [ pronoun] [noun]”. This is a clumsy stylistic tic of this poem and it is not a stylistic tic found in the works usually attributed to Shakespeare. It is one reason why many readers find the poem metrically clumsy: we usually and reasonably think that poems are bad if they seem to have a very limited repertoire of tricks for making their lines scan’ (private communication, May ). I gratefully acknowledge Margrit Soland’s help in making these computations. See Brian Vickers, ‘“Mutual Render”: I and Thou in the Sonnets’, in Vickers, Returning to Shakespeare (London and New York, ), pp. –. I counted instances of ‘I’ forms, of ‘Thou/You’ forms. A. C. Partridge, Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. A Study of Colloquial Contractions, Elision, Prosody and Punctuation (London, ), p. . Partridge proposed a comparison (well worth performing) between Shakespeare’s ..– and Fletcher’s ..– (the famous last speech of Buckingham), and cited other instances of ‘the syntactical difficulty with which [Shakespeare] develops his ideas in verse’, including ..–, –, –; .. –; ..–; ..–. In his ‘reply’ to a critic, eager to reiterate his claim for strong verbal links between the Funerall Elegye and Henry VIII, Foster claimed that ‘Shakespeare’s Henry VIII contains many lines, even whole speeches, that are close adaptations of WS’s “pedestrian prosiness”’ (Foster , p. ). He went on to describe Henry VIII as ‘an aesthetic failure’, and referred disparagingly to ‘the pious doggerel of Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest’. Foster seems to have felt a need to bring Shakespeare down to the level of ‘W. S.’ Foster (, pp. –) illustrated this point with a quotation from Henry VIII (..–), a description of Cardinal Wolsey’s educational foundations, in which he also claimed to find ‘specific verbal echoes’ of the poem’s irredeemably vague account of William Peter’s education (FE, –). The play refers to Cardinal Wolsey, and to ‘Those twins of learning that he rais’d in you, / Ipswich and Oxford!’ The Elegye refers to Peter, the ‘curious temple’ of the deceased’s ‘mind’ having been enriched by ‘Those noble twins of heaven-infused races, / Learning and Wit, refined in their kind’. Apart from the trivial collocation of the words ‘twins’ and ‘learning’, the passages are not similar. Shakespeare uses the metaphor ‘twins’ to describe something concrete, Wolsey’s educational foundations (Cardinal College, Ipswich – dissolved after his fall – and Cardinal’s College, Oxford, surviving as Christ Church), ‘W. S.’ typically uses it to express two abstractions. For instance, Dolores M. Burton, Shakespeare’s Grammatical Style (Austin and London, ), merely itemizes different grammatical features, with a barrage of statistics, without attempting literary critical analysis. J. P. Houston commented, not unfairly, that the book ‘merely assembles remarks on grammatical details with no framework for interpretation’ (Shakespearean Sentences. A Study in Style and Syntax (Baton Rouge, LA, ), p. ). Cf. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, ; rev. edn, ), ch. , ‘The Expressive Function of Rhetorical Figures’, pp. –.
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Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (), ed. W. G. Crane (Gainesville, FL, ; repr. Delmar, NY, ). Cf. Vickers , pp. , ; Vickers , p. . I came across an excellent use of antimetabole (and polyptoton) in my lunchtime reading on the day that I wrote this section, by Michael Wood, reviewing Nicholas Boyle’s biography of Goethe: ‘What Goethe now denies is not the fulfilment of desire but the desirability of fulfilment’: London Review of Books, July , p. . Cf. also WT, ..–, . See also ..: ‘To die upon the bed my father died’; ..: ‘’Twixt his unkindness and his kindness’. See also ..–: ‘the young Prince, whose honourable thoughts / (Thoughts high for one so tender) . . . ’ ’ : , , A. T. Moore, ‘The Date of John Ford’s Baptism’, NQ , (March, ): –. M. Joan Sargeaunt, John Ford (Oxford ; New York ), pp. –. Sargeaunt , pp. –; M. Wiggins, forthcoming New Mermaid (second) edition of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. See The Nondramatic Works of John Ford, edited by L. E. Stock, Gilles D. Monsarrat, Judith M. Kennedy, and Dennis Danielson (Binghamton, NY, ), pp. –. All quotations are from this edition. See Clifford Leech, John Ford and the Drama of His Time (London, ), pp. , , . Fames Memoriall: NDW, pp. –. The only flaw in Leo Stock’s excellent edition, as his reviewer Thomas C. Faulkner pointed out (Text, (): ), is that while restoring three stanzas to the poem, containing a panegyric to Blount’s widow, Penelope Rich (as found in Bodleian MS. Malone ), Stock did not restore the corrected readings of lines –. I have done so below, drawing on Stock’s meticulous collation (p. ). Funerall Teares will be found in this volume under ‘Shorter Pieces’ (NDW, pp. –). Cf. Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama, and Nature’s Law – (Cambridge, ), pp. –. Dorothy M. Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London, ), p. . Still, against my thesis that these lines describe the odium heaped on him for having celebrated Mountjoy, Penelope, and Essex, it must be recorded that Ford continued to excuse Essex. In The Golden Meane () he described him as having been ‘propt up in honours, and cast downe by envie’ (NDW, p. ). It was not until A Line of Life () that he could express some reservations, describing Essex as ‘a man too publikely beloved, and too confident of the love he held’. Yet even now Essex is said to have ‘felt the misery of Greatnesse, by relying on such as flattered and envyed his Greatnesse’ (NDW, pp. –), as if he had been guilty of no fault himself. In an important essay, Frederick M. Burelbach, Jr commented rather scathingly on Fames Memoriall and ‘The Monarch’s Meeting’ (the poem
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appended to Honor Triumphant (), written to celebrate the amity between the kings of England and Denmark), judging that they ‘reveal another weakness of Ford’s earliest style – awkwardness in handling structural problems. There is little sense of form to “The Monarch’s Meeting”, and almost none to Fame’s Memoriall. In both cases there is a frail skeleton – . . . the career of Devonshire in the latter – but excess detail, repetition, and frequent digressions obscure the central purpose of each poem’: Frederick M. Burelbach, Jr, ‘John Ford’s Style: the Apprentice Years’, McNeese Review, (): –, at p. . This essay derives from the author’s unpublished PhD dissertation (Harvard University, ), ‘The Nondramatic Works of John Ford: a Transcript and Reprint with a Critical Introduction’. Ronald Huebert, John Ford. Baroque English Dramatist (Montreal and London, ), p. . Rhetoric, a ff. Cf.Vickers , pp. –, –, and Vickers, ‘Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance’, NLH, (): –. Abrams , p. ; claims repeated in Abrams a, at p. . See, e.g., Robert Davril, Le Drame de John Ford (Paris, ), pp. –; Leech , pp. –, –, –; H. J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Melbourne, ), pp. –; Donald K. Anderson, Jr, John Ford (New York, ), pp. –. The revised Short-Title Catalogue numbers this item , still attributing it to Joseph Fletcher, but with the note: ‘dubious . . . more likely by John Ford’. M. Joan Sargeaunt, ‘Writings Ascribed to John Ford by Joseph Hunter in Chorus Vatum’, RES, (): –. For Calvin see Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.–, ed. J. T. McNeill, tr. F. L. Battles, vols. (Philadelphia, PA, ), .–. For the wider debate see Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible. Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ), ch. : ‘The Death of Christ’ (pp. –), but without citing Ford’s poem. See his ‘Sermon preached before the Kings Majesty at Whitehall, On the Sixth of Aprill, being Good-Friday. An. Dom. ’, on a text from Jeremiah :: ‘The estimate whereof [the ‘quality of Christ’s Sorrow’] we may take from the second word of Melting, that is, from His sweat in the Garden; strange, and the like whereof was never heard or seen. No manner violence offered Him in body; no man touching him, or being neer him, in a cold night (for they were fain to have a fire within doors) lying abroad in the air, and upon the cold earth, to be all of a sweat, and that sweat to be Bloud; and not as they call it, Diaphoreticus, a thin faint sweat, but Grumosus, of great Drops; and those, so many, so plenteous, as they went through His apparel and all; and through them all, streamed to the ground, and that in great abundance: Read, enquire, and Consider, si fuerit sudor, sicut sudor iste; If ever there were sweat like this sweat of His? Never the like sweat certainly, and therefore never the like Sorrow’: XCVI Sermons (London, ), pp. –. Quotations are from the text edited by Dennis Danielson in NDW, p. ; here I have reversed roman and italic type.
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Cf. Gerald Eades Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vols. (Oxford, –) (hereafter JCS ), . ff. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (rev. edn, New Haven, CT, ). Danielson, in his introduction (NDW, pp. –), gives a useful digest of this tradition. Colin A. Gibson, ‘“The Stage of My Mortality”: Ford’s Poetry of Death’, in Michael Neill (ed.), John Ford. Critical Re-Visions (Cambridge, ), pp. –, at p. . The poem was entered in the Stationers’ Register on May , The Golden Meane on June . See G. D. Monsarrat, ‘John Ford’s Authorship of Christes Bloodie Sweat’, ELN, (): –, at p. n. . Unfortunately, three of Foster’s quotations from Christes Bloodie Sweat (a, p. ), have the wrong line-reference: for read ; for read ; and for read . See G. D. Monsarrat’s meticulous edition, NDW, pp. –, from which all quotations come. I have silently omitted editorial square brackets, which document with admirable fidelity the alterations Ford made in the second edition. On Renaissance Neo-Stoicism see, e.g., Iustus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie Written in Latin by Iustus Lipsius, Englished by Sir John Stradling, ed. R. Kirk (New Brunswick, N J, ), pp. –, and G. D. Monsarrat, ‘Les Th`emes Sto¨ıciens dans la litt´erature de la Renaissance Anglaise’, Th`ese (Universit´e de Lille, ), and Light from the Porch. Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature (Paris, ). For Ford’s debt to Seneca in GM and LL see also Monsarrat, ‘John Ford, Borrower and Lender (Seneca, Lipsius, and Thomas Adams)’, NQ , n. s. (): –. Clucas, ‘ “Noble Virtue in Extremes”: Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, Patronage and the Politics of Stoic Consolation’, Renaissance Studies, (): –. Clucas discusses both Davies (pp. –) and Ford (pp. –). All quotations are from the edition by G. D. Monsarrat, NDW, pp. –. Editorial square brackets are again omitted. Cf. GM, pp. , , , , , , , , ; LL, pp. , , , , , (twice). Cf. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, ., urging Lucilius to ‘despise both kinds of fortune’ (utramque fortunam). The concept recurs in the title of Petrarch’s moral treatise, enormously influential in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, De remediis utriusque Fortunae, well translated by Conrad H. Rawski, Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, vols. (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, ). Guillaume Du Vair, The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks, tr. T. James (), ed. R. Kirk (New Brunswick, N J, ). Du Vair subsequently wrote his own treatise on La Constance (), translated by Andrew Court in as A Buckler Against Adversitie Or A Treatise of Constancie. Cyrus Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (V)’, SB, (): –, at pp. –.
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Eugene M. Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, CT, ), pp. –, –. Derek Roper (ed.), John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (London, ). Gilles D. Monsarrat, ‘The Unity of John Ford: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and Christ’s Bloody Sweat’, SP, (): –. Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama (London, ; rev. edn; first edn ), p. . The term ‘commendation’ recurs in GM, pp. , , ; and LL, pp. , , , , , , , . Cf. Vickers , pp. –. Satires, .: ‘virtue is the one and only true nobility’. Cf. the full discussions in Monsarrat , pp. –; , pp. –. Elsewhere ‘nobleness’ is associated with constancy (NDW, p. ), with courage (pp. , , ), with virtue (pp. , ), and wisdom (pp. , , ). ‘For who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught? and what so much good doth that teaching bring forth (I speak still of moral doctrine) as that it moveth one to do that which it doth teach? For, as Aristotle saith, it is not gn¯osis but praxis must be the fruit. And how praxis can be, without being moved to practise, it is no hard matter to consider’: Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (Vickers , p. ). The principle is reiterated at the opening of A Line of Life: ‘It is granted in Philosophie, that Action is the Crowne of Vertue’ (NDW, p. ). Cf. Lipsius: ‘Let us . . . by many labours . . . not covet to know alone, but to be wise and do thereafter’, unlike those scholars who are ‘vaine, unconstant, only speculative, and given to no fruitful or profitable studie . . . these men have their knowledge to no end but to know. So little care have they of their life and deeds . . . ’ (Lipsius , p. ). Similarly Du Vair: ‘Let not us seeke any other recompence of our labours, but the conscience of well doing. . . . To bee short, let us hold this for a maxime, that the fruit of noble actions is to bee sayd to have performed them nobly . . . ’ (Du Vair , p. ). The term ‘well doing’, so prominent in Sidney’s Arcadia, recurs in Fames Memoriall (). NDW, pp. –. This text was printed for the first time in Vickers a, pp. –. See now the posthumous publication by Jeremy Maule, ‘“To the Memory of the Late Excellent Poet John Fletcher”: a New Poem by John Ford’, English Manuscript Studies –, (): –. See chapter below, items *, *. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London, ), p. . T. S. Eliot, ‘John Ford’, Selected Essays (London, rev. edn, ), pp. –; st edn, . Robert Davril, ‘Shakespeare and Ford’, ShJB, (): –, at p. ; my translations. Martin Butler, ‘Love’s Sacrifice: Ford’s Metatheatrical Tragedy’, in Neill , pp. –.
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See Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis – (Cambridge, ), especially ch. , ‘The Caroline Audience’ (pp. –). Both essays are reprinted in Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge, ): ‘“He that Plays the King”: Ford’s Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart History Play ()’ (pp. –); ‘Oxymoron and the Structure of Ford’s The Broken Heart ()’ (pp. –). For the contributions of Richard J. Kennedy to this debate, concerning Ford as author of the Elegye, see . ( Mar. ), . ( Mar. ), . ( Apr. ), . ( Apr. ), . ( Apr. ), . ( Apr. ), . ( May ), . ( May ); for Patrick Gillespie’s contributions see . ( Jul. ), . ( Aug. ). Both writers cited parallel passages: my account tries to give an integrated account of Ford’s work, considering the poems’ structure, topics, rhetoric, syntax, vocabulary, and prosody. Cf. W. L. Godshalk ( ., Mar. ); R. J. Kennedy ( ., Mar. ). ‘ ’’ ‘ ’ ‘John Ford: Three Studies’, PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, May . Volume of this huge dissertation ( pages) consists of three studies, ‘Ford’s Figures of Speech’ (pp. –), ‘Ford’s Vocabulary’ (pp. –), and ‘Investigations in A New English Dictionary’ (pp. –). Volume ( pages) consists of ‘A Line Concordance of The Broken Heart’, while Volume ( pages) reproduces ‘Word Indexes of The Lover’s Melancholy, Love’s Sacrifice, and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. (I am grateful to the library staff of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, for supplying a xerox copy.) It is much to be regretted that these pioneering word-lists, manually compiled, never formed the basis of a Ford concordance, which would be an enormously useful tool. Still, given that six plays by Ford await a modern edition, future Ford scholars will have much to do. Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Hildesheim, ). I list these participial forms to show how much they resemble those used in the Elegye. In Fames Memoriall the compounds using present participles are: ‘eaglet-towering’ (), ‘heart-easing’ (), ‘ever-mounting’ (), ‘deepreaching’ (), ‘close sitting’ (), ‘evergaping’ (), ‘sweet-piercing’ (), ‘deep-moving’ (), ‘death-bewayling’ (), ‘mischief-breeding’ (), ‘modell-tuning’ (), ‘heart-stealing’ (), ‘well-labouring’ (). Those using past participles are ‘shrill strayn’d’ (), ‘high-rear’d’ (), ‘ritch-stiled’ (), ‘soules-united’ (), ‘sharp-witted’ (), ‘worn-wasted’ (), ‘firm-settled’ (), ‘smooth-chind’ (), ‘safe secured’ (), ‘toungoyled’ (), ‘sick-thoughted’ (), ‘flint-hearted’ (), ‘heart-united’ (), ‘treble-girt’ (), ‘half-conquer’d’ (), ‘stiffneck’t’ (), ‘double-edged’ (), ‘well mastred’ (), ‘overcloyde’ (), ‘fame-royallized’ (), ‘well-deserved’ (), ‘dear-experience’t’ (), ‘resolution-armed’ (), ‘selfe-affected’ (), ‘now dispised’ (), ‘best approved’ (), ‘short
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breathed’ (), ‘high-soar’d’ (), ‘soone extinguisht’ (), ‘il-blinded’ (), ‘while-imprisond’ (), ‘just deserved’ (), ‘soul-united’ (), ‘empty-ayr’d’ (), ‘ill suted’ (), ‘canker-eaten’ (). In Christes Bloodie Sweat the compounds using present participles are: ‘musicke-straining’ (), ‘time-beguiling’ (), ‘fire-condemning’ (), ‘never-fading’ (), ‘life-restoring’ (), ‘stil-burning’ (), ‘mony-hoording’ (), ‘soule-killing’ (), ‘all-scorning’ (), ‘heart-inveigling’ (), ‘deathdesiring’ (), ‘sin-contriving’ (), ‘sin-inviting’ (), ‘sin-effecting’ (), ‘selfe-accusing’ (), ‘soule-devouring’ (), ‘never-waking’ (). Those using past participles are: ‘woe-begon’ (), ‘over-sway’d’ (), ‘ill-gotten’ (), ‘bloody-minded’ (), ‘over-given’ (), ‘ore-turnd’ (), ‘soule-endangered’ (), ‘bane-impotion’d’ (), ‘heavens-incensed’ (), ‘bareleg’d’ (), ‘hard-hearted’ (). Cf. ‘well-deserved’, ‘well-guided’, ‘well-labouring’ (FM ); ‘well tempered’, ‘well ordered’ (GM ); ‘well-doing’ (LL ), ‘well-built mind’, ‘well practiz’d’ (LS); ‘well-doing’, ‘well-advised’ (BH); ‘well prepared’ (WE); ‘well-tim’bred’, ‘well-acquainted’, ‘well-growne’, ‘well-coloured’, ‘well pleased’ (TPW ); ‘well-spoken’, ‘well-tun’d’, ‘well temper’d’, ‘well accomplish’d’ (LC ); ‘well-doing’, ‘well-strong-wrought’, ‘wel-shapt’, ‘well advis’d’ (LM ); ‘well searcht’, ‘well-ply’d’, ‘well contented’, ‘well counsell’d’, ‘well met’, ‘well bestow’d’ (Q); ‘well estated’ (FMI ); ‘well-read’, ‘well trimd’, ‘well doing’, ‘well said’ (twice), ‘well met’, ‘well acquainted’, ‘well looking’, ‘well playd’ (twice), ‘well remember’d’, ‘well provided’ (FCN ); ‘well-lin’d’, ‘well bred’, ‘well-remembred’, ‘well arm’d’ (LT ); ‘well-doing’, ‘well mixt’ (twice), ‘walls well hung’, ‘well studied’ (SG), ‘well advised’ (WA); and ‘well-balanc’d’ in Ford’s ‘commendation’ of Barnabe Barnes (NDW, p. ). See Quirk et al., , §. – (pp. –). David J. Lake’s figures for seven plays by Dekker give the following totals: has/hath: to , a ratio of . to (Ford: to .); does/doth: to , a ratio of . to (Ford: to .). Ford preferred the older, Dekker the newer forms. ., Mar. . See table .. For two instances in prose passages, cf. Q , .., . Also ‘self-affected’ ( instance in Ford), ‘inaffected’ (). Also ‘unblemished’ ( times in Ford). Also ‘brittlenesse’ (). Foster claims that Temp. .., ‘the rest o’ the fleet . . . are upon the Mediterranean float’ is an instance of the obsolete sense of ‘float’ as ‘the flux or flood of the tide’ (OED, ‘float’, n. ) – in opposition to ‘ebb’, the sense given to this word in the Funerall Elegye and throughout Ford’s plays. However, the Shakespeare Glossary of C. T. Onions, revised and enlarged by R. D. Eagleson (Oxford, ) glosses it as ‘Wave, billow; (hence) sea’ (p. ). Private communication, March . Cf. ., Mar. . Patrick Gillespie also cited a number of words occurring in the first lines of the Elegye which are never used by Shakespeare ( ., Aug. ).
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‘The Vocabularies of Shakespeare’s Plays’, RES, (): –; ‘The Growth of Shakespeare’s vocabulary’, RES, (): –. Cf. M. I. Scott, ‘Words for OED from Christes Bloodie Sweat’, NQ , (): . Ford’s Elegy to John Fletcher () contains five polysyllabic words in its lines, namely: ‘customary’, ‘miserable’, ‘imitation’ (twice), ‘admiration’, and ‘impossibilities’; cf. Vickers , pp. –. Eduard Hannemann, ‘Metrische Untersuchungen zu John Ford’, InauguralDissertation der vereinigten Friedrichs-Universit¨at Halle-Wittenberg (Halle a. S., ). Alfred Hart, ‘Shakespeare and the Vocabulary of The Two Noble Kinsmen’, in Hart a, pp. –; from RES (): –. Foster’s quotations from Hart are careless, omitting and inserting words at will. Chalker and Weiner , pp. –; Quirk et al., , pp. –, , –. Over a century ago Eduard Hannemann noted Ford’s frequent ‘Trennung des Genitivs vom zugeh¨origen Nominativ: . . . “with strains / Of lighter mixture”; “works and forms / Of compliment”’ (, p. ). Davril , p. ; all translations are mine. Ward Elliott and Robert Valenza, ‘Smoking Guns and Silver Bullets. Could John Ford Have Written the Funeral Elegy?’, Literary and Linguistic Computing, (): –. Elliott and Valenza , p. , n. ; cf. Tarlinskaja , pp. –. The Elliott–Valenza figures for ‘<noun + of + noun>’, produced electronically, are lower than those I arrived at with a manual count, namely instances. All that matters for the accuracy of their argument is that the Shakespeare data were consistently produced by the same means. Cf. W. Bang (ed.), John Ford, The Queen in Materialien zur Kunde des a¨ lteren Englischen Dramas, vol. (Louvain, ), pp. viii n., , ; Hoy , pp. , ; Lake , table . (following p. ), Band (e). See also Appendix III, table (p. ). One abbreviation characteristic of Shakespeare not used in the Funerall Elegye is elision involving the definite article. Stanley Wells pointed out that ‘a common feature of Shakespeare’s late verse is the presence of the elided forms i’th’ and o’th’; there are some fifty-seven occurrences in the verse of Cymbeline as printed in the Folio, and thirty-three in that of The Tempest (a much shorter play). I have not found a single one in the poem’ ( Wells b, p. ). The texts used for this calculation are the original quarto edition of the Elegye, and the Ford texts as edited by L. E. Stock (Fames Memoriall ) and Dennis Danielson (Christes Bloodie Sweat) in the old-spelling edition (NDW ), which reproduces the original punctuation. For Fames Memoriall the editor has mostly preserved the punctuation of the presentation manuscript, which is thought to be a scribal copy, not authorial, but is at all events representative of Renaissance punctuation practices. And it is quite likely that Ford proof-read both poems published under his name, Fames Memoriall
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being his first venture into print, Christes Bloodie Sweat being a text over which he took considerable pains in preparation, as the nearly marginal references to the Bible confirm. Whoever compares the punctuation in these poems with that in Ford’s prose works, which his editors judge to be undoubtedly authorial (NDW, p. ), will find the same system at work. Modernization can be very misleading. Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day, vols. (London, , ), . –; Sargeaunt , pp. –; Eliot ; Davril , pp. –; Hannemann , pp. –. Elliott and Valenza contest Foster’s claim that the use of who to modify an inanimate noun (‘book who’) is ‘immeasurably small’ in English literature outside Shakespeare (Foster a, p. ). They cite, from Ford’s Fames Memoriall, the following instances: ‘wars of Belgia who’ (), ‘lives who’ (), ‘hand, by whom’ (–), ‘reports . . . Who’ (–) and ‘dart . . . who’ (). (They also cite ‘Poore malediction’s sting, who did despise’ (), but, like ‘slander’s selfe, who must avow’ (), this is a conventional personification.) From Christes Bloodie Sweat they cite ‘dropes, in whom’ (), ‘Sinn’s . . . for whom’ (), ‘eares, who’ (), ‘eyes, who’ (), ‘faults whom’ (–), ‘sins who’ (), ‘soule, whom’ (), and ‘case, who’ (). Although, as we saw in chapter , this ‘archaic’ grammatical variant persisted in English well into the eighteenth century, we can certainly endorse their conclusion that ‘this test is anything but a reliable way to distinguish Shakespeare’s private property from Ford’s’ (, p. ). Ford treated ‘pearl’ and ‘girl’ as disyllabic. Frank Kermode has also proposed a connection between hendiadys and metaphor, defining hendiadys as ‘a way of making a single idea strange by splitting an expression in two, so that it calls for explanation as a minute and often rather sinister metaphor’: Shakespeare’s Language (London, ), p. . In the plays, to pick out only a few examples, Ford achieves a similar blurred effect by his use of noun-doublets: Whom grief hath arm’d with hate and scorn of life (SG, ..) Thou Mother of her counsells and her cares (SG, ..) . . . so much below your ranke and greatnesse (FMI, ..) Patrick Gillespie pointed out some similarities between the use of rhetoric in the Elegye and that in Fames Memoriall ( ., Jul. ). Puttenham , p. . Joseph , pp. , . See, e.g., lines , , , , , . Cf. –, –, –, –, –, –. See also –, –, –, –, etc. See also –, –. See also , , , etc. See also –, –, etc. Dennis Danielson also noted ‘the frequent use of anadiplosis together with linking the last line of one stanza to the first line of the next . . . ’, and Ford’s
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use of ‘iteration in the first or last lines of consecutive stanzas to create a strong sense of continuity’ (NDW, p.). There is certainly little sense of onward movement. For other examples cf. lines –, –. ‘ ’ Douglas Sedge, ‘An Edition of The Queen; or, The Excellency of her Sex’, MA thesis, The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham, ), p. . Cf. also: ‘you may yeeld to the present age example, / And to posterity a glorious chronicle’ (FCN, ..–); ‘When your black tainted name, which should have been – / Had you preserved it nobly – your best chronicle / Wherein you might have lived’ (Q , ..–). Bertram Lloyd, ‘An Unprinted Poem by John Ford?’, RES, (): –; NDW, pp. –. I have here restored the manuscript readings, as recorded in Stock’s collation (NDW, p. ). Cf. Huebert , pp. –, on Ford’s frequent ‘deification of women’, using such terms as ‘temple’ and ‘shrine’. G. D. Monsarrat () observes that here this phrase ‘means “while he was still alive”. Shakespeare never uses “was a man” like this but always with the sense “was valiant”, “was a true man” ( Henry VI, ..; Hamlet, ..; Julius Caesar, .., etc.)’. G. D. Monsarrat () points out a pertinent difference between the Elegye and Shakespeare’s usage: ‘what is striking in the elegy is the use of a singular abstract noun after “best of ”: this never occurs in Shakespeare but it is precisely what we find in Ford’. Cf. De officiis ..: ‘But since, as Plato has admirably expressed it, we are not born for ourselves alone . . . ’, and ..: ‘For Nature has not brought us into the world to act as if we were created for play or jest, but rather for earnestness and for some more serious and important pursuits . . . ’ The abstract vocabulary of this speech (‘mine own essential horror’) is quite unlike Rowley’s, and most of the nouns recur frequently in Ford’s work. I count more than thirty instances of ‘doat’, more than twenty of ‘horror’, nine of ‘reckoning’ (always in the sense of judgment being passed on one’s deeds, good and bad), and two of ‘runaways’. It includes the rare word ‘Novells’ (meaning novelties) also found in The Fancies Chaste and Noble (..), and it parallels exactly the Sun’s closing speech (..–), which is indubitably by Ford. Dekker, The Dramatic Works, ed. F. Bowers, vols. (Cambridge, –), . . H. Dugdale Sykes, Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (Oxford, ), pp. –. Duncan- Jones , p. . On the long-lived hostility to the theatre, see Jonas A. Barish, The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and London, ), and Brian Vickers, ‘Bacon’s Use of Theatrical Imagery’, in W. A. Sessions (ed.), Francis Bacon’s Legacy of Texts (New York, ), pp. –.
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In The Golden Meane, among the instances of virtuous men overcoming adversity, Ford cites Thomas Mowbray, banished by Richard II yet going on to live a valuable life, using details that could only have come from Shakespeare’s play: NDW, pp. , –, . See also Donald K. Anderson, Jr, ‘Richard II and Perkin Warbeck’, ShQ (): –. In The Laws of Candy Cassilane is warned that ‘Children yet unborne / Will stop their eares when thou art nam’d’ (..–). Shakespeare also uses ‘wintered’ once, in As You Like It (..): ‘winter’d garments must be lin’d’, where it means ‘adapted for or worn in winter’ (OED, ; Onions, rev. Eagleson, A Shakespeare Glossary). In Ford, however, it seems to have a quite different connotation, namely ‘exposed to the influence of winter; subjected to wintry conditions; chilled or blasted by winter’ (OED, ). Cf. Vickers , p. , with instances from Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch. Cf. also the preface to A Line of Life, where Ford affirms that ‘hitherto (how ever the course hath proved a barre to my thrift, yet) I never fawned upon any mans Fortunes, whose person and merit I preferred not’ (NDW, p. ). I owe this point to Gilles Monsarrat (), who also observes that Shakespeare often uses the word precedent, ‘but only once with the meaning for a person: “A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant / For me” (Titus Andronicus, ..–). In this single instance he uses “for”, whereas Ford uses “to” . . . ’ Who, in his modernized version of the poem, unaccountably printed the word as ‘president’ (, p. ); the old spelling signifies ‘precedent’. Cf. also the opposition, in Christes Bloodie Sweat, between ‘inward griefes and outward paines’ (), and the conclusion of A Line of Life: ‘All glory whether it consists of profits or preferments, is without, and therefore makes nothing to the essence of true happinesse: But the feeling of a resolved constancie is within, and ever keepes a Feast in a mans soundest content’ (NDW, p. ). Cf. also ‘the sensual surfets of fleshly and wanton appetites’ (Q , ..–); ‘the desires of my sensuall appetite’ (SD, ..–); ‘every flame of sensuall appetite’ (LT, ). Gilles Monsarrat () observes that, in sharp contrast to Ford, ‘Shakespeare always uses “commonwealth” with the meaning “body politic”, never metaphorically for what has been called “the little world of man”’. Cf. also the observation that man ‘containes the summary of all the great world, in the little world of himselfe’ (NDW, p. ). Gilles Monsarrat () points out that Shakespeare never uses the phrase ‘“both fortunes”, even though he uses “fortunes” times. Ford probably found the expression in Seneca (‘utraque fortuna’) . . . ’ Cf. also NDW, p. , note to line , identifying the source, Epistulae Morales, ., and indicating further Ford usages in the prose works (NDW, pp. , , ) and in Perkin Warbeck (..). ., Mar. . Cf. Sargeaunt , pp. , , ; Davril , p. ; Oliver , p. ; Sedge , p. xviii. As Gilles Monsarrat observes (), an even closer parallel to the pleasant ‘bread of rest’ anticipated in the Elegye is a passage in The Golden Meane:
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‘Sweet is the bread of content, and the sleepe of securitie is a bread of sweetnesse’ (NDW, p. ). He also points out that ‘Ford found all these [ biblical] references listed in the “second table” of the concordances that were published in some editions of the Geneva Bible’. This Bible contained ‘Two right profitable and fruitfull , or large and ample Tables Alphabeticall’, the first containing the interpretation of foreign ‘words and names scatteringly dispersed throughout the whole Bible’, the second ‘comprehending all such other principall words and matters, as concerne the sense and meaning of the Scriptures . . . ’ (I quote from a edition, STC ). The ‘second table’ is in effect a mine of metaphors. According to OED, the word occurs in late medieval texts (dated , ), and enjoyed a limited currency in the late s, as shown by two quotations from Sir Robert Dallington’s A Method for Travell (), and one from Daniel’s Octavia (). F. L. Lucas (ed.), The Works of John Webster, vols (London, ), . . Gilles Monsarrat () observes that ‘Shakespeare uses “die all” three times, but only in the sense “all of us” and “all of you”’. That secular meaning stands in sharp contrast to Ford’s Christian one. Cf. also Ford’s Elegy on John Fletcher: ‘We who survive / Are dead, not thou, for we are dead, alive’ (Vickers , p. ). Cf. also Annabella’s regret, vowing ‘Repentance, and a leaving of that life / I long have dyed in’ (TPW, ..–). Rhetoric, b.. ., May . Quoted by R. J. Kennedy, ., Sept. . .
G. Blakemore Evans (ed.), The Riverside Shakespeare. Second Edition (Boston, ). David Bevington (ed.), The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Updated Fourth Edition (New York, ). See Ian Lancashire, ‘Empirically Determining Shakespeare’s Idiolect’, ShStud, (): –, at pp. , . James Hirsh, in ‘A Funeral Elegy, Shakespeare, and Elizabeth Cary’, The Ben Jonson Journal, (): –, followed Lancashire by using ‘word associations’ to argue that the Elegye was actually written by Elizabeth Cary. But here again this method violates a basic principle of authorship studies, that verbal parallels only have real evidential power when combined with parallels of thought. Some of the parallels Hirsh proposed are completely commonplace expressions, such as ‘employ my wits’, ‘advance their name’, ‘by experience taught’, and ‘deadly force’ (Hirsh , pp. –). Others are quite different from the Elegye. Its tautologous account of how Peter ‘retir’d home, to a home . . . and estate’ (FE, –) is quite unlike the lines from Cary’s Maryam, urging ‘Let us retire us, that we may resolve / How
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now to deal in this revers`ed state’ (p. ). The latter phrase describes some setback, the former refers to land and property. In the Elegye, the description of ‘the candle, and the bodie’s light / Darken’s the inward eye-sight of the mind’ (FE, –) is an awkward, but individual version of the distinction between outer and inner states. In Maryam, by contrast, we find a completely commonplace sequence of ideas: ‘I’ll muffle up myself in endless night, / And never let mine eyes behold the light’ (p. ). On the evidence of the excerpts quoted here, Cary’s diction is colloquial, lacking the clotted, noun-heavy style of ‘W. S.’, and her verse moves much more freely than his. Richard Abrams, ‘W[illiam] S[hakespeare]’s “Funeral Elegy” and the Turn from the Theatrical’, SEL, (): –, at p. . Stephen Booth, ‘A Long, Dull Poem by William Shakespeare’, ShStud, (): –, at p. . New York Times, January , p. . Modern Philology, : –. See William A. Ringler, Jr, Bibliography and Index of English Verse Printed – (London and New York, ). Professor May’s continuation, up to , is forthcoming. edition, pp. –; edition, p. . Taylor a, p. . Again, by co-ordinated planning, much of this essay appeared a few days later in the TLS (Taylor b). Cf. Elliott and Valenza , p. ; L’Espresso, February , pp. –; L’Express, May , pp. –; Lingua Franca, July / August , pp. , . See J. L. Harner (ed.), The World Shakespeare Bibliography – on CD-Rom (Cambridge, ), item . The broadsheet, printed in , copies, was distributed free at the MLA conference at Chicago in December . ‘Poem by Shakespeare! Read All About It!’, New York Times Book Review, June ; pp. , –. WSB, item . See James Knowles, ‘WS MS’, TLS, April , pp. , . , ., Apr. . Professor Daugherty added a statement evidently intended to warn off any other Shakespeare scholars ‘beginning to . . . work seriously on the evidence underlying’ Foster’s authorship claim: ‘Meanwhile, I frankly see myself as being in the enviable position of having already done that work – having already spent years with the poem off and on (including the now-familiar questions of statistical methodology, John Ford, the poem’s “aesthetic quality”, and so on – and thus of not being forced to play catch-up now. As those of you now seriously engaged in that catch-up work will understand all too well (because the issues are tough and some of the prerequisite backgrounding unspeakably tedious), I am very glad of this.’ Daugherty assured his readers that ‘. The evidence that Shakespeare wrote is overwhelming. . Good evidence that anyone else wrote it ( John Ford, Simon Wastell), or whoever, is nonexistent . . . . Those who have thus far written in opposition to Don’s claim . . . have simply not engaged the evidence . . . When they do – and it will admittedly
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take them a lot of time and labor, not all of it pleasurable (see above) – my best guess is that they’ll come to support the attribution.’ In other words, the work has been done, the issue is closed. Foster judged Honan’s article ‘well researched, balanced, and accurate’, but when the London Times described the Elegye as ‘“homoerotic in tone”’ he commented: ‘it isn’t, though I wish it were – W. S.’s funeral verse is no more erotic than cold cabbage’ (Foster , p. ). In Foster’s polarized world, key elements of literary texts may be differently described, by friend or foe. Foster repeated this suggestion in ., Jan. . See, for example, the exchanges between M. W. A. Smith and Eric Sams in Notes and Queries. Smith, a distinguished literary statistician whose work is a model of mathematical accuracy, fully aware of all the methodological problems involved in analysing Elizabethan dramatic texts, published an essay (‘Edmund Ironside’, NQ , (): –) in which he applied to that play a new statistical method called Principal Component Analysis, comparing it with Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s Henry VI and Richard III, documenting its fundamental linguistic differences from both dramatists’ style. In reply (‘Edmund Ironside and “Stylometry”’, NQ , (): –), Sams, the chief proponent of Ironside as Shakespeare’s, heaped scorn on Smith’s method, as relying on ‘demonstrably wrong assumptions’, lumping his work together with that of A. Q. Morton and Thomas Merriam, as having been ‘discredited’ and being just as ‘arbitrary, unverifiable, . . . undefined . . . [and] demonstrably wrong’ as Smith’s. In his reply (‘Edmund Ironside: Scholarship versus Propaganda’, NQ , (): –), Smith itemized the extraordinary series of misrepresentations of which Sams was guilty, demonstrated that his methods differed totally from those of Morton and Merriam, and utterly rejected the claim that Sams had attributed to him, that stylometric testing was infallible. As he had repeatedly stated in his publications over the preceding decade, ‘the result of this method on its own should not be regarded as definitive but should be taken in conjunction with other evidence’ (p. ), for ‘only qualitative interpretation of statistical calculations are meaningful’ (p. ). Smith deplored the methods by which Sams fuelled his polemic, by resort to ‘the preposterous, by the gross distortion of deceptive phraseology, by misleading sarcasm or lofty contempt’ (p. ), fair comment on the ad hominem approach to which authorship studies are all too prone. The editors then closed down the discussion, allowing Sams space for a brief reply in which he continued to protest, ‘I can confute [Smith]’: NQ , (): . In my ‘General Editor’s Preface’ to George L. Geckle (ed.), Measure for Measure (London, ; ‘Shakespeare: the Critical Tradition’ series, vol. ), I have analysed a recent debate in S over Measure for Measure (pp. xxxi–xxxiii), which revealed a surprising continuity with Victorian discussions of the play. See the website, www.shaksper.net, which now includes full search functions.
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The first reference is a full one, ‘ .’ standing for S , year , posting no. . Since most of the ensuing discussion took place in the same year, references hereafter will be in the simpler form (; Jan.). I give the date on which a contributor posted the letter to the editor , which is usually a few days before it was posted on the list. Foster a; Abrams b. See ., Mar.; , Mar.; , Mar.; , Mar. See ., Mar.; , Mar.; , Mar.; , Apr.; , Apr.; , Apr; , Apr. See ., Feb.; , Feb.; , Feb.; , Mar.; , Mar.; , Mar.; , Mar. Dave Evett alleged that Kennedy’s version of ‘scholarly discourse’ was ‘intemperate, rude, vulgar, ignorant, arrogant, and coarse’ (, Mar.). The documentary record of S gives no support for these allegations. See WSB, item : W. Elliott and R. J. Valenza, Matching Shakespeare, : Computer Testing of Elizabethan Texts for Common Authorship with Shakespeare (Claremont, CA, ), and items – for reports published in , , and . , .. The same posting ( Jan. ) included a communication from D. J. Kathman also approving of Elliott and Valenza’s work, citing their articles in Computers and the Humanities () and in other journals, where Elliott ‘responded to Oxfordian criticisms . . . (quite effectively, in my opinion)’. Personal communication, September , quoted with permission. Elliott and Valenza, ‘So much hardball, so little of it over the plate. Conclusions from our “debate” with Donald Foster’, posted online in September at http://govt.claremontmckenna.edu/welliott/hardball.htm, pp. – , at p. . A much-shortened version is forthcoming in Computers and the Humanities. As they record, the new editors of CHum (Dan Greenstein, King’s College London; Nancy Ide, Vassar College) had originally granted them nineteen pages (the length of Foster’s second response), but subsequently reduced their allotted space to only eight pages. It is noteworthy how Foster’s critics continually find their attempts to have a say being blocked. Elliott and Valenza replied that they had taken up the challenge to test the Shakespeare claimants because they ‘thought the anti-Stratfordians had enough of a prima facie case’ to make it worth investigating. Otherwise they ‘took no position pro or contra, left the external-evidence debate to others, confined our tests to internal evidence – and concluded that none of the testable claimants or apocrypha matched Shakespeare. For this we think orthodox Stratfordians, like Foster should be grateful, not incensed’ (, p. ). Nor is it borne out by the interview given by Foster to Lingua Franca (Crain , p. ). ‘My CHum review was largely cobbled together from those old advisory letters, much of it copied verbatim . . . ’, including ‘a few of my less delicate phrases’ from ‘letters written, . . . years earlier’ (Foster , p. ).
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See Jackson , pp. –, on Timon of Athens, and for Othello, most recently, MacDonald P. Jackson, review of Honigmann’s The Texts of ‘Othello’ and Shakespearian Revision, ShStud, (): –; David J. Lake and Brian Vickers, ‘Scribal Copy for of Othello; a Reconsideration’, NQ , (): –. See Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author (). He belatedly grasped this point when an opponent was guilty of it, noting in his autobiography that the defence in the Unabomber case ‘neglected to consider sample size’ (Foster , p. ). Foster accused Elliott of not being able to count (b, pp. , ; , pp. , etc.), but he has his own problems with numbers. Elliott and Valenza had admitted that the Textcruncher program they had used for one test gave a result erroneous by nine-tenths of percent (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). Foster then claimed that their index ‘is actually off by nine percent ( instead of )’ (, p. , n. ). They reply: ‘But the denominator of the and the is ,, not . . . /,ths is nine-tenths of a percent, just as we said’ (, p. ). Foster berated them for having ‘overlooked as many as instances’ of whenas in Greene’s Selimus (, p. ): but they never analysed that play (Elliott and Valenza , p. ). His claim that ‘amusingly enough, the Elegy receives a clear “pass” on’ the whenas/whereas test, while Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets fail (, p. ), they reply, ‘is mistaken, since we did not use the test on poems’ (, p. ). Foster criticized them for miscounting the instance of it as the first or last words for sentences (, pp. , , n. ), but unfortunately ‘none of his H citations for first- or last-word it’s actually has a first- or last-word it’, and he has also ‘badly miscounted’ or ‘transposed’ his results for Titus Andronicus (, p. ). Polemics can have an adverse effect on accuracy. ., Feb. ; ., Feb. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA, ), p. . For an application of Grice’s ‘Cooperative Principle’ to Othello, see Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare. Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven and London, ; rev. edn, ), pp. –. Foster also used the term ‘gerrymander’ in his attack on Elliott and Valenza. According to SOED, it derives from a political manipulation made in Massachusetts in , while Elbridge Gerry was Governor, and involves ‘arranging electoral districts so that one party will be enabled to elect more representatives than they could on a fair system’. The transferred meaning is ‘to manipulate in order to gain an unfair advantage’. See Hieatt, ., Feb. . Foster could not prevent himself from gloating over this triumph: ‘Kent’s fuming letters [were] greatly tempered by PMLA’s managing editors, bless their hearts’: ., Feb. , ‘Foster on Shaxicon (Part Five of Six)’. See ‘CTI Textual Studies, Q & A, Text Analysis is Tools’, http://infor. ox.ac.uk/ctitext/enquiry/tat.htm. WSB, entry . See http://www.acls.org/op-ii.htm.
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David J. Kathman, ., Aug. . Similarly, Sean Lawrence, writing in the electronic journal Early Modern Literary Studies (.) in December , judged that Foster’s ‘application of established analytical strategies to extensive databases introduces a new rigour to bibliographical studies . . . His methods seem vindicated by the acceptance of “A Funeral Elegy” into recent and forthcoming editions of the complete works of Shakespeare . . . That these tools are not only reliable, but also broadly applicable across historical periods, was powerfully demonstrated by Foster’s correct ascription of the anonymously published . . . Primary Colors, to journalist Joe Klein.’ See http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/emls/-/rev law.html. For the testimony of Kaczynski’s brother David see the Court TV online website, http:www.courttv.com/trials/unabomber/documents/affidavit/html, paragraphs –. Foster’s affidavit can be found at http://www. unabombertrial.com/courtdocuments. Terry Prestin, ‘From Sonnets to Ransom Notes. Shakespeare Sleuth Helps Police in Literary Detection’, New York Times, November , p. . For a cool evaluation of this literature see Joyce Carol Oates, ‘The Mystery of JonBen´et Ramsey’, New York Review of Books, June , pp. –, –. I quote from http://www.jameson.com/foster page.htm, accessed August , December . This and other relevant websites can also be accessed by using one of the powerful search engines now available such as alltheweb.com or google.com, using the search term ‘jameson’. In his autobiography Foster advises: ‘Without specific information about the offender, profiling can be unproductive or even misleading. In my opinion, the best way to gather knowledge of the perpetrator’s age, movements, educational background, work record, and circle of acquaintance is to engage the offender in communication, from which a particularized linguistic and textual profile may be constructed. At the investigative level, a single piece of anonymous writing from a violent criminal can be as useful as fingerprints, and far more reliable than a profile based on similar crimes by other offenders. That’s because a language and text profile depends on patterns of evidence generated by the offender’s own brain’ (Foster , p. ). Steve Thomas, JonBen´et. Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (with Don Davis), rev. edn (New York, ), p. . See http://www.pacificsites.com/∼bari/foster.htm, accessed August , March and December . In his autobiography Foster uses the same expression, describing his quandary over whether to expose a false attribution to Thomas Pynchon: ‘I bit my tongue and said nothing.’ But he subsequently did expose it, and was attacked by the person concerned, drawing the lesson for himself: ‘Sometimes I just don’t know when to bite my tongue’ (Foster , pp. , ). I quote this document from http://www.jameson.com/foster page.htm, but it has been available on several other websites, such as http://www. crimelibrary.com/ramsey, and RockyMountainnews.com. It can also be accessed using various search engines.
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See the New York Times, November , ‘Paper Chase’, a review by Adam Liptak, senior counsel in the legal department of the New York Times company. Liptak noted that ‘Foster devotes only two cryptic and curious pages to the Ramsey investigation’, and saw an opportunity ‘to test [Foster’s] technique’ on ‘words attributed to Foster himself in a letter to JonBen´et Ramsey’s mother . . . a text attributed to him that he declines to acknowledge. According to The Rocky Mountain News and the Ramseys’ attorneys, this is what Foster wrote to Patsy Ramsey: “I know you are innocent – know it absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my professional reputation on it, indeed my faith in humanity.” The style of the author of Author Unknown and the letter’s unknown author match up nicely. They share a distinctive clipped syntax, quirky staccato jumps, a first-person swagger, a welcome absence of academic language, a would-be player’s eagerness and, most of all, a stone certainty. On the textual evidence alone, then, it would seem that the letter to Patsy Ramsey was written by Don Foster.’ Detective Thomas finds Foster’s error concerning Mrs Ramsey excusable: ‘Then Foster wrote a letter to Patsy Ramsey suggesting that he thought she was innocent. Those statements were made before Foster was brought aboard to look at the case file, after which he changed his conclusion degrees. To me, that only strengthened his position, not weakened it, for it showed he had no anti-Ramsey bias. Once the professor had access to the actual case documents, he changed his mind’ (p. ). To students of Foster’s methods, however, this total reversal of position must call in question his methodology. See http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/forensic-linguistics.html, search heading ‘Donald Foster’s Methods’, postings between September and June , especially that by Catherine Mambretti on June , from which I quote. Dr Mambretti, herself a textual analyst, also objected that Foster’s methodology was inadequate, being based on ‘a limited subset of writings’, and not having performed ‘any analysis to exclude other possible writers’. These are by now familiar complaints. Adam Langer, ‘The Mysteries of the Moonlighting English Professor. Don Foster has turned himself into the Sherlock Holmes of literary attribution’, Book, January/February ; at http://www.bookmagazine.com/ issue/donfoster.shtm. The Advancement of Learning, Book ; Vickers , p. . In its Latin translation, the De Augmentis Scientiarum, the utterance is more pointed: ‘Opinio enim copiae inter causas inopiae est.’ See The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., vols. (London, –), . . John M. Ellis, Literature Lost. Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven and London, ), p. . Her books include Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford, ), and Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago, ). Susan Haack, ‘Staying for an Answer. The Untidy Process of Groping for Truth’, TLS, July , pp. –, at p. .
Notes to pages –
The Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. An Attempt to Determine Their Respective Shares and the Shares of Others (New Haven, CT, ; New York, ), p. . : ’ Ford’s plays are cited, whenever possible, from the quarto texts, preserving the original spelling and punctuation. Act, scene, and line-references are added from modern editions, as follows: Marion Lomax (ed.), The Lover’s Melancholy, The Broken Heart, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Perkin Warbeck (Oxford ; ‘Oxford Drama Library’); Joe Andrews Sutfin, ‘Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, The Lady’s Trial, and The Queen: Critical, Old-spelling Editions of the Texts of the Original Quartos’, PhD dissertation, Vanderbilt University, (University Microfilms, –,); Dominick J. Hart, ‘The Fancies, Chast and Noble’ by J. Ford. A Critical Edition (New York and London, ); C. M. Gayley (ed.), Representative English Comedies . . . Volume III. The Later Contemporaries of Shakespeare (New York, ): The Spanish Gypsy, pp. –; A. H. Bullen (ed.), The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Variorum Edition, Volume III (London, ): The Laws of Candy, ed. E. K. Chambers, pp. –. For the Ford–Dekker collaborations, see note below. Paul A. Cantor, ‘John Ford’, in F. Bowers (ed.), Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists (Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. ) (Detroit, MI, ), pp. –, at p. . By happy contrast, Kenneth Tucker, in A Bibliography of Writings by and about John Ford and Cyril Tourneur (Boston, MA, ), included The Queen, The Laws of Candy, and all the co-authored plays. R. Barbour, ‘Recent Studies in John Ford (–)’, ELR, (): –. G. E. Bentley, JCS; Schoenbaum . See Bang ; Sherman, ‘A New Play by John Ford’, MLN, (): –; Sykes, ‘John Ford’s posthumous play, The Queen’, in Sykes , pp. –; Sargeaunt , Appendix ; Oliver , pp. –; Sedge ; Anderson . Oliphant , pp. –; Hoy , pp. –. G. E. Bentley’s attitude to the scholars whom he contemptuously labelled ‘disintegrators’ can be gauged from this comment on The Laws of Candy: ‘The disintegrators are pitifully uncertain in their attempts to assign authors to this play, and their contradictory and changing opinions are an illuminating commentary on their methods and reliability’ ( JCS, . ). This sneer was directed at Oliphant, who candidly admitted that he had revised his earlier ascription, persuaded by H. W. Wells; yet Bentley did not deign even to mention the detailed evidence they cited, an unscholarly tactic later used by Schoenbaum (). ‘The Collaboration of Dekker and Ford (II). The Authorship of The Witch of Edmonton’, Anglia n. . (): –. See Fredson Bowers (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vols. (Cambridge, –), abbreviated as ‘Dekker, Works’: . –.
Notes to pages –
Authorship discussions come from Cyrus Hoy (ed.), Introductions, Notes, and Commentaries to Texts in ‘The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker’, vols. (Cambridge, ), abbreviated as ‘Hoy, Introductions’: . – for The Witch of Edmonton. See Bertram Lloyd, ‘The Authorship of The Welsh Embassadour’, RES, (): –; Dekker, Works, . –, and Hoy, Introductions, . . J. Q. Adams (ed.), The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, – (New Haven and London, ), pp. , . ‘The Collaboration of Dekker and Ford (I). The Authorship of The Sun’s Darling’, Anglia n. . (): –. Dekker, Works, . –; Hoy, Introductions, . –. Sykes, ‘John Ford, the Author of The Spanish Gypsy’, MLR, (): –; repr. in Sykes , pp. –; Sargeaunt ; pp. –; Oliver , pp. –; Lake , pp. –; Jackson , pp. –. See Lucas , . –; Hoy , pp. –. See Cyrus Hoy, ‘Verbal Formulae in the Plays of Philip Massinger’, SP, (): –. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis – (Cambridge, ) p. . Hannemann , pp. –. Hannemann’s figures for triple endings closely match Pierce’s: LS , TPW , LM , LT , PW , BH , FCN (p. ). His method has been approved and extended by MacDonald Jackson (, pp. –, , , , n. , ).
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Index
Abbott, E. A., , , , , Abrams, R., xv, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Absi, M. A., Addison, Joseph, xi, Alexander, Sir William, Allott, Robert, Alston, Tobias, , Anderson, D. K., Jr, , Andrewes, Lancelot, , Ariosto, Ludovico, Aristotle, , , , Austin, W. B., Bacon, Sir Francis, , , , , , , , Bajetta, C., Baldwin, T. W., , Ball, C. N., Bang, W., , , , Barber, C. L., xv, , , , , , Barish, J., Barker, R. H., , Barnes, Barnabe, , Baskerville, Simon, , Bately, J. M., , Bathurst, C., Baugh, A. C., , – Beal, P., , , , Beaumont, Francis, , , , , , , , , , , , Bennett, A. L., , , Bennett, S., , Bentley, G. E., , Bevington, D., , , , Blount, Charles, Eighth Lord Mountjoy, First Earl of Devonshire, xviii, , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , Blount, Penelope, Countess of Devonshire, , –, , , , , , , Booth, S., , Bourchier, John, Second Baron Berners, , Bowers, F., Bradbrook, M., , , Brewton, Margaret, , , Brook, S., Brooke, C. F. Tucker, –, Burelbach, F. M., Jr, , , Burrow, C., , Butler, Charles, Butler, M., –, Butter, Nathaniel, , – Byrne, M. St C., , , Caesar, Julius, , Campion, Thomas, , Cantor, P. A., Capell, E., , Carew, Thomas, , , Cavendish, George, , , Chambers, D. L., , , –, Chambers, E. K., , , , Chambers, R. W., – Chapman, George, , , , Chaucer, Geoffrey, , , Chettle, Henry, , , , Christ, Jesus, xvii, –, , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Cicero, Marcus Tullius, , , , , Clayton, T., xxi Clucas, S.,
Index
Cohen, W., – Cook, H. M., , Corkine, William, Coryat, Thomas, , Crain, C., Crashaw, Richard, Creede, Thomas, , Crow, John, Cruden, A., Dahl, T., , Daniel, Samuel, , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , Danielson, D., Daugherty, L., Davies, Sir John, , Davison, P., –, Davril, R., , , –, , –, Dekker, Thomas, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , –, , – Deloney, Thomas, , , , , Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex, –, –, , Devonshire, see Blount, Charles Donne, John, , , , , , –, , , Dowland, John, , , Drayton, Michael, , , , , , Drew, Edward, Drew, John, Drury, Elizabeth, Du Vair, Guillaume, , Duncan-Jones, K., xxi, , –, , –, Egan, G., Eld, George, , , , –, , , Eliot, T. S., , Elizabeth I, Queen, Elliott, W. E. Y., xxi, xxii, , , , –, –, –, –, –, – Ellis, J. M., – Ellis-Fermor, U., , Elyot, Sir Thomas, , , , –, Empson, W., –, –, Engel, H., , Erasmus, Desiderius, , Evans, G. B., xxi, , , Farr, D. M., , , Ferrabosco, Alfonso, , Fischer, O.,
Fletcher, John, xviii, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Florio, John, , , Ford, Henry, Ford, John, xviii–xx, –, , –, , , –, , , –, , – : Broken Heart, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , Fair Maid of the Inn, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , – Fancies, Chaste and Noble, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Lady’s Trial, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Laws of Candy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Lover’s Melancholy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Love’s Sacrifice, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , Perkin Warbeck, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Queen, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Spanish Gypsy, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , Sun’s Darling, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Index , , , , , , , , , , , , Welsh Ambassador, , , , , , , , , , , , , Witch of Edmonton, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – : ‘Contract of Love and Trueth’, ‘A Memoriall to Sir Thomas Overburie’, , , , , ‘In honorable memory of the Earle of Devonshire’, , Christes Bloodie Sweat, , , –, , –, –, , , , , , , , –, –, , , –, , –, , –, , –, , , –, , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Fames Memoriall, –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , , –, , , –, –, , –, , , –, , , –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , , –, –, , , , , –, , , –, Honor Triumphant, , , , , , , , , , , , ‘On Ben: Jonson, Deceased’, , , – ‘To the Memory of John Fletcher’, , : Golden Meane, –, –, , –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , Line of Life, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , Ford, Thomas, , Ford, William, xviii, –, , , Foster, D. W., xiii–xxii, , , , –, , –, , , , , , –, –, , , –, , , , –, –, , –, , –, –, –, –, , , , , , –, , –, –
Franz, W., Frost, D. L., –, , Garner, B. A., Gascoigne, George, , , Gibson, C. A., Giroux, R., Godshalk, W. L., , Googe, Barnaby, Graham-White, A., – Greenblatt, S., , , Greene, Robert, , , , Greg, W. W., , , –, Greville, Fulke, , Grice, P., Gross, R., , , –, Haack, S., – Hahn, E. A., Hannemann, E., , Harington, Sir John, , , , , , Hart, A., , , – Henslowe, Philip, , Herbert, George, , , Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke, , , , Herdan, G., – Heywood, Thomas, , , , , , , Hieatt, A. K., xxi, , –, – Hieatt, C. W., –, – Hirsh, J., – Honan, W. H., Honigmann, E. A., Hooker, Richard, , Hope, J., xxi, –, , , Horace, , Horden, John, , , Hoskins, John, , , , , Houston, J. P., – Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, Hoy, C., , , , , , , – Huebert, R., , , Ide, N., Jackson, M. P., xxi, , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , Jaggard, William, , James I, King, , , , , , , , , Jennens, Charles, Jentoft, C. W., ,
Index
Johnson, G. D., Jones, Robert, , Jonson, Ben, xviii, , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Joseph, Sister M., , Juvenal, Kathman, D. J., , Kennedy, J. M., Kennedy, R. J., xxi–xxii, , , –, –, , –, , Kerl, E., –, , , , , , King, A., Knowles, J., Kr¨uger, A., Kyd, Thomas, , , , , , –, , Lake, D. J., –, , , , , , Lancashire, I., – Leech, C., , Leishman, J. B., Levi, P., Lipsius, Justus, , –, Lloyd, B., , , Locke, John, , Lucan, , Lucas, F. L., , , , Malone, Edmond, , , Marlowe, Christopher, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Marston, John, , , , , , , Martial, , Martz, L., Massinger, Philip, , , , , , , , , , Maule, J., xviii, , , Maxwell, B., , – May, S. W., – Meres, Francis, Middleton, Thomas, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Milton, John, , , , , M¨ollendorf von, P., Monsarrat, G. D., xxii, –, , , –, , , , , , , , , , Montaigne de, Michel, Morier, H., ,
Morley, Thomas, , , Mortimer, A., xxi Morton, A. Q., Moseley, Humphrey, Mountjoy, see Blount, Charles Munday, Anthony, , Murray, P. B., N¨agelsbach, K. F., Nashe, Thomas, , , , Ness, F. W., , – Noble, R., Norbrook, D., O’Neill, Hugh, Second Earl of Tyrone, , Oates, J. C., Obortello, A., Oliphant, E. H. C., , , , , Oliver, H. J., , , Oras, A., , –, , , Overbury, Sir Thomas, xviii, , , , , , Ovid, , , , , , Parkes, M., Partridge, A. C., , , –, , , , Pavier, Thomas, , –, Peacham, Henry, , , , , Peele, George, , Peirce, C. S., xxi, – Pendleton, T. A., xxi, , , –, –, –, , , , , , , , , , Pequigney, Joseph, , Percy, Henry, Ninth Earl of Northumberland, –, Perec, G., Peter, John, , , Peter, Otho, , Peter, William, xiii, xv, xviii, xix, , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , –, , , , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Peters, H., – Petrarca, Francesco, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Index Pierce, F. E., , , , , Pope, Alexander, Price, D., Proudfoot, R., Puttenham, George, , , , , –, , Ralegh, Sir Walter, Ramsey, J., – Ramsey, P., – Reese, M. M., Rich, Penelope, see Blount, Penelope Rich, Robert, Third Baron, Ringler, W., , Rissanen, M., – Robbins, R., , –, , , , , Roper, D., Rosseter, Philip, Rowley, William, , , , , , , , , Rushdie, Salman, Ryd´en, M., , , , Sales de, Fran¸cois, Sampley, A. M., , Sargeaunt, M. J., , , , , , , Sch¨afer, J., , , , Schmalz, J. H., , Schulze, E., Sedge, D., , , Seneca, , Servius, Shaheen, N., , Shakespeare, Gilbert, Shakespeare, William, xiii–xviii, , –, , –, , , –, –, –, –, –, , , , , –, –, –, , –, , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, , –, –, –, –, –, –, , , , –, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, –, –, , , , , , –, : All’s Well That Ends Well, , Antony and Cleopatra, , , , , , , As You Like It, , , , , , , Comedy of Errors, , , , , , Coriolanus, , , , , , –,
Cymbeline, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Edward , Hamlet, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Henry , , , Henry , , , Henry , , , , , , , , –, , , , Henry , , , , Henry , , , , Henry , , , , , , , Henry , , , , , , , , , , , –, , , , , Julius Caesar, , , , , King John, , , , King Lear, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , –, Love’s Labour’s Lost, , , , , , Macbeth, , , , , , , , , , Measure for Measure, , , , , , Merchant of Venice, , , , , Merry Wives of Windsor, Midsummer Night’s Dream, , , , , , , , Othello, , , , , , , , , , , , Passionate Pilgrim, Pericles, , , , Phoenix and Turtle, , , Rape of Lucrece, , , , , , , , , , , , , , Richard , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Richard , , , Romeo and Juliet, , , , , , , , , , , Sonnets, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Taming of the Shrew, , , , Tempest, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Timon of Athens, , , , , , , Titus Andronicus, , , , , , , Troilus and Cressida, , , , , , –
Index
Shakespeare, William (cont.) Twelfth Night, , , , , , Two Gentlemen of Verona, , , , Two Noble Kinsmen, , , , , , , , , , , Venus and Adonis, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Winter’s Tale, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , – : Lover’s Complaint, , , , , , , Shapiro, I. A., Sheen, E., , , , , Shirley, James, , , Sidney, Sir Philip, , , , , , , , , , , , , , Simpson, P., , Skipton, William, Smith, M. W. A., Smith, Wentworth, , Spenser, Edmund, , , , , –, , , , , , , Spevack, M., , , Stanford, Henry, Stock, L. E., , –, , , Strachey, William, , , , Strode, William, , , Susenbrotus, Johannes, , Swift, Jonathan, xvi, Sykes, H. D., , , , , –, , Tarlinskaja, M., –, , , – Tasso, Torquato, – Taylor, G., xiii–v, xvi, xvii, xx, xxi, –, –, , , , , , , , –, , , , Taylor, John, – Theobald, Lewis, , Thomas, S., , Thorpe, Thomas, , , , , , –, Tobin, J. J. M., xxi, –,
Tourneur, Cyril, , , , , , , , , Tyndale, William, Ure, P., , , Valenza, R. J., xxii, , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, – Vendler, H., Vere de, Edward, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, Virgil, –, , , , Vicary, Thomas, Waith, E., Wallis, John, – Walton, J. K., Warren, M. J., Wastell, Simon, Webster, John, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Wells, S., xiv, –, –, , , , , , , –, Wells, W., , , , White, H. O., Wiggins, M., Williams, C. B., –, Williams, F. B., Jr, Williams, G. W., Willoughby, Henry, Wilson, Thomas, , , Wither, George, , , Wood, T. A., –, , , , , , Woudhuysen, H., xxi, , – Wright, G. T., –, , , , , , , –, , , Wriothesley, Henry, Third Earl of Southampton, Wyatt, Sir Thomas, Wyclif, John, Yule, G. U., –,
