THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader A Ford, Not a Shakespeare You remember the headlines back at the end of 1995? "New Work by Shakespeare," "Literary Sleuth Uncovers Lost Poem by the Bard," "Did the Swan of Avon...
...Foster deserves credit for admitting his mistake about "A Funerall Ele-gye," but if his fame, book advances, invitations to appear on television, and academic stardom are the result of being wrong, who wouldn't embrace the dialectical uses of error...
...Shakespeare has his share of faulty errors, but these just aren't his sort of errors...
...You can see why...
...In his otherwise gracious e-mail admitting that he's changed his mind, Foster takes a swipe at the "Bar-dolators" whose worship of Shakespeare prevented them from even considering the possibility that he had written anything as inferior as "A Funerall Elegye...
...He's been asked for literary analysis of notes in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case, the Unabomber manifesto, and the post-September 11 anthrax letters...
...Monsarrat published the result in the May issue of the Review of English Studies, and that—combined with news of the British writer Brian Vick-ers's forthcoming book Counterfeiting Shakespeare, which similarly concludes that Ford was the author—proved too much for Foster...
...Published in 1612—"in memory of the late vertuous Maister William Peeter"—the poem was signed with the initials "W.S...
...That may be, in fact, the way the mind, or at least the scholarly mind, needs to work...
...Foster has a point about Bardolatry, if we find it too-much easier to attribute these words to Ford rather than Shakespeare, for Ford was a great dramatist who even at his worst is rarely this bad...
...A front-page story in the New York Times followed...
...And Foster's right, of course, that some of Shakespeare's admirers can be a little hard to bear (although they are to be preferred to the academics for whom writing about the playwright is primarily an excuse to demonstrate their mastery of post-colonialism, queer studies, or decon-structive theory...
...It's a line about the way truth is often discovered through the dialectical process of making claims, recognizing error and often thereby discovering new truths...
...grave sir, hail...
...America sank to its knees in awe, while Britain huffed and puffed in outrage...
...But it's also why Foster should have known better in the first place...
...But even in the these passages, Shakespeare is always saying something...
...More successful were his stylistic conclusions that Joe Klein was the "Anonymous" behind the bestselling novel Primary Colors, and that Thomas Pynchon was not the author of the curious 1996 literary production entitled The Letters of Wanda Tinasky that some had ascribed to him...
...The late Shakespeare could say, in The Tempest, All hail, great master...
...being down, insulted, rail’d, And put upon him such a deal of man, That worthied him, got praises of the king For him attempting who was selfsubdued...
...No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes," he explained in his e-mail, "deserves to be called a scholar...
...I come To answer thy best pleasure...
...A professor from the University of Burgundy named G.D...
...In a June 12 posting to a Shakespeare e-mail discussion list, Foster declared that he'd changed his mind...
...Take this speech from King Lear (II.2, lines 116-124): It pleased the king his master very late To strike at me, upon his misconstruction...
...But the Shakespeare error by which the Ford truth was discovered didn't happen in the privacy of Foster's mind...
...The passage from King Lear seems a muddy expression of a complex thought about human motivation—if anything, too complex a thought for Oswald to have when he explains to Cornwall about why Kent has set about him...
...Even when he's writing just for the joy of watching himself write, there's a core of thought...
...It happened in public, in the glare of the front page of the New York Times—and part of the reason it happened was precisely because there's front-page material in a new poem by Shakespeare...
...The passage from "A Funerall Ele-gye," on the other hand, is a muddied expression of something very simple: "The late vertuous Maister William Peeter" never got angry without just cause...
...But it seemed impossible that the mature William Shakespeare—only a few years before his death in 1616—could have written anything quite this bad...
...be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl'd clouds: to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality where Ariel gives us the hackneyed fusing of curl'd clouds...
...His first tentative work on the subject, Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution, was published in 1989 by the small University of Delaware Press, while his recent memoir, Author Unknown, was issued by the mainstream publisher Henry Holt with dust-jacket publicity that called him "the world's first literary detective...
...And to express this minor thought, we have a curious eye of a quick-brain'd survey (and what's that when it's at home...
...But set that beside this, from “A Funerall Elegye” (lines 29-36): The curious eye of a quick-brain’d survey Could scantly find a mote amidst the sun Of his too-short’ned days, or make a prey Of any faulty errors he had done— Not that he was above the spleenful sense And spite of malice, but for that he had Warrant enough in his own innocence Against the sting of some in nature bad...
...The truth is that Shakespeare was capable from time to time of an unclar-ity so palpable that one feels as though one were moving through a fog of words...
...But it's the way in which it's bad that's interesting...
...The early Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, could write: The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light, And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels which sounds like poetry about how poets write, rather than poetry about its subject...
...That's a good line, of a sort, and it's been quoted in all the news reports about Foster's recantation...
...Like the claim for Shakespeare's authorship of the elegy, all these deductions played out in the public eye...
...The alleged discovery of bad poetry by John Ford just doesn't rate the space, and Donald Foster was seduced...
...Well, it turns out at last that the Brits were right: Shakespeare isn't the author...
...That's why Shakespeare is Shakespeare, of course—and why it was worth all the news when Donald Foster ascribed to him the rather thoughtless "Funerall Elegye...
...Agents Take Lessons in Detection From Shakespeare Super-Sleuth," read one newspaper headline...
...In the years since he got it wrong, Foster has gone from strength to strength...
...The textbook publishers Riverside, Norton, and Addison-Wes-ley, all added the poem to their new editions of Shakespeare...
...But there's something better than rejoicing at one's errors—and much better than the pseudo-Hegelianism of using error to discover truth...
...Those initials may have stood for William Stradling, the subject's cousin, or they may have stood for someone else, lost in the mists of history...
...It all started when a Vassar professor named Donald Foster claimed to have demonstrated that Shakespeare was the author of a minor Renaissance poem called "A Funerall Elegye...
...Monsarrat had been assigned the 578-line poem by the main French publisher of Shakespeare, and he became convinced, while working on his translation, that it reflected all the philosophical prejudices and stylistic tricks of the playwright John Ford, most famous as the author of 'Tits Pity She's a Whore...
...which is supposed simultaneously to be able to find a mote and make a prey...
...Errors aren't just errors, but faulty errors...
...And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit, Drew on me here again...
...When he, conjunct and flattering his displeasure, Tripp’d me behind...
...But then along came Donald Foster to say that a combination of scholarly considerations—but particularly computer analysis of the language using the Renaissance database "Shaxi-con"—proved that Shakespeare had indeed written "A Funerall Elegye...
...The meter is uneasy in Not that he was above, and the sense has gone astray in Against the sting of some in nature bad...
...In the New York Observer Ron Rosenbaum—who had been among the few Americans to reject the original attribution to Shakespeare—cheered: "It's a line that should win him more admirers than any so-called discovery, and it's a line more scholars should take to heart...
...New Work by Shakespeare," "Literary Sleuth Uncovers Lost Poem by the Bard," "Did the Swan of Avon Write It...
...Bottum...
...They might even represent a blatant attempt to ride on the playwright's fame and make readers at the time believe Shakespeare had written the verse...
...FB.I...
...First publish your most outrageous thought, reap the reward, and then settle down to decide what's actually the truth...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 42
