Don Foster and the Funeral Elegy

Sorry.. my skepticism is based on Foster's earlier work: on Shakespeare Authorship at Claremont McKenna College in California and on the Elegy. Claremont is the project that received much publicity about 5 years ago with its finding that none of the claimants in the authorship debate could possibly be the author. (of course Stratford was excluded due to insufficient comparitory data; only six signatures now two : )

David Kathman replies:

The Claremont McKenna Shakespeare Clinic was not, I repeat, not the work of Don Foster; it was the work of Ward Elliott, a political scientist, and Robert Valenza, a statistician. Foster did advise Elliott and Valenza on some textual matters, since neither of them is a literary scholar, but he had nothing to do with the planning of the project or the actual testing. He has in fact been rather critical of some aspects of the Clinic (see below), though overall he has had many good things to say about it.

At a press conference for Foster's next big project Elegy, in LA, Feb 9./96, Ward Elliot of Claremont stated that the Claremont tests indicated that Shakespeare was NOT the author of the Elegy. Foster's response was "that it was necessary to first get tests that work." So his Claremont authorship project conflicts with his Elegy work, one or the other, or perhaps both are erroneous.

David Kathman replies:

It wasn't a "press conference" that this exchange occurred at; it was a scholarly conference at UCLA devoted to the Funeral Elegy. You make it sound as if Foster simply waved his hand and dismissed Elliott's objection ex cathedra, when in fact he has shown in considerable detail why Elliott and Valenza's conclusions about the Elegy are based on flawed methodology, and why the Elegy actually fits better than most of Shakespeare's canonical poems, once the appropriate adjustments are made. For example, one Clinic test that the Elegy "fails" is Grade Level, based on a combination of word length and sentence length. The Elegy's score of 22 is higher than the "normal" range for Shakespeare's poems, but this is a function of the fact that it is written in continuous couplets without stanzaic breaks, unlike any of Shakespeare's canonical poems; as Foster has shown, any poem in such a stanza form will have a very high Grade Level, because there are no stanza breaks to force sentences to end. There are also larger questions involving Elliott and Valenza's test selection, which I won't get into. If anybody is really interested in more info, e-mail me.

Elliott and Valenza have done a lot of very useful work, but they are guilty of what critics have falsely accused Foster of doing -- they rely too heavily on the results their computers give them, using a program to crank out a "yes" or "no" result rather than using the computer's results as one type of evidence in a comprehensive attribution study. Contrary to what many people seem to think based on media reports, Don Foster is very much aware of all the factors to consider in attribution studies, including the quality of the poem itself, and he would never in a million years take what a computer told him and trumpet it as "proof" that Shakespeare wrote the Funeral Elegy.

Certainly, his Elegy work is now under serious scrutiny... Apparently, heated exchanges have occurred recently on the London Times Literary Supplement between Foster/Abrams on one side and Editor Brian Vickers/Prof. Stanley Wells on the other. (Oxfordians need not participate.)

David Kathman replies:

True, and it was a pretty sorry spectacle. Vickers and Katherine Duncan-Jones made some astoundingly flimsy, self-contradictory arguments, and badly distorted Foster and Abrams's positions. Vickers's confident assertion that Simon Wastell wrote the Elegy will not stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

David Kathman says "Abrams will enjoy a hearty laugh when he learns that he's Foster's "sidekick." And I'm sure that Don Foster will be amused to learn that he's "struggling to maintain [his] academic reputation" maybe so.. but here is what Brian Vickers writes in his reposte (4/12/96): "It is not surprising that they are upset, given that they have wagered their whole professional reputation on the claims for Shakespeare's authorship, and stand to lose a lot once it is generally discredited"

David Kathman replies:

I figured that must have been what you were referring to when you said that Foster and Abrams were "struggling to maintain their professional reputations"; the only problem is that such a struggle exists only in Brian Vickers's fantasies. Don Foster's professional reputation is as strong as ever; in April he gave a very well-received presentation on the Elegy to the World Shakespeare Congress in Los Angeles (several one-time skeptics told him afterwards that they were very impressed with the evidence), and he currently has several papers in press, another book in the works, and more professional commitments than he can handle. Rick Abrams just published a paper on the Elegy in the Spring 1996 Studies in English Literature; it deals with the literary quality of the Elegy (not a computer in sight), and it's recommended reading for anyone interested in the debate. You can certainly disagree with their arguments if you want, but to pretend that these guys are struggling professionally is just wishful thinking at best. They have been consummate professionals in presenting their arguments and evidence, unlike some of their opponents.

Vickers goes on to say: "In fact they are guilty not only of arrogance but of pervasive dishonesty." Vickers details Foster's methods of tiptoeing through the computer data, discarding any tests that disproved his thesis.

David Kathman replies:

Please. Foster has been scrupulously fair in dealing with objections to his thesis, some of which have been more valid than others.

Then: "Foster and Abrams... represent that recently emergent type of scholar who performs elaborate analyses of poetic language by using concordances and other electronic resources rather than by reading poems. But what do machines know about literary conventions, genre, rhetoric, or figurative language ?...

David Kathman replies:

Now, this is one of the most ludicrous distortions of many in Vickers's article. As I noted above, Foster does not blindly do computer analyses rather than reading poems; he uses such analyses as one kind of tool in attribution studies which employ a very wide variety of evidence, including external evidence, historical and literary context, and much more. Of course machines don't know about literary conventions, genre, rhetoric, or figurative language; that's why we need people who do know about such things. Don Foster knows more about the genre of Jacobean funeral elegies than probably any person alive, and he knows very well what he's talking about with regard to the Funeral Elegy's genre. Rick Abrams's paper, cited above, is almost exclusively concerned with the Elegy's figurative language.

In all 13 years Foster seems never to have noticed... that both the epistle, in which the author describes his inexperience in writing poetry, and the modesty topos, as used with such banality in the poem itself, would alone be enough to exclude Shakespeare from consideration, with a lifetime's work of unequalled range and variety behind him...

David Kathman replies:

Sigh... These are of course matters of personal taste, but Foster and Abrams have addressed them many times and presented very cogent reasons for their views, contrary to Vickers's smug implication.

Vickers continues: "The parallels that I see between [the 1612 Peter Elegy and the 1627 Elegy for Baron Spenser], and the difference that many more people see between either of them and Shakespeare, are in fact so gross as to defeat computerized statistics; the scale is too large; it only needs a normal reader with some powers of judgement to tell the difference."

David Kathman replies:

Again, Vickers is taking his personal judgement and presenting it as something only an idiot could disagree with. I suggest that people read the poem, but also read Abrams's paper (and Foster's when it comes out in the fall), and then reread the poem and reread it again, then possibly get a copy of Harry Hill's reading of the Elegy on CD and listen to it. Many people's initial reaction to the Elegy is negative, but many of them have found more and more to like about it the more they read it, and it's certainly a more complex poem than it appears at first blush. Harry Hill was initially a scoffer, but as he rehearsed the Elegy in preparation for recording it, it steadily grew on him, and now he's an enthusiastic champion of Shakespeare's authorship. I'm not saying anybody should take my or Harry Hill's or Don Foster's or anybody else's word on this; just do try to keep an open mind, and read what people have actually written about the poem rather than what a third-hand media report says they wrote.

He continues: "Foster was doubtful about pressing the identification, since the poem's language was not so figurative or filled with word play as is characteristic of Shakespeare. Then emerged his Svengali, Richard Abrams, who said in an interview: "where I came in... was to notice that the poem avoids the language of imagination because, in the poet's mind, imagination is strangly implicated in the murder of his friend. Shakespeare was deliberately writing this way."

David Kathman replies:

My only comment is to ask people to actually read Abrams's article, rather than relying on sound bites.

Thanks very much for the summary of Foster's latest work. As indicated above, I will likely remain a skeptic for some time until I've had a chance to assess his data and methodology, and review critical assessment of his latest computer work.

David Kathman replies:

As I said before, your skepticism is welcome and necessary. I hope everybody with an interest in this issue will follow Peter's example and take a good hard look at the evidence and arguments.

David Kathman