Paradigms of Authorship
Ian Lancashire · Shakespeare studies · 1998
Deciding the authorship A Funeral Elegy seems to me to depend on confirming Donald Foster's finding that Shakespeare shares with A Funeral Elegy dozens words that occur nowhere in ... other corpora (1997: 120), and on electronic library that includes works by many candidate authors, not just the small pool bearing the initials W.S. Yet instead testing Foster's application this method, both opinions in the current debate over the attribution, pro and con, sidestep it.(1) They look elsewhere for confirmation their views. Stephen Booth, like me, agrees that W. S. is Shakespeare, but Booth says Foster's computer-generated is altogether vulnerable (1997:234), characterizes all statistics as arbitrary and obscure, and remarks As to the tests themselves, I don't pretend to understand (237). Because there are statistics in simple counts all rare words (those with a frequency up to twelve), Booth's skepticism may not be quite so damning a factor: statistical tests are normally only used on a sample, a part a much larger body data that cannot be studied directly, to determine the probability that the characteristics the sample hold true for the whole group. What persuades Booth that Foster and Abrams are right is incident in contemporary history, Foster's success in attributing Primary Colors to its (now admitted) author. Yet if Foster used the same method for these two attributions, how can the results in one case be vulnerable, and not the results in the other? Katherine Duncan-Jones shares Booth's doubts about the method but not his belief in the attribution. She disputes Shakespeare as author the Elegy no matter what Professor Foster's database may reveal (1997: 192). In proposing instead a candidate whose style she does not analyze but claims does not make her feel ... that he definitely composed the Elegie (206), Duncan-Jones expresses disbelief in the viability stylometry itself as method. Leah S. Marcus walks the same line. She objects to limiting ourselves to stylistic analysis when there are other promising avenues to explore (1997: 211); and she also proposes a rival candidate without analyzing his style in detail, although she is sympathetic to the Shakespeare attribution. However, she does cite the absence stylistic traits Shakespeare in Elegy as evidence against Foster's attribution. Marcus says that Elegy is curiously lacking in distinctive [Shakespearean] markers, by which she means, not the grammatical mannerisms that Foster points out (who or whom as an impersonal relative pronoun, and hendiadys, 1997: 121-22), but instead metaphoric density and vividness (212). Elegy favors abstract and plain language, which she concedes may be stylistically for the subject (219). She believes this concession may strengthen the case for Shakespearean authorship, but in referring to metaphor and vivid language as matters appropriate style, Marcus implicitly characterizes them as markers over which a writer has conscious control. Any competent author could empty his verse both for some reason. If so, neither trait can be counted on to distinguish any author's handiwork from any other's. Another reason for wariness is the ambiguity in such features. English plain speech is built on a graveyard dead metaphors. What counts as a metaphor? Foster uses unambiguous markers: a word, a phrase, or a collocation either exists in someone's writings or does not. Stanley Wells accepts style as a valid criterion for deciding authorship. Nonetheless a skeptic, he points out stylistic contraindications in the Elegy, features that he does not find in Shakespeare's works, particularly several uses including of deserving praise and nine years (1997: 188). Depending on a function word everyone uses (of), and being unambiguously countable, Wells's negative markers warrant careful scrutiny. When I searched a TACT database the New Oxford Shakespeare, some collocations closely resembling his examples turned up(2); and Wells's negative findings are consistent with a generally accepted observation that Shakespeare's style changes over time. …