Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare
Ward E. Y. Elliott, Robert J. Valenza · Shakespeare Quarterly · 1997
Summary: Donald Foster, using computers and the Vassar Electronic Text Archive, has devised several impressive "green-light, must-be-Shakespeare" inclusion tests to show that A Funeral Elegy shares rare words and rare stylistic quirks with Shakespeare. But his conclusion that the Elegy is therefore "Shakespeare’s beyond a reasonable doubt" is overstated and underproved, since his inclusion tests have not been shown to be immune to "false positives." His "must-be’s" turn out to be more like "could-be’s." Other computer-aided tests, newly developed or adapted by the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic, are "red-light, can’t-be-Shakespeare" exclusion tests. Several of these show both the Elegy and A Lover's Complaint falling far outside of Shakespeare’s range. Like Foster’s tests, the Claremont tests are novel and imperfect and will no doubt be further qualified under closer scrutiny. But exclusion tests can be imperfect and still reliably disprove authorship in ways that inclusion tests cannot reliably prove it. A battery of valid "can’t-be" test outcomes do more to disprove authorship than a battery of valid "could-be" outcomes do to prove it.