The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0085  Wednesday, 1 March 2006

[1] 	From: 	Hugh Grady <
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	Date: 	Sunday, 26 Feb 2006 17:56:30 -0500
	Subj: 	RE: SHK 17.0069 Authentication Article

[2] 	From: 	Elliott Stone <
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	Date: 	Tuesday, 28 Feb 2006 18:34:08 -0500
	Subj: 	Re: SHK 17.0069 Authentication Article


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Hugh Grady <
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Date: 		Sunday, 26 Feb 2006 17:56:30 -0500
Subject: 17.0069 Authentication Article
Comment: 	RE: SHK 17.0069 Authentication Article

I can't let this post past without commenting on the egregious 
Reaganesque rhetoric ("Mistakes were made") that Don Foster employed in 
his account of the early, mistaken attribution of the Funeral Elegy to 
Shakespeare which he championed. In his 1989 book, listservers should 
recall, Foster made the cautious (and in retrospect wise) claim that the 
case for Shakespeare's authorship was possible but not certain. That 
book is fully owned by him in the statement: "I am well acquainted with 
the risks of over-reliance on quantitative techniques. In 1989 I 
published a book proposing that the 1612 poem "A Funeral Elegy," by "W. 
S.," might be Shakespeare's.

It was Foster, of course, who was the chief perpetrator of the escalated 
claim seven years later that computer analysis-his own!--had in fact 
clinched the claim and proven his suspicions correct. But his agency is 
oddly missing in the wording that follows:

"Seven years later, the elegy made front-page news when 
computer-assisted analysis, along with the opinion of other Shakespeare 
scholars, tended to confirm that "W. S." was indeed Shakespeare.

Mistakes were made indeed.

--Hugh Grady

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From: 		Elliott Stone <
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Date: 		Tuesday, 28 Feb 2006 18:34:08 -0500
Subject: 17.0069 Authentication Article
Comment: 	Re: SHK 17.0069 Authentication Article

Mr. Kennedy was certainly the first one to debunk Prof. Foster's claim 
that the "Elegy By W.S." was not our William Shakespeare.

However, there are still those of us who believe that there was an 
original funeral poem that was written (but suppressed) by Shakespeare 
on the death of the Catholic Martyr and Jesuit Saint Edward Campion. 
This unpublished poem was used by Daniel, Ford and William Strachey as 
the template for their funeral poems. Strachey was the W. S. of the 
Funeral Elegy which was a satire published by Thorpe to make money. It 
is sad that the critics have failed to see the humor in this poem but 
what is even sadder is to think that William Shakespeare could have 
possibly been believed to have been the author of "The Elegy by W.S.".

Best,
Elliott H. Stone

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