The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  And he also phrased the retraction to make sure it was spun as a retraction caused by reading Monsarrat, not Vickers’s book (although he did mention Vickers’s forthcoming book as an additional factor).

  Still, I never expected the day to come. It was one of those moments when you remember exactly where you were. I was sitting in my living room, surfing the Net with my morning coffee, coming upon a couple of new communiqués on the SHAKSPER discussion list (which are automatically delivered to members’ in-boxes) when I saw the subject line: “ABRAMS AND FOSTER ON THE FUNERAL EL——” (there was no more room on the subject line).

  At first I thought: What more can they say at this point? Or could it be an attempt to refute, preemptively, the three coming attacks on the attribution that Vickers had heralded?

  But when I opened that post I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. First Abrams, then Foster, in an obviously coordinated move, both admitted they were wrong. They took it all back. It wasn’t Shakespeare after all. It was John Ford. All this after nearly seven years of strenuous insistence that it was Shakespeare—and that everyone who disagreed was a fool. All their computer tests, their “close reading” had collapsed like a house of cards—all because of a single scholarly article, the one by G. D. Monsarrat in Review of English Studies.

  Frankly I couldn’t believe what I was reading at first. The notion that SHAKSPER had been hoaxed crossed my mind, as it did more than one other initial reader. But it was real.

  As another list member expressed it, using the earthquake imagery which is, it seems, endemic among excited scholars: “This is seismic!”

  Here is a sample and summary of what Foster wrote. Ostensibly an admission of error, it’s actually a marvelous comic tour de force of spin that comes close to suggesting that in many ways his big mistake was somehow a vindication.

  First Foster attacks a number of scholars who had, early on, rejected his headline-making attribution to Shakespeare and had initially suggested some minor poets (less well known than Ford) as alternatives to Shakespeare. In other words, people who were right about the large claim. These suggestions “failed for a good reason,” Foster scolds, “They were mistakes.”

  Foster then concedes Monsarrat was right about Ford because “I know good evidence when I see it.” Is this the right time for him to boast of his expertise on good evidence?

  Then he quotes a passage from the Elegy—about “answers which the wise embrace [rather] than busy questions such as talkers make.” A passage that seems to imply that all his opponents until now—who just happened to be right when he was strenuously, loudly, aggressively wrong—were just “busy talkers” while he was somehow “wise.” (Wise but wrong.)

  At which point Foster temporarily switches gears and offers a lovely, gracious sentence: “No one who cannot rejoice at the discovery of his own mistake deserves to be called a scholar.”

  But he returns from that note of graceful, high-minded humility to an unconvincing self-defense: he’s moved far beyond the question of the Elegy; he barely remembers it. Years ago he too considered Ford, but the numbers just weren’t right: “Ford’s ‘rate of enjambment’ was too low.” In other words, he had a good statistical excuse for his mistake, but he should have paid more attention to “internal”—nonstatistical—evidence, something he claims to have “insisted on in arguing the case for Shakespeare.” (This will come as a surprise to those who tried to argue “internal evidence”—the words as opposed to the numbers—in disputes with Foster.)

  But in any case, he was using all the right methods, there was just some unexplained glitch in the answer that the methodology produced. No matter, he assures us. After having almost succeeded in distorting the Shakespeare canon for all time, he’s moved on to true crime stories: “Since 1997 I have had a second career in criminology and forensic linguistics.” (In other words, he’s left ivory-tower pedants behind for more relevant and important work—built of course upon the fame achieved as a “Shakespeare super-sleuth”—on the same tools and methods that led him to believe in a bogus identification for so long.) “Nor have I yet determined where I went wrong with statistical evidence.” (Implicit but unstated assumption: statistical evidence is still the right way to make literary attributions, he may have just made a mistake in what statistics he used, or how he manipulated them.)

  “Still, my experience in recent years with police detectives, FBI agents, lawyers and juries has, I hope, made me a better scholar.” (If you don’t count the fact that he tried to jump into the JonBenét case with risible results. Instead he implies his “experience” with the justice system has been an unending series of triumphs for him and his methods.)

  Then he takes another slap at people who were right when he was wrong. He now looks down his nose at them anyway, because he’s identifying himself with the supposedly infallible criminal justice system with its “higher standards.”

  And once again he mischaracterizes his opponents as merely fusty bardolaters who believed Shakespeare “was simply not a man to write that sort of thing.” This is the key sentence, what all the griping and grudging in the nominally “gracious” concession has been leading to: the old charge of bardolatry. Foster is still alleging that his opponents’ argument was nothing more than the snobbish belief that Shakespeare was “simply not a man to write that sort of thing.” Here Foster’s disingenuous condemnation of his opponents as snooty bardolaters surfaces again despite the discovery that they were right and he was wrong. They were right for the wrong reasons, he’s saying in effect. They were right by accident, while concomitantly, he suggests, he was wrong for the right reasons. Those who doubted him were not doing so because such a thing as literary judgment, stylistic attentiveness or any of the imprecise methods have value; Foster’s “scientific” conclusion was completely off, but still, he implies, theoretically superior.

  Having admitted he was defeated by “good evidence,” he still accuses his opponents of mere subjectivity: “Personal opinions cannot stand for evidence nor can personal rhetoric.” In other words, the scholars who opposed him were basing their opinions not on a lifetime of literary scholarship but merely on “personal opinions,” while his bullying predictions that opponents would be “destroyed” were not “personal rhetoric,” but pure scholarly discourse.

  Summing up, Foster tells us Monsarrat used Fosterian methods to prove Foster wrong. Thus, even though he was dead wrong, his methods have been vindicated, because they were slavishly adopted by the guy who got it right—which as we shall see is far from the case.

  CLOSE READING TRUMPS MARKETING (AT LEAST THIS TIME)

  Looking back on what I wrote about the Foster retraction (and Ford attribution) at the time, I feel I tried to be gracious in singling out the one gracious sentence in Foster’s retraction for special attention and glossing over the grudging and bitter tone of most of it.

  In any case, that one sentence I singled out is the one that read: “No one who cannot rejoice at the discovery of his own mistake deserves to be called a scholar.” It is a beautifully written sentence and I made a special point of highlighting it and giving Foster credit for it—although in order to do so I had to gloss over Foster’s own history of scorn for the possibility that he had made a mistake, and disdain for those who dared suggest it.

  I’d gone out of my way to be kind to Foster in that first published story in more than one way: I omitted the fact that the Monsarrat article that ostensibly forced Foster to concede also pointed out several instances in which Monsarrat disputed Foster’s use of evidence to make his case.

  Instead I focused on what I thought—and still think—is the most important phenomenon disclosed by Monsarrat’s analysis, the true source of the whole scandal: a failure of close reading in deciding what is Shakespearean. Foster’s choice instead was number-crunching counting—counting words as bits, bytes, atoms, isolated from their context, often mistaking their context or ignoring the different context in which Shakespeare and Ford might use th
e same word. Vickers calls it “atomizing” language into word-units for the purpose of a one-zero digital analysis that fails to capture context.

  But first, I found out a little more about this fellow G. D. Monsarrat and how he got on the Foster case. As soon as I saw Foster’s post, I obtained a copy of Monsarrat’s article, which identified him only as a professor of English studies at the Université de Bourgogne.

  Within a day of reading Foster’s retraction and the Monsarrat attack that prompted it, I once again called Brian Vickers in Zurich. He filled me in on the origin of Monsarrat’s paper. Vickers seemed pleased and, to my mind, very generous in an old-fashioned scholar’s way in being unperturbed that Monsarrat might have gotten credit for disproving the Foster attribution and nominating John Ford as the man behind the initials “W.S.” (and getting Foster to retract)—all before Vickers’s already completed book came out.

  Vickers told me a fascinating story about Monsarrat, this apparent academic giant-killer. About the way the relentless marketing of the Elegy finally backfired. Monsarrat was a specialist in English religious poetry and prose of the seventeenth century; he had been called upon by a French publisher, which was preparing a bilingual edition of Shakespeare, to do a French translation of the “Funeral Elegy.” Just as in America, there was marketing pressure to include the “new Shakespeare poem” in the edition. Another instance of the insidious creep of the mistaken Foster attribution beyond the realm of English to corrupt the way the rest of the world saw Shakespeare’s body of work as well.

  But fortunately Monsarrat was well versed in the religious and devotional poetry of John Ford, and as soon as he began studying the Elegy for translation purposes he began to feel that it was the “authorial voice” of Ford, not Shakespeare.

  Vickers told me that as Monsarrat “worked on translating the Elegy into French, he began to find that in virtually every line of the Elegy there were parallels to Ford coming to mind. Not just verbal—since he’s written on English stoicism, he found echoes of Ford’s version of stoic philosophy.”

  Time after time Monsarrat found reason to challenge Foster’s attempt to discount the Elegy’s parallels to Ford. Foster claimed that they were there because Ford had “plagiarized” from the Elegy, thus, in his view, plagiarized from Shakespeare. Instead, Monsarrat suggested, there is evidence that Ford’s post-Elegy works weren’t borrowing from “Shakespeare’s” Elegy—they were borrowing from himself.

  How did he know? Monsarrat reexamined the places in the Elegy that Foster said were Shakespearean echoes rather than Ford echoes, despite their parallels to Ford. And in case after case, after reading the words and phrases in context Monsarrat found that (read carefully, read closely) the Elegy’s use of the phrase was more consonant with Ford’s customary usage than with Shakespeare’s usage of the same word or phrase.

  Consider two examples: First the phrase “pure simplicitie.” The word “simplicitie” appears in both Shakespeare and Ford, but, Monsarrat argues, “Ford used the word with synonymous adjectives, ‘artless simplicities’ … ‘spotless simplicities’ … Shakespeare never uses the expression [‘pure simplicitie’] and only uses ‘simplicitie’ with pejorative adjectives: ‘Twice-sod simplicitie’ … ‘low simplicitie’ ” (my italics).

  (Fascinating: Aside from its implications for the Ford-Shakespeare Elegy identification question, the fact that Shakespeare, when he spoke of it, was an enemy of “simplicity” is worth noting for those of us obsessed with his bottomless complexity.)

  It was really more than anything else the dumb simplicity of the Elegy that made me averse, nearly allergic to it from the beginning. In clumsy ways that define the difference between complicated and complex, the Elegy would appear to be expressing a complex thought but in fact be spinning out complicated verbiage to disguise simplemindedness, the inability to think. When Shakespeare is purely simple, if he can ever be said to be purely simple, it works the other way: simplicity concealing complexity, not complicatedness concealing dumb simplicity.

  On to a second example: the use of “bread” in Shakespeare, the “Funeral Elegy,” and Ford. Monsarrat points out, “Foster considers that ‘the bread of rest’ [in the Elegy] is an echo of ‘the bitter bread of banishment’ [in Shakespeare] but it is in fact closer to Ford’s ‘Sweet is the bread of content’ and ‘sleep of securitie is a bread of sweetnesse.’ In Shakespeare the bread is ‘bitter,’ in Ford it is pleasant.’ ”

  As I was discovering these examples of Foster isolating, counting, atomizing the words without close or closer-reading context, Brian Vickers faxed me from Zurich a similar example from the galleys of his book Counterfeiting Shakespeare. In Ford, Vickers says, “a word like ‘steddiness’ is not a linguistic counter [my italics] … that can be found with an electronic search function, but a term having specific connotation within a philosophical system”—connotations (of Ford’s stoic philosophy in the Elegy) that Vickers, like Monsarrat, argues were ignored or simply misunderstood by Foster in his tunnel-vision reliance on mere counting and crunching.

  Essentially what Monsarrat and Vickers were demonstrating was that Don Foster had been, in Hamlet’s words, the “engineer hoist with his own petard.” Foster’s “petard” being his computerized counting methods, which allowed him to count a lot more words and turn them into bits, but left him analyzing only bits and pieces, not contexts, connections, resonances, ambiguities, relationships with other words. Without, in other words, everything that makes poetry untranslatable into bits and pieces, everything that distinguishes a living body from a corpse.

  * Notable American exceptions: A. Kent Hieatt and the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic and its directors, Ward Elliott and Robert J. Valenza.

  Postscript

  Have I been harsh on Don Foster? Certainly less harsh than he has been on his critics when he was riding high. One scholar who thought I’d been, well, stringent, added that “If you were to say of Foster, ‘Well, he asked for it,’ I would be hard-pressed to argue the contrary.” In fairness, though, I should say that Foster turned out to be more right than I was—and I’ve credited him in print for it—about one literary controversy in which I was agnostic: whether some letters written under the name “Wanda Tinasky” were actually the work of Thomas Pynchon. Using traditional, nondigital methods of literary analysis, Foster cleverly identified the real, non-Pynchon author; I’d written “I can’t make up my mind” about it. If only Foster had remained agnostic about the Elegy.

  But in fact I see this chapter as a tribute to Foster, or at least to his vulnerability to the Shakespearean spell and the intoxicating effects it can have. In fact I don’t think one can place the blame for his mistaken fervor entirely on Foster. It’s in great measure Shakespeare’s fault, it’s bardolatry’s fault, it’s celebrity culture’s fault, it’s the “frenzy of renown” that Shakespeare has generated.

  It could be argued that to become intoxicated by seeing Peter Brook’s Dream might have a different effect from becoming intoxicated by faux-Shakespeare like the “Funeral Elegy.” I hadn’t “discovered” anything new at the Brook Dream, not a new work. I had discovered something that was always there, waiting to be released. But who knows how I might have acted if I’d been in Don Foster’s position and thought I’d discovered something more apparently “Shakespearean” than the pathetic Elegy?

  Chapter Six

  The Indian, the Judean and Hand D

  A true scholar—or is he a “scholarly nihilist”?—and a real dilemma.

  It hasn’t made front-page headlines the way the elegy did, but the Hand D controversy has an excitement of its own. An importance all its own.

  And a Hand of its own. If Hand D becomes accepted, canonical Shakespeare, it will suddenly mean that we believe we have something only dreamt of by scholars for centuries. A manuscript in Shakespeare’s hand. Not a complete manuscript, just a single scene. But a scene of genuine thematic significance if “Shakespearean.” At the moment we barely have more than a single word,
aside from the six sacred signatures.

  At the moment most scholars recognize only six instances of Shakespeare’s actual handwriting. Six “authentic signatures.” One from his deposition in the so-called Wigmakers’ Lawsuit, the rest from mortgage and property transactions and his will.

  And oh yes, two words: “By me.” The words that preface one of the signatures on the last page of the will.

  “By me”—isn’t it ironic that of all the words written by the hand behind the “veil of print,” the only two words we can be certain of: “By me.”

  Unless you believe in Hand D. In which case we have an entire dramatic scene, 147 lines in Shakespeare’s own handwriting. A veritable exhibition of his writing process, his hesitations, his habitual spelling and metrical tics, not to mention thematic preoccupations. A secret book of golden clasps that contains golden keys to many unresolved issues, centuries-old debates such as that over the Indian and the Judean in Othello’s final words.

  But is the hand behind Hand D truly William Shakespeare’s? The contention over Hand D has been conducted over more than a century by serious-minded scholars open to arguing with skeptics. And no one has been more skeptical than Paul Werstine, whose challenge to Hand D is even more urgent in the light of the Elegy fiasco.

  But first some background on Hand D …

  “Hand D” is the literally disembodied phrase for the author of a handwritten section of a never-printed play manuscript called Sir Thomas More, a kind of panoramic biopic, you might say, about the martyred “Man for All Seasons.” More, the son of a tradesman who rose to become Henry VIII’s secretary of state, who temporized about Henry’s breach with Rome but took a stand against a royal divorce that cost him his head.