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A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s “Best-Speaking Witnesses”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Donald W. Foster
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Abstract

A Funeral Elegy was written in February 1612 by “W. S.,” a poet of “name and credit” closely familiar with Shakespearean texts. The pamphlet was registered by a stationer, Thomas Thorp, whose livelihood depended chiefly on the Shakespeare-Jonson theatrical circle and who had published Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609. Privately issued and surviving in just two copies, A Funeral Elegy received scant notice until 1989, when I first presented archival, statistical, and literary evidence that WS could be William Shakespeare. Focusing on intertextual evidence derived in part from new electronic resources, this essay addresses a vexing conundrum: the elegy is aesthetically disappointing and yet distinctively Shakespearean—a paradox that raises larger questions about attributional methodology and canonical theory. An emerging scholarly consensus supports a Shakespearean attribution for the elegy, though the poem challenges prevailing notions of what it is that makes Shakespeare “Shakespeare.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 111 , Issue 5 , October 1996 , pp. 1080 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1996

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