A Funeral Elegy: Ford, W.S., and Shakespeare

Abstract

The attribution to Shakespeare of A Funeral Elegy (1612), by W.S., is often found unconvincing. Ford has been mentioned, and this article gives some of the evidence for his authorship, in particular many word combinations and single words (sometimes characteristic of Ford) that occur in the elegy and in Ford's prose works, poems, and plays, but never in Shakespeare. The elegy's debt to Richard II is easily explained as Ford borrowed from the play in other works. Some of the ‘collocational clusters’ alleged as evidence for Shakespeare's authorship are in fact much closer to Ford. Foster discovered (a small) part of the link between the elegy and Christ's Bloody Sweat (1613) only after attributing the poem to Shakespeare; he could only see Ford as plagiarist and even claimed that Ford modelled his Christ on William Peter. This is a travesty of Ford's poem. W.S. has not been identified; he was, presumably, a young Devonshire gentleman who wanted to dedicate an elegy to the deceased's brother; not being able to write it himself, he asked Ford to do so. The elegy was written in about a fortnight and Ford quite naturally used many of the words and expressions he had used, was using, or was going to use in Christ's Bloody Sweat and The Golden Mean (both 1613). The elegy belongs to Ford's non‐dramatic works, not to Shakespeare's.