'Counterfeiting' Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's 'Funerall Elegye' by Brian Vickers (review)

Abstract

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 197 performance criticism a cutting-edge discipline. Thus Edelman's volume can provide teachers as well as students with an understated but elegant exemplar of how to read, direct, act, perform, and respond to The Merchant of Venice, a play fated to become more controversial and contentious as the years go by. University of Reading Grace Ioppolo ' Count erfeiting'Shakespeare: Evidence, Authorship, and John Ford's ' Funerall Elegy e\ By Brian Vickers. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge Uni? versity Press. 2002. xxviii + 568pp. ?55; $75. ISBN 0-521-77243-5. In an uncharacteristically brief note, Brian Vickers acknowledges (p. xxi) that this book was overtaken by events. On 12 June 2002 both Donald K. Foster and his loyal supporter Richard Abrams used the shaksper website to 'concede the force of the philological case for John Ford [as author of A Funerall Elegye] presented by Gilles Monsarrat in the latest issue of the Review of English Studies'; Foster also made the handsome admission that 'Personal opinions cannot stand for evidence, nor can per? sonal rhetoric'. Soon after Foster's capitulation other scholars, led by Stanley Wells, generously welcomed him 'back to the fold'. Sadly, however, lasting harm has been done, and much time wasted. It will take many years forAmerican editions of Shake? speare's collected works containing the Elegye to vanish from library shelves, and unwary students will continue to be misled. Harm has also been done to the reputa? tion of American Shakespeare scholarship. Should new, and sounder, additions to the Shakespeare canon be proposed, there is a risk that they will not be taken seriously if they emanate from the United States. Cambridge University Press went ahead with the publication of 'Counterfeiting3 Shakespeare in September 2002, and Vickers hoped that the book 'may help' Foster to understand where he went wrong in his own analysis of the language of this dreary poem (p. xxi). This gives the book a target audience of one. Much of it appears to be addressed severely and exclusively to Donald Foster, resembling an over-long tutorial note on an essay by a misguided student. The media, who are warned not to get over-excited by Shakespeare 'discoveries' of dubious credentials, are unlikely to mend their ways. In the aftermath of Foster's retraction, together with Professor Monsarrat's at? tribution of the Elegye to John Ford, Vickers's book comes across as gratuitous dead-horse-flogging. Part 1, a devastatingly thorough demolition both of Foster's scholarly methods and of his use of manipulative rhetoric, at least incorporates, as a preliminary salvo, a 'Prologue' entitled 'Gary Taylor finds a Poem', in which Vickers (P- 53) dismisses 'The whole misguided identification of this mediocre Petrarchan poem'?'Shall I die?'?as a lyric by Shakespeare. But Part i's 259 pages, though locally entertaining, are surely too numerous. Vickers makes it exhaustively clear, for instance, that when Foster in 1997 claimed that the Elegye manifested what the distinguished metrical scholar George Wright called 'the Shakespearian hendiadys', he revealed his own crass misunderstanding of this figure. But the case could have been made equally well with fewer examples. In Part 11,which runs to a mere 158 pages, Vickers sets out evidence, both contextual and stylistic,that suggests that John Ford wrote the poem. And in a relatively concise 43-page epilogue he discusses 'The Politics of Attribution', focusing his unsparing gaze on the probability that 'com? mercial factors' outweighed the requirement that Taylor's and Foster's respective attributions should be properly assessed. Three appendices provide an old-spelling text of the all-too-widely available Elegye, a list of verbal parallels between lines in it and in poems by Ford, and an essay on 'Establishing Ford's Canon'. 198 Reviews In an investigation of such scope we might imagine that no pebble would be unexamined . Nevertheless, there are some remarkable omissions. Most notably, Vickers's own 'argument' that the poem 'was written by Simon Wastell', set out in a long TLS essay on 8 March 1996 and corroborated on 12 April, is not mentioned. Again on the shaksper website, Vickers has recently declared that 'some people erroneously concluded that...