The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic: How Severe Are the Problems?

Abstract

Ward Elliott (from 1987) and Robert Valenza (from 1989) set out to the find the ”true“ Shakespeare from among 37 anti-Stratfordian ”Claimants.“ As directors of the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic, Elliott and Valenza developed novel attributional tests, from which they concluded that most ”Claimants“ are ”not-Shakespeare.“ From 1990-4, Elliott and Valenza developed tests purporting further to reject much of the Shakespeare canon as ”not-Shakespeare“ (1996a). Foster (1996b) details extensive and persistent flaws in the Clinic's work: data were collected haphazardly; canonical and comparative text-samples were chronologically mismatched; procedural controls for genre, stanzaic structure, and date were lacking. Elliott and Valenza counter by estimating maximum erosion of the Clinic's findings to include ”five of our 54 tests“, which can ”amount, at most, to half of one percent“ (1998). This essay provides a brief history, showing why the Clinic foundered. Examining several of the Clinic's representative tests, I evaluate claims that Elliott and Valenza continue to make for their methodology. A final section addresses doubts about accuracy, validity and replicability that have dogged the Clinic's work from the outset.