Who Wrote "A Funerall Elegie"?

Abstract

My approach to 1612 Funerall will be quite different from those adopted by Donald Foster, Richard Abrams, Lars Engle, and others. Rather than asking--as Engle has done--If Elegy were Shakespeare's, What Difference would it Make?(1) I want first to assemble some of powerful arguments, both internal and external, against its being work of Shakespeare. Some of these were touched on by Foster in his 1989 Study in Attribution, but many were not. To me these arguments rule out any possibility of Shakespeare's authorship, no matter what Professor Foster's database may reveal. In process of doing this, I shall explore poem for indications of kind of person who appears to have written it, emerging with a profile very different from Shakespeare's. Secondly, I shall set out in some detail credentials of a writer who, on basis of this profile, seems to me to be a strong contender for authorship. Exit Shakespeare In common, I imagine, with many other Renaissance scholars who have been lucky enough to work in Oxford's Bodleian Library, I first looked briefly at Elegie many years ago, along with any other works I could lay my hands on that had initials attached to them. STC makes such a search now quite a simple matter. A perusal of author's dedicatory epistle, in which he speaks of himself as not a habitual or professing poet--Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am lesse adicted to--soon dulled my curiosity. writer is modest enough to admit that some divine intervention--indeed, a miracle--will be required to sustain his literary labor of love for his friend, otherwise obscure Devonian William Peter. poem itself seemed, and to me still seems, charged with that passionate intensity that Yeats, in The Second Coming, attributes to the worst among his contemporaries. quality of writing, acknowledged by Foster and Abrams to be aesthetically disappointing, strikes me as a good deal worse than this. Though by no means unintelligent, it is utterly devoid of literary finesse. poem is slow moving, awkward, and repetitive, and includes lines and phrases of startling clumsiness, such as O thou deceast! (539). I suspect that many greater scholars, such as Chambers and Greg, may also have glanced at poem in their time, turning from it again in disappointment. Certainly there is no evidence that anyone before 1989 ever considered attributing it to Shakespeare. Nor, perhaps more importantly, are there any general allusions to Shakespeare in sixteenth or seventeenth centuries as having any special gift for elegy, extraordinary Phoenix and Turtle notwithstanding--whose utter difference from Elegie as a dense, concise work of spectacular originality, should surely give us pause. While we may feel that discovery of some of those pre-1598 texts of sugred sonnets, as praised by Francis Meres, is still a remote but exciting possibility, there is no reason to believe that there are elegies by Shakespeare awaiting discovery or recovery. In respect of lack of either specific attribution or general association, claims of Elegie are weaker even than those of lyric Shall I Die?, which at least is ascribed to Shakespeare in one seventeenth-century manuscript.(2) I would like to begin by asking some broad thematic questions, prompted by passages in Elegie, that bear on probability or otherwise of Shakespeare's authorship. I have already touched on dedicatory epistle, which seems to assert, a little pompously, that W. S. is not a habitual poet. But that aside, I wonder if A Funerall Elegie could possibly have been written by a professional player and dramatist? To be more specific, how likely is it that a writer whose most celebrated tragic hero envied histrionic gifts of First Player, in whom a mere dream of passion provoked Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, would have been moved to praise William Peter for his determinedly un-actorlike quiet sincerity: this man (whiles yet he was a man) Sooth'd not current of besotted fashion: Nor could disgest as some loose Mimicks can, An empty sound of ouer-weening passion. …

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