Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of tables
- List of abbreviations and note on references
- Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
- PART I DONALD FOSTER'S ‘SHAKESPEAREAN’ CONSTRUCT
- 1 ‘W. S.’ and the Elegye for William Peter
- 2 Parallels? Plagiarisms?
- 3 Vocabulary and diction
- 4 Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
- 5 Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
- 6 Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
- 7 Statistics and inference
- 8 A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
- PART II JOHN FORD'S ‘FUNERALL ELEGYE’
- Epilogue. The politics of attribution
- APPENDICES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Vocabulary and diction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of tables
- List of abbreviations and note on references
- Prologue. Gary Taylor finds a poem
- PART I DONALD FOSTER'S ‘SHAKESPEAREAN’ CONSTRUCT
- 1 ‘W. S.’ and the Elegye for William Peter
- 2 Parallels? Plagiarisms?
- 3 Vocabulary and diction
- 4 Grammar: ‘the Shakespearean “who”’
- 5 Prosody, punctuation, pause patterns
- 6 Rhetoric: ‘the Shakespearean “hendiadys”’
- 7 Statistics and inference
- 8 A poem ‘indistinguishable from Shakespeare’?
- PART II JOHN FORD'S ‘FUNERALL ELEGYE’
- Epilogue. The politics of attribution
- APPENDICES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Foster's treatment of diction is a major prop in his claim that the Funerall Elegye ‘is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (1996a, p. 1082). The term ‘diction’ is something of a misnomer, however, since Foster used it to discuss matters of vocabulary, rhetoric, compound words, verbal parallels, and much else. In 1989, under this heading ‘Diction’, Foster put forward several linguistic items which, he claimed, are unusually prominent in both Shakespeare's works and in the Funerall Elegye (pp. 93–105). As two of his keenest critics pointed out, Foster's method essentially consists of identifying some ‘rare Shakespeare quirk’, recording that he has found no other example of this quirk other than in the Elegye, and proceeding
to the next point. Though he does not openly claim that the presence of any given Shakespeare quirk shows a work to be Shakespeare's, or that its absence shows that a work is not Shakespeare's, he strongly implies that many such quirk tests seem so close to perfect in their immunity to false positives that a work, if it passes enough of them, ‘must be Shakespeare’.
Notionally, Foster also attempted a negative check in some cases, by referring to a database that he had assembled, consisting of a ‘Cross-Sample’ of English verse elegies published between 1610 and 1613 (Foster 1989, pp. 80–1, 132–54). This was only a small excerpt from the larger ‘Checklist’ he had compiled, of ‘English Memorial Verse, 1570–1630’ (pp. 80–1, 132–54).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'Counterfeiting' ShakespeareEvidence, Authorship and John Ford's Funerall Elegye, pp. 100 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002