Shakespeare’s Sonnets that differ from Foster’s estimates 
and largely confirm the preliminary results achieved in 
Anne Lake Prescott’s and our “When Did Shakespeare 
Write Sonnets 1609?” (Studies in Philology 88 [1991]: 
69-109). He says most of the sonnets were composed 
late; we believe that many were written around 1593-94, 
when sonnets had become popular in England, although 
many were revised or added later, sometimes much later. 
Shaxicon is a valuable introductory tool, but other evi­
dence, including the contexts of each pair of words pro­
duced by it, must supplement it.

A. KENT HIEATT 
Deep River, CT

To the Editor:

Almost a decade ago, in his Elegy by W. S.: A Study in 
Attribution (1989), Donald W. Foster first explored the 
possibility that Shakespeare might have written A Fu­
neral Elegy. A product of meticulous research and scru­
pulous argument, the book reached no firm conclusion 
on this question, but in subsequent presentations to the 
Shakespeare Association and the MLA, Foster has gone 
from cautious advocacy to unequivocal certainty. Now in 
his October 1996 PMLA article he concludes that “A Fu­
neral Elegy belongs hereafter with Shakespeare’s poems 
and plays .. .” (1082).

In the article Foster almost completely ignores the 
strong evidence against Shakespeare’s authorship, much 
of which he considers in his book. Lines 139-40 (in 
which “country” means home area, a sense in common 
usage as late as Jane Austen), 145-78, and 557-60 clearly 
imply that WS committed a youthful indiscretion and 
will learn from it to avoid scandal in the future. I find it 
impossible to believe that at forty-eight and about to re­
tire Shakespeare could have been concerned about his 
“endangered youth” and “days of youth.” Foster ex­
plained in 1989: “It is certainly possible in the phrase 
‘the hopes of my endangered youth’ to envision a poet 
who is speaking as a young man, perhaps a man even 
younger than Peter himself. Indeed, those readers who 
are disinclined to accept Shakespearean authorship of 
the poem may find here an insurmountable objection, 
one that counterbalances all evidence that Shakespeare 
may have written the poem” (Elegy by W. S. Yld).

The elegy in its entirety provides the most compelling 
evidence against its attribution to Shakespeare. That the 
supreme master of language, at the close of his career, 
could have written this work of unrelieved banality of 
thought and expression, lacking a single memorable 
phrase in its 578 lines, is to me unthinkable. The poem is

not simply uninspired, it is inept in its stumbling rhythm, 
its conventional and flat diction, its empty sententious­
ness. Nowhere in the work do I encounter Shakespeare’s 
creative signature, despite Foster’s astounding statement 
that the poetry of the Elegy is “no better, if no worse, than 
what may be found in Henry VIII or The Two Nobel Kins­
men” (Elegy by W. S. 201; my emphasis). Selecting al­
most any passage at random—for example, 525-36—I 
see a pedestrian prosiness, an absence of concreteness 
and specificity, a lack of any true affective quality.

What I find most distressing in Foster’s article is his 
confident assertion that study of A Funeral Elegy will 
open “new critical directions,” presumably for the study 
of Shakespeare’s work generally (1092). That inclusion 
of the poem in the canon, already promised for three lead­
ing editions of the collected works, will legitimate A Fu­
neral Elegy as a proper, even exciting, object of critical 
and biographical study is a dismal prospect indeed.

SIDNEY THOMAS 
Syracuse, NY

To the Editor:

I read Donald W. Foster’s essay with great interest. 
Partly on the basis of information supplied in the essay, I 
believe that the author of A Funeral Elegy was Elizabeth 
Cary rather than Shakespeare.

The subject of the Elegy, William Peter, was born in 
Devonshire in 1582 and lived in Oxfordshire from the late 
1590s to 1609, when he returned to Devonshire, where 
he married Margaret Brewton. He was murdered in Janu­
ary 1612. Shakespeare was eighteen years older and lived 
mainly in London during Peter’s entire adult life; he 
would have had little opportunity to have become a close 
friend of Peter. Cary was three or four years younger than 
Peter and lived mainly in Oxfordshire during Peter’s more 
than ten years of residence in the vicinity. Cary married 
in 1602, but the union was arranged and apparently love­
less. In the early years of her marriage Cary did not reside 
with her husband, who left England in 1604 and returned 
in 1608, the year before Peter left Oxfordshire and Cary 
gave birth to her first child. (Information about Cary’s life 
can be found in the introduction to The Tragedy of Mariam, 
ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson [Berkeley: 
U of California P, 1994].)

After noting the grief felt by Peter’s friends, the Elegy 
poet singles out one of them:

Amongst them all, she who those nine of years 
Liv’d fellow to his counsels and his bed