The Authorship Controversy | Katherine Duncan-Jones (essay date 1997)
Katherine Duncan-Jones (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: "Who Wrote A Funerali Elegie?," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XXV, 1997, pp. 192-210.
[In the essay that follows, Duncan-Jones asserts that the poem 's tone, imagery, and literary allusions establish a profile for the author of the poem—one that does not fit William Shakespeare.]
My approach to the 1612 "A Funerali Elegie" will be quite different from those adopted by Donald Foster, Richard Abrams, Lars Engle, and others. Rather than asking—as Engle has done—"If the Elegy were Shakespeare's, What Difference would it Make?"1 I want first to assemble some of the powerful arguments, both internal and external, against its being the 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...
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