SOURCE: "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 435-60.

[In the following essay, Abrams argues that signs of Shakespeare's authorship of the poem "The Funeral Elegy " are evident in the poem's allusions to the theatrical profession and to Shakespeare's works. Abrams also maintains that the poem's narrator reveals "biographical coincidences" which point to Shakespeare, as the elegist.]

On 25 January 1612 in Exeter, after a day's drinking with two friends, a thirty-year-old Devonshire country gentleman, William Peter, was murdered. Nineteen days later in London, Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Shakespeare's Sonnets, registered as ready for publication a 578-line poem entitled A Funeral Elegy in Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter. This poem, signed W. S. on the title page and in the dedication, was introduced to Shakespeare studies by Donald Foster who, in Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution, noted the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship but did not then, in 1989, feel he could press his arguments with confidence. More recently Foster and I have presented a greatly augmented case for Shakespeare's authorship at professional conferences and in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement.¹ Needless to say, the attribution has not met with universal assent. Much of the dry, repetitious Elegy does not sound like the Shakespeare we know. Nonetheless, on examination many signs of Shakespeare's authorship emerge: biographical coincidences, verbal echoes of Shakespeare's canonical works, including plays not yet printed in 1612, and verbal anticipations of a play or plays (The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII) not yet written in 1612, together with a host of characteristic, even idiosyncratic stylistic mannerisms. That all this was managed in probably well under two weeks (allowing for news of Peter's death to travel the 160 miles from Exeter to London) by a grief-stricken W. S., who courted a resemblance to Shakespeare, who enjoyed (on the poem's testimony) success sufficient to provoke envy, and who had access to the publisher of the Sonnets, is highly intriguing. Consequently, scholars who at first were skeptical, even dismissive, of claims for Shakespeare's authorship have begun to listen hard to the evidence.

This essay is planned as a companion piece to Foster's new study, which will appear in PMLA. Employing traditional tools of literary analysis 1 discuss W. S.'s allusions to the theatrical profession; also, I call attention to singularities in the elegist's manner of alluding to Shakespeare. On both scores, I argue, W. S. must be Shakespeare himself. If the Elegy diverges stylistically from Shakespeare's other writings, then these divergences may be explained as the poet's deliberate accommodation of his art to the "Unhappy matter of a mourning style," an accommodation for which the Elegy supplies abundant metapoetic evidence of intention.² In a further turn of my discussion, I contextualize this stylistic transformation by linking it with tendencies in proximate Shakespearean texts. My attempt in this latter regard is speculative, falling outside the bounds of my evidentiary argument. Others who accept the poem as Shakespeare's may wish to build other bridges. I am persuaded, though, that bridging of some sort is in order if the Elegy is to be truly assimilated to the canon and not just to orbit around it indefinitely, like the little-read, though widely-accepted A Lover's Complaint. I come to this view through observations of responses to the Elegy in the past few months. Certain responses have suggested to me that even if the extensive evidence for Shakespeare's authorship stands up to scrutiny, the Elegy's future may be clouded. Emotional resistance can run high because of the kind of poem this is: no trifle like the late, unlamented "Shall I Die?" Rather, in a record starved of first-person testimony, the Elegy promises to be that thing we have sorely lacked: an intimate document from the poet's final years in which Shakespeare, in something like his own voice, extemporizes on the way of the world and his own sense of place in it.

It is precisely because the Elegy would seem to be a poem not just by Shakespeare but about him that it may be expected to provoke unreasoned resistances beyond those provoked by such trivial (and mistaken) attributions as "Shall I Die?" and Edmund Ironside. Our latent bardolatry may feel violated to hear a voice so alien (jaded, hurt, chiding) proposed as that of the author with whom we feel most comfortable. Of course, there are many Shakespeares, from Arnold's demigod "out-topping knowledge" to the New Historicist's cipher, the locus of collaborative cultural forces; but probably the most familiar—paradoxically, the most international—is the one who first appeared in a heading of Ben Jonson's commonplace book: "De Shakespeare nostrati. " Since Jonson's time "native Shakespeare" has been naturalized to states unborn and accents unknown; he has been rebaptized "our Shakespeare," and readers around the world hold him dear. These feelings of personal attachment are threatened by the strange voice in the poem, a voice that can strike our ears like that of Richard II disowning his followers: "For you have but mistook me all this while" (III.ii.174). To begin with the strangeness, I turn to a passage in which W. S. muses on his own deviation from familiar norms.

I

In his dedication to William Peter's brother John, W. S. seems sheepish about his present endeavor:

Exercise in this kind I will little affect, and am less addicted to, but there must be miracle in that labor, which, [but] to witness my remembrance to this departed gentleman, I would not willingly undergo.³

W. S. does not say here that he is a stranger to poetic exercise as such but only to "Exercise in this kind," to elegy-writing, which, he facetiously remarks, is so remote from his usual poetic mode as to require a minor miracle to see him through the labor of composition. That W. S. is a practicing poet appears both in direct assertions in the Elegy and in the poem's many felicities such as its smooth versifying, which implies practice. However, even if W. S. is a veteran poet, to suppose that his wonted genre is dramatic poetry would seem unwarranted on two grounds. The first ground, that the Elegy lacks the elements of conflict and tension that make for effective theater, is not critical. Though the poem is indeed undramatic, this feature owes less to want of skill on W. S.'s part than to an easily comprehended artistic program. Rather than dignify Peter's murderer, Edward Drew, by placing him center-stage with his victim, W. S. reduces Drew's visibility, making Peter the victim of cosmic forces, of "time, and his predestinated end" (line 1). With Peter's antagonist out of the picture, what drama remains centers on W. S.'s own relationship with the deceased, and here to an extent the Elegy does deliver conventional theatrical satisfactions. Vividly staging his struggle with loss, W. S. rises to a poignant finale in which he makes peace with his friend's death.

The Elegy's finale goes far to remove impressions of mediocrity. But more often the poem so lacks the colloquial vitality we expect from a dramatist as to render seemingly ludicrous a Shakespearean attribution. This flatness may be variously rationalized, e.g., with reference to the poem's hasty composition or to the poet's grieving distraction. Only bardolatry would insist that Shakespeare never had his off-days, and most readers would agree in principle that a work need not be good to be his. These rationalizations, though, are vulnerable to further objections. So far as we can tell, no deadline prevented the poet from working until he had what he wanted—and in any case the Elegy's style seems all wrong. When Shakespeare errs, he errs on the side of exuberance. His metaphors swarm, compete for dominance. From such a poet's grief we might have expected seething excess, not the Elegy's pallid abstractions.

The issue of Shakespearean language, as it bears on attribution, needs to be carefully theorized, rescuing the Elegy from the iron whim of readers prepared to pronounce yea or nay on the basis of mere taste-testing. In inquiring what strikes us as the genuine Shakespearean ring, we may consider a passage in the Elegy which does sound like the Shakespeare that finds its way into anthologies. One of the poem's few quotable gems is its evocation of apocalypse:

For when the world lies winter'd in the storms
Of fearful consummation, and lays down
Th'unsteady change of his fantastic forms,
Expecting ever to be overthrown.

(lines 171-4)

Presumably, if the Elegy contained more such writing, it would win its way sooner into the canon. The passage appeals not only in its subtle alliteration and its bold predicate-adjectival use of "winter'd," but in these elements' coordination with what may be called, inadequately, the image. Contemplating an apocalyptic storm W. S. distances himself from myriad creaturely terrors of "consummation"; he seeks comfort in the prospect of creation's surrender of its overstrained "fantastic forms," much as Leontes in The Winter's Tale rages for the "purity and whiteness of [his] sheets" (I.ii.327), without knowing what it is he longs for. To gauge the importance of the stylistic criterion of the image in authenticating language as Shakespeare's, we may listen to David Willbern, who writes of "metaphor, analogy, terms of likeness," as the cornerstone of Shakespeare's mind and art.⁴ Or we may listen to a scholar who voices this concern precisely with regard to the Peter elegy. Affirming that Shakespeare's "language is concrete . . . supercharged with metaphor that constantly stimulates . . . imagination," MacDonald Jackson rejects a Shakespearean attribution on the grounds that W. S. "does not really think in images," and Jackson is right; W. S. does not.⁵ Yet what Jackson fails to consider is whether, occasion warranting, W. S. might not have forborne writing in images, much as he foregoes dramatic complication. Late in the century John Dennis will remark, "No sort of imagery ever can be the Language of Grief. If a Man complain in Simile, I either laugh or sleep."⁶ If the elegist shares this decorum, we are inhibited from speculating about how he thinks, since how W. S. writes depends on conscious discipline. Yet if we cannot penetrate the elegist's mask of art to intrinsic habits of mind, if W. S. trains his faculties to suit an artistic program, then at least we may comprehend that program by attending to W. S.'s treatment of imagination. His remarks on the topic point all in one direction; they reveal the poet's fully conscious theorizing of his elegiac practice.

In a posture that is clearly symptomatic, W. S. blames imagination for its role in Peter's murder. Throughout the Elegy he censures "fond conceit," "disguise," "affect[ation]," which he opposes to Peter's earnest. Worshiping novelty, the age is ever ready to devise "Which way to wound with defamation's spirit" (line 416). But Peter, speaking "in tongue most plain," avoided "the complemental phrase of words" and "never was addicted to the vain / Of boast" (lines 325-8). So within this model, which conflates errant social uses of imagination (the murderer's skylarking) with literary uses (fantastical poetry), W. S. chooses his norm. Rejecting the stylistic equivalent of Drew's swaggering, he commits himself to sincerity and directness, the qualities of a man "Not hir'd . . . / By vain conceit . . . /Nor servile to be lik'd" (lines 229-31). The notion of an overweening imagination evidently held special associations for this poet. A different author might never think to connect imagination with the violence that ended Peter's life. Moreover, these associations presumably impel W. S. to rein in his own imagination in writing the Elegy. Like Prospero drowning his book because he is reluctant on his return to society to hold godlike sway over his fellow creatures, W. S. disdains to use imagination to bully or bedazzle. And Prospero becomes a pertinent comparison in the further respect that the terms that W. S. presses into service to characterize the rabid imaginations of Drew and his kind generally admit of theatrical implications. Affectation, disguise, "glad sleights" (line 73): these terms suggest not just literary art, but that branch of literary art which "court[s] opinion" on a daily basis (line 92). Those who labor in the public theater are always "servile to be lik'd," because it is by virtue of the audience's indulgence—as they like it—that the players thrive.

If then W. S. employs an uncustomary style, as he asserts in the dedication, the possibility arises that his custom was dramaturgy—an art "servile to be lik'd," which, in writing elegy, he felt occasion-bound to repudiate. The greater evidence for this thesis lies in a series of oblique but systematic allusions to the theatrical profession taken up the moment W. S. enters the poem as a persona. Delaying his use of "I" until the Elegy is well under way, W. S. eventually remarks:

But that I not intend in full discourse
To progress out his life, I could display
A good man in each part exact and force
The common voice to warrant what I say.

(lines 79-82)

Eschewing narrative form, the Elegy scants Peter's history. Yet had he wished, W. S. asserts, he might have "progress[ed] out" his subject's life, depicting its various phases with such vigor as to "force" acclamation of Peter's merit. At first glance, the remark suggests an oratorical context. Ticking off highlights of Peter's life as in a funeral oration, W. S. will compel readers, fictionalized as hearing the oration, to assent vocally to his own estimation of the deceased. But this reading runs aground on "force," used in conjunction with "The common voice." Normally, greatness, not goodness, compels "common" (=vulgar; cf. line 327) admiration; hence W. S.'s remark better suits a figure of public mourning like Mountjoy, whose career Samuel Daniel "progressed out" in a funeral poem from which the Peter elegy borrows.⁷ Unlike Mountjoy, Peter died lacking noble works, as W. S. concedes in the next lines. His life was one of quiet virtue; he was a "good man," not a great one. And though good lives solicit respect they don't compel it—at least not in the world of the Elegy, whose moral blindness. W. S. never tires of rebuking.

By this logic we may guess that if a narrative of Peter's modestly virtuous life has power to "force / The common voice," the power resides not in the life as such but in the representation or "full discourse" that converts that life to spectacle. This hint is borne out by W. S.'s comment that were he to tell Peter's story we would observe a good man "in each part exact," a statement that can mean that Peter was a good man in each and every quality. But "part" is also a latent theatrical metaphor which the adjacent lines activate. Peter's life comprised a series of roles which he performed with exactitude. Thus, if W. S. thinks theatrically in claiming ability to narratize his friend's life, displaying a good man in each enacted part, then his boast about forcing the common voice points not necessarily to readers fictionalized as an audience, unfailingly discerning of moral virtue. Rather, the common voice's endorsement becomes the manipulated response of literal spectators confronting the poet's "display." Judged by the deeds he lived to perform, Peter's deserts must seem meager. Yet had W. S. chosen, he could have heightened the illusion of greatness by resort to customary means. The implication is that W. S.'s custom is dramaturgy. When "part" is read as "role," the whole passage reads as the boast of a professional poet vaunting ability to enforce vocal approbation in the public theater.⁸

After signaling his professional status W. S. continues to use theatrical language casually for awhile, saluting Peter's enactment of "judicious parts" which "win / Applause" (lines 102, 115-6). Then, picking up the rhyme in "force / The common voice to warrant what I say," he formally designates Peter a fit subject for drama: "Not any from this frailer stage is gone / Whose name is like to live a longer day" (lines 127-8). Here, the "stage" on which Peter acted is his home soil as opposed to more visible venues, the court and the public theater ("Though not in eminent courts or places great / For popular concourse" [lines 129-30]).⁹ Peter's life was fit "matter" for the poet's pen ("style") to "rehearse" (lines 150-1) precisely because he lived it untheatrically. His custom of "suiting so his habit and desire / As that his virtue was his best attire" (lines 95-6) contrasts with the wicked who "Court . . . opinion with unfit disguise" (line 92), and also with a weakened W. S. who himself "court[s] opinion" (line 572). The theatrical basis of these contrasts is affirmed when W. S. characterizes the wicked as both actors—"loose mimics" mouthing "An empty sound of overweening passion" (lines 275-6)—and playwrights "plotting . . . / . . . / For popular applause" (lines 447-50); and the analogies justify W. S.'s break with theatrical style. Though others act and plot, not they but Peter, "attire[d]" in virtue and performing "judicious parts," "soonest win[s] / Applause." So if Peter wins through rectitude what lesser men achieve by mimicry and plotting, W. S. is induced to practice like restraint, forsaking customary activities shared with the wicked.

In noting the conformity of W. S.'s poetic style to his friend's outspoken plainness, we are in a position to survey the Elegy's fundamental strategy. If W. S. is a player and a plotter like the men who court opinion, if Prospero-like he resembles the Drews and Antonios of this world more than he cares to admit, then Peter was something finer. Yet Peter was also a poet of sorts, inscribing his deeds in human memory and God's book (lines 160-70, 179-80). And Peter may have been a literal poet, competent to write W. S.'s eulogy had W. S. predeceased him (lines 236-40). But because Peter died first, W. S.'s question became: how to praise Peter in a manner befitting Peter's virtue. The answer was obvious; harmonizing his style with the dead man's, W. S. scrupulously mortifies his own habitual play of fancy. So if W. S. not only praises Peter but emulates his restraint, the Elegy, disdainful of the stage's huckstering values, nonetheless becomes a kind of impersonation. What the poem achieves as mimesis is not entertainment but homage. W. S. bears witness to Peter's virtue both by describing it and by drawing on a plain voice in himself to exemplify it. In thus stylistically binding himself to the departed, he performs a ritual gesture; in effect he continues a friendship that he celebrates throughout the Elegy as double selfhood.

Let me be clear about my argument, lest I be accused of special pleading for a Bad Poem. To my mind, the Elegy is not a bad poem; though arduous reading, it contains many passages of distinction. But the real issue, as regards attribution, is not whether one likes or dislikes the Elegy, but whether the poem sustains levels of competence that corroborate the considerable evidence of Shakespearean authorship, and whether its project may be plausibly assimilated to Shakespeare's canonical texts. Stylistically, the poem may not excite the majority of readers, yet the Elegy can be shown to succeed on its own terms. That is to say, W. S. sets forth in Peter a stylistic ideal to which he makes himself answerable. Yes, a wag might interject, an ideal of Dullness. But it would be rash to speak peremptorily of stylistic failure, when the Elegy so clearly embodies the plainness and directness it proposes to our admiration. Though the narrative posture may strike us as odd for Shakespeare, the very fact that the Elegy employs an answerable style should disarm a certain kind of criticism. What is clear is that the Elegy's nontheatricality cannot be used as an argument against Shakespeare's authorship because the Elegy exhibits an antitheatrical style—a style which in its own terms is free from "affect[ation]," "disguise," "glad sleights," however much we might miss these entertaining vices. To summarize: "I could write a play about Peter, compelling applause," the Elegy's argument runs, "because no fitter subject ever passed from the stage of this world. But I won't, because to do so would belie Peter's avoidance of pretension. Instead I'll imitate Peter's lack of contrivance in a text that is both emulous and plain. I will do these opposite things at once, and in doing them I become two people at once: both W. S. and W. P. united."

To my mind, W. S.'s skill in staging the transformation of his wonted theatricality is an impressive performance, though whether W. S. then achieves force as a plain speaker of an unorthodox kind (unorthodox with respect to such singularities as the poem's complex syntax, which typifies late Shakespeare) is beyond my present scope. In all events, by observing the elegist's association with the stage in his self-presentational quatrain, lines 79 to 82, and in similar passages threaded through the poem, we are in a position to affirm his identity, because now we are dealing not just with a poetic W. S. but with one who lived his life in the public eye. Donald Foster's Elegy by W. S. proceeds by whittling down an exhaustive list of W. S.'s (and G. S.'s, G. for Gulielmus) until only Shakespeare remains as a plausible candidate. One reviewer, questioning this method, leaps on Foster's admission that "any number of poetic W. S.'s" may have been alive in England in 1612, not just those on Foster's list; if the elegist was a provincial who wrote just this one surviving work, he argues, W. S. would be untraceable.¹⁰ The evasion will no longer serve. Playwrights work with companies; they lead visible careers. If W. S. wrote for the stage and can boast power to force the common voice, his achievement would have left a record. Yet the Short-Title Catalogue shows no other professional English playwright with the initials W. S. alive in 1612. If W. S. truly possesses the background he implies, only Shakespeare fills the bill.

II

Besides the metapoetic evidence I adduce, the Elegy offers a further clue to W. S.'s identity in its manner of alluding to Shakespeare's work. Though anyone can echo the Bard, the Elegy's allusions, spanning the breadth of Shakespeare's career, cannot be explained as mnemonic residue in the mind of a London theatergoer. Nor can they be explained as copying from quartos in the elegist's possession, because some recollected passages were not yet in print by 1612. Of most immediate interest to our discussion, certain echoes occur anomalously in contexts in which W. S. exhibits patent hostility to poetic art. In the quatrain preceding the evocation of a world wintered in apocalyptic storms, W. S. explains that if high art should fail to memorialize his friend, "Time would to time his honesty commend":

Whiles such as do recount that tale of woe [Peter's murder],
Told by remembrance of the wisest heads,
Will in the end conclude the matter so,
As they will all go weeping to their beds.
For when the world lies winter'd . . .

(lines 167-71)

The allusion of course is to Richard II Richard instructs his Queen to sit by the fire "In winter's tedious nights" and, hearing "tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid," to "Tell .. . the lamentable tale of me, / And send the hearers weeping to their beds" (Richard II, V.i.40-5). W. S. reproduces the details of winter, tale, woe, "weeping to their beds"; moreover, his adaptation survives a shift of tone and address in the original. Turning to Northumberland, Richard prophesies a day when "foul sin gathering head / Shall break into corruption"; W. S. foresees a "day of doom" when "much affected sin / Shall ripen to a head" (V.i.58-9, FE, lines 157, 175-6). Either W. S. had passages of Richard II off by heart or he had access to the 1597 Quarto. Could he then have been merely an admirer of Shakespeare's? Doubtful; for the close fit of the reworked material with W. S.'s narrative of stylistic conversion underscores the likelihood of authorial self-allusion. To show this, I turn to the Elegy's first lines, in which W. S. sets the problem he later resolves by adapting Richard II

W. S. begins rhetorically, "What memorable monument can last / Whereon to build [Peter's] neverblemish'd name / But his own worth?" (lines 5-7), then reiterates his position in our passage under discussion. Should Peter "lie obscur'd without a tomb," W. S. explains, his "memorable" "worthiness" will nonetheless endure to the world's end in homely tales (lines 159, 156). Saluting oral tradition, W. S. implicitly calls in question his own artistic attempt to devise a lasting poetic monument for his friend. Poetic art participates in a world of brittle forms. Yet after cosmic annihilation, Peter's deeds, "The gainful fruit of well-employed wit," will live on "in a book where every work is writ" (lines 179-81). In the elegist's dialectic, honest folktales and God's "book" counterpoise studied art and creation's "fantastic forms." And into this dialectic W. S. imports—on the wrong side of the battle line if he is a poet other than Shakespeare—testimony from Shakespeare himself. That an obscure author should at this juncture of anti-art in the poem seek authority from the famed playwright would be anomalous. But for Shakespeare in a spirit of retraction to cite his own words against himself, pointedly reminding himself of what his pride lets him forget—this strikes me as plausible and effective poetic and spiritual practice. The same passage, adapted from Richard II, that would adulterate the integrity of an unknown W. S.'s censure of the stage by incongruously soliciting poetic authority becomes, in Shakespeare's hands, an admonition of the vanity of his own art.

Not only does the Elegy's sustained adaptation of Richard II read better as palinode than as a second author's fusion of assault and homage, but the King's Men playwright John Ford seems to have read the passage this way. In his pious 1613 meditation Christes Bloodie Sweat Ford bases his Christ on Peter (his Devonshire neighbor) and echoes W. S.'s adaptation of Richard II, conflating it with its Shakespearean source:

In after-times, when in the winters cold,
Folkes use to warme them by their nightly fires;
Such Parents as the time of life termes old,
Wasting the season, as the night requires:
In stead of tales, may to their children tell,
What to the Lord of glorie once befell.

(lines 1729-34)¹¹

From W. S. Ford borrows the detail (absent in Richard II) of parents telling tales of woe (line 161), and from Richard II he borrows the detail of "winters cold," absent in the Elegy (or rather, displaced into the wintry apocalypse). The precise politics of Ford's intertextual gesture is elusive, yet it is safe to say that in fusing the two texts, Ford dignifies the elegist rather than placing him in Shakespeare's shadow. And from this we may deduce that Ford supposed W. S. to be Shakespeare, for were it otherwise he would have been indiscreet, in 1613, when he was launching his own theatrical career with the King's Men play An Ill beginning has a Good End (not extant), to yoke the company's principal dramatist with an upstart W. S. who crowded Shakespeare by imitation and who accused the stage of tawdriness, with its "loose mimics" and plotters for "popular applause."

But in another sense Ford would have guessed that Shakespeare shared W. S.'s attitude. Perhaps all London would have guessed, if The Tempest struck contemporary spectators as the retirement play it has seemed to later audiences. And even if The Tempest's reports of Shakespeare's retirement are greatly exaggerated, Ford still would have guessed, because he would have ascribed to Shakespeare the sentiments of the 1609 Sonnets. One hesitates to raise the topic; the most slippery questions that arise from attributing the Elegy to Shakespeare concern its relation to the Sonnets. But leaving aside larger issues, it can be shown that W. S.'s disdain for the theater coincides with Shakespeare's disdain, e.g., in sonnet 110, in which Shakespeare winces at making himself "a motley to the view," at "gor[ing his] own thoughts," at selling "cheap what is most dear." Linking the two works, we may conjecture that if Shakespeare indeed wrote the Elegy, he made good a pledge to himself, finally wearing with pride a style "barren of new pride" (sonnet 76). As the sonneteer chafed against "art . . . tongue-tied by authority" and "folly . . . controlling skill" (sonnet 66), so W. S. boasts a pen "free from control," whose freeing will cause "pain to many men" fearful of the truth (lines 231-2). If Shakespeare is the elegist, his style not "servile to be lik'd" reflects a hard-won integrity.

Again, regardless of whether one links Peter with the Fair Youth, it's of interest that the Elegy takes up the Sonnets' theme of immortalizing art. Thus, the Sonnets open with the lovely boy's procreative power to immortalize himself, and move quickly along to the poet's ability to grant eternity: "Nor shall Death brag thou wand'rest in his shade / When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. / So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" (sonnet 18). The Elegy relinquishes this fantasy:

Here, then, I offer up to memory
The value of my talent, precious man,
Whereby if thou live to posterity,
Though't be not as I would, 'tis as I can:
In minds from whence endeavor doth proceed,
A ready will is taken for the deed.

(lines 241-6)

Aware that his talent (skill, coin) can barely supplement Peter's purchase with his own merits of an eternal name, W. S. concedes that if Peter "live to posterity, / Though it be not as I would, 'tis as I can": if not in a great poem, then in the best I can write. But also: if not in the flesh ("as I would"), then in "eternal lines," alas! As the contracted "it" shifts reference, W. S. muses on the difference between real life and the life verse can give. And with this reflection, which dashes poetry's eternizing pretensions, he signs himself "A ready will." The locution echoes two Sonnets-mannerisms: in a typographically set-off couplet, W. S. presumably puns on his forename of Will. Moreover, he adapts the language of theatrical epilogue: good will substitutes for achievement (other adaptations: "If we offend, it is with our good will" [Midsummer Night's Dream, V.i.108]; "And when good will is show'd . . . / The actor may plead pardon" [Antony and Cleopatra, II.v.8-9]). If W. S. is not Shakespeare, he certainly strives to look like him. Yet why do so, given his antitheatrical bias? If the elegist possessed a settled puritanical disdain for theatrical excess, would he seek Shakespearean authority for his position? As in the Elegy's adaptation of Richard II, so with Ready Will's wry retraction: the hypothesis of Shakespearean palinode works better than that of a second author's jumble of assault and homage.

It is possible also to elaborate connections with the late plays. If, antitheatrical in plainness, the Elegy was written at the end of Shakespeare's career, then its style may reflect on Shakespeare's reasons for ending that career. We are accustomed to reading The Tempest as a sui generis valedictory play; yet by raising the possibility that Shakespeare systematically wrote himself out of the theater, the Elegy points to another late play, The Winter's Tale. As a portrait in excessive imagination, Leontes anticipates dreads that resurface in the Elegy. Revulsed by the world's wickedness, seeking the peace of annihilation, he displays oracular, punitive characteristics that recur in W. S. Such a view, of course, jars with the antiquated Dowdenesque picture of a poet serene in retirement, a picture that lingers on in some quarters. Nonetheless, it bears observing that Leontes's excesses key with similar vices in Prospero, who exhibits sexual repugnance in lecturing Ferdinand, and who rides herd on Caliban and the comic plotters with the Leontean hounds "Fury" and "Tyrant"—an action that causes Prospero to take stock and drown his book. Such correspondences suggest that Shakespeare may have staged as antisocial in Leontes and Prospero personal tendencies which he then brought under control, responsibly espousing in the Elegy. Taken together with the Peter elegy, the two final romances evince a bad taste in Shakespeare's mouth. A young man's former delight in his own mellifluousness is later experienced as a Sir Smile's slipperiness—the indulgence of a Leontes or a Prospero throwing his imaginative weight around.

In reading autobiography in Shakespeare's fictions I place myself in unenviable company. However, if Shakespeare indeed wrote the Elegy, this late-life credo sets on a firmer footing our sleuthing attempts to extract an autobiographical subtext from the late plays, whose protagonists exhibit frequent distaste for human society. Of all literary arts, drama is the most sociable; its "essence . . . is human involvement."¹² Yet from such involvement Shakespeare apparently fled, living in "his elder days . . . at Stratford: and supplied y^e stage with 2 plays every year."¹³ Helpful in understanding the temperament behind this apparent flight from London life is E. A. J. Honigmann's work on the Last Will and Testament and on contemporaneous observations of Shakespeare the man. Over against the sociable bard of tradition Honigmann poses an alternative Shakespeare, a melancholic such as John Aubrey invokes: "not a company keeper [he] wouldn't be debauched, & if invited to[,] writ .. . he was in paine."¹⁴ To proceed speculatively, though from a fact that has been allowed astonishingly little resonance in Shakespeare biography, Aubrey's antisocial Shakespeare mirrors the voluntary solitude of the heroes of the final tragedies. Except for Antony, the late tragedies present a series of "lonely dragons"—Lear, Timon, Macbeth, Coriolanus—whose disdain for society strains the possibility of drama as an art of interactions. Similarly, though traditional interpretation renders Shakespearean romance a nostalgic, autumnal celebration of the world of story and his own art, this sentimental approach, invested in fantasies of Shakespeare the Friendly Genius's drive to bourgeois contentment, ignores the romances' disconcerting tendency to build comedy around the plights of isolated older men. Pericles needing a miracle, "who for this three months hath not spoken / To any one"; gruff importent Cymbeline, cut off from his family and his court; paranoid Leontes, "speak[ing] a language" his dearest "understand not"; even Prospero operating through the tricksy Ariel—these are men who in a profound sense have lost the will to play. Though it is distasteful to imagine Shakespeare's becoming this grave man, the Elegy's reiteration of the Sonnets' aversion to the theater and its reinforcement of the attitudes of the protagonists of the late tragedies and romances tells a consistent tale. From the Elegy's vantage point, Shakespeare tired of staging the eleventh-hour social reintegration of aging male solitaries.¹⁵

By reading palinode in W. S.'s Shakespeare allusions, and by tying W. S.'s attitudes to the Sonnets and the late plays, we establish the Elegy's relevance to the canon. Granted, if W. S. was a poet other than Shakespeare, he may have found congenial the voicings of ressentiment he heard in these late works and may have been encouraged to seek in Shakespeare a prestigious ally. Yet this bedfellows-explanation raises more questions than it answers, because it grounds itself in the affinity of W. S.'s and Shakespeare's literary and social thought. Such a thesis, moreover, fails to explain the grateful voice of deliverance heard often in the elegist, a voice that may be referred to a poet recently "set . . . free" from artistic "crimes" (Tempest, Ep. 19-20), though otherwise hard to account for. We hear the voice in W. S.'s triple boast of a pen "Not hir'd [by a patron] . . . / . . . / Nor servile to be lik'd [by an audience], free from control [of the censor]" (lines 229-31). And if Shakespeare/W. S. expresses relief in wrenching free from recent servitude, Shakespeare's artistic production after Peter's death bears additional comment. As is now recognized, Shakespeare, on retiring to Stratford, did not quite abjure rough theatrical magic, as used to be imagined, but entered on a phase of managed decline in which he collaborated with John Fletcher on the lost Cardenlo, The Two Noble Kinsmen and, perhaps, Henry VIII. If Shakespeare mourned William Peter, his grief may have stamped his final work; and though this is not obviously the case with Henry VIII, which may have been drafted in part by the time of Peter's murder, it holds true of the single Shakespearean text which we know to postdate the Elegy. Despite differences in genre and tone, The Two Noble Kinsmen exhibits strong correspondences with the Elegy, correspondences which suggest that this final play in which Shakespeare had a hand may have served its senior author with an occasion for the continuing purgation of his grief.

III

One shared preoccupation that links the Elegy with The Two Noble Kinsmen may be inferred from the play's genetic relations in the canon. Like A Midsummer Night's Dream with which The Two Noble Kinsmen shares a major source, the play tells a story consonant with the death of William Peter: the story of a compulsive contest of masculine vanities resulting in senseless loss. Shakespeare had been over this ground before. Lysander and Demetrius, compulsively "try[ing] manhood" for the sheer contest of it (Midsummer Night's Dream, III.ii.412), are prototypes of Arcite and Palamon at their most inane. Similarly in Romeo and Juliet, which A Midsummer Night's Dream parodies, male rivalry dispenses with occasion ("Could you not take some occasion without giving?" [Romeo and Juliet, III.i.43-4]); Mercutio and Tybalt enter on a quarrel mystified in its origin as a spontaneous eruption of the season ("we shall not scape a brawl, / For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring" [III.i.3-4]). As the Veronese brawlers' blows are "bred of an airy word" (I.i.89), so is the kinsmen's rivalry. "That sigh was breath'd for Emily" (Two Noble Kinsmen, III.iii.44), exclaims Palamon, reintroducing hostilities into a scene that had grown amicable. Not Emilia necessarily but the bare thought of her can spark a quarrel when the mad blood stirs. In The Two Noble Kinsmen contention is self-generating, a "peevish odds" about which it is impossible to "speak / Any beginning" (Othello, II.iii.184-5).

In claiming the same for W. S.'s handling of Peter's murder, I shall seem to contradict an earlier contention. I asserted that the Elegy elides the degrading fact of human antagonism, making Peter a nonpareil while absorbing the murderer into the force majeure of "time, and his predestinated end." But the elegist has it both ways. Peter is saint-like, destiny's plaything; the villainous Drew scarcely appears. Nonetheless, even as the elegist endlessly rehearses the perfections of the dead man who "doubly lives, / Once in his proper self, then in his name" (lines 495-6), he hints that his doubly living friend may have lived, also, a life of unwitting doubleness, too freely accompanying Drew on his mad spree. Thus, the favorite Shakespearean myth of rival brothers haunts the poem as a subtext. Vehemently opposing the suspicions he imagines arising in petty minds of Peter's fault in his own death, W. S. at another level himself opens "the text of malice," trading in "Close-lurking whisper's hidden forgeries" (lines 267, 417). Frequently, he calls Peter's virtues in question in the very act of asserting them. Peter possessed "short-liv'd deserts" (line 12); the ambiguous phrase can signify either the lifelong deserts of one dying young or deserts that themselves died early. Peter "Rul[ed] the little ordered commonwealth / Of his own self (lines 294-5): either a little orderly commonwealth or a commonwealth that was little-ordered. He was "[not] addicted wholly / To unbeseeming blushless vanities" (line 93-4): not wholly? just 99%? Through such equivocations W. S. insinuates a spectral subject that shadows the Peter of eulogy. With passive aggression he fuels the labors of those who would "conster . . . with corrupt commentaries" the dead man's life, "Comparing by thy death what thou hast been" (lines 265, 254).

One motive for W. S.'s insertion into his eulogy of the "hidden forgeries" he guards against is apotropaic. He seduces, then makes an example of, the seduced reader. Yet this rhetorical explanation of the elegist's slanders is overly generous, for W. S. does tar his friend, if mildly. By inserting into his eulogy traces of his own presumable reservations, he creates a densely private text. Moreover, by suggesting that Peter could fall, W. S., opening "the text of malice," does fall. He becomes a case in point of the corruption that undermines the honorable man who too easily slides into "loose mimic[ry]" of a besetting wickedness.

Now this jeopardy of insidiously turning into one's enemy is the kinsmen's topic from their first moments onstage. The cousins' dialogue, universally assigned to Shakespeare, echoes and complicates the language of the Elegy, hinting that, despite their vigilance, the kinsmen may become what they despise. Arcite speaks of a failure to negotiate Thebes's moral currents:

for not to swim
I' th' aid o' th' current, were almost to sink,
At least to frustrate striving; and to follow
The common stream, 'twould bring us to an eddy
Where we should turn or drown; if labor through,
Our gain but life and weakness.

(I.ii.7-12)

From here the scene moves to a comedy of misprision in which Arcite's fear of insidious currents is borne out by each kinsman's swerve from his intended conversational course. First Palamon, then Arcite, falls "out" of role (I.ii.26, 34-5), till at mid-scene the spectacle of erraticism reaches its climax when Palamon, mocking Theban degeneracy, himself displays absurd affectation of the kind he satirizes (I.ii.44ff). Arcite's fear that, in Thebes, good intentions count for little is confirmed. The currents he associated with a dangerous social milieu are revealed already to reside within the kinsmen themselves.¹⁶

The motif of perilous waters recurs at play's end when Arcite's foreboding comes home to him. Crushed by his toppling horse, he in effect "turn[s and] drown[s]," while the survivor Palamon "labor[s] through" to a "gain [of] but life and weakness." Arcite becomes "a vessel . . . that floats but for / The surge that next approaches" (V.iv.83-4); awaiting death, he is at the mercy of internal currents, of his own constitution in revolt. And all this is anticipated by the Elegy. Like Arcite, Peter, killed on horseback, is associated early on with treacherous currents, though, in keeping with the poem's eulogistic ends, it is the elegist, rather, who becomes the victim of an evil tide. Peter, we are told, did not fall prey to dissolute influence but resisted "the assault of youth's encouragement":

As not the tide of this surrounding age

Could make him subject to the drunken rage
Of such whose only glory is their ill.

(lines 66-70)

In both poem and play, society's coercive tide operates internally, figuring similar conceptions of vice.¹⁷ Moreover, in both texts the sea imagery resolves itself with like irony. Though Peter defied "the current of besotted fashion" (line 274), and though (in a metaphor reconfiguring the biblical flood [line 178]) W. S. vows that the evil that killed his friend will not prevail against Peter's name, yet the besotted current may claim an alternative victim in Peter's alter ego, the poet. Grasping at the hope of someday seeing his friend reanimated, W. S. insists that he will cling to this consolation, "Although perhaps I ignorantly range / And court opinion in my deep'st unrest" (lines 571-2). The time-frame is ambiguous, allowing two meanings: (1) although I may someday backslide . . . ; but also, and more troublingly (2), although in this hope of bodily resurrection I already pursue a pious vanity.¹⁸ The elegist continues:

But whether doth [= even if] the stream of my mischance
Drive me beyond myself, fast friend, soon lost,
Long may thy worthiness thy name advance.

(lines 573-5)

In these verses but three lines from the Elegy's conclusion, W. S., "court[ing] opinion" (line 572), assimilates himself to the vices he has condemned. Though, throughout the poem, he has distinguished between Peter and himself on the one hand, Drew and his kind on the other, at the end he vexes the distinction. Whether by later returning to old ways or by already flattering himself with a false hope, he verges on similarity to the wicked who "Court . . . opinion" (line 92). Thus, whereas Peter stood fast against the current of falsehood, W. S. risks lapsing in the integrity which was Peter's dearest legacy to him. And in this state of heartsick contradiction, in which he fears he makes love to the very forces that killed his friend, W. S. draws on Peter's ordeal for a figure of his own extremity. Though Peter resisted the tide of evil influence, the dead man's "mischance" flows on in the poet, "Driv[ing him] beyond [him]self ' into a sea of aphasia, of self-loss.

This figure, toward which the whole poem moves, of the elegist swept downstream by grief, calls up the dying Arcite as a wrecked ship awaiting a fatal inward surge, and simultaneously translates the second scene's irony of Palamon's coalescence with his satirical object. The kinsmen inhabit a world of conjunct opposites; as Arcite warned: "here to keep in abstinence we shame / As in incontinence" (I.ii.6-7). Similarly, on Peter's death W. S. enters such a world. Courting opinion in his "deep'st unrest," he is estranged from Peter—becomes what he condemns—by reason of his very love for Peter. Yet if W. S.'s grief sends him reeling into the camp of Peter's tempters, then in a further paradox, this rupture, by sealing W. S.'s destitution of self, unites him more deeply with the deceased. The worst returns, if not to laughter, at least to solidarity:

But whether doth the stream of my mischance
Drive me beyond myself, fast friend, soon lost,
Long may thy worthiness . . .

Who is "soon lost," Peter or the elegist? Clearly both. The double grammar suggests either W. S.'s avowal to his "fast friend" (Drives me beyond myself, O fast friend, and I am soon lost), or his pity for his fast friend (who too soon, in youth, was lost); and this interplay, reinforced by the coincidentia oppositorum of the acoustically similar, conceptually opposite modifiers—(tied) "fast"/"lost" (loosed)—merges as twins in loss the dead man and the desolate survivor.

Twinship in loss is also the kinsmen's condition at play's end, and surprisingly so, because throughout the play the kinsmen's fates are projected as inversely related. Yet when loss occurs it is mutual. Winning by default Palamon grieves more for Arcite than he rejoices in Emilia. This paradox of double loss, articulated in Theseus's final speech, may be traced back through various transformations all the way to Arcite's exposure of the false options of swimming with or against the tide. Or it may be traced back further still, to a forelife in the Elegy. "To follow / The common stream," Arcite predicted, "'twould bring us to an eddy / Where we should turn or drown; if labor through, / Our gain but life and weakness." The prophecy may also be recapitulative; for Peter has already experienced a violent Arcite-like death, which has reduced the elegist, like Palamon, to mere "life and weakness." After Peter's murder W. S. must carry on with no "prop / Whereon to lean and rest" (lines 566-7), bearing a grief like that which dominates the play's conclusion. Indeed, it is tempting to seek the play's raison d'être in the sorrow that, coming unexpectedly at the end, never finds a proper catharsis. To put the matter provocatively, if Palamon's misery harkens back to the elegist's, then The Two Noble Kinsmen may be viewed as having been written from the subject position of its principal character. In act V's final moments, while Theseus busily seeks consolation, Palamon is self-condemning, mute. Disillusioned with his impending marriage, he no longer lives toward a desired future. Was it to express this emptiness tinged with self-contempt that the play was undertaken? Was the emptiness Shakespeare's? If so, then in relation to the Elegy the play's project may be read as one of publicly deriving the basis of an undischargeable grief, a reason for silence. After the false valediction of The Tempest Shakespeare moved on to a retirement that took. If we accept the Elegy as Shakespeare's, the poem becomes a key text in plotting his course beyond The Tempest to this final exercise of his theatrical powers.

To review the evidentiary implications of the Elegy's correspondences with The Two Noble Kinsmen: both poem and play employ sea-images to figure disturbances in the moral sphere; both distribute these images among paired characters (the two Wills, the kinsmen), and both climactically internalize the figure of sea-disaster to render an ironic double loss. To be sure, these correspondences do not in themselves prove authorship. Accepting them, one may argue that an unknown W. S. influenced Shakespeare as a reader. But such an argument lacks force because it fails to explain why an obscure imitator of Shakespeare could so strongly influence the aging dramatist on the eve of his retirement. In an early passage in The Two Noble Kinsmen Palamon, declaring himself and Arcite "masters of our manners," denies that "apes can tutor [u]s" (I.ii.43-4) and describes a buffoon show of mutual mimicry: apes imitating apes. To believe that Shakespeare in this play followed so closely at the heels of W. S. would make him an "ape" or "loose mimic" of the kind both he and the elegist decry.

A further reason why the Elegy's correspondences with The Two Noble Kinsmen imply Shakespeare's authorship of the poem is that Shakespeare's only other surviving play after The Tempest exhibits similar patterns. Foster discusses many overlaps of Henry VIII and the Elegy, to which we may add the pattern of sea imagery. As the Arden editor R. A. Foakes observes, the leit-motif of "sea, storms, and shipwrecks" constitutes Henry VIII's "most vivid imagery . . . reserved for highlighting certain especially dramatic moments."¹⁹ Particularly, the counterpoint of figures of watery peril in the falls of Wolsey and Katherine calls up both The Two Noble Kinsmen and the Elegy; and Wolsey's famous cognitio in which he washes out to sea, venturing too far on the puffed bladder of pride (III.ii.358-64), recalls the Elegy's conclusion. If, with some scholars, we assign Wolsey's speech to Fletcher, we must deduce that Fletcher too was influenced by W. S.; and we must assume that Shakespeare was twice influenced, both elsewhere in Henry VIII (cf. Foster, Elegy by W. S., pp. 122-3, 162-7) and in Kinsmen. Or if Henry VIII precedes the Elegy, we are driven to a hypothesis of reciprocal borrowing. W. S. borrows from Henry VIII (but how did he get hold of a manuscript?), whereupon Shakespeare in The Two Noble Kinsmen borrows back from W. S. Thrift demands a different explanation. The high incidence of sea-images in the final plays owes to Shakespeare's recent composition of The Tempest; and the parallelisms in the handling of these materials in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the Peter elegy support a hypothesis of Shakespeare's authorship of the Elegy.

IV

If accepted into the canon, the Elegy will presumably oblige us to rethink many aspects of Shakespeare's life, career, and art, but in closing it remains to ask how we shall come to regard the poem itself. Granted its importance as a Shakespeare document, is the Elegy as artistically woeful as many readers have felt, or has "the method of this doleful song" (line 537) an unsuspected power to wind its way into our minds and hearts? Though much can be urged against the Elegy's repetition and frequent banality, other elements—the author's passionate sense of scruple, his rejection of literary sleight and pursuit of an unvamping diction—add up to a powerful ethical performance, with particular appeal to those "on whose foot the black ox of the world has tread." A funeral poem for a young girl published the same year as the Peter elegy supplies terms to discuss this performance. John Davies of Hereford writes:

If in this Paper Monument [the poem] there be
One Ornament of Arte that's worthy thee,
Or any Worke of Wit that may retaine
Thy Memory; my Labour for my Paine
Is too great Meed: sith by the same I show
Times future, what will better them to know.
So shall I in thy Praise include mine owne;
And making thee so knowne still, still be knowne.²⁰

Davies's confession that he praises to gain praise is not only admirable in its candor but useful in throwing in relief the motives of the Peter elegist. In his resolute unpoetic-ness W. S. lives up to the sentiment of his dedication: "whatsoever is here done, is done to him [i.e., for Peter] and to [for] him only." Reading other elegists we may appreciatively tally "ornaments of art" which they garner to their own and their subjects' credit. But the Peter elegy invites appreciation, rather, as a "sacrifice" (line 206), a deep-fetched offering, where what is sacrificed is the narcissistic element of performance, and where wit serves to subvert its own selfpromotional wiles. To recall Hamlet's tribute to Horatio, "as just a man/As e'er my conversation cop'd withal" (III.ii.54-5): Hamlet assimilates himself to his bland object of praise. Yet his sober panegyric ballasts other highflying moments, and few would begrudge Hamlet his need to set feet on the ground. In praising Horatio, Hamlet reduces his own visibility as praisegiver. And most engagingly, he qualifies his fulsomeness, which has made Horatio uncomfortable: "Something too much of this" (III.ii.74). The strengths of Hamlet's modest performance are those of the Peter elegy.

In so praising the Elegy I don't wish to imply that the poem is all rigor and no humor. The fatal Cleopatra is alive and well, leavening for instance W. S.'s presentation of himself as "A ready will"—a drollery later darkened by the reflection that wrath "Gave death for free good will" (line 338), for Will Peter, that is. Verses in which W. S. emerges as a sly corrupter of words may serve as the entry many will wish to take. In these verses we feel that Shakespeare was simply too good a poet to master his follies, and chose instead to dramatize the struggle of fond conceit and moral earnest. However, the poem's ultimate claim lies not in this tension but in its resolution. W. S.'s effort is reparative, to engraft Peter new after time and human cruelty take from him; and to this end, despite continual falsenoting, a triumphal music swells at the close. If W. S. initially equivocates, entrapping uncharitable interpretation by commending Peter's "short-liv'd deserts" (line 12), he later removes ambiguity, recuperatively praising his friend's "flourishing and fair long-liv'd deserts" which Drew "could not touch," though he struck home "to [Peter's] frail and mortal parts" (lines 491-3). Though human frailty betrayed Peter to dubious "bypath[s]," death purged his fault, leaving in memory a "precious white," "free from such stains as follies are" (lines 41, 59, 19). And toward this "white"—an aesthetic equivalent of Peter's virtuous plainness or "pure simplicity" (line 350)—the poem moves, arriving only in its last verse, a verse which dispenses with ornaments of art, justifying itself by a "purity adorn'd/With real merit" (lines 359-60).

Until that verse, though, the purity must be earned, won-through-to by a progression of colors. The sequence begins with W. S.'s refutation of the odious saw, "'Such as is the end, the life proves so'" (line 366), against which he urges counter-instances, demonstrating that "all that can be said [of Peter]/Can be but said that 'He was good'" (lines 531-2). Then W. S. supplies a "sentence" of his own (line 535). Modifying Christian paradox he speaks not of God's love but of the love of the living which keeps the dead man alive: "'He died in life, yet in his death he lives'" (line 536).

The Christian platitude of life-in-death is cut down to human size by the substitution of earthly esteem for a heavenly reward. Yet even this cut-down paradox is too clever for the simplicity for which the poem longs. Continuing to mortify imagination, to "lay . . . down/Th'unsteady change of his fantastic forms" (lines 172-3) the poet presses toward a purity adorned only with merit.

Plunged into sorrow by his loss, W. S. is unsure of what remains for himself. Yet he is sure of one thing, Peter's deserving:

But whether doth the stream of my mischance
Drive me beyond myself, fast friend, soon lost,
Long may thy worthiness thy name advance
Amongst the virtuous and deserving most,
Who herein hast for ever happy prov'd:
In life thou liv'dst, in death thou died'st belov'd.

(lines 573-8)

Though W. S.'s opinion-courting links him with Drew and his kind, the next phrase reunites him with his fast friend. Swept downstream by grief, W. S. remains tied to Peter. Yet even if this tie comes undone, if unable to meet Peter again in heaven W. S. is lost beyond retrieval, he trusts in Peter's deserving. The poem's last verses affirm the worthiness that will keep Peter's name forever happy. And the very last verse reiterates the trope of conjunct opposites; life and death are reconciled by Peter's being beloved in both. The line is remarkable; my ear wants to hear a trite Christian irony: "In life thou died'st, in death thou livest." But no, that irony was used up some forty lines before, and what remains is plainer. Capping the progression of "sentences" that summarize Peter's life, the final verse catches up recent tropes (the stabilization of "hapless" in the immediately echoing "hope"; the reconciled dualities of "fast"/"lost"). The line seems replete, seems to house reserves of meaning, as Peter's laconism was said to be pregnant. Yet for all that, it is perfectly simple. In the Elegy's last line, Peter's epitaph, the poem achieves transparency. No further indulgence here of idiosyncratic propensities. Only a resolved voice: doleful, yet moving through sorrow to a "precious white," to a silence beyond this vale of theatrical ambiguities.

Notes

¹ Donald W. Foster, Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution (Newark DE, London, and Toronto: Associated Univ. Presses, 1989); quotations from the Elegy are hereafter cited in text and notes as FE. Conference appearances include Richard Abrams and Donald Foster, "Expanding the Canon? W. S.'s Elegy for William Peter," Shakespeare Association of America (25 March 1995), and "Another Shakespeare," Modern Language Association of America (30 December 1995); and Donald Foster, "Shakespeare Discoveries?" International Shakespeare Association (12 April 1996). Richard Abrams, "In Defence of W. S.," TLS, 9 February 1996, pp. 25-6. See also Richard Abrams, "Breaching the Canon: Elegy by W. S.: The State of the Argument," ShN 45, 3 (Fall 1995): 51-2, 54. Foster's new essay, "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Best-Speaking Witnesses,'" will appear in PMLA III, 5 (October 1996).

²FE, line 150; citations follow Foster's lightly-edited text. Canonical Shakespeare citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

³FE, dedicatory epistle, A2^r-v; Foster, Elegy by W. S., pp. 26-9.

⁴ David Willbern, "What is Shakespeare?" in Shakespeare 's Personality, ed. N. Holland, S. Homan, and B. Paris (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1989), p. 237.

⁵ MacDonald Jackson, review of Foster, Elegy by W. S., ShS 43 (1991): 258-61, 259. Jackson gives as his most damning of three instances of failed imagery, "his mind and body made an inn,/The one to lodge the other" (lines 113-4), remarking, "This is not complexity but confusion" (p. 259). Perhaps so, but the usage recalls Henry VIII, I.i.161-2: "his mind and place/Infecting one another, yea, reciprocally."

⁶ John Dennis, preface to The Passion of Byblis, in Critical Works, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939-43), 1:2.

⁷ Foster, Elegy by W. S., pp. 82, 197-200.

⁸ The faintness of the theatrical allusions may raise doubts, but modesty was in keeping with the occasion; the poem's dedicatee, John Peter, would not have needed W. S.'s vocation to be spelled out. Contemporaneous usage supports a reading of W. S.'s wording as theatrical. In Winter's Tale (1610) "part" means simultaneously trait and role, I.ii.400; The Tempest (1611) twice mentions Ariel's "exactly" performing a quasi-theatrical charge, I.ii.238, 500 (cf. All's Well That Ends Well, III.vi.61). Daniel's elegy, "A FVNERALL POEME. Vpon the Death of the late noble Earle of Devonshire" in Certaine small workes (London, 1611 ; first ed. 1606), probably suggested the figure of Peter as an actor: "let it now sufficient be, that I,/The last Scene of his act of life bewray;/Which gives th'applause t'all" (07^r; cf. 03^v "thou livd'st . . . to discharge/Those parts which Englands & thy fame should raise"). Daniel's view of Mountjoy's life as intrinsically dramatic, needing only to be disclosed, contrasts with W. S.'s proud refusal to enhance theatrically his subject's virtuous if uneventful life. John Ford, echoing FE in Christes Bloodie Sweat (1613), lines 889-94, in The Nondramatic Works of John Ford, ed. L. E. Stock et al. (Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), p. 184, refers to the tragic dramatist's enforcement of an audience's sorrow; cf. n. 11 below.

⁹ A parallel pair occurs at FE, lines 570-1, where more outré venues are hinted: hope must "Play in the strongest closet of my breast,/Although perhaps I ignorantly range." Coordinated with the theatrical meaning of "play," "closet" suggests closet drama, and "range" a touring company.

¹⁰ E. A. J. Honigmann, review of Foster, Elegy by W. S., N&Q 37, 4 (December 1990): 465-7, 467.

¹¹ Cf. also Richard II, V.i.35 and Christes Bloodie Sweat, lines 1735-6. For Ford and Peter's probable acquaintance, Foster, Elegy by W. S., pp. 178-9. Ford's conflation in Christes Bloodie Sweat of Richard II and FE turns on Richard II's treatment of Richard, and FE's treatment of Peter, as imitatio Christi (e.g., FE, lines 367ff). Indeed, Ford seems to model his Christ on Peter; hence, the emphasis on the head-wound produced by the crown of thorns, and on Christ's "sinking down." Ford further links Shakespeare and W. S. visà-vis Jesus when he writes that Jesus "di'd indeed not as an actor dies /. . . / In shew to please the audience," and glosses the audience's tragic pleasure as "The idle habit of inforced sorrow": "The Crosse [Christ's] stage was, and he plaid the part/Of one that for his friend did pawne his heart" (lines 889-94). Citing this passage in The Shakespeare Allusion-Book. A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591-1700, re-ed. John Munro, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), 1:237, the original editor C. M. Ingleby remarks, "This is perhaps the most curious allusion to a work of Shakespeare's made during his lifetime," and identifies the one who pawned his heart for his friend as "assuredly . . . Antonio" in the Merchant of Venice. If "inforced sorrow" echoes W. S.'s boasted ability to force the common voice, and if the one who pawned his heart was Antonio, W. S. and Shakespeare again merge. The pattern becomes still more interesting if (as the database SHAXICON indicates) Shakespeare performed the Merchant of Venice's Antonio, for then, recollecting Shakespeare/Antonio's desire to sacrifice himself for Bassanio, Ford suggests that, after mere theatricals, Peter took up Christ's part in earnest, "di'd indeed not as an actor dies." The intertextual weave is rich in that Ford's borrowing from W. S. in Christes Bloodie Sweat reciprocates W. S.'s borrowing from Ford in Fames Memoriali (1606); see Abrams, "Breaching," p. 52.

¹² Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 312.

¹³ John Ward, in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), 2:249.

¹⁴ Cited by E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare 's Impact on His Contemporaries (Totowa NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1982), pp. 1-24, 23. Cf. his Myriad-Minded Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 4-20, and his "The Second-Best Bed," New York Review of Books 38, 18 (7 November 1991): 27-30.

¹⁵ Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Solitary Man (Totowa NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), chap. 10; on pp. 161-5 she observes that the romances exponentially increase the tragedies' insistence on the inevitability of solitude.

¹⁶ This meaning is reinforced by the scene's pervasive language of incontinence, including emetic and sanguinary purgation, bleeding, weeping, sweating, and lactation, I.ii.7, 20, 23, 33, 60-2, 76-7.

¹⁷ Cf. lines 98-9: "The float/Of fond conceit, such as this age affords." The secondary images figuring these vices also overlap. In both texts, the evil current to be resisted is a histrionic craving to feed on others' being; iniquity is not just morally untenanted but ontologically hungry, ready to devour and assimilate, to engulf innocence in its tide of debauchery. In Thebes, the city of oral "repletion" (I.ii.24; cf. I.ii.76-7), foppish "apes" theatrically transform themselves head to toe, "Affect[ing] another's gait," speech, costume, cut of beard, comportment (I.ii.44-58). In FE's corrupt social world, the wicked are "loose mimics," actor-like "disgest[ing]/An empty . . . passion," "Courting opinion with unfit disguise/Affecting fashions" (lines 275-6, 92-3).

¹⁸ The poet's ignorant ranging recalls sonnet 109, lines 5-6, "if I have rang'd,/Like him that travels I return again." Ranging is then glossed in sonnet 110, line 1, as "go[ing] here and there," and also, in 110, lines 5-6, as "look[ing] on truth/Askaunce and strangely." The two meanings correspond to those I assign "range" in FE. To the second, cf. FE's dedication in which W. S., unused to pious labors, seems almost surprised to find himself in the company of Christian sobriety.

¹⁹ Foster, Elegy for W. S., pp. 162-7; King Henry VIII, Arden edn. (London: Methuen, 1957), p. xxv. Cf. Frank Cespedes, "'We are one in fortunes': The Sense of History in Henry VIII," ELR 10 (Autumn 1980): 413-38, 423-4. Sea-loss imagery may have figured also in the lost Cardenio, to judge by Theobald's redaction, Double Falsehood, I.i.22-4. Roderick's hope that his scapegrace younger brother will "court Opinion with a golden Conduct" draws from their father the confidence that he, "by Fears weighing [the younger brother's] unweigh'd Course," suspects otherwise. If the nautical metaphor in "unweigh'd Course" echoes Cardenio, then the correspondence with phrase ("court opinion") and image in FE is exact.

²⁰ John Davies of Hereford, Complete Works, ed. A. Grosart, 3 vols. (rprt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), "A Funerali Elegie, on the death of . . . Elizabeth Dutton," in The Muse's Sacrifice, or Divine Meditations (1612), 2:63.