Exit Sclater.

ABRAMS, RICHARD

Katherine Duncan-Jones's ascription of the Peter elegy to the Puritan minister William Sclater represents the most detailed attempt so far to locate an author other than Shakespeare. In her conclusion, though, Duncan-Jones announces that her case for Sclater is only tentative ("my mind is not quite made up on this subject").(1) Her belated irresolution, whose better part may well be honest doubt, serves also a rhetorical function. Broached at a juncture when her argument runs into serious trouble, Duncan-Jones's irresolution implies that finally it does not matter much who wrote the Elegy--if not Sclater, then some other nonentity--so long as we're agreed it wasn't Shakespeare. In view of Duncan-Jones's hesitation, and in the light of Donald Foster's newly presented evidence of the Peter family's anti-Puritan (and probably Catholic) convictions, my systematic effort in this essay to refute the Puritan Sclater's claim may smack of overkill. But a detailed argument deserves a detailed response, in the course of which I shall take the opportunity to correct several misassumptions about the Elegy that Duncan-Jones's essay puts in circulation.

Clearing ground for her attribution, Duncan-Jones offers aesthetic: impressions that would "rule out any possibility of Shakespeare's authorship" (192). For her, Shakespeare is a known quantity, "our Shakespeare," and this is not the man. But Duncan-Jones's totalizing attempts to capture Shakespeare's essence are, for all their appeal to common sense, dated, reductive, and ideologically partial; they produce a Bard who would be unrecognizable to many readers. Observing that Shakespeare "had just celebrated theatrical illusion brilliantly" in The Tempest (194), Duncan-Jones cannot imagine him admiring the reserved, untheatrical Peter. She forgets Prospero's weary disengagement with his own theatrical artifice a,; "rough magic." Similarly, as a playwright to the king, Duncan-Jones's snobbish Shakespeare would not get mixed up in some "dingy project" involving a "fairly modest Devon gentry family." But Shakespeare was other things besides a court poet; he befriended publicans and sinners--witness his involvement in the Bellott-Mountjoy trial the very year of the Peter elegy. Nor would Duncan-Jones's Shakespeare become pious or "preachy" even in a funeral poem. But do we really know the conscience of the man who retired early from the stage, cut his adulterous son-in-law out of his will, and perhaps "dyed a papist"? Most incredibly, despite his celebrated powers of imaginative identification, Shakespeare, as "a nongraduate," cannot "have cared about the fact that William Peter was "'double honor'd in degree'" (195). This last assertion betrays a blindness that is pervasive in Duncan-Jones's argument. Just as she overlooks the possibility that certain features of the Elegy, such as its praise of Peter's achievements--which happen to have been scholastic--may be mandated by genre, so she fails to consider that W. S.'s disclaimer of "Exercise in this kind" may refer to the genre ("kited") of elegy, not broadly to poetic composition.

In proposing an alternative candidate to Shakespeare, Duncan-Jones constructs a profile of W. S. based on speculatively interpreted internal evidence, then locates a historical figure matching her profile. She begins with a strained demonstration that, as she maintained in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (29 March 1996, p. 17), "the world of the author and subject of the Elegy [are] almost wholly Devonian." Foster had demonstrated that W. S. favors standard London English, and Duncan-Jones fails to challenge this finding; nor does she herself argue that W. S. possessed an insider knowledge of Devon. Instead, her whole argument rests on the contention that the poem salutes four luminaries associated with the region. The Elegy's "strongest poetic echoes" are John Ford and Samuel Daniel, both West Country natives, who composed elegies on the death of a third West Country man, Sir Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy. Duncan-Jones's fourth West Country figure turns out to be, surprisingly, Sir Philip Sidney, whom she indirectly connects with Mountjoy. After Sidney's death, Mountjoy became the lover of Penelope Rich, Sidney's Stella, whom he eventually married. In Duncan-Jones's view, this triangulation qualifies Sidney for inclusion as an honorary West Country man.

Much is wrong with Duncan-Jones's argument. Nowhere in his canonical writings does Sclater display an interest in contemporary secular authors, much less in West Country authors. Moreover, by the time he moved to Somerset (around 1606), Daniel and Ford had already moved away to London, which became the center of their literary activities (Duncan-Jones adduces no evidence of their attracting favorite-son followings in the West Country).(2) Mountjoy possesses a stronger claim; after subduing Ireland he was created earl of Devonshire in 1604. But Mountjoy never returned to Devon; he lived out his brief life at his London estate of Wanstead, dying in 1606. In short, not one of Duncan-Jones's three principal West Country figures would spontaneously have thrust himself upon a local consciousness; all would require cultivation. But from the time of Sclater's arrival in Somerset he was embattled; his life of complaint and vexation in his adoptive region hardly seems conducive to the formation of chauvinistic reading tastes.

Four names on Duncan-Jones's list quickly boil down to two, and then just one. If W. S. associated Peter with Mountjoy (not only because of the Devon connection but for reasons I'll mention in a moment), then Ford and Daniel may be implicated only incidentally, not as West Country poets but as protobiographers whose elegies constituted the readiest sources for Mountjoy's life and death. As for Sidney, though Mountjoy indeed married Stella, the marriage gave rise to scandal. Mountjoy died three months later, prompting the court gossip John Chamberlain to write:

The Earl of Devonshire left this life on Thursday night last, soon and

early for his years, but late enough for himself; and happy had be been

if he had gone two or three years since, before the world was weary of

him or that he had left that scandal behind him.(3)

W. S. models his grieving account of Peter's death on Ford's treatment of Mountjoy's fall, which in turn follows popular representations of Essex's fall. Accordingly, W. S. often writes as though Peter died the victim of an envious faction rather than a single hand, and he fears that Peter's bad end will, like Mountjoy's, destroy his reputation. Such sympathies are plausible in Shakespeare, the apparent admirer of Essex, who can also be linked with Mountjoy via Southampton; when Southampton incurred the Queen's wrath for his unauthorized marriage to Elizabeth Vernon, Mountjoy courageously proclaimed him his best friend.(4) But the same sympathies are unlikely in Sclater, who would have balked at taking up the scandalous Mountjoy and would have frowned at Penelope's loud contempt for her Puritan husband and her long flirtation with Catholicism (rumored to have ended in a deathbed conversion).(5) For Sidney to enter "Sclater's" poem under such auspices was to be tarnished by association.

In sum, of the four names on Duncan-Jones's list, only Mountjoy, who was more a Londoner and a habitue of the court than a West Country man, seems relevant. But a fifth name is strangely absent from Duncan-Jones's list: Shakespeare's. Even scholars skeptical of Shakespeare's authorship concede that the Elegy contains many echoes of his work. Duncan-Jones fails to explain why a Somerset-based Puritan minister scornful of "loose mimics" should have phrases from Shakespeare rattling around his head.

Jacobean literary and aristocratic society was close-knit, degrees of separation minimal. For this reason, any number of lines can be drawn connecting Duncan-Jones's Elegy-related figures. To illustrate, one way to link Mountjoy, Ford, Daniel, Sidney, and Shakespeare, while emphatically excluding Sclater, is through the countess of Pembroke's Wilton. Shakespeare performed and visited there, Sidney was the countess's brother, Daniel enjoyed her patronage, Ford dedicated texts to both her sons, and Mountjoy took over as Daniel's patron after Daniel left her service. What is more, Otho Peter, Will's father, seems to have had land dealings with the countess.(6) Still, I do not deceive myself that Wilton holds a lost key to the Elegy any more than I believe in Duncan-Jones's West Country network. Wilton's viability as an alternative common denominator highlights the flaw in Duncan-Jones's method.

Returning later in her essay to W.S.'s alleged West Country orientation, Duncan-Jones observes that "every single one" of Sclater's five books published between 1610 and 1612 "had a West Country dedication" (201). The coincidence would be significant only if the books were dedicated to acquaintances living elsewhere--for example, in Sclater's former residence of Staffordshire--and if the Elegy were also dedicated, unaccountably, to a Staffordshire resident. Taken by itself without support from Duncan-Jones's bogus West Country "echoes," the Elegy's dedication to Peter's brother who lived in Devon is unremarkable.

Duncan-Jones argues that W. S. was not just a West Country resident but a Puritan. Besides noting the Elegy's contratheatrical motif (discussed in my previous essay), she submits only two pieces of evidence: (a) the word predestinated, for which see Foster's present discussion, and (b) W. S.'s citations from the Bible, "especially those books most drawn on by Puritans, the Old Testament Prophets and Revelation" (196). One passage she traces to Rev. 20:12. But Revelation was a favorite Shakespeare text, adapted, by Naseeb Shaheen's count, no fewer than ninety-one times (including six adaptations of Rev. 20:12) in thirty-three plays.(7) Neither were the Prophets a Puritan monopoly, but the point is moot since Duncan-Jones's two examples are questionable. The more plausible is W. S.'s very free adaptation of Dan. 9:27 (FE, 171-4);(8) the other, his phrase, "the path / Which guides to doing well" (FE, 503-04), to which Duncan-Jones compares Joel 2.8:

Neither shall one thrust one another, they shall walke euery one in his

path: and when they fall upon the sword, they shall not be wounded.

Duncan-Jones concedes that "the verbal link is a bit tenuous." Is there anything that links the two passages besides the word path, which, with its plural, occurs seventy-six times in the King James Bible?

Arriving at this plateau Duncan-Jones surveys the ground she has traversed: "Putting all these things together I believe that the Elegie's tone, preoccupations, imagery, and literary allusions point to its being the work of someone of strong Puritan faith, most probably a clergyman, living in the West Country" (197). I have faithfully recorded all of Duncan-Jones's evidence. From what then does she deduce not only a West Country Puritan but "someone of strong Puritan faith," and why a clergyman, unless "preachy" has been silently promoted from an aesthetic judgment to a historical datum? Duncan-Jones immediately builds on her inference: "If such a man were in holy orders he would probably be a university graduate." That lets out Shakespeare. But unless I nodded, no evidence for a formally educated Puritan clergyman ever emerges. Instead, turning to Sclater, Duncan-Jones demonstrates his possession of all the traits she herself conjures by innuendo.

Duncan-Jones saves for last her discussion of W. S.'s personal travails. During his Somerset ministry, Sclater suffered traducement and "hazard of life," possibly from a knife wound such as Peter received.(9) Duncan-Jones connects this with W. S.'s enigmatic allusion to his loss of "credit"--credit he hopes to regain in the place he lost it, "Even in which place the subject of the verse/ ... / Had education and new being" (149-52). The apparent reference is to Oxford, where Peter was "double honor'd in degree." But Sclater was a Cambridge man, whose troubles occurred in the West Country. Duncan-Jones positions herself with two arguments. First, she conflates the "place" where W. S. was traduced (148) with the "soil / Where [Peter] enjoy'd his birth, life, death and seat" (130-31), although eighteen lines separate the two words. "It is just about conceivable--" she condescends, "this writer not being distinguished for lucidity--that the `soile' of line 130 is different from the `place' of lines 148-49 ... but to me this seems rather unlikely" (197). Why unlikely? When in her TLS letter Duncan-Jones admitted that "Exercise in this kind" might refer to elegiac composition, she similarly opted for a conversation-closing "But I find this unlikely." In neither instance does she give reasons for her privileged impression; and with respect to "place" she buoys up her reading with a citation that should have sunk it.

W. S. claims to have lost credit in the place where Peter "had education and new being" (152). Duncan-Jones interprets:

In conjunction with "new beeing" [Q1], which presumably refers to

birth, baptism, or both, I think the poet is using "education" in OED's

sense 1, current until the Restoration: "The process of rearing a child

or young person." The phrase "education and new beeing" is a

cumbersome expansion of the very familiar expression "bred and born"

For Duncan-Jones the poet is "forging a connection between the location" of his own loss of credit and the region where Peter was born and bred. Perhaps; but she further opines that in order "to make any real sense," this connection must be a "geographical coincidence" and not just an analogy between two hostile environments. Standard scholarly procedure to determine what W. S. had in mind when he wrote "education" is to compare the word's use elsewhere in the Elegy. Duncan-Jones ignores its occurrence in line 54 in context with "Learning" and "Teaching" (56, 61)--a train that leads W. S. to the conclusion that Peter "spen[t] his spring of days in sacred schools" (74), that is, at Oxford. As for "new being," though Duncan-Jones glosses the phrase as "birth, baptism, or both," baptism instantly drops away. Her argument requires her to read simply, "birth"; otherwise she could not generate her variant of the set phrase, "born and bred." (To read "birth" for "new being" additionally creates a unique redundancy with the phrase, "birth, life, death and seat.")

Determining that W. S. lost credit in the West Country, Duncan-Jones inquires into the cause of his loss. Her earlier hunch of a clergyman now gives rise to the inference that W. S. got into "trouble within some close-knit provincial community," where he was maligned by "his parishioners, perhaps." To enable this unfounded inference, she is obliged to disregard the word sin (W. S.'s enemies "sifted to imbane / [his] reputation, with a witless sin"). Thus convenienced, Duncan-Jones speculates that W. S. "may have been altogether too independent minded for some people's liking" (199). The conjecture turns out to fit Sclater, who matches Duncan-Jones's profile in every particular:

We are looking ... for a man of education and ability who had got into

some sort of serious trouble, perhaps for his religious convictions.

These troubles were strongly linked with the same "place" where William

Peter was born and died. This individual did not normally write

poetry. (200)

Besides "ability," not one point here can be sustained by direct argument from the evidence. At such moments one may be excused for wondering whether Duncan-Jones's profile was not created to fit the suspect.

Even when Duncan-Jones's frame is in place, Sclater requires considerable grooming. In initially explaining her method of profiling the elegist, Duncan-Jones announced that her arguments "rule out any possibility of Shakespeare's authorship, no matter what Professor Foster's database may reveal." But Duncan-Jones discards more than just the evidence from Shaxicon. She ignores stylistic and linguistic indicators, ignores evidence of borrowings from a manuscript to which few writers besides Shakespeare could have had access, ignores similarities with nearly contemporaneous Shakespeare plays, and much more. At one point, acknowledging Sclater's stylistic differences from W. S. (this is the problem she sidesteps by abruptly declaring that her case for Sclater is only tentative), Duncan-Jones appeals to circumstances: W. S. composed in haste, in shock, and in an unfamiliar genre. The same argument could be used to support a claim for Shakespeare or just about anyone.

By way of positive lexical evidence, Duncan-Jones observes [hat "Sclater was an adventurous writer ... capable of such a coinage as `possibilited.' The OED includes several hundred citations from Sclater's works" (206). Over five hundred, by my count, and many strange indeed, but few that overlap W. S. The rarest matching word is overgo, which W. S. uses differently from the OED citation for Sclater, though in a sense corresponding to two out of three Shakespeare uses. The next rarest is unrest, which Duncan-Jones cites hopefully. But unrest is common enough in Shakespeare; indeed, according to Chadwyck-Healey, the language's earliest analogue to the Elegy's exact locution of "deep'st unrest" is "deep unrest" in The Rape of Lucrece (line 1275).(10) Most damaging, Sclater's coinages follow different principles of word-formation than those linking Shakespeare and W. S. "[T]his may not be significant," Duncan-Jones explains, because of the Elegy's "complete difference, both in genre and subject matter, from [Sclater's] prose works" (206). But the Elegy also differs generically and in subject matter from Shakespeare's plays, narrative poems and sonnets, yet the principles of coinage never vary.

Especially misleading is Duncan-Jones's dogmatic assertion that W. S. "makes much of his lack of expertise in poetry" (209). On this point as elsewhere Duncan-Jones divides her evidence, filling the gap with bountiful hypothesis. Thus, Duncan-Jones's "much" turns out to consist of only two passages in the Elegy, one that she cites at the beginning of her essay, the other at the end. Both she misreads. In her final paragraph Duncan-Jones finds damning testimony in W. S.'s utterly conventional downplaying of "The value of my talent" (242). Were we to eliminate Shakespeare on this basis, we would need to discard every text in which he speaks of his own writing, including the dedications to Southampton, the sonnets, and the dramatic prologues and epilogues both early and late, for all allude in one way or another to the poet's "all-unable pen." (The same passage contains another obvious modesty topos; W. S. remarks that "no merit strong enough of mine" can fuel poetic praise [237]).

The second passage in which W. S. supposedly confesses poetic inadequacy is the dedication--and here I must dwell on textual particulars, not only to refute Duncan-Jones's reading but to refine my own. W. S. begins by asserting that in honoring Peter, he performs the "last duty of a friend," serving therein as "but a second to the privilege of Truth." The final four-word phrase derives verbatim from Ford's dedication of Fames Memoriall (1606), in which Ford affirms that Truth will out--Truth's privilege is to make itself known--so that in correcting the record about a slandered Mountjoy, he himself becomes Truth's humble mouthpiece. Similar logic governs W. S.'s opening. Because his friend's goodness speaks for itself, Peter's reputation will thrive with or without the poet's intervention; W. S. is merely Truth's "second," its backer-up (OED, sb, II.8.a; Tmp 3.3.103).(11) More than a courtesy is involved here; the hairsplitting distinction between primary and secondary witnesses recurs throughout the Elegy. Notably, the figure of self-revealing Truth caps the poem's opening meditation: "Truth doth leave / Sufficient proof" (26). And what Truth leaves proof of is not quite Peter's "good endeavors"--dying young, he left unperformed many noble deeds--but his "worth" or "deserts" (4, 7, 12). The idea is clearly important, for "deserts" occurs also as the last word of the dedication, in which the Elegy is inscribed to Peter's brother and to those who loved Will Peter "for his deserts."

The antithesis of deeds and deserts is bound up with the dedication's next sentence, in which W. S. disclaims "Exercise in this kind." Duncan-Jones reads a non sequitur: I am new at writing poetry--not an impossible reading. But for two reasons "Exercise in this kind" reads better as "exercise in the elegiac mode that I just labelled the `last duty of a friend.'" That duty, of course, is to bury and commemorate the dead--an act that W. S. incidentally performs in verse. But the unaccustomed part lies not in the choice of poetry as a medium but in the exercise of commemoration itself. This is clear because the key notion of "warrant[ing]"--that is, witness[ing]--"in [Peter's] behalf" recurs immediately in the second part of the sentence: "Exercise in this kind I will little affect ... but there must be miracle in that labor which, to witness my remembrance to this departed gentleman, I would not willingly undergo." Duncan-Jones wants to read here a greenhorn admission: "divine intervention--indeed, a `miracle'--will be required to sustain [W. S.'s] literary labor of love." But the words cannot support that meaning without emendation.(12) More correctly, W. S. explains that "in memorializing William Peter, I would undertake any labor short of the miraculous" (Foster's gloss). In other words, he sheepishly avers that he lacks practise in the art of humbly seconding the truth (I am reminded of Donne: "You know my uttermost when it was best, and even then I did best when I had least truth for my subjects"(13)). But he accepts that only through such unassuming service can he discharge "Such duties as [are] owe[d) to thy desert" (226).

Further refuting Duncan-Jones's misreading of "Exercise in this kind" is W. S.'s boast of artistic prowess the moment he enters the poem in the first person:

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

(79-82)

As I noted in my earlier essay, W. S. trusts in his own power to move an audience; by telling Peter's story he can compel broad assent. Systematic allusions further indicate that W. S.'s wonted narrative mode is theatrical--though my argument to this effect drew fire from Stanley Wells and Leah Marcus (and a custard pie from Stephen Booth). In denying that "progress [out]" is dramaturgical, Wells misses my point, which is simply that the transitive infinitive means to narratize--the dramaturgical connotations rest on other elements in the passage. Marcus, too, errs in narrowly relating W. S.'s vaunt "to the language of the ecclesiastical courts": "Although Will Peter himself cannot prosecute for slander in the usual way--by bringing in six or more citizens to swear to his good name--W. S. can posthumously restore that name by serving himself as witness of the `common voice.'" Certainly, the act of witness is relevant, but Marcus needs to make room for "force."(14) W. S. places himself in a dynamic relation to public opinion. Boasting ability to force the common voice, he cannot simultaneously embody it.

Clearly, W. S. boasts of his power to retrace Peter's life, but as I have come to realize, progress out also means something else. It means to come forward in time from Peter's death, projecting what he would have been had he lived. This more truly "progressive" meaning is guaranteed by the next quatrain with its explanatory "For":

For if his fate and heaven had decreed

That full of days he might have lived to see

The grave in peace, the times that should succeed

Had been best-speaking witnesses with me

(83-86)

Though Peter's brief life exhibited only deserts, that same life, continuing along the path it was following, would have produced "good endeavors" such as times future would have applauded. While affirming his ability to supplement Peter's deserts with fabricated deeds possessing verisimilitude, however, W. S. renews his commitment to seconding literal Truth, which already witnesses in Peter's behalf. Twice he echoes the dedication, declining to force an audience to "warrant what I say" (82), to turn contemporaries into "witnesses with me" (86). He refrains from intervening heroically because, by a fiction, Peter's deserts already guarantee lasting fame. "[S]hould [Peter] lie obscur'd without a tomb"--should W. S. fail in his act of poetic commemoration--"Time would to time his honesty commend" (159-60), Truth continue to exercise its privilege of speaking. No less fervently would "the times that should succeed" have applauded Peter's deeds had he lived than the present time will bear unprompted witness to his deserts.

W. S.'s ethical commitment entails an aesthetic loss. In this poem, fit service often means little more than to repeat flatly, with imperceptible variations, "He was good" (532; cf. 17, 346). But if W. S. high-mindedly performs an aesthetically disappointing act of witness, he keeps in focus the conditions by which he is able to stir the common voice. Because Peter exhibited perfect consistency of character, because "He was good," W. S. can conjure predictively his friend's unacted deeds, "display[ing] / A good man in each part exact"; he can present Peter (in Sidneian terms) not as he was but as he should have been. In thus claiming ability to complete the life-as-text that "Time ... / Abridg'd" (1-2), W. S. takes as his province a vatic realm off-limits both to Duncan-Jones's preacher and Marcus's ecclesiastical court-witness. His power lies in his command of the poet's immemorial stock-in-trade of probable fictions. And though he declines the option of stirring an audience, he never doubts "The value of my talent" to achieve this end. He simply refuses, for once, to "range beyond [himself], courting opinion with unfit disguise."

One respondent suggests that I have tried to pass the Elegy off as "a good poem." I don't accept these as the terms of the debate. Granted, I derive more pleasure from a sonnet, but I find the Elegy interesting, and my experience in staging it (for four voices) has convinced me that several passages can be compelling. It's regrettable that authorship politics prevents some readers from hearing a syllable of the elegist's grief! Deferring critical appraisals, we need to be discussing the circumstances of the Elegy's composition. The suspicion, aired frequently at an earlier stage of discussion, that W. S.'s initials are falsified, seems to have died away, and a similar demise seems to be overtaking the misperception of W. S. as a paid hack ("Not hir'd").(15) Patently, a debate looms over the question of the elegist's acquaintance with Peter (for me, the issue is decided by W. S.'s divulgence of having sealed with his friend a "constant and irrefragable vow" [235]). These are matters to thrash out in the normal give-and-take of evidence. A harder question is how to break the vicious circle in which a nuanced reading of the Elegy becomes immediately suspect because readers assume that a Sclater-caliber author cannot have meant much of anything. I conclude with a crux that again engages both the poem and its dedication.

A stranger to "Exercise in this kind," W. S. in his dedication proclaims that he "little affect[s], and [is] less addicted to" elegiac composition. The verbs echo a passage (echo, in the sense that the poem gives evidence of anterior composition) in which W. S. praises Peter as one who neither "Affect[ed] fashions, nor [was] addicted wholly / To unbeseeming blushless vanities" (93-94). Is the repetition an unconscious reminiscence, or does W. S. exert strong artistic control over harmonies and minute variations of phrase? A fair amount hinges on the question. W. S. implicates himself in the degeneracy of Peter's murderer(s) through such devices as his climactic appropriation of the epithet "courting opinion" earlier applied to Drew and his kind. A similar irony may operate in W. S.'s understatement that he is not addicted to elegy; by using words elsewhere connoting theatrical excess, he may imply his own discomfort with pious exercises. But that is a debate we're not yet ready to engage, for we've yet to agree on the subtleties of which W. S. is capable. Right now, good poem or bad, the Elegy needs some better readers.

Notes

(1.) Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Who Wrote A Funerall Elegie?" Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997): 192-210, 208.

(2.) Though a small matter, it is worth noting that Daniel probably came from the Bath area in the northeast tip of Somerset rather than from Taunton (where Duncan-Jones places him), in the extreme southwest, near Sclater's Pitminster; similarly, Beckington, to which Daniel retired, is in the northeast; cf. Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1964), 2. Lisa Hopkins, John Ford's Political Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), tentatively places Ford within a Catholic coterie. If she is right, Ford would be even less likely to be included in Sclater's reading list.

(3.) Cited in Cyril Falls, Mountjoy: Elizabethan General (London: Odhams Press, 1955), 235.

(4.) Mountjoy to Cecil, 8 June 1600, CSP Ireland, 9: 223. After Mountjoy's death, Southampton served as his chief mourner and took financial responsibility for his illegitimate children.

(5.) For Penelope's Catholic associations, cf. Hopkins, Ford's Political Theatre, 9-13. To be sure, Mountjoy and Sidney can be linked in other ways than through Penelope. But when all is said, one must question whether Sidney was regarded as an honorary West Country man, even in the "tangential" way Duncan-Jones suggests. Sidney's death met with an outpouring of memorial verse; anyone who could capitalize on an association did so. If Sidney truly functioned as a source of West Country pride, Duncan-Jones should be able to adduce evidence to that effect.

(6.) PRO, London: Inq. p.m. C142/296/106 (8 Oct. 1607); copy, Court of Wards, WARD 7/33/251.

(7.) Donald W. Foster, "Shakespeare and the Peters in History," Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998): 293; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Tragedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987); Biblical References in Shakespeare's Histories (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989); Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993).

(8.) "The Text of A Funeral Elegy by W. S.," ed. Donald W. Foster, Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997), 95-114.

(9.) Inferring that Sclater may have been the victim of a knife attack, Duncan-Jones argues that his emotional identification with Peter inspired the poem. But W. S. never mentions a knife injury, and he alludes only obliquely to Peter's mode of death. If W. S. sustained such a wound, the coincidence with Peter would have been uncanny and he might be expected to make more of it. So if Sclater did suffer a knife attack, it can be argued that the circumstance weakens his chance of being the elegist.

(10.) Chadwyck-Healey, Literature Online (LION), online, available at http://www.chadwyck.co.uk/lion/index.html.

(11.) With regard to W. S.'s fiction of the universal self-revealing truth of Peter's goodness, Duncan-Jones's contention that W. S. "claims to be uniquely qualified to perform the task of creating a poetic monument to [Peter's] good name" is seriously misleading.

(12.) In the first version of my previous essay I myself misread along Duncan-Jones's lines, supplying a "but" before "to witness," "W[illiam] S[hakespeare's] `Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," Studies in English Literature 36 no. 2 (spring 1996): 435-460, 437.

(13.) John Donne, "An hymne to the Saints," in Poems, ed. H. Grierson (reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 1: 288.

(14.) Stanley Wells, "`A Funeral Elegy': Obstacles to Belief," Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997): 186-91; Leah S. Marcus, "Who Was Will Peter? Or, A Plea for Literary History," Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997): 211-28, 218.

(15.) In a related view, Marcus conjectures that Shakespeare wrote the Elegy on retiring to Stratford to ingratiate himself with the "local magnate" Edward Greville, who was Peter's kinsman, or with members of Greville's family. But Stratford town historians such as Fripp make clear that Greville's fortunes had waned by 1612 (Greville had already surrendered the Manor of Stratford to the Crown by 4 March 1610, when it was sold to William Whitmore), that the Stratford Corporation despised Greville, and that his family regarded him as a loose cannon. For Shakespeare to cultivate such an alliance would have been bad town politics. Furthermore, Edward was rumored to be an accidental fratricide, and his mad-dog father (later executed for a different murder) supposedly aggravated the scandal by laughingly condoning the killing. To lament Peter as an Abel to Drew's Cain (FE, 383-90) in such company would not result in popularity. Equally unhistorical is Marcus's account of the departure of Shakespeare's cousin Thomas Greene from Stratford after "repeated shaming rituals" (Marcus, 226). Greene left Stratford because of strained relations not with Greville, apparently, but with William Combe. Greene's brother meanwhile remained on solid enough terms with Greville's ally George Carew for Carew to recommend him for town clerk on Thomas's departure. For Edward Greville and Thomas Greene, cf. Edgar I. Fripp. Shakespeare: Man and Artist (reprint: London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 2: 542-48, 833-36, et passim. A more recent and detailed account of Greville's decline may be found in Menna Prestwich, Cranfield: Politics and Profits under the Early Stuarts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 70, 78, 86, 401ff.

RICHARD ABRAMS is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. He is completing a book entitled Another Shakespeare: Essays in Speculative Biography.