"Exercise in this kind": Shakespeare and the "Funeral Elegy" for William Peter.

Abrams, Richard

The story has become familiar: On 25 January 1612, in Exeter, after a day's drinking with the brothers Edward and John Drew, William Peter was murdered. Nineteen days later Thomas Thorpe entered in the London Stationers' Register a 578-line poem entitled A Funeral Elegy in Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter. The poem, twice signed W. S., was introduced to Shakespeare studies by Donald Foster in Elegy by W. S.: A Study in Attribution (1989). Noting the possibility of Shakespeare's authorship, Foster did not at that time feel he could press his arguments with confidence. But over the next five years, new evidence emerged; Foster and I presented an augmented case for Shakespeare's authorship at professional conferences, in the Times Literary Supplement and the Shakespeare Newsletter, in the journals PMLA and SEL, and online.(1) Inevitably, the Elegy's attribution to Shakespeare met with resistance; dry and repetitious, the poem was not a welcome addition to the canon. Yet the case for Shakespeare's authorship rests on powerful evidence: biographical coincidences, verbal echoes of canonical works including plays not yet printed in 1612, and anticipations of a play or plays not yet written in 1612, together with a host of characteristic, even idiosyncratic stylistic mannerisms. That these coincidences were managed in probably under two weeks (allowing for news of Peter's murder to travel the 160 miles from Exeter to London) by a poet who just happened to be initialed 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 were initially skeptical of claims for Shakespeare's authorship began to listen hard to the evidence.

The present essay, expanding on one originally published in SEL, looks first at W. S.'s allusions to the theatrical profession and at singularities in his manner of alluding to Shakespeare; on both scores, I argue, W. S. must be Shakespeare himself. If the Elegy deviates stylistically from Shakespeare's other writings, then this deviation may be explained as an accommodation to the poetic occasion, an accommodation for which the Elegy supplies abundant metapoetic evidence of intention. In a further turn of my argument, I contextualize the poet's transformation of his customary style by linking the Elegy with proximate Shakespearean texts. My attempt in this latter regard is speculative, falling outside the bounds of my stricter evidentiary argument. Others who accept the Elegy as Shakespeare's may wish to build other bridges. It is plain in any case that some bridging is in order if the poem is truly to be assimilated to the canon and not just to orbit around it indefinitely, like the little-read but widely accepted A Lover's Complaint. For even if the massive evidence for Shakespeare's authorship stands up to scrutiny, the Elegy faces emotional resistance because of the kind of poem it is. In a record starved of first-person testimony, the Elegy bids to be that thing we have sorely lacked: an intimate document--from the final years, no less--in which Shakespeare extemporizes on the way of the world and his own sense of place in it.

Because the Elegy, if Shakespeare's, must be reckoned nothing less than a late-life credo of our favorite author's, it raises high expectations and is capable of touching off deep resentments. Our latent bardolatry feels violated to hear a voice so alien proposed as "our Shakespeare's." Of course, by now there are many Shakespeares, from Arnold's demigod "out-topping knowledge" to the New Historicist's cipher, the locus of collaborative cultural forces. Yet probably the most familiar of these--paradoxically, the most international--is the Shakespeare who appeared first 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 then unknown; readers around the world hold him dear. This sense of personal attachment can feel threatened by the strange voice in the poem, a voice that can sound like that of Richard II disowning his followers: "For you have but mistook me all this while" (3.2.174).(2) To begin with the strangeness, I turn to a passage in which W. S. muses on his own departure from comfortable norms.

I

In his dedication to William Peter's older 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, to witness my remembrance to

this departed gentleman, I would not willingly undergo

As I read this, W. S. does not say that he is a stranger to poetic exercise as such but only to "Exercise in this kind," to elegy writing--a task he is nonetheless prepared to undertake to witness his regard for "this departed gentleman." That W. S. is a practicing poet appears both in direct assertions elsewhere in the Elegy and in the poem's many felicities, such as its smooth versifying, which bespeaks practice. However, even if poetic composition is no novelty to the elegist, to suppose that his wonted genre is dramatic poetry may 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 not necessarily to want of skill on the elegist's part, but perhaps only to an easily comprehended artistic program. Rather than dignify Peter's murderer by placing him center stage with his victim. W. S. reduces Edward Drew's visibility, making Peter the victim of cosmic forces, of "time, and his predestinated end" (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 satisfactions. Vividly staging his own 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, for example, with reference to the poem's hasty composition or 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. We have no reason to believe that the elegist was prevented by deadline from working till he had what he wanted--and in any case the Elegy's style seems all wrong. When Shakespeare errs, he errs usually 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 that does sound like the Shakespeare that finds its way into anthologies. One of the poem's few 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

(171-74)

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 rages for the "purity and whiteness of [his] sheets," for universal desolation. 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 that "Shakespeare thought in metaphor, analogy, terms of likeness: he represented one thing by another" (his italics).(3) 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.(4) 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."(5) If W. S.'s sensibility extends this far, we probably shouldn't pronounce on how he thinks, since how he writes depends on conscious discipline. Yet if W. S.'s mask of art is impenetrable, if the poet 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 his fully conscious theorizing of his elegiac practice.

In a typical and symptomatic posture, W. S. blames imagination for its role in Peter's death. Throughout the Elegy, W. S. 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" (416). But Peter, speaking "in tongue most plain," avoided "the complemental phrase of words" and "never was addicted to the vain / Of boast" (325-28). 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" (229-31). The notion of an overweening imagination evidently held special associations for this poet--a different writer might never think to connect imagination with the random violence that ended Peter's life--and these associations suggest why the elegist might choose to rein in his imagination in writing the poem. Like Prospero who drowned his book because reluctant on his return to society to hold godlike sway over his fellow creatures, so W. S. disdains to use imagination to bully or bedazzle. Moreover, Prospero becomes a pertinent comparison in the respect that the terms W. S. presses into service to characterize the rabid imaginations of Drew and his kind admit often of theatrical implications. Affectation, disguise, "glad sleights" (73): these terms suggest not just literary art, but that branch of literary art which "court[s] opinion" on a daily basis (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. adopts 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 the elegist 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.

(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" public 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 in writings of the period, not goodness but greatness compels "common" (i.e., vulgar; cf. line 327) admiration; hence W. S.'s remark better suits a figure of public mourning like Charles Mountjoy, Earl of Devonshire, whose career Samuel Daniel "progressed out" in a funeral poem from which the Peter elegy borrows.(6) 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," that power resides not in the life as such but in the representation or "full discourse" that converts the 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 simply that Peter was a good man in each and every quality. But "part" is also a latent theatrical metaphor which the adjacent lines activate. The theatrical sense is insistent in the modifier "exact." Contemporaneous usage offers analogies; a year before the Peter elegy, Prospero could be heard on the London stage praising Ariel for "Exactly ... perform[ing]" his charge--the context is heavy with theatrical implication--and bidding him further to perform "exactly . . . / All points of my command" (Tmp 1.2.238, 500-01). On this reading, Peter's life comprised a series of roles, which the young man performed with exactitude. Moreover, if W. S. thinks theatrically in claiming ability to narratize Peter's life, displaying a good man in each enacted part, then his further 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 suggests the manipulated response of literal spectators confronting the poet's seductive "display." Judged by the deeds Peter lived to perform, his 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 clear: 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.(7)

After signalling his professional status, W. S. continues for awhile to use theatrical language casually. Characterizing his friend's "honesty and worth" as a text to be "scan[ned]," he salutes Peter's enactment of "judicious parts" which "win / Applause" (88-89,102,115-16). Then, climactically 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" (127-28). Here, the "stage" on which Peter performed 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" [129-30]).(8) Peter's life was fit "matter" for the poet's pen ("style") to "rehearse" (150-51) precisely because he lived it untheatrically. His custom of "suiting so his habit and desire / As that his virtue was his best attire" (95-96) contrasts with the wicked who "Court . . . opinion with unfit disguise" (92), and also with a weakened W. S. who at the end of the poem will himself "court opinion" (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" (275-76)--and playwrights "plotting ... / For popular applause" (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, then W. S. has cause to practice similar restraint, forsaking customary activities shared with the wicked.

In noting the conformity of W. S.'s style to his friend's outspoken plainness, we are in a position to survey the Elegy's fundamental artistic 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, too, was a poet of sorts, inscribing his deeds in human memory and God's book (160-70, 179-80). And Peter may have been a literal poet, competent to write W. S.'s eulogy had W. S. predeceased him (236-40). But because Peter died first, W. S.'s question became: How to praise his friend in a manner befitting Peter's virtue. The answer was obvious; modulating his style to harmonize with the dead man's, W. S. scrupulously mortifies his own habitual play of fancy (able to "force / The common voice"), both praising Peter's restraint and, more relevantly, emulating it. In this latter sense, the Elegy becomes a kind of impersonation, however disdainful of the stage's huckstering values. 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. And in thus stylistically binding himself to the departed, he performs a ritual gesture, in effect continuing beyond the grave a friendship celebrated 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 poem, but whether it sustains Shakespearean levels of competence, and whether its project can be plausibly assimilated to Shakespeare's canonical texts. Stylistically, the Elegy may fail to excite readers, yet the poem can be shown to succeed on its own terms: W. S. sets forth in Will Peter a stylistic idea to which he holds himself answerable. Yes, a wag might interject, an ideal of Dullness. But it would be rash to speak peremptorily of failure when the Elegy so clearly embodies the stylistic qualities of plainness and directness it proposes to our admiration. Though the narrative posture may strike us as odd for Shakespeare, the very fact that the poem embodies 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 poem exhibits an antitheatrical style--one which, in its own terms, is free from "affect[ation]," "disguise," "glad sleights," however much we might miss these entertaining vices. "I could write a play about Peter, compelling applause," W. S. proclaims in effect, "for 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 branching syntax, typical of late Shakespeare) is a question that exceeds my present scope. In any event, 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 Elegy, we are in a position to affirm W. S.'s identity, because now we are dealing not just with a poetic W. S. but with one who lived his life in the public eye. 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 would be untraceable.(9) 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

To readers of the Times Literary Supplement who followed the debate about the Elegy in early 1996, my argument may seem to rest on a naive assumption. Though I contend that W. S. was a professional playwright, TLS readers may question whether he was even a W. S. If authorial initials in the early modern period were unreliable, as Brian Vickers asserts, then "W. S." by transposition may be S. W. (e.g., Simon Wastell).(10) Or he may possess an entirely different set of initials, signing himself pseudonymously, as Nicholas Breton often did for reasons unknown, or suffering misrepresentation at the hands of a publisher eager to improve sales by implying Shakespeare's authorship. Once doubts are cast on the elegist's initials (which appear both on the title page and in the dedication), readers may despair of ever learning his identity. Yet this aporetic response would be excessive; not only can reasons be added to those already in circulation supporting the initials W. S., but I would argue that, though the initials were invaluable in providing a first clue to the elegist's identity, they are superseded in importance by other kinds of evidence that converge in Shakespeare's behalf.

In the TLS debate, skepticism toward Shakespeare's authorship flourished in an atmosphere of indifference to close stylistic analysis, especially when that analysis turned statistical. Eyebrows lifted, as if at a breach of drawing-room propriety ("Most people who make a profession of the study of literature . . . are . . . better at English than at maths"(11)). But the Elegy's measurable correspondences with late Shakespearean style are so extensive that not even a malin genie of an author could have worked them all into his text. And of course no author would have bothered, since Jacobean bookbuyers did not normally count ands and buts before making a purchase. Style matters: if W. S. favors "incongruous who/m" or a rare (indeed, but for Shakespeare and himself, unexampled) form of hendiadys, if he sustains an unusually high rate of enjambment, then Simon Wastell or any other contender for authorship (such as Katherine Duncan-Jones's announced candidate, the non-poet William Sclater(12)) should display at least tendencies in this direction. To discard Foster's tests because one doesn't like the result sets a dangerous precedent. Few scholars are prepared to abandon their opinions about the division of hands in The Two Noble Kinsmen, or the bolder surmise of a second hand in Henry VIII, though these judgments were achieved largely through testing similar to Foster's, though less rigorous.

Another reason for confidence lies in the voice of the elegist, which comes through loud and clear in the poem. One cannot read ten lines of the Elegy without encountering a writer of passionate integrity who would be disinclined to make capital on his own or another's grief. Yet it has been suggested that W. S. was a hireling (possibly a curate) retained by the Peter family to salvage the reputation of a youth he barely knew.(13) Such rank conjecture flies in the face of W. S.'s direct testimony that he takes pen in hand, "Not hir'd, as heaven can witness in my soul," but to discharge "a constant and irrefragable vow" to a "fast friend" (229, 235, 574), and it ignores W. S.'s frequent denunciations of careerism (447-50), the spiritually abasing pursuit of gain (46), "disguise," and "loose mimics" who exercise themselves in borrowed passions (275-76). If W. S. were a hireling, he might be expected to make more room for himself in his poem. Further, his mourning attitudes are inconsistent with those of a paid mourner or family friend offering solace. These include self-remonstration, ambivalence toward the deceased, and misgivings about religion, culminating in a confession of shaken faith. To be sure, these attitudes appear side by side with more conventional ones, but the presence of the topoi of consolatory rhetoric in the poem does not undo the obvious fact of W. S.'s urgency to work through a personal grief.

Regarding initials: Jacobean authors who signed themselves pseudonymously generally had obvious reasons for concealment (e.g., recusant fears of sanctions). W. S., however, had reasons to make himself known. Though the poem's intended audience is uncertain, we may be sure of one reader, the dedicatee, John Peter, whom not even an alteration of initials could have fooled. And W. S. indicates a second audience: he hopes his poem will "Purchas[e] credit in the place I lost it. / Even in which place the subject of the verse [Peter] / . . . / Had education and new being" (148-152). The lines have been glossed as reflecting W. S.'s desire to see his elegy collected in the newly-founded Bodleian Library at Oxford (where Peter was "double-honor'd in degree" [302]). Though the details of W. S.'s disgrace are lost to us, the elegist plainly wishes and expects to be recognized. To falsify his initials under the circumstances would have been tantamount to sabotaging his own project of redeeming his good name.

Then too, if W. S. had cause to sign himself correctly, a publisher might hesitate to tamper with his signature--not least because the elegist gives the impression on every page of a man with a retaliatory axe to grind. But also, such a publishing venture stood to gain little. Prior to the Peter elegy, independently bound volumes of memorial verse to "private persons" were virtually unknown(14); without reference to an established market, a publisher might gamble on profits but he could hardly count on them. Indeed, on the basis of the Elegy's subject matter, its lack of an "Epistle to the Reader" and its title page's failure to note either a stationer or a sales location, Foster deduces that the Elegy was privately printed, its printing financed by W. S. himself.(15) The inference seems plausible, though we need not rely on it to argue Thorpe's faithful transmission of W. S.'s initials. If Thorpe were piratically inclined, he might have done better to attach Shakespeare's name to anonymous doggerel on any light subject than to funeral verses for an obscure country gentleman with whom the reading public failed to associate him. Or even if the public somehow linked the dramatist with Will Peter, Shakespeare's name (much less his initials) did not guarantee sales when attached to a non-narrative, nondramatic text. Thorpe knew this better than anyone. Three years earlier he had published, with fanfare, Shakespeares Sonnets. Never Before Imprinted, yet despite the hard-sell title and the amatory subject matter, the volume evidently sold too poorly to warrant a second printing.

Recent assessments of Thorpe's character also lend credence to his ascription of the manuscript in which he held the copyright. Thorpe's reputation, long at low ebb partly because of a characterassassinating article by Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography, was restored some years ago by Katherine Duncan-Jones in an essay stressing Thorpe's theatrical connections.(16) The publisher of Chapman, Marston and "for four crucial years" Ben Jonson, Thorpe labored to ensure the continuing favor of theater men, on whom depended much of his trade. Through Jonson, Duncan-Jones imagines Thorpe meeting Shakespeare, from whom he obtained a manuscript of the Sonnets. Thus, where Lee painted Thorpe a shady entrepreneur, Duncan-Jones underscores his rectitude and careful attention to manuscript copy. Presumably, Thorpe's sense of fairplay would have extended to the elegist, especially if W. S. were involved in the London theater.

To take this argument further: in a well-received essay on the Sonnets antedating his work on the Elegy, Foster ratifies Duncan-Jones's favorable account of Thomas Thorpe. He interprets "T. T.'s" notorious "dedication" to "Mr. W. H." as a typographical error for "Mr. W. SH."--Shakespeare himself.(17) If Foster is right, then Thorpe was not just "Jonson's friend," as Duncan-Jones styles him, but Shakespeare's as well; their amity would have deepened with Thorpe's publication of the Elegy. But what if a W. S. other than Shakespeare wrote the poem? In that case Shakespeare presumably would have wanted Thorpe to shield him from confusion with the obscure poet who shared his initials, used theatrical imagery and mimicked his style. When in the same year as the Elegy, Thorpe published William Shute's translation of Guillaume du Vair's Holy Meditations upon Seaven Penitentiall Psalmes (1612), he signed the author "W. Shute," though not even the most careless reader could mistake this W. S. for Shakespeare. Then too, even if Shakespeare might tolerate being taken for another W. S., the elegist had reasons to maintain a distinct identity--for instance, to clear his name at Oxford. Yet he invites confusion at every turn: he models his dedication on that of Lucrece; he puns on (or tolerates the appearance of punning on) his own apparent forename of Will and Peter's forename of Will (FE, 246, 68, 338), and he often alludes to Shakespeare's poems and plays. Such practice would be odd in an author who, if he possessed even a modicum of literary intelligence, would realize that his initials already tended to fuse him with Shakespeare, yet W. S. fuels the fire, displaying not the slightest anxiety of influence.

With regard to W. S.'s Shakespeare allusions, I would argue that several of the broadest of these, when approached from a certain angle, offer clear evidence for attribution. One cannot ascribe probative value to any single allusion because, of course, anyone in 1612 could hear or read Shakespeare and then quote him. Yet a shrewder method offers itself. Instead of ascribing immediate attributional significance to a given Shakespeare echo, we may ask what W. S. himself (conceived as a separate person from Shakespeare) thinks he is doing when he creates evidence for attribution in the eyes of his contemporaries by conspicuously alluding to the celebrated author whose initials he "shares." Read this way, several of W. S.'s Shakespeare allusions tend to confirm that W. S. is Shakespeare, because they occur in contexts in which the importation of a "foreign" author would undermine the obviously intended meaning. These allusions are, in other words, reflexive; they offer retrospection, Shakespearean self-criticism of a fascinating kind, because in them we enjoy a privileged glimpse of Shakespeare harkening back to career milestones which enable him to plot his current artistic and spiritual location.

III

An instance of conspicuous Shakespeare allusion in the Elegy occurs in the quatrain preceding the evocation of a world wintered in apocalyptic storms. W. S. explains that, should high art fail to memorialize his friend, "Time would to time his [Peter's] 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 . . .

(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" (R2, 5.1.40-45). 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 time 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" (5.1.58-59, FE, 175-76). The complexity of the allusion leaves little doubt of W. S.'s derivativeness; either W. S. had passages of Richard II off by heart, or he had access to the 1597 Quarto, or to a manuscript. In any event W. S.'s choice of a text for adaptation is suggestive. In paradoxically deriving from a literary celebrity--indeed, from Shakespeare's cultivated poetking--a humble ideal of poetic art, he comments on his own aspirations in writing the Elegy. The significance emerges with respect to the Elegy's opening lines, in which W. S. broaches the problem he later resolves by adapting Richard II.

W. S. begins his poem rhetorically: "What memorable monument can last / Whereon to build [Peter's] never-blemish'd name / But his own worth?" (5-6); his "answer" occurs in our passage under discussion. Should Peter "lie obscur'd without a tomb," W. S. explains, the young man's "memorable" "worthiness" will still endure to the world's end in homely tales (159, 156). In thus saluting the spontaneity of oral tradition, W. S. implicitly calls in question his own enterprise of devising a lasting poetic monument for Peter. 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" (179-81). In the elegist's dialectic, durable honest folktales and God's eternal "book" counterpoise the vanity of 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 W. S. with antitheatrical convictions should at this juncture of anti-art in the poem seek authority from the celebrated playwright would be anomalous. But for Shakespeare in a spirit of retraction to cite his own words against himself--this strikes me as plausible and effective poetic and spiritual practice. As an allegory of stylistic conversion, the poet-king Richard's pastoral affirmation of poetic value outside the learned courtly tradition coincides with the established author Shakespeare's forsaking of his customary realm of literary control for "exercise in this kind"; it hardly suits an epigone aspiring to literary culture. The same adaptation of Richard II which would compromise the integrity of an obscure 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 evidently read the passage this way. In hispious 1613 meditation Christes Bloodie Sweate Ford bases his Christ on Peter (a 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

(1729-34)(18)

From W. S. Ford borrows the detail (absent in Richard II) of parents telling tales of woe (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. From this we may deduce that Ford supposed W. S. to be Shakespeare himself, for otherwise he would have been indiscreet when launching his own theatrical career with the King's Men play An Ill beginning has a Good End (1613, not extant) to yoke the company's principal dramatist with an upstart W. S., who crowded him by imitation and accused the stage of tawdriness.

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. That the Elegy and the Sonnets are very different kinds of writing hardly needs emphasis; yet these poems' palpable differences ought not blind us to similarities that would have struck a contemporary. Thus, W. S.'s disdain for the theater echoes the dramatized disdain of 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." To a Jacobean reader like Ford who came to the Elegy from the Sonnets (and Foster gives evidence that Ford's acquaintance predates the Sonnets' publication), Shakespeare would appear, in writing the Elegy, to make good a pledge to himself, to wear finally 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 (231-32). A reader such as Ford who took W. S. for Shakespeare would hear in the elegist's style not "servile to be lik'd" the hard-won integrity of an an author just then effecting his liberation from the stage.

Like the Sonnets, the Elegy deals with art's ability to confer immortality. Opening with the youth's procreative power to immortalize himself, the Sonnets move quickly along to the poet's power 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. Heaven refuses to "Give life anew [to the elegist], by giving life again / Where life is missed" [to Peter] (546-47); and W. S. acknowledges his own insufficiency to accomplish the task:

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 cloth proceed,

A ready will is taken for the deed.

(241-46)

Confessing that his talent (skill, coin) can only scantly supplement Peter's purchase of an eternal name through his own merits, W. S. concedes that if Peter "live to posterity, / Though it be not as I would, 'tis as I can": though not in a great poem, then in the best I can write. But also: though 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. With this somber 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. evidently puns on his forename (as he elsewhere puns on the name of Will Peter). And he adapts the language of theatrical epilogue, in which good will substitutes for achievement (similar adaptations: "If we offend, it is with our good will" [MND, 5.1. 108]; "And when good will is show'd . . . / The actor may plead pardon" [Ant 2.5.8-9]). If W. S. is not Shakespeare, he strives to look like him--but why, given his antitheatrical bias? Hard enough to account for in W. S.'s performance is his solicitation of Shakespearean authority to argue art's insufficiency (or at least his own art's insufficiency) to revive Peter. But harder still is the matter of why he would conjure a rival poet Shakespeare, whose successes vulgarly outshine his own, to intrude on an intimate moment of confessed artistic inadequacy. As with 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.

Had the Peter elegy been written, say, five years earlier, the poem would be impossible to assimilate to received narratives of Shakespeare's career and development, and its attribution would be questionable. Yet by 1612 the situation has changed considerably; the notion of palinode is at home in discussions of the aging Shakespeare. Thus, if, antitheatrical in plainness, the Elegy was written at the end of Shakespeare's theatrical 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 shared with W. S. To be sure, such a view jars with the charming Dowdenesque picture that lingers on in some circles of a poet serene in retirement. Nonetheless, Leontes' evils key with vices of Prospero, who exhibits sexual repugnance in lecturing Ferdinand, and who rides herd on the comic plotters with the Leontean hounds "Fury" and "Tyrant"--an action that causes Prospero to take stock and drown his book. The correspondences raise a possibility that Shakespeare may have staged as antisocial in his late romance heroes a personal rage that he then brought under control, espousing responsibly in the versified rants of the Elegy. Taken together with the Peter elegy, the two final romances imply a bad taste in Shakespeare's mouth. What was initially a young man's delight in his own mellifluousness came later to be 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 truly wrote the Elegy, then this late-life credo sets on a firmer footing our speculative attempts to extract an autobiographical subtext from the final plays, whose protagonists exhibit frequent distaste for human society. Of all literary arts, drama is the most sociable; its "essence . . . is human involvement."(19) Yet from such involvement Shakespeare apparently fled, living in "his elder days . . . at Stratford: and supplied ye stage with 2 plays every year."(20) Helpful in understanding the temperament behind this apparent flight from London life is 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 Aubrey invokes: "not a company keeper [he] wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to[,] writ he was in pain."(21) To proceed conjecturally, 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 of 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 impotent 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 desire to play. Of course, many will deny that the romance protagonists may be read as projections of their author, formed pearl-like around a grain of biographical fact. Such interpretive procedure still bears a taint of heresy; and in any case, it is distasteful to imagine Shakespeare's becoming at the end this "grave man." Nonetheless, the Elegy's reiteration of the Sonnets' dramatized aversion to theatricality and poetic excess, and its reinforcement of protagonists' attitudes in the late tragedies and romances, tells a consistent story. From the Elegy's vantage point, Shakespeare tired at last of staging the eleventh-hour social reintegration of aging male solitaries.(22)

By reading palinode in W. S.'s Shakespeare allusions and by tying W. S.'s attitudes to those dramatized in the Sonnets and the late plays, we establish one possible relevance of the Peter elegy to the Shakespeare canon. Granted, if W. S. were a poet other than Shakespeare, he may have found congenial the voicings of ressentiment he heard in these late works, and he may have been encouraged, therefore, to seek in Shakespeare a prestigious ally. Yet this bedfellows explanation raises more questions than it answers, not only with respect to the Elegy's specific Shakespeare allusions, but because it grounds itself in the mutual affinity of W. 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" (Tmp, Ep. 19-20), though otherwise difficult 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]" (229-31). And if W. S./Shakespeare expresses relief in wrenching free from 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 Cardenio, 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 completely or 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 vast differences in genre and tone, The Two Noble Kinsmen exhibits strong correspondences with the Elegy, correspondences that 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.

IV

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 (MND, 3.2.412), 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?" [Rom, 3.1.43-44]); 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" [3.1.3-4]). As the Veronese brawlers' blows are "bred of an airy word" (1.1.89), so the kinsmen's rivalry. "That sigh was breath'd for Emily" (TNK, 3.3.44), 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" (Oth. 2.3. 184-85).

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 saintlike, 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" (495-96), 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" (267, 417). Frequently, he calls Peter's virtues in question in the very act of asserting them. Peter possessed "short-liv'd deserts" (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" (294-95): either a little orderly commonwealth or a commonwealth that was little-ordered. He was "not addicted wholly / To unbeseeming blushless vanities" (93-94): not wholly? just 99 percent? 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" (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.

This jeopardy of insidiously turning into one's enemy is also the kinsmen's topic from their first moment onstage. The cousins' dialogue, which occurs in a scene universally assigned to Shakespeare (except for untestably short scenes, 1.2 has the play's highest overlap of rare words with the poem), echoes and complicates the language of the Elegy, hinting that the kinsmen, despite their vigilance, may become what they despise. Arcite speaks of 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.

(1.2.7-12)

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, (26, 34-35), the spectacle of erraticism reaching its climax at mid-scene when Palamon, mocking Theban degeneracy, himself displays affectation of the kind he satirizes (44ff). Arcite's fear that good intentions count for little in Thebes is confirmed. The currents he associated with a dangerous social milieu are revealed already to reside within the kinsmen themselves.(23)

The motif of perilous waters recurs at play's end when Arcite's foreboding comes home to him. Crushed by his 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" (5.4.83-84); he awaits death at the mercy of internal currents, of his own constitution in revolt. And all this is anticipated by the Elegy. Killed on horseback like Arcite, Peter is associated early on with treacherous currents, though, in keeping with the poem's eulogistic aims, it is finally the elegist rather than Peter who is styled the victim of an evil tide.(24) 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" (66-70; cf. 98-99). In both poem and play, society's coercive tide operates internally, figuring similar conceptions of vice;(25) and in both texts the sea imagery resolves itself with like irony. Though Peter defied "the current of besotted fashion" (274), and though (in a metaphor reconfiguring the biblical flood [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 the poet. Grasping at the hope of seeing his friend resurrected, W. S. insists that he will cling to the consolation, "Although perhaps I ignorantly range / And court opinion in my deep'st unrest" (571-72). The time frame is ambiguous, allowing two readings: (1) although someday I may backslide . . . ; and more troublingly (2), although in this hope of bodily resurrection I already pursue a pious vanity.(26) The elegist continues:

But whether cloth [= even if] the stream of my mischance

Drive me beyond myself, fast friend, soon lost,

Long may thy worthiness thy name advance

(573-75)

In these verses but three lines from the Elegy's conclusion, W. S., "court[ing] opinion," 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" (92). Whereas Peter stood fast against the current of falsehood, W. S. risks lapsing in the integrity which was Peter's 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" (1.2.6-7). Similarly, on Peter's death W. S. enters such a world. Courting opinion in his "deep's" unrest, he is alienated 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 unites him more deeply with the deceased by sealing W. S.'s own destitution of self. The worst returns, if not to laughter, at least to solidarity:

But whether cloth 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 their fates were 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' 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, "`would bring us to an eddy / Where we should turn or drown; if labor through, / Our gain but life and weakness." The prophecy is also recapitulative; for Peter has already experienced a violent Arcite-like death, which has reduced the elegist, Palamon-like, to mere "life and weakness." After Peter's murder W. S. must carry on with no "prop / Whereon to lean and rest" (566-67), bearing a grief like that which dominates the play's conclusion. Indeed, it is tempting to seek the play's raison d'etre in the sorrow that, coming unexpectedly at the end, never finds 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 5'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 psychological 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 use 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 prove authorship. Accepting them, one may argue that an unknown W. S. influenced Shakespeare as a reader. But that argument lacks force: could an obscure imitator of Shakespeare's reciprocally 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" (1.2.43-44) and describes a buffoon show of mutual mimicry: apes imitating apes. To believe that Shakespeare in The Two Noble Kinsmen 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 leitmotif of "sea, storms, and shipwrecks" constitutes Henry VIII's "most vivid imagery . . . reserved for highlighting certain especially dramatic moments."(27) 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 (3.2.358-64), 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, 122-23, 162-67) 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 parallelisms in the handling of materials in Henry VIII, Two Noble Kinsmen and the Peter elegy support a hypothesis of Shakespeare's authorship of the Elegy.

V

If accepted into the canon, the Elegy will presumably oblige us to reconsider 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 the Elegy's importance as a Shakespeare document, is the poem as artistically woeful as many readers have felt, or has "the method of this doleful song" (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 trod." 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(28)

Davies's confession that he praises in order to gain praise usefully throws in relief the motives of the Peter elegist. In his resolute unpoetic-ness W. S. lives up to the sentiment of his own 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 the poet garners to his own and his subject's credit. But the Peter elegy invites appreciation, rather, as a "sacrifice" (FE, 206), a deep-fetched offering, where what is sacrificed is the narcissistic element of performance, and where wit serves to subvert its own self-promotional wiles. To recall Hamlet's tribute to Horatio, "as just a man / As e'er my conversation cop'd withal" (3.2.54-55): Hamlet assimilates himself to his bland object of praise. Yet his sober panegyric ballasts other high-flying moments, and few would begrudge Hamlet his need to set his feet on the ground. In praising Horatio, Hamlet reduces his own visibility as praisegiver. And most engagingly, Hamlet qualifies his fulsomeness, which has made Horatio uncomfortable: "Something too much of this" (3.2.74). 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" (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, choosing 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 false-noting, a triumphal music swells at the close. If W. S. initially equivocates, entrapping uncharitable interpretation by commending Peter's "short-liv'd deserts" (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" (491-93). 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" (41, 59, 19). And toward this "white"--an aesthetic equivalent of Peter's virtuous plainness or "pure simplicity" (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" (359-60).

Until that verse, 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'" (366), against which he urges counterinstances, demonstrating that "all that can be said [of Peter] / Can be but said that `He was good'" (531-32). Then W. S. supplies a "sentence" of his own (535). Modifying Christian paradox he speaks not of God's love but of the love of the living keeping the dead man alive: "`He died in life, yet in his death he lives'" (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" (172-73), the poet presses toward a purity adorned only with merit.

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

But whether cloth 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 forever happy proved:

In life thou liv'dst, in death thou died'st beloved.

(575-78)

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 W. S., unable to meet Peter again in heaven, is lost beyond retrieval, he trusts in Peter's deserving. The poem's last verses affirm the worthiness that will keep Peter's name happy forever, 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 lives." 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 Elegis 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 Foster, Elegy by W. S. (Newark, Del., London, and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989); "Expanding the Canon? W. S.'s Elegy for William Peter," Shakespeare Association of America (25 March 1995); "Another Shakespeare," Modern Language Association of America (30 December 1995); "Shakespeare Discweries?" International Shakespeare Association (12 April 1996). Richard Abrams, "In Defence of W. S.," TLS (9 February 1996): 25-26; Richard Abrams, "Breaching the Canon: Elegy by W. S.: The State of the Argument," ShN 45, no. 3 (1995): 51-52, 54; "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s `Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," SEL 36 (1996): 435-60. Donald Foster, "A Funeral Elegy: W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s "Best-Speaking Witnesses," PMLA 111, no. 5 (1996): 1080-95.

(2.) Canonical Shakespearean citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Citations of the Elegy follow Foster's lightly edited text.

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

(4.) MacDonald Jackson review of Foster, 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" (FE, 113-14), remarking, "This is not complexity but confusion" (259). Perhaps so, but the usage recalls H8 1.1.161-62: "his mind and place / Infecting one another, yea, reciprocally."

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

(6.) Foster, Elegy, 82, 197-200.

(7.) 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. In WT (1610) "part" means simultaneously trait and role, 1.2.398; to the references to "exact" performance in Tmp, cf. AWW 3.6.61. 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" (O7r; cf. O3v: "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), l. 889-94, in The Nondramatic Works of John Ford, ed. L. E. Stock et al. (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 199l), 184, refers to the tragic dramatist's enforcement of an audience's sorrow; cf. n. 18 below.

(8.) A parallel pair occurs at FE, 570-71, where more outre 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.

(9.) E. A. J. Honigmann, review of Foster, N&Q 37, no. 4 (1990): 465-67, 467.

(10.) Brian Vickers, "Whose Thumbprints?" TLS (8 March 1996): 16-18. The initial suggestion to look into Wastell is Honigmann's, art. cit, 467.

(11.) Stanley Wells, "In Memory of Master William Peter," TLS (26 January 1996): 28.

(12.) Katherine Duncan-Jones, letter to the editor, TLS (14 June 1996): 17.

(13.) Wells, "In Memory," 28; Vickers, "Whose Thumbprints?" 16-17.

(14.) Foster, Elegy by W. S., 72-73.

(15.) Ibid., 73.

(16.) Duncan-Jones, "Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?" RES n.s. 34 (1983): 151-71. Duncan-Jones, in a letter to the editor, TLS (29 Mar. 1996): 17, supposes that George Eld, the printer of the Elegy, may have attributed the poem to W. S. in hopes of boosting sales, but she gives no basis for her suspicion that Eld would have acted independently from Thorpe, who held the copyright.

(17.) Donald Foster, "Master W. H., R.I.P.," PMLA 102 (1987): 42-57.

(18.) Cf. also R2, 5.1.35 and CBS, 1. 1735-36. For Ford and Peter's probable acquaintance, see Foster, Elegy, 178-79. Ford's conflation in CBS of R2 and FE turns on R2's treatment of Richard, and FE's treatment of Peter, as imitatio Christi (e.g., FE, 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." For further discussion of CBS as Ford's Peter elegy, cf. Foster, "Funeral" 1086-87. Ford also links Shakespeare and W. S. vis-a-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" (1.889-94). Citing this passage in The Shakespeare AllusionBook A Collection of Allusions to Shakespeare from 1591-1700, re-ed. John Munro (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 2 vols, 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 MV. 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 My'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."

(19.) Harry Levin, Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976), 312.

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

(21.) E. A. J. Honigmann, "The Second-Best Bed," New York Review of Books 38.18 (7 November 1991): 27-30; Shakespeare's Impact on His Contemporaries (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982); Myriad-Minded Shakespeare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 4-20.

(22.) Janette Dillon, Shakespeare and the Solitary Man (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), chap. 10; on pp. 161-65 she observes that the romances exponentially increase the tragedies' insistence on the inevitability of solitude.

(23.) This meaning is reinforced by the scene's pervasive language of incontinence, including emetic and sanguinary purgation, bleeding, weeping, sweating, and lactation, 1.2.7, 20, 23, 33, 60-62, 76-77.

(24.) So, too, in The Two Noble Kinsmen the danger of drowning shifts from the Jailer's Daughter (who faces literal drowning in 4.1) to Arcite, who drowns metaphorically.

(25.) The secondary images figuring these vice 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" (1.2.24; cf. 76-77), foppish "apes" theatrically transform themselves head to toe, "Affect[ingl another's gait," speech, costume, cut of beard, comportment (44-58). In FE's corrupt social world, the wicked are "loose mimics," actorlike "disgest[ing] / An empty . . . passion," "Courting opinion with unfit disguise, / Affecting fashions" (275-76, 92-93).

(26.) The poet's ignorant ranging recalls sonnet 109.5-6, "if I have rang'd / Like him that travels I return again." Ranging is then glossed in sonnet 110.1 as "go[ing] here and there," and also, in 110.5-6 as "look[ing] on truth / Askaunce and strangely." The two meanings correspond to those I assign "range" in FE.

(27.) Foster, Elegy, 162-67; King Henry VIII, Arden edition (London: Methuen & Co. 1957), xxv. Cf. Frank Cespedes, "`We are one in fortunes': The Sense of History in Henry VIII," ELR 10 (1980): 413-38,423-24. Sea-loss imagery may have figured also in the lost Cardenio, to judge by Theobald's redaction, Double Falsehood, 1.1.22-24. 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.

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