Back in 1983, when he was working toward his doctoral degree, Donald Foster came across a little-known Elizabethan elegy, bound as a 21-page pamphlet and stored in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
The printing was done in 1612 by Shakespeare's publisher. The text itself referred to the author as a successful poet. And it was signed with initials: W.S.Was this a lost work of William Shakespeare?
Foster, who has since become a professor of English at Vassar College, knew that academia would ridicule such a belief on the basis of that evidence alone. So he spent the next 13 years working on an elaborate literary mystery.
Now he argues that largely through his computer analysis of the author's choice of words, he has proved that the 578-line elegy is Shakespeare's. And many Elizabethan scholars in the United States and abroad are inclined to agree.
If they are right, this is the first piece of writing convincingly identified as Shakespeare's since parts of a play called "Sir Thomas More" were ascribed to him in 1871.
The elegy was written for the funeral of a youth involved in the London theater who was murdered on horseback after an afternoon of tavern hopping.
For those who accept the attribution, the poem provides a treasure of biographical information about Shakespeare, including his lack of religious conviction, his disenchantment with theatrical excess and the possibility, hinted at in his sonnets and long noted by scholars, that he was bisexual.
When Foster first came across his find, titled simply "A Funeral Elegy," he knew that Elizabethan experts, a conservative lot by any standard, usually greeted plays or poems newly attributed to Shakespeare with derision.
At the time, in fact, two scholars were touting what they described as newly discovered Shakespearean works. One swore by a potboiler titled "The Birth of Merlin," and the other championed a jingle that opened with the lines "Shall I die? Shall I fly?" Both claims were quickly debunked.
Last month, in contrast, a group of respected Shakespeareans led by Foster were greeted with applause in Chicago, where, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, they made their case that Shakespeare was the author of the elegy.
Stephen Booth, a renowned Shakespeare scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, who served as chairman of the meeting, said: "I'm vastly impressed by Foster's scholarship. No one has attempted to discredit it."
Lars Engle, a professor of English at the University of Tulsa who is the author of "Shakespearean Pragmatism" (University of Chicago Press), said, "Over the next 10 or 20 years this will become part of the Shakespeare canon, and no one will question it."
"Their methodology is flawless," said Thomas Pendleton, a professor of English at Iona College who is co-editor of the Shakespeare Newsletter, an academic quarterly. "If anything is likely to get included in the canon, this is going to be it."
In England, Robert Smallwood, head of education programs at the Shakespeare Center at Stratford-Upon-Avon, said he was "prepared to be convinced" by Foster's evidence because he believed that "Shakespeare wrote more than we are presently confident in attributing to him."
There are a few doubters, but even they hold out the possibility that Foster is correct. Barbara Mowat, acting director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, said: "We don't have any foolproof scientific tests we can apply, and so it takes consensus. And I don't think that exists right now, although it may come to exist in the future."
Foster's detective work began when, working toward his doctoral degree at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he found the elegy among UCLA's microfilm copies of the holdings of the Bodleian Library.
At the time, he was studying the publications of Thomas Thorpe, the London stationer who published Shakespeare's sonnets.
Elegies published in pamphlet form were common in Elizabethan times; Foster found such elegies by more than 200 poets from the period. This one survived because Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the library, had made a deal to get a copy of everything published in London.
"Halfway through the elegy," Foster said, "I was struck by the mannerisms borrowed from Shakes-peare. It contained typically Shakespearean linguistic idiosyncrasies like the use of the word `who' instead of `which' or `that.' "
But Foster was reluctant to make a claim. "I was cautious," he said. "So I presented both the pros and cons of the case in a book called `Elegy by W.S. - A Study in Attribution,' which the University of Delaware Press brought out in 1989."
This flushed out several other scholars familiar with the elegy. One in particular addressed something that had nagged at Foster, giving him doubt about his theory: the language of the elegy was not so figurative or filled with word play as is characteristic of Shakes-peare.
But Richard Abrams, a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine, offered a plausible explanation.
"Where I came in," Abrams said in an interview, "was to notice that the poem avoids the language of the imagination because, in the poet's mind, imagination is strangely implicated in the murder of his friend. Shakespeare was deliberately writing this way."
What clinched matters for Foster was the output of his computer program, which he named Shaxi-con. Its database indexes all the words in Shakespeare's 36 plays that appear 12 times or fewer - words like "unprevailing," "abandoned" as an adjective and "widow" as a verb.
In a sort of literary triangulation, Foster made a computer analysis of the elegy itself, of works by other authors published around the time of the elegy, and of Shakespeare's own work from the same period - "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest" and "Henry VIII."
He found that both Shakespeare and the author of the elegy had picked out and then used similar words in their own writing, with too many instances to be mere coincidence.
When Foster examined the plays in which Shakespeare himself was performing as an actor at the time - "The Winter's Tale" and "Cym-beline" - he found the same pattern.
Foster and his colleagues have been busily dissecting the elegy to learn what it may tell about its author.
For one thing, the poem expresses skepticism about what was then a widely accepted Christian belief in bodily resurrection in heaven. It refers to that belief as "the weak comfort of the hapless."
"This reveals the author of the elegy to be profoundly agnostic, or at least struggling with profound doubt," Foster said.
Engle, of the University of Tulsa, said the elegy might also shed added light on Shakespeare's sexuality.
The subject of the elegy, William Peter, was an Oxford student with connections to theatrical circles in London. Following an afternoon of drinking, he was on horse-back when stabbed in the back of the head and killed. He was buried at Exminster Church in Devonshire.
In the elegy, W.S. was at pains to praise the youth and to make the point that the horrible conclusion of his life did not reflect his virtue.
Engle said the elegy could suggest that "Shakespeare had what we would now think of as a homosexual attachment to the youth."
Scholars have long believed that Shakespeare may have been bisexual because, although most of his treatment of love is distinctly heterosexual, the first 126 of his 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man, who Engle now suspects may have been William Peter.
The elegy could also reflect Shakespeare's anger at having been falsely accused of homosexuality. Engle said the elegy might show Shakespeare "trying to tidy up a set of misimpressions that the sonnets had left about the relationship between the poet and William Peter."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
An excerpt from `A Funeral Elegy'
Following is portion of "A Funeral Elegy," published in London in 1612 and newly attributed to Shakespeare:
For when the world lies wintered in the storms
Of fearful consummation, and lays down
Th' unsteady change of his fantastic forms,
Expecting ever to be overthrown;
When the proud height of much affected sin
Shall ripen to a head, and in that pride
End in the miseries it did begin
And fall amidst the glory of his tide;
Then in a book where every work is writ
Shall this man's actions be revealed, to show
The gainful fruit of well-employed wit,
Which paid to heaven the debt that it did owe.
Here shall be reckoned up the constant faith,
Never untrue, where once he love professed;
Which is a miracle in men, one saith,
Long sought though rarely found, and he is best
Who can make friendship, in those times of change,
Admired more for being firm than strange.
- New York Times News Service