Bard Wrangle--Much Ado About a Poem

It was a literary scholar’s dream: the discovery of an unknown manuscript by a great writer. But it was not the work of just any great writer. It was a love poem by William Shakespeare.

Only weeks ago, a 32-year-old researcher from Topeka, Kan., who does not even hold a doctorate in literature, was working in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and ran across an untitled nine-stanza lyric, which he says is the work of the great Bard himself--the first Shakespeare find since the 17th Century.

News of Gary Taylor’s “discovery” has now made its way into English departments across the United States and Great Britain and, indeed, all over the world. It has touched off a literary wrangle that is likely to last for decades.

A few Shakespeare experts are ecstatic, believing this to be the greatest literary find in memory. Other scholars are cautiously optimistic. Many, however, are skeptical; some downright hostile.

Although the feud is far more public and voluble than most literary disagreements, it illustrates the minute concerns and painstaking research that is characteristic of literary scholarship. Unlike recent literary cases where forgery had been suspected (the 1983 fake Hitler diaries; Clifford Irving’s 1972 phony autobiography of Howard Hughes), the effort to determine the authorship of this 350-year-old poem will not involve science and technology so much as historical analysis and the “art” of the literary scholar.

“What will happen is that we will see scholarly articles in the next two years pooh-poohing it,” said William Schaeffer, UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and a former executive director of the Modern Language Assn. “Two years later, there will be articles pooh-poohing that. Two years after that, another set of articles. . . . It could go on indefinitely.”

That there should be a stir among scholars over a new Shakespeare poem is hardly surprising. Shakespeare commands more attention from scholars than does any other writer in the English language, and there surely are more articles and books on the subject than any single bibliography could possibly contain.

Yet the swiftness and extent of the critical reaction has astonished even literary experts.

First-Hand Look Sought

Librarians at the Bodleian report that “remarkable” numbers of British scholars have already journeyed to the Oxford library to have their own look at the manuscript. At least one American university, the University of California, Santa Barbara, last week sent one of its young scholars to scrutinize the poem.

In an unusual move for a scholar who would typically publish his research findings in an academic journal, the man who discovered the poem has rushed his defense of the poem into print in a newspaper.

Writing in today’s New York Times Book Review, Taylor said he discovered the poem, which begins “Shall I die? Shall I fly,” one evening while doing a routine reference check for a new Oxford edition of the complete works of Shakespeare, which he is now editing.

The poem, Taylor explained, is contained in a manuscript collection amassed in the 18th Century and donated to the Bodleian Library in 1756. The poem was not written in Shakespeare’s hand but attributed to him by a private individual, probably in the 1630s.

Eminent scholars have taken the manuscript from the stacks in recent years but none apparently had thought to take seriously the attribution “Wm. Shakespeare,” Taylor said.

“We have not bothered to look (for additional works by Shakespeare), because we are sure there is nothing to find; after all, (it has been assumed) if there were anything to find, our predecessors would already have found it.”

Although it is unlikely there will ever be definitive proof that this is an authentic Shakespeare poem, Taylor contends that there is enough “evidence” to lead him and the co-editor of the new Oxford edition, Stanley Wells, who heads the university press’ Shakespeare department, to include it in their edition of Shakespeare’s works.

Established Procedure

In checking the authenticity of the poem, Taylor followed a procedure used by most reputable literary scholars. He looked first for “external” evidence that the poem was what it claimed to be.

With most writers, even some from centuries ago, there are many places to look for clues. In the case of Shakespeare, the task is more difficult. There are no diaries to consult. No definitive published volumes to be checked. Despite centuries of study, scholars cannot fix, with any certainty, the date of the composition of many of the plays, or even say precisely when Shakespeare was born.

As a result, one of Taylor’s first tasks was relatively simple: He examined the penmanship used throughout the manuscript and noted the way the poem jumped from one page to the next within that manuscript. The document that contains the poem is known as a miscellany, a kind of early anthology of poetry. Scholars generally agree that it was probably put together by a single individual for his own pleasure or for a member of the royal court.

The script, decorative flourishes and placement of the 90-line untitled lyric within that manuscript suggested that the poem was part of the original miscellany. It was not added later, Taylor said.

Moreover, he said, the attribution of other poems in the manuscript to such poets as Ben Jonson and John Donne was “not demonstrably wrong.”

“The scribe of the . . . manuscript testifies to Shakespeare’s authorship of the poem, and although we do not know exactly who this witness was we know approximately when he wrote and that he had no reason to lie,” Taylor said.

“Unless other evidence emerges that decisively contradicts this attribution, such external evidence establishes a prima facie case for Shakespeare’s authorship.”

Some Agree

After seeing a copy of the poem and Taylor’s defense, Samuel Schoenbaum, a University of Maryland Renaissance scholar and the American consultant for the Oxford University Press Shakespeare project, told the New York Times that he agreed.

“It’s authentic until proven otherwise,” Schoenbaum said. “Gary Taylor has made a prima facie case for all the evidence that it is a Shakespeare poem. It’s a brilliant discovery.”

Other scholars have not been so easily convinced.

The contention that the authorship of other poems in the manuscript is “not demonstrably wrong” is hardly persuasive, said Ronald Rebholz, professor of English at Stanford University who has been studying and lecturing on Shakespeare for two decades.

“This is a most ridiculous argument,” Rebholz said. “It would be a powerful argument if all the inscriptions were demonstrably correct, but to say they are not all wrong does not indicate that one particular one is right.”

Taylor contends, however, that there is even more persuasive evidence inside the poem that it is truly the work of Shakespeare.

This “internal evidence”--the choice of anecdotes, the pairing of images, the repetition of phrases--supports the thesis that the poem was not only written by Shakespeare but dated between 1593 and 1595, the early years of his career when he is believed to have written such plays as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Romeo and Juliet,” Taylor wrote.

To analyze this internal evidence, Taylor relied on a computerized concordance of Shakespeare. In its original form, the concordance is six volumes of computer printouts listing the number of times Shakespeare uses such phrases as “naught but” (16), “so rare” (6) and “ ‘tis a wonder” (1).

Shakespeare “commands the largest vocabulary of any writer of the period” and he uses many “unique” words, Taylor said. At the same time, Shakespeare repeats many phrases, so that “any work with a credible claim to Shakespeare’s authorship” must both be original and echo other Shakespearean verse.

As evidence that the untitled poem meets that test, Taylor points to several of the poem’s phrases that appear elsewhere: In the untitled poem, he refers to “gold tresses,” in Sonnet 68 to “golden tresses.” In the poem, he speaks of “more than a mortal”; in “Macbeth,” the phrase is “more in them than mortal knowledge”; in “Cymbeline,” it’s “more than in mortal seeming” and in “Kinsmen” it’s “more than mortal.”

Lip Service

In the untitled poem, Shakespeare refers to “lips red.” “Lips” are also “red,” Taylor noted, in “Venus,” Sonnet 130, “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night.”

To which, O. B. Hardison, professor of English at Georgetown University and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, retorted, “What color but red would lips be?”

Hardison said he agreed with the scholars who have said that they are simply not convinced by the stylistic evidence that Shakespeare and not some other Elizabethan poet wrote the poem, although he puts the chances of it being Shakespeare’s higher than most scholars have allowed--at about 65%.

“Of course, there is no way to be certain,” he said.

Reginald Foakes, a Shakespeare expert in UCLA’s English department, said: “I think, myself, I will remain very skeptical about this poem for a long while. So far I haven’t seen anything to give me any conviction that this poem is Shakespeare’s.”

Donald Foster, the Santa Barbara scholar who left last week for Oxford, is one of a handful of people who have actually taught the untitled poem. “Certainly it was nothing new to him,” his wife said last week.

An expert in writing styles, Foster had “never suspected the poem might be by Shakespeare--and, indeed, is quite skeptical that it could be,” said one of his colleagues at the university. According to the colleague, Foster went to England to put together his own stylistic refutation of Taylor’s claim.

But even the critics know that will not settle the argument.

“Nothing short of someone popping up and saying, ‘Ah, yes, I know that poem. It’s the work of someone quite different from Shakespeare,’ (will settle the dispute),” Hardison said.

Echoing the sentiments of many scholars, Hardison concluded that he hopes that it was not the work of the great poet and dramatist.

“It’s really a dreadful poem,” Hardison said, “hardly worthy of Shakespeare. Why, I’ve got a poem right here by Chidiock Tichborne, which is much better. And he only wrote one poem. Would you like to hear it? . . . “

THE DISPUTED POEM Shall I die? Shall I fly? Lovers’ baits and deceits, sorrow breeding? Shall I fend? Shall I send? Shall I shew, and not rue my proceeding? In all duty her beauty Binds me her servant for ever. If she scorn, I mourn, I retire to despair, joying never.

First Stanza