Professor Stands By Claim Poem Was Penned by Bard

A British academic who sparked a literary controversy when he claimed to have found an unknown Shakespeare poem said Monday that he is confident the document is authentic.

Peter Levi, Oxford University professor of poetry, told a London news conference that he had made no mistake over its authorship.

“I don’t see any reason why it should be by anyone other than Shakespeare,” he said.

Publication of the poem, tucked away in another volume at the Huntington Library in San Marino, has prompted a number of skeptical comments by experts.

Dr A.L. Rowse, one of Britain’s most distinguished Shakespeare scholars, said the poem is “almost certainly not” one of the bard’s works.

The poem is pasted into the back of a volume containing a play by John Marston, a dramatist contemporary of Shakespeare, and bears initials that could be WSH or WSK.

“I think it is W. Sh. Otherwise why would Marston have written it?” asked Levi, who has written a 28-page book in an attempt to prove that the poem was written by Shakespeare.

Levi said the poem was written for an engagement party given for the daughter of a countess, with each verse spoken by a friend or relation offering gifts to the bride-to-be.

Some experts claim the issue is not new--that the poem has been known of since 1801.

The Levi verses are “quite good--but they are simple and direct” and lack Shakespeare’s elusiveness and imagery, Rowse, a renowned Elizabethan scholar, wrote in London’s Evening Standard newspaper on Monday.

“I am not merely indulging in scholarly skepticism when I say I do not think the verse is Shakespeare’s,” said Stanley Wells, director of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University. “I do not think Levi made anything of a case because he seems to be saying that because it is good it must be Shakespeare’s. That is a subjective judgment.”

Levi said he worked from photocopies of the poem “because I cannot afford to jump on a plane to California. I am poorly paid.”

“I don’t terribly mind what happens to my reputation,” said Levi, 56, who has published 12 books of his own poems and written or edited 25 others. “It would be a terrible act of cowardice not to have printed as a poem of Shakespeare what other people were too idle or too silly to notice.”