Nation IN BRIEF : NEW YORK : Scholar Says Poem a Shakespeare Work

A U.S. scholar has identified an Elizabethan elegy as a work by William Shakespeare after 13 years of literary detective work aided by a computer program, the New York Times reported. If Donald Foster and other scholars who agree with him are right, it would be 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 paper said. The poem, simply titled “A Funeral Elegy,” was printed in 1612 by Shakespeare’s publisher, referred to the author as a successful poet and was signed with the initials “W.S.” The 578-line work was written for the funeral of a youth involved in the London theater who was murdered on horseback after an afternoon of tavern hopping. “I’m vastly impressed by Foster’s scholarship,” Stephen Booth, a renowned Shakespeare scholar at UC Berkeley, told the paper. “No one has attempted to discredit it.”