Elliott and Valenza Respondents’ Brief, Egan v. Elliott and Valenza

February 11, 2011

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”  -- Attributed to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Abstract:  Petitioner Michael Egan claims that Thomas of Woodstock is “irrefutably Shakespeare’s.”  Our stylometric tests say it has far too much Shakespeare discrepancy to be a credible Shakespeare ascription.  Mr. Egan has many times challenged us to set up a panel to rule on the matter, most recently with a bet of £1,000 to nothing that the panel will rule in his favor.  He has twice tried to pull out at the last minute, denouncing the process as a fraud.  We are asking the present panel to rule on the merits anyway, with whatever evidence both sides present, subject to the rules agreed to by both sides in October, 2010.

Some questions are matters of opinion and cannot be settled simply and objectively on observed facts.  This is one where the facts seem to us clear.  We have taken scores of measurements of Shakespeare’s most countable, consistent, and distinctive stylistic quirks, most of them not hard to understand.  One of these is the word ye.  Shakespeare used it sparingly, about four times in a play on average, rarely more than 20, never more than 30.  If Shakespeare were Cinderella, his ye slipper would run on the dainty side, around size four or five, never above seven.  Whoever wrote Woodstock was not at all sparing when it comes to ye’s.  He used 231 of them in just one play, almost twice as many as can be found in all of our 29-play core Shakespeare baseline.  That’s not dainty.  A better word would be “outsized” or “supersized,” more in the range of basketball giant Shaquille O’Neal’s size 23.  O’Neal is a big guy, seven feet, one inch tall, weighs 325 pounds, and neither he nor many of his stats are hard to distinguish from Cinderella.

What is true of ye’s is also true of 61 other tests.  We have taken Shakespeare’s measure in 152 tests.  In 62 of these, Woodstock falls outside Shakespeare’s range, with 24 more Shakespeare rejections in just one play than we found in all 29 core-Shakespeare plays combined (Tables 1 and 2).  That’s also far too many for Shakespeare. The odds that Shakespeare would produce that much discrepancy from his own norms by chance in just one play are vanishingly low, lower by far than the odds of getting hit by lightning. 

We are not the only ones who see Woodstock as more like Shaq than Cinderella.  David Lake’s and MacDonald Jackson’s tests show that Woodstock is loaded with 17th-century words and meters, looks years later than Richard II (1595), and therefore can hardly be credibly described as a source text for R2. (Lake, 1983, Jackson, 2001, 2007, 2010). Our tests agree.  No mainstream scholar has endorsed Mr. Egan’s ascription. Three of the very best – Rossiter, Lake, and Jackson – firmly reject it. No external evidence has been produced to support it.  

Mr. Egan himself has disavowed much of the evidence cited in his own book and has twice tried to pull out of the hearings he demanded to settle the dispute.  In demanding this hearing, and agreeing to its rules, he assumed a heavy burden of proof: “to show by clear, convincing, and irrefutable evidence that [Woodstock] is by Shakespeare.”  He hasn’t come close to doing that.  We would urge the panel to rule that he has failed on the merits.  If the panel would like to address other issues in the dispute – Woodstock’s date, the wisdom and fairness of the hearing procedures, whether they think it’s a close call, or any other lessons they may wish to draw, we would welcome them.

I.  Background.  See Appendix 1, Wager Timeline [hereafter, Timeline] for more details and source citations. 

(1) Our original offer. Respondents Elliott and Valenza [hereafter “we”] have not come to Shakespeare through the regular channels.  Nobody would use the word “orthodox” to describe us, our methods, or our bet.  But we have discovered many Shakespeare insights that the regular channels would have been much slower to produce.  We have been trying for many years to acquaint Shakespeare regulars with the New-Optics stylometric methods developed by our Shakespeare Clinic (1987-94). These are most fully described in our 2004.  They seem to us in many ways an improvement over traditional methods. We supposed, and we still suppose, that anyone who cares about Shakespeare authorship should know something about them.

But getting them across to Shakespeare regulars has not been easy. We picked a time when the Author was dead, and authorship studies were grossly out of style with insiders -- doubly so, if they were of Shakespeare, the deadest of Dead White Males, and the one with the largest, most impassioned fan-base of amateur authorship buffs, many of them with insistent, undeserving claims – and triply so if they use quantitative, stylometric, computerized evidence, which many lit department regulars deplore and distrust.  Our work offended all three of these taboos, and we have often had to face circled wagons and impassioned blockers, more bent on denouncing it and excluding it than on heeding or even reading it. The 1990s were the years of the Shakespeare Wars (Rosenbaum, 2006). We were mid-level participants.  We took five years of flack from Donald Foster, who promised us a whacking if we published our findings. When we did, he appointed himself a gatekeeper-bouncer to block our access to orthodox outlets (our 2002).  He did not pull his punches, but did pull his rank, and many heeded him. We turned to less formal,, more open outlets, such as The Shakespeare Newsletter and SHAKSPER.  In 2003, we offered our stylometric evidence to help inform a SHAKSPER discussion of Shakespeare’s authorship of A Lover’s Complaint and parts of Titus Andronicus.  But SHAKSPER had two ardent bouncers, too. The first, whom we shall call Foster Clone, liked stylometrics of the accepted sort, but not ours, because ours didn’t agree with Foster’s.  The second bouncer, Hockey Fan, warned us to keep our stick on the ice and leave all our quantitative evidence at the door.  As far as he was concerned, all statistics were circular, misleading, and useless for telling you anything that you do not already know.  

Foster Clone’s bark was louder than his bite. Unlike Foster himself, he had no discernible rank to pull, the Shakespeare Wars were over, and his side had surrendered (Foster, 2002).  Hockey Fan seemed a more serious obstacle because many SHAKSPER correspondents – including Michael Egan – shared, and still share, his scorn for quantitative evidence like ours.  They are not comfortable with numbers, don’t understand them, don’t trust them, and don’t want anyone on SHAKSPER to be bothered with them. These numerophobes – with the odd exception of Hockey Fan himself, who was also a Foster admirer -- never believed Foster’s stylometric “proofs” in the first place – correctly, as it turned out – and many of them gloated when he had to confess that his Funeral Elegy ascription was wrong and ours (2001) right (his 2002).   If Foster’s supposedly “flawless” stylometry was wrong, why shouldn’t ours be wrong too, since he was not just a regular, but a celebrity pro, “The Sherlock Holmes of Literary Attribution,” and we were not? 

Hockey Fan tried to show with hockey examples that statistics predict nothing – incongruously because in the real world sports nuts (unlike lit nuts) are also stats nuts, obsessively studying the odds so they can play them to their side’s best advantage.  Surely, he argued, if you looked just at the stats, you would suppose that Canadians were mediocre hockey players because at the time they had gone 50 years without winning the Olympics.  We weren’t persuaded. Everyone, including Hockey Fan, knows that the best Canadian skaters turn pro, which, in those years disqualified them for the Olympics.  But we did offer him a $25 bet that the Ducks and the Devils, both teams who had used the stifling, stats-inspired neutral-zone trap all year, would use it in the championships that very night. They did so, again and again, in an all-too-predictable game. 

Then, returning to the main question, we bet him $1,000 that he couldn’t find a new, untested, other-authored play that would pass our Shakespeare tests – nor (if he could find one) a new, untested, single-authored Shakespeare play that would fail our tests. We agree completely with Daniel Patrick Moynihan that entitlement to one’s own opinion does not entitle anyone to his own facts. Our bet was an attempt to separate the one realm from the other and move the dispute from assertion, opinion, and deadlock to observation, fact, and closure. It worked. Hockey Fan declined the bet, stopped blocking us, and we have since enjoyed many years of fruitful, unobstructed discussion with SHAKSPER’s members.  

The bet is still open to anyone but has since been raised to £1,000 to discourage frivolous challenges.  Our terms are generous. Takers are permitted and encouraged to pre-test their plays, using our donated software.  They could test hundreds of new plays, if they wished, without risking any money, only the time it would take to edit and test the plays. To this day, neither Mr. Egan nor anyone else has taken us up on our bet, possibly because even our harshest critics share our common-sense expectation that past observation does help predict the future.  The time costs of preparing and pretesting a new batch of plays would be too high and the statistical odds of winning the bet too low to make it attractive (our 2004, 363-65).

(2) Egan’s 2005 counterbet.  In 2005, Mr. Egan challenged us to his own opinion-based, counterbet similar in style, substance, and outcome to the one now at issue, and following the same sequence:  first, a taunting, confrontational challenge; then an apparently-serious search for agreement on rules of engagement; agreement on most points, but ending abruptly with his angry, vituperative withdrawal.  He announced the forthcoming publication of his Richard II, Part I (his 2006). He claimed to have proved “irrefutably” that 1R2/Woodstock [hereafter Woodstock] was Shakespeare’s. He called us “pale, trembling cowards,” and demanded that we pay him £1,000.  Two weeks later he taunted us for our “deafening silence” for not answering him immediately and ridiculed us as “cowering” and “stylomeretricious.”  He was not pleased when SHAKSPER correspondent Bill Lloyd revealed that he (Egan) had already posted hundreds of pages of his own evidence on his own website and told him (Lloyd) that he should have kept his mouth shut.

Woodstock did not remotely qualify for our bet.  It was not an untested play, no mainstream scholar that we know of thought or thinks it is Shakespeare’s, and Egan, unlike us, was asking not for a test of fact, like a horse race, but for a contest of opinion, more like a beauty contest.  He soon abandoned his bet claim but still pressed hard for a long, open-ended season of hearing and debate on Woodstock’s authorship, perhaps with an eye to stirring up interest in his book.  By then we had read his webpage and found it loaded with hundreds of pages of bluster and weak evidence, but too sprawling, convoluted, and lacking in strong evidence to make us want to spend our money on his book or our time politely enduring his moods and patiently sifting through the haystack of his evidence in hopes that a needle of real evidence might somehow emerge.  We had no interest in months of wrangling with him over it, nor in helping recruit and pay a blue-ribbon panel of judges to waste their time on it, as well as ours.  Nonetheless, with the mediation of Larry Weiss, convener in the present case, we were willing to offer him a month of discussion and debate, with SHAKSPER’s entire membership as judges, with brief opening and closing statements on both sides but no limits on postings on his own website or ours.  He found these terms intolerably restrictive, upbraided Elliott as “a fake and phoney [sic],” denounced the process as “just so much flim-flam,” and resigned in a huff.  “The bet,” he said, “has been called off and the matter is now closed.” 

But it wasn’t. A few months later, yet another number-skeptic respectfully wondered whether our statistics, though well-enough tested on plays mostly written “at the height of [Shakespeare’s] career,” could distinguish a supposedly very early play like Woodstock from the earliest of Shakespeare’s plays.  Our answer: easily.  “Woodstock fails … 20 [Shakespeare] tests, while R3 fails none and 2H6 fails only three, with a Shakespeare composite upper limit of two.  The odds that Shakespeare could have written Woodstock are trillions of times lower than the odds that he could have written R3 or 2H6…”  Egan’s initial retort: “Ward Elliott is obviously looking for a fight. I’m not interested.” 

(3) Egan’s 2005 countercase.  But he was interested. Days later he posted a four-page summary of his case, relying on “the analogies of theme, preoccupation and character (the Spruce Courtier and Osric, Simon Ignorance and Dogberry, etc.; parallel scenes; s.d. overlaps; comparable narrative strategies; convergences of philosophy and historical analysis; use of the same obscure sources, and in the same way; identical imagery; similar errors; at least one revealing Freudian slip; and a lot more.”  He provided a number of examples of phrasal parallels, including a few of the 1,600 unique Shakespeare parallels he thought he had detected in Woodstock. It’s hard, he said, to believe that our “provocations” and “distortions” were “mailed in with a straight face.”  See our Timeline, 13-16 for his position, 16-17 for our demonstration that his new batch of phrasal parallels was likewise not unique. But, tellingly, he did not ask to revive the hearing he had just backed out of.

 (4) The present controversy. The controversy lay mostly dormant for several years till, as new editor of The Oxfordian, the journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society, Egan asked us to write an article on our years of debate with Oxfordians.  We did so, and, a few days before Halloween, 2010, he tried, unsuccessfully, to insert his own footnote correcting our “mendacious account” of the bet. See Timeline, 21-22. “The account of our bet given here is a complete distortion …. My book is over 2000 pages and it needs each one. Anytime Prof. Elliott is willing to compare his analysis of 1 Richard II with mine, in full on both sides, I’m up for it…. How about it, Ward?”

We reminded him of his earlier pronouncement, “The bet has been called off and the matter is now closed,” and urged that he give it a rest.  Timeline, 22. A few days later, in a here-conciliatory, there-taunting e-mail, he made the following remarkable proposal:  “set up a panel of your own choosing and submit your full case for non-Shakespeare along with my full case for WS. You win, you get 1000 pounds stirling [sic]. I win, I’ll take nothing except the satisfaction.”

“That’s how confident I am,” he added. “Now, what’s your excuse for refusing? Because I know ahead of time you don’t have guts.” Timeline, 24.

We responded skeptically and warned him that under no circumstances would we consent to requiring the panel to read all 2,000 pages of his book, large portions of which we had fruitlessly labored through on his web page, and which was later described by its most admiring reviewer as an “erratically organized” “reader’s nightmare.” We said: “If you really expected them to read all 2,000 pages, at a minute a page, that’s 33 hours of reading, worth $3,333 per panelist at a very conservative $100 an hour, times three panelists and the other party = $13,333 worth of time to settle a £1,000-bet.  That’s far too much to ask of them, or me.” “I don’t want to be a party to saddling the panel, or myself, with an unreasonable workload just for your satisfaction.”  Timeline, 25.  We also suggested a format for the panel, Larry Weiss as convener, and two members of the Golden Ear panel, chosen by the convener, plus rules of engagement.  On Halloween, 2010, Egan agreed to all of these, in the following terms:

(5) Rules of engagement for present hearing:

Question:  “Resolved:  that Michael Egan has presented clear, convincing, and irrefutable evidence that the anonymous Elizabethan play known variously as Richard II, Part One, Woodstock and/or Thomas of Woodstock is by Shakespeare.”

            Burden of proof: on [Egan] to show by clear, convincing, and irrefutable evidence that it [Woodstock] is by Shakespeare.

            Panel:  Larry Weiss, convener, and two non-anonymous members of [Elliott’s] Golden Ear panel chosen and recruited by him [Weiss] as he thinks best.

            Format:  Case briefs by both sides, not to exceed a total of 20,000 words per side.  Unlimited supporting documents may be submitted by both sides.  Panelists may consider as much or little of these as they deem necessary to come to a fair and considered judgment. You [Egan] present your opening brief first whenever you are ready.  We [E&V] respond as soon as we reasonably can.  You [Egan] submit your closing brief in the same amount of time we took to respond to your opening brief.  Panel deliberates and decides in its own time, states its reasons, informs both sides, and announces the results on SHAKSPER.

            Terms of [Egan’s] bet:  If the panel declares for us [E&V], you [Egan] owe us £1,000.  If it declares for you [Egan], we owe you nothing under your bet.  [But (we added) we might well have some further thinking to do about ours.]

Publicity: Summary of results to be posted by convener on SHAKSPER at end of process.  No outside publicity permitted prior to that.

            Behavior of parties:  should be consistent with terms of agreement, reasonable and non-obstructive on both sides.  Convener is final arbiter, has power to warn parties and declare a forfeit in extreme cases of noncompliance.

            Waiver of terms:  Permitted, with mutual consent of parties and convener.

(6) Creation of the panel.  Egan demands panelists promise to read everything he submits. One doesn’t. Convener Larry Weiss spent the month of November 2010 recruiting two willing panelists with no preconceived position on Woodstock’s authorship. The two volunteers are Will Sharpe, actor, guitarist, and onetime classicist, with 12 years of Shakespeare graduate studies; and Dale Johnson Tucker, a self-educating homemaker and Shakespeare buff.  Egan at first seemed supportive, and even willing to cut the expected size of his case statement from 2,000 pages to something more like 700 pages.  But he became increasingly alarmed that the panelists were not required to read every word of all 700 pages, but, by the terms of his agreement, only “as much or little of these as [the panelists] deem necessary to come to a fair and considered judgment.”  He leafleted the panelists with an 80-page, 29,000-word copy of his text notes on Woodstock.  Weiss cautioned him to abide by the terms of the agreement and to stop leafleting the panelists on his own.  Egan demanded that every panelist be pledged or required to read every page of whatever he submitted. “I have made my position absolutely clear. Unless the panel agrees to review all the evidence I present I refuse to participate.”  Timeline, 39. Two of the panelists said that they were willing to review everything submitted, within reason; the third, the one who had already located all four volumes of Egan’s study in a nearby library, did not make this commitment. 

(7) Egan’s withdrawal.  Egan professed to be shocked not to have every panelist’s pledge to read every page.  On 9 December 2010 he e-mailed Weiss to withdraw for the final time, with these words:   “I don’t care for your tone. Your demand is profoundly offensive. I withdraw.”  Timeline, 41.  Weiss remonstrated, said  he was willing to read all reasonable submissions, but not to require the last panelist to read twice what he (and Egan) had agreed to, found Egan in breach of the agreement, and would consult Elliott as to what needed to be done. Timeline, 42-43. This is our response.

II. Issues. 

(1)  Has Egan breached the agreement and thereby forfeited his £1,000?  Transparently yes, in our view.  He agreed to this: “Behavior of parties:  should be consistent with terms of agreement, reasonable and non-obstructive on both sides.  Convener is final arbiter, has power to warn parties and declare a forfeit in extreme cases of noncompliance.”

And this:  “Case briefs by both sides, not to exceed a total of 20,000 words per side.  Unlimited supporting documents may be submitted by both sides.  Panelists may consider as much or little of these as they deem necessary to come to a fair and considered judgment.”

Yet he said this: “I have made my position absolutely clear. Unless the panel agrees to review all the evidence I present I refuse to participate.” 

And he was duly warned by the convener, in these words:  “If your insistence as a condition of participating further that the panel members be required “carefully and indeed scrupulously” to study lengthy materials in addition to your main submission, including a “short essay” which is one and a half times the permitted length of the submission which the rules require us to study, isn’t a request to deviate from the rules, I don’t know what is.”  Timeline, 42.  To us the breach seems undeniable and not inadvertent.

(2).  Has Egan “presented clear, convincing, and irrefutable evidence that the anonymous Elizabethan play known variously as Richard II, Part One, Woodstock and/or Thomas of Woodstock is by Shakespeare?”  Plainly no.  Having badgered and implored us into setting up an impartial panel with clearly stated rules of engagement, and having agreed to the rules, he has broken his own contract and then wrongfully attempted to withdraw without submitting his case, and with a flurry of abuse for the convener, the respondent, and the panel:  “There is nothing here to encourage me to think that this is anything but a rigged process with a predetermined outcome. I’m sure Ward Elliott is already preparing a triumphalist statement that will distort my concerns and the actual reasons for my withdrawal…. This is just a legal game to him. The real issue here--did Shakespeare write Richard II, Part One? -- has been lost sight of.” Timeline, 41. This is not Mr. Egan’s first such bait-and-switch; it is exactly what he did the first time we offered to get him a hearing in 2005: demand a hearing, deride the respondents for not providing  it at once, agree to negotiated rules of engagement, denounce or break them, denounce the other parties, and stomp out without ever having to prosecute or defend his own case.  Had we done such a thing even once, we would have heard much from him about our lack of guts and our “deafening silence” when challenged.  He has now done it twice, expects to get away with it, and will probably try it again when he thinks the time is right, as he has done not only with us, but also with his attacks on MacDonald Jackson, who likewise addressed his points seriously but got nothing but distortion and abuse in return.  See Jackson’s three papers in Appendix 3 to our case statement.  We hope that the panel will help make Mr. Egan’s next such try come later, rather than sooner, and with less benefit of the doubt than whatever he now enjoys.

III. Remedies.  In a normal court of law or arbitration, where the main issue is who owes what to whom, Egan’s breach of contract would settle the matter.  The convener, perhaps in consultation with the panel, or perhaps not, would rule for us, as the rules provide.  Mr. Egan would owe us £1,000; a form of justice would be done; and specific performance of the contract would be legally enforceable in court.  Whether Mr. Egan, whose willingness to honor his own previous agreements has not inspired our confidence, would pay up voluntarily is not clear.  Nor, if he doesn’t, is it clear whether the costs of collecting it would exceed the amount owed.

But this is not a normal lawsuit. It is the latest of a series of urgent Egan demands for a verdict on Shakespeare’s authorship of Woodstock.  Our inclination for now is to ask the convener and the panel to defer judgment on Egan’s breach of his own agreement and let him a have his verdict on the merits. It is what he still asks for, even while backing out of the hearing process: “The real issue here--did Shakespeare write Richard II, Par[t] One?--has been lost sight of.”  ”If at some point you wish to set up a genuinely fair and objectively [sic] review of the case for Shakespeare and 1 Richard II I will gladly participate. Until then, thanks but no thanks.” Egan to Weiss, 9 Dec 2010, Timeline, 40-41. 

He has repeatedly demanded a hearing, repeatedly blasted us for our expected or perceived “cowering” failure to engage in it,  yet repeatedly done his best, when invited to state his case compactly, ducked out, insisting that many of his publications were NOT his case – for example his now-withdrawn 2005 webpage and the long textual notes he distributed to the present panelists on his own – and that his case is the entire unindexed, erratically written 2,000 pages, or perhaps the 700 or so pages he specified in December, but never produced, or maybe it’s the 700 pages minus the now-disavowed textual notes.  His insistence on having his case heard has been matched with point-blank refusal to provide it whenever someone calls his bluff.  He hides the needle of his case in the haystack of his book and then refuses to deliver the haystack.  As one of the panelists, asked, who was willing to review everything he submitted, “So ...  are we going to see the evidence, or not?”  At this writing, despite assurances of two-thirds of the panel that they would review everything, his answer is “not.”

We think our own evidence is strong enough, and Mr. Egan’s burden of proof heavy enough, to get the matter settled no matter what Mr. Egan does or doesn’t do to expand on what he has already made available.  We certainly have no intention of winnowing his most plausible points for him; that’s his job – nor of forcing him to provide his own evidence, though nothing but his own intransigence – or is it his desire to make people buy his book? -- is stopping him from doing just that.  We remind our readers that he has already made, and not yet disavowed, a four-page statement of his case.  Timeline, 13-16.  He also made another short statement in a 2008 letter to the TLS. Timeline, 20-21.  Before attempting to back out of the present agreement, Mr. Egan distributed to the panel his 80-page short history of the text (his 2006, v. 3, 131-209). He has also posted on public websites his own edition of the text and an Oxfordian article taken from his general introduction (see References, below).  He has also published, but has now refused to submit, the whole of his general introduction.  We would invite him to submit that, too, subject to the rules to which he agreed.  Neither the panelists nor we should be expected to buy it.  But we have looked at the two key volumes via interlibrary loan, and scanned some of it for our own use, to make it more searchable.  We would be willing to send that material to the panel, but only with the written permission of Mr. Egan, who holds the copyright.  He has the right to grant or deny such permission, but not the right to deny it and then claim that the panel chose to ignore his evidence.  We would also be willing to let him belatedly submit his brief, which he claims to have written already, to the panel, provided he otherwise abides by the terms of his agreement.  But there should be reasonable deadlines for both actions: no more than one week from our submission for a simple go-ahead for us to send our scan to the panel, no more than five weeks for him to submit his separate case statement, if he wishes to do that..

In sum, we believe that Mr. Egan has already submitted or published enough material to permit a fair assessment of his case.  If he refuses to provide further argument or evidence for his position, or to let us do so on his behalf, it should not bar the panel from considering and ruling on the evidence already made available by both sides.  Having gone to the trouble of setting up a willing panel at his insistence, we certainly see no reason why Mr. Egan’s intransigence should bar us from providing it with our own evidence.

 

 

IV. Why Woodstock is not irrefutably Shakespeare’s.

In November, 2005, in a four-page posting of our own (SHK 16.1951, Timeline, 12), we responded to William Davis’s question whether tests validated for Shakespeare at the peak of his career were also valid for Woodstock, which, by Egan’s once-conventional dating, could be one of his earliest plays.  We thought they were valid, and compared Woodstock to two of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, 2H6 and R3.  We have updated and extended this posting for the present brief, and supplemented it with three MacDonald Jackson papers and a David Lake paper on the dating of the play, firmly assigning it to the 17th century (Appendices 2 and 3).

The Woodstock reference is important for two reasons: (1) since there is no external evidence connecting the play to Shakespeare, the debate is entirely over internal evidence; and (2) Mr. Egan, like many scholars prior to 2001, but much more insistently, argues for a date between 1592 and 1593, which at first glance does seem like a plausible time for a Richard II, Part I to have been written – just before R2.  The early dating is crucial to Mr. Egan’s case, in that there are many similarities, such as “pelting farm,” between R2 and Woodstock.   If Woodstock preceded Richard II, any plagiarized similarities between the two works had to be R2 lifting from Woodstock, not the reverse (Egan, 2006, 1: 95-122).  David Lake, using internal evidence, strongly challenged this dating in 1983 (our Appendix 2); our evidence cast doubt on it in 1996; and MacDonald Jackson thoroughly discredited it in 2001, and again in 2007 and 2010 (our Appendix 3), amid a torrent of Egan’s gibes (Egan, 2007) stronger in its rhetoric than in its evidence.  Both Lake and Jackson see Woodstock as a 17th-century scribal manuscript loaded with 17th-century words in 17th-century meters much more similar to Samuel Rowley in the early 1600s than to Shakespeare in the 1590s or at any time. We find their evidence much more persuasive than anything we have seen from Egan and attach it in full as Appendices 2 and 3, but we did not repeat it in 2005 and give only a glimpse of it here because it is hard to compress and is very well covered by the original authors.  It seems to us devastating to Egan’s case. 

Instead of revisiting Jackson and Lake, we proceeded to our own evidence, and, following Mr. Davis’s hypothetical, wondered what could be said from our tests of Woodstock, Henry VI, Part II, probably the earliest and least co-authored of the H6 series, and Richard III, if all three were discovered as anonymous manuscripts in a time capsule. Was there any way you could tell from Shakespeare’s remaining core plays which of the three manuscripts were Shakespeare’s?

We supposed from Mr. Egan’s 2005 website that he would find that the three plays were indistinguishable from each other, and that “Richard II, Part I’s” 1,600 “unique” Shakespeare “fingerprints” would prove “irrefutably” that Shakespeare wrote it. Shakespeare spoke of “heads cut off,” of “forfeiture of land,” and of “nearness in blood;” so did whoever wrote Woodstock; therefore Shakespeare must have written Woodstock.  We didn’t and don’t find such parallels persuasive because we doubt that they are unique, and we actually searched a couple of them in contemplation of the later-rejected debate, and we found many parallels in other writers. To us, they are more like fingers, toes, eyes, and ears than like fingerprints or DNA. If you and Shakespeare both have ten fingers and two ears, we don’t think it necessarily proves that you are Shakespeare.  Lene Peterson had already made this point, Timeline, 8-10, and it appears again and again in Jackson’s systematic searches for unique LION links.

Egan’s response was this:  “Ward Elliott is obviously looking for a fight. I’m not interested. If he wants to discuss the authorship of 1 Richard II/Woodstock, it must be in an appropriately scholarly manner.”  Five days later, he attacked us for addressing the wrong “fingerprints” from his webpage.  “While the parallels Elliott cites do exist, and are worth noting in the larger context, they are not my case [his words, our emphasis]. Much more significant are the analogies of theme, preoccupation and character (the Spruce Courtier and Osric, Simon Ignorance and Dogberry, etc.; parallel scenes; s.d. overlaps; comparable narrative strategies; convergences of philosophy and historical analysis; use of the same obscure sources, and in the same way; identical imagery; similar errors; at least one revealing Freudian slip; and a lot more).” Timeline, 13-16. “I certainly do offer numerous phrase and verbal parallels, but devote several pages explaining my reasons for rejecting trivial expressions such as ‘heads cut off,’ ‘forfeiture of land,’ ‘nearness in blood’, etc. [our emphasis].” “What I actually do provide in support of my claim (at the verbal/phrasal level) are examples like these:”

[dead as a doornail, What traitor’s there?, shiver’d, crack’d and broke, issue of King Edward’s loins, My staff, Where slept our scouts, forfeiture of land (!),rich chuffs...rich whoresons, see Timeline, 13-16]

We have little faith in “unique phrasal parallels,” having almost always found their uniqueness overclaimed, both individually and in large aggregates, like the hundreds of “finger prints,” “loops and whorls” cited by Egan (1: 194-221), to say nothing of the other hundreds touted by anti-Stratfordians (our 2004, 325-27).  But we did make a cursory search of our Claremont Archive, looking only at modern-spelling, non-Shakespeare texts in our own archive. We found that Shakespeare and Woodstock’s author were far from the only ones to say “dead as a doornail,” “what traitor’s there?,” “issue of loins,” etc., as Egan’s short list implies. The specifics of his short list are cited on Timeline, 13-16; our alternatives are listed next, (and out of the Timeline’s default chronological order for easier comparison with his short-list claims). Timeline, 16-17.  A more extensive search would no doubt have produced many more such examples.  With the availability of Literature OnLine (LION)’s all-but-comprehensive collection of surviving early-modern plays, and with a high enough level of patience and skill, it is now possible to make a credible claim to a feature’s uniqueness.  When we hear such claims from a master like MacDonald Jackson, we take them seriously. See our Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia article, forthcoming, pp. 3-4.  We cannot say the same of Egan, if our spot-checks (or Jackson’s, or Lene Petersen’s, see Timeline, 8-10) of his grandiose claims of uniqueness are representative.  He simply has not taken the trouble to see if they are true.  Instead, he has once again disavowed them as the cornerstone of his case (See his TLS letter, 26 March 2008, where he attacked his reviewer for “misrepresenting his evidence” as largely based on phrasal parallels. “While I … do adduce literally thousands of phrasal parallels, my case rests principally, as it should, on the quality of the writing.”  Then, apparently forgetful of what he had just insisted, he clinched his argument by citing yet another phrasal parallel, exactly as he had done in 2005. Timeline, 20-21.

Most important, he has not taken the trouble to rebut contrary evidence like ours on the merits.  Our preferred approach is to look for differences from Shakespeare, not resemblances. Differences disprove common authorship a thousand times more powerfully than non-unique resemblances prove it. If you and Cinderella both fit a Size Five slipper, it doesn’t prove you are she, only that you could be. But if you are a Size Ten (or, in this case, a Size 23), you have a lot of explaining to do. If there are many tests and only one or two of such differences found in a sample text, it might still be Shakespeare’s; if there are too many Shakespeare discrepancies, it gets much less likely.

What would happen to our core Shakespeare baseline profiles if we had never heard of either R3 or 2H6? The short answer is “nothing at all.” 2H6 is not in our core baseline because we wanted a clean baseline and were aware that most scholars suspect that the entire H6 series is co-authored. R3 is a gold-standard pure-Shakespeare baseline play, but not one that sets any boundaries. On every test it scores within profile boundaries set by the other 28 core Shakespeare plays. For our time-capsule thought experiment that means that we haven’t had to change a single profile to test the three “anonymous” plays.

The first and least important outcome of such a test is this: all three plays, like all our Shakespeare plays and most of our plays not by Shakespeare, pass at least 28 of the 48 tests. They all have plenty of Shakespeare resemblances. But these piles of non-unique resemblances prove very little. Much more important is the second outcome, marked by stars (*) and blue shading in Table 1 below: Woodstock fails all of the remaining 18 tests, while R3 fails none and 2H6 fails only three, with a Shakespeare composite upper limit of two. The odds that Shakespeare could have written Woodstock are trillions of times lower than the odds that he could have written R3 or 2H6, no matter which of our two odds-calculating conventions is used, or which edition of Woodstock is analyzed, Egan’s or Ule/Rossiter’s. See our 2004, pp. 399, 402. The Table 1 used here is updated from our 2005 posting chiefly by adding two new comparison plays:  Egan’s own edition of Woodstock (TOWE = Thomas of Woodstock, Egan), and SEEME, Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me, modernized by our Shakespeare Clinic last year from Nathaniel Butter’s 1605 edition.  Lake and Jackson both think from word dating and resemblances to Rowley that Rowley wrote Woodstock in the early 17th century.   In terms of composite distance from Shakespeare’s normal ranges, our “very early” 2H6 is just outside our Shakespeare ballpark, and our “very early” R3 is in the infield just a yard or two from home plate -- but the supposedly “very early” Woodstock is in a different statistical galaxy. These seem to us very powerful prima facie evidence that R3 certainly, and 2H6 quite possibly, could be Shakespeare’s, but not Woodstock.

Table 1

Shakespeare Rejections, Richard III, 2H6, See Me, and Woodstock, 1994 tests

Shakespeare Test, Range

R3

2H6

TOWU

TOWE

SEEME

Remarks

Grade Level, 4 to 7

5

6

5

5

9*

g, e

rd1

Hyphenated Compound Words, 52 to 180

85

82

15*

32*

16*

e

 

Feminine Endings, 8 to 17

16

12

17.5*

17.2*

20.1*

t, p

 

Open Lines, 11 to 23

17

14

32.3*

23.9*

7.8*

t, p, e

 

With (2d last word of sentence %), 9-21

12

14

9

8*

8*

e

 

It, (last word of sentence %), 8-30

16

7*

17

18

12

e

 

It (first word of sentence %), 7 to 18

9

9

4*

5*

2*

e

 

BoB1, 284 to 758

425

284

202*

200*

318

 

 

BoB3, -174 to 247

-109

-179*

-202*

-211*

-77

 

 

BoB7, 278 to 779

358

514

32*

49*

654

 

 

Aggregate Buckets, -2 to +2

-1

-1.54

-5.1

n/a

n/a

 

rd1

Total 1, 0 to 9

0

1

18*

27*

1

 

rd2

On’t per 20,000, 0 to 2

1

0

8*

7*

1

t

 

i’faith per 20,000, 0 to 8

0

1

9*

8

2

 

 

‘ll per 20,000, 31 to 90

41

55

138*

130*

113*

 

 

‘d/’ld per 20,000, 0 to 2

0

1

11*

10*

          2

t

 

Total 2, 6-37

8

13

47*

39*

7

 

 

I do + verb, 5 to 28

13

9

2*

2*

7

 

 

Metric Fillers, 1-13

8

4

0*

0*

3

 

rd2

-ly per 20,000, 98 to 161

155

108

194*

199*

136

 

rd3

Most + modifier, 8 to 32

18

17

28

26

5*

t

 

See per  20,000, 0 to 5

4

3

10*

15*

8*

 

 

Whereas/whenas per 20.000, 0

0

2*

0

0

0

e

rd3

Total Sh. rejections in 48 1994  tests, 0-2

0

3

18

17

9

 

Shakespeare rejection

 

Round 1 tests, rd1

 

Round 2 tests, rd2

 

Round 3 tests, rd3

 

R3 = Richard III

2H6 = Henry VI, Part II

TOWU = Thomas of Woodstock, Ule/Rossiter edition

TOWE = Thomas of Woodstock, Egan edition

SEEME = Samuel Rowley, When You See Me, You Know Me (1605)

g, p, e, t = test is sensitive to genre, prosody, editing, or time of composition

Table 1: “Too many rejections in the Woodstock column.” Unlike 2H6 and R3, Woodstock has far too many rejections to be a Shakespeare could-be. In our regular 48 tests, Woodstock falls outside Shakespeare’s 1590’s range 18 times, 2H6 thrice, Richard III never. By contrast, none of our 28 other core Shakespeare baseline plays have more than two rejections. 13 have one rejection; 9, like R3, have none. Source: our 2004, pp. 398-420. Remarks: * = Shakespeare rejection, sample falls outside Shakespeare profile. g = test is sensitive to genre; p = test is sensitive to prosody; e = test is sensitive to editing; t = test is sensitive to time of composition. For a description of each test, see our 1996, 196-203.

These calculations assume, improbably, that Mr. Egan’s dating of Woodstock is correct. They also presuppose that the Ule/Rossiter and Egan editions of Woodstock we used are roughly consistent in their editing with the Riverside Shakespeare, which we used for our Shakespeare baseline. In one respect, this is not so.  Egan wrote the last four pages of his text himself to replace pages missing in the original. Nevertheless, it is clear from Table 1 that Egan’s and Ule/Rosssiter’s editions test enough alike that Woodstock, far from being “irrefutably Shakespeare,” is a gross Shakespeare mismatch by both.  Egan’s early dating of Woodstock, chosen to explain resemblances between it and R2, aggravates and exaggerates the discrepancies between the two plays.  Five of Woodstock’s rejections are from tests sensitive to time of composition, the ones marked “t” in Table 1. If, as Jackson, Lake, and we argue, the play was more likely written in the 1600’s, some or all of these rejections would disappear. But Mr. Egan would have to disavow his dozens of ringing declarations that “Richard II, Part I” came first, take back his talk of Jackson’s ineptitude and lack of objectivity, and “data beautification” (Egan, 2006, 1, 124-26), and admit that whoever used terms like “pelting farm” in Woodstock was more likely to have borrowed them from Richard II than the reverse.  Even in the 17th century the play would still have 13 rejections and, hence, still have astronomically low odds of Shakespeare authorship, much lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning.

Four more Woodstock-rejecting tests, marked “e” in the remarks column, can be sensitive to the way the text was edited and may not reflect actual differences between one author and another. But we have seen that using Egan’s own augmented edition gives Woodstock essentially the same outcomes as the Ule edition (one test on the Egan edition has not yet been done).  Even if all four editing-sensitive tests were ignored, along with all five time-sensitive tests, and we used Egan’s own edition, Woodstock would still have 8 or more rejections and would still test on a different statistical planet from any play in our Shakespeare baseline.

Stylometry, in essence, is a way of trying to predict what we don’t know from what we do know. We know from years of testing that Shakespeare’s known, single-authored plays and poems are remarkably consistent, predictable, and profilable, enough so that we are willing to bet on it and get no takers. With very few exceptions, they fall within a narrow range of composite probability, and they continue to do so, as we have just shown with R3, if you pull one out and test it against all the rest, with no known false positives or false negatives. See our 2004, pp. 357, 365-368.

Not every call based on our new-optics methods is easy enough to bet on.  Where the sample text is short, or possibly co-authored, or written before or after Shakespeare’s writing lifetime, we cannot speak with such assurance, and we have made a special effort in recent years to tell our readers not just whether we think a text is or is not Shakespeare’s but how well we think we know it and how much we think it differs from Shakespeare. In our published writings and postings over the years we have reported many close calls, such as some of the “Shakespeare sections” of Edward III and Sir Thomas More (our 2010), and some middling calls, such as A Lover’s Complaint (our 2004a). 2H6, though technically just outside our ballpark, is a very close call and would fall within the ballpark had we defined it one rejection more loosely or had drawn one of our profiles a point wider. Both of these would be perfectly reasonable safety allowances for latent variability (our 2004, p. 366), and we suppose that 2H6, though not in our gold-standard baseline, could easily be Shakespeare’s.

But Woodstock was not, and is not, a close call. It was more like The Funeral Elegy and the poems of Oxford, Bacon, Marlowe, and every other testable Claimant -- in a different stylometric galaxy from our Shakespeare baseline. If Woodstock had turned up in a time capsule along with R3 and 2H6, it would be not be at all hard to tell which of the three “very early” plays could be Shakespeare and which could not. We might not go so far as the leading Woodstock editor, A.P. Rossiter, in saying “There is not the smallest chance that he [Woodstock’s anonymous author] was Shakespeare (Rossiter, 1946, p. 73),” but it does seem to us that the odds of common authorship with Shakespeare are much lower than the odds of getting hit by lightning or of winning the lottery. Woodstock, whether early or late, was a clear, easy couldn’t-be. If Mr. Egan had not backed out on his own challenge in 2005, we would have been surprised if SHAKSPER’s membership thought otherwise, far less that it would judge Woodstock as “irrefutably Shakespeare.”

That, in essence, is an updated version of our case in 2005, which prompted Egan to say “Ward Elliott is obviously looking for a fight. I’m not interested.”  Timeline, 12.  Would that it were so.  Much has happened since then.  Egan took up the cudgel five days later:  “Elliott’s provocations take the form of misrepresenting my data and my arguments, then sneering at his own caricatures.” Timeline, 13.  Six months later we got his “I’m calling you out, Ward” e-mail.  Timeline, 18.  Five years later he challenged us to the present bet, but then tried to back out yet again.  Though we have never been tempted to buy his book, we have borrowed the two most pertinent volumes from another library, looked at everything he has asked of the panelists, and found in them, as before, a haystack of inflated rhetoric and fancied parallels which don’t check out as unique – but no needle, no serious effort to state his case compactly or to refute our contrary evidence .  We have also acquired, edited, and tested his publicly-posted edition of Woodstock with no material change in outcome. 

As it happens, we also reconvened our Shakespeare Clinic last year, prepared and analyzed 22 new, early plays, plus 52 old ones, including the not-so-early Woodstock and a baseline of six of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and developed many new tests of common authorship.  In so doing, we were taking a slight risk.  Any or all of the 22 newly-tested plays, had they fit within our Shakespeare profiles, could have won the student who prepared it £1,000 on our original bet.   However, to no one’s surprise, none came close.   The 2010 Shakespeare Clinic tests have not all been completed, and the summary is still under development and analysis, but enough results are now available to make it clear that, on the numbers, Woodstock looks even more discrepant from early Shakespeare than it did in 2005.  Table 2 looks at the same plays as Table 1, again using our unaugmented Ule/Rossiter Woodstock, which Table 1 shows to give essentially the same outcomes as Egan’s augmented version.  The new outcomes: 44 rejections for Woodstock in 104 current tests, 43 for Seeme, only two for R3, two for 2H6.  Woodstock has far too many contractions to match our new early-Shakespeare baseline; too many we’s, ye’s, and our’s; too many oaths; too many midline speech endings for an early play; too few metric fillers and adversions; too few while’s, on’s, upon’s, I’s, mine’s, and you’s.  All of these figures are not raw counts per play but rates per 20,000 words (Table 2).

Table 2

Shakespeare Rejections, Richard III, 2H6, See Me, and Woodstock, 2010 tests

Shakespeare Test, Range*

R3

2H6

TOWU

SEEME

Remarks

Source

I’m, 0-1

0

0

13

1

t

round2

you’re, 0-2

0

0

12

0

t

 

we’re, 0-0

0

0

2

0

t

 

you’ve, 0-0

0

0

2

0

t

 

Total 1, 1-12

0

1

18

1

t

 

on’t, 0-2

1

0

6

1

t

 

i’faith, 0-8

0

0

9

1

t

 

Total 2, 6-37

8

13

47

7

t

 

‘ll, 31-90

42

54

138

113

t

 

‘d, 0-2

0

1

11

2

t

 

Total metric fillers, 1-13

14

2

0

3

 

 

I do, total, 6-41

15

12

2

9

 

 

I do + verb, 5-28

13

9

2

7

 

round2

-like, 0-4

4

3

6

2

 

round3

look, 4-11

8

11

3

2

 

 

see, 1-7

4

7

10

8

 

 

Total adversions, 18-27

27

25

34

21

 

round3

while, 7-19

8

11

6

12

 

words1

on,60-144

101

63

54

46

 

 

upon, 23-67

47

40

18

14

 

 

say, 36-64

44

41

30

33

 

words1

in-, 58-107

89

68

57

60

 

pref-suf

-able, 14-28

16

20

10

8

 

 

-ly, 108-155

155

108

194

136

 

 

-ment, 12-26

24

17

32

16

 

pref-suff

I, 385-537

521

435

358

367

 

words2

mine, 22-39

30

22

12

8

 

 

we, 35-104

78

84

174

128

 

 

our, 40-119

86

58

129

116

 

 

chief, 0-1

0

0

9

5

 

 

ye, 1-16

1

16

185

136

t

 

you, 147-497

273

159

137

186

 

words2

‘sfoot, 0-0

0

0

11

1

t

oaths

‘sblood, 0-0

0

0

2

1

t

 

total oaths,, 2-19

8

10

42

11

t

oaths

e’en, 0-1

0

0

2

2

t

contractions

i’th’, 0-0

0

0

1

18

t

 

any’t, 4-20

4

18

34

19

t

 

ta’en, 0-6

2

1

10

0

t

 

t’other, 0-0

0

0

6

3

t

 

o’, 0-2

0

2

6

1

t

 

Total 2, 10-42

10

29

89

51

t

 

Total 3, 32-94

32

65

128

88

t

contractions

MLE. % , bef. 1594, 1 to 3

3

1

8

n/a

t

König, WE

Total rejections, 44 tests here

1

0

44

20

 

 

Total, rejections, 104 new tests

2

2

44

43

 

 

* 7-early-Sh. play baseline

 

 

 

 

 

 

all counts are per 20,000 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

t = test is sensitive to time of composition

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table 2. “Too many rejections – again -- in the Woodstock column.” Woodstock has 44 rejections (shaded blue) from Shakespeare profiles based on his seven earliest plays: Henry VI, Part II; The Taming of the Shrew; Two Gentlemen of Verona; Richard II; Love’s Labor’s Lost; and King John.  None of these baseline plays has more than four rejections in 104 tests. 2H6 and R3, the two comparison earliest plays selected for the hypothetical “time capsule” in our Tables 1 and 2, have only two rejections each.

Table 2, with more and newer tests on more plays than Table 1, has the same bottom line: 22 times more rejections for Woodstock than for 2H6 or R3, the comparison plays in both Tables.  23 of Woodstock’s 44 early-Shakespeare rejections are sensitive to time of composition, marked with a t in the remarks column, consistent with Lake’s and Jackson’s conclusion that Woodstock is early-17th century, not late-16th.  Many of these discrepancies would be less glaring, or not rejections at all, if the later Lake-Jackson dating were accepted.  Some, like Woodstock’s giant ye slipper, are glaring no matter how you look at them. Woodstock has a raw count of 231 ye’s in just one 25,009-word play.  The entire Shakespeare-authored portion of the canon, with some or all of 35 plays and more than 700,000 words, has just 138 ye’s.  Stated differently, Woodstock has more than fifty times Shakespeare’s average number of ye’s per play.  Claiming that it is irrefutably Shakespeare’s is like claiming that Shaquille O’Neal, with his size-23 foot, is irrefutably Cinderella, thanks to his many other “unique” resemblances.  This is a problem which might send a lesser man than Mr. Egan to the drawing boards, perhaps to return mumbling something about 17th-century revisions by an evolved Shakespeare, or perhaps even by someone else. With enough searching, some such mumbling can indeed be found in Egan’s book.  In his 2006, Vol. 3, 128, he argues that the data are “open to more than one interpretation, including the possibility that 1 Richard II was written by Shakespeare in the 1590s and revised ten or fifteen years afterwards.”   Elsewhere he proposes that Shakespeare might have “touched [Woodstock] up some time after 1603 when a new copy was being prepared for a revival (his 2006, 142, 148, see Jackson, 2007, 94-95).”

Jackson found this argument implausible (his 2007, 94-95). So do we.  Woodstock’s 17th-century words and meters are so thoroughly embedded in the text that the rewriting, if there was one, had to have been almost total. And it would still look much more like Shaq than like Cinderella on our ye test and 13 other tests validated for the 17th century (Table 1). No 17th-century solo Shakespeare play or portion has more than eight ye’s; Woodstock has 231. Anyone who claims that they are Shakespeare’s has a lot of explaining to do. If Mr. Egan has done so, he has hidden it well in his sprawling, unindexed haystack and contented himself with an abusive critique of Jackson, (his vol. 1, 121-49; his 2007), which bypasses the problem altogether, addresses more manageable, less conclusive Shakespeare resemblances, such as “pelting farm,” upbraids Jackson for “worthless” statistics, “data beautification (his vol. 1, 125), being “stylomeretricious (Timeline, 5),” etc. – and concludes that Woodstock is “irrefutably Shakespeare.”

 Lake’s and Jackson’s evidence is attached as Appendices 2 and 3.  Both authors found Woodstock loaded with post-1599 marker words, like ‘em, I’m, i’th’, o’th’, a’th’, the use of has and does rather than hath and doth, and the oath ‘Sfoot, compared to any early playwright, Shakespeare included. Lake found 72 such post-1599 marker words in Woodstock, and a total of only 27 in his four Shakespeare comparison plays (his 1983, 136). If he had added ye to his “late words,” his count would have been Woodstock, 303 late words, Shakespeare comparison (LLL, MND, MOV, and 2H4): 40 for four plays combined.  His pre-computer, hand-counted data is consistent with Jackson’s computer-verified data (2001, 2007, 2010) and ours (Tables 1 and 2): Woodstock had thirty times as many late-words as you would expect even in Shakespeare plays from the late 1590s.  Jackson also found Woodstock saturated with embedded verse features very unlike Shakespeare’s in the 1590s.

V. In sum:

Mr. Egan, who has put 2,000 pages of heart, soul, and study, into his Woodstock enterprise, is no anti-Stratfordian, though he is now the editor of The Oxfordian, the world’s only anti-Stratfordian journal, and shares many of the anti-Stratfordians’ methodological preferences, if not their conclusions.  We see him as a hyper-Stratfordian Canonizer, in the mold of the late Eric Sams, someone who thinks the Stratford Man wrote not only the entire Canon, but much else besides.  We have read more than our share of hefty anti-Stratfordian and hyper-Stratfordian tomes, most of them cheaper, shorter, and better written than what we have seen of Mr. Egan’s, and indexed, too.  But we wonder whether even the heftiest of them could match Mr. Egan’s in the sheer, relentless volume of supposedly unique Shakespeare resemblances they collect?  To us, anti-Stratfordians and hyper-Stratfordians have many things in common.  They worship Shakespeare; they can’t get enough of him.  They Canonize other people’s works with abandon.  They pile up those tons of “unique” resemblances, which don’t all pass muster as unique.  They don’t mind if there is no external evidence, no smoking gun, no support for their position from mainstream scholars, and a ton of contrary evidence.  They aren’t above a bit of name-calling to discredit or silence their critics.   All of these features, we believe, may be found in Mr. Egan’s writings.  We don’t find them convincing. 

Sometimes we wonder whether he himself finds them convincing.  When we look at his record over the years we see him as an intense, mercurial personality.  In his bad-cop mode, he seems brazen, cocky and confrontational:

“It is now two weeks later and the silence from the direction of Claremont Mackenna College [sic] has been deafening. Obviously the man is not showing up.” 

“In fact, I feel so confident about my case, I’m willing to issue the same challenge to any and all. How about Robert J. Valenza, Elliott’s partner, who may have more spine than his cowering friend? Or will he too wisely choose discretion as the better part of academic valor? I’ll wager we’ll not be hearing from him either.” 

“It’s time to call the stylomeretricious bluff.”  Timeline, 6.

In his good-cop mode, he seems wistful and conciliatory, hoping for a hearing, wishing someone, somewhere, would take the time to buy his book and read it carefully and sympathetically:  “Let’s take the contention out of the mix.” “It’s not personal. I truly wish you would read my book. Just put aside the stylometry for a minute and look through the bloody telescope!” Timeline, 6, 22.

In the end, with the hearing all but agreed on (or, in the present case, fully agreed on) he has invariably become hostile and suspicious that the reading or discussion won’t be extensive or intensive enough, raised the ante, and stomped out, with more abuse: “You’re obviously a fake and phoney [sic].” “[This is] a rigged process with a predtermined [sic] outcome.” ”The matter is now closed.”  “I don’t care for your tone. Your demand is profoundly offensive. I withdraw.” Timeline, 10, 40-41. 

More significant than any of his tough talk, though, is Mr. Egan’s persistent evasiveness when it comes to making his case; his often-repeated refusal to state it compactly; his many heated denials that he relies on whatever parts of his case have come to light; and his habit of pulling out when the showdowns he demanded actually loomed.  Here are some examples, all emphasis supplied:

Lloyd, you should have checked with me first before you opened your mouth. The site is NOT the book.” Timeline, 3.

Ward Elliott’s provocations take the form of misrepresenting my data and my arguments, then sneering at his own caricatures. For example, in his November 27 letter he asserts that I claim 1 Richard II/Woodstock “dovetails so perfectly with Richard II that it has to be the first part of a sequence.” This is just not true.

It’s hard to believe this [Elliott’s first batch of non-unique parallels] was mailed in with a straight face. While the parallels Elliott cites do exist, and are worth noting in the larger context, they are not my case. Much more significant are the analogies of theme, preoccupation and character (the Spruce Courtier and Osric, Simon Ignorance and Dogberry, etc.; parallel scenes; s.d. overlaps; comparable narrative strategies; convergences of philosophy and historical analysis; use of the same obscure sources, and in the same way; identical imagery; similar errors; at least one revealing Freudian slip; and a lot more). Elliott is culpably silent about all this, that is, the guts of my position--why? I certainly do offer numerous phrase and verbal parallels, but devote several pages explaining my reasons for rejecting trivial expressions such as ‘heads cut off,’ ‘forfeiture of land,’ ‘nearness in blood’, etc. I even go out of my way to cite ‘touchstone examples,’ drawn from the attributionist work of Vickers and Mac Jackson. What I actually do provide in support of my claim ( at the verbal/phrasal level) are examples like these: [cites eight more non-unique parallels ] Timeline, 14-16.

Egan denies that his case is based on verbal and character analogues.  “This is simply not so.” “While I … do adduce literally thousands of phrasal parallels, my case rests principally, as it should, on the quality of the writing. [quoting 15 lines of verse] “But he concludes – again -- with a verbal parallel, “dead as a doornail.”  Timeline, 20.

He could have fooled us.  Why was he so insistent that he couldn’t state his case compactly; that everyone had to read the mountains of parallels which comprise most of his books – but not, it seems, the same mountains when they were posted on his web page?  Why did he go to the trouble of compiling them, posting them, and printing them if he didn’t think they helped his case?  Why, when questioned on the non-uniqueness of the parallels, did he disavow them and move to decidedly softer, more subjective evidence:  first to things like “parallel scenes, narrative strategies, analogies of theme, historical interpretation, and Freudian slips,” then “quality,” the final refuge of the Disintegrationists, the softest and most subjective of them all?  Why, having disavowed one batch of his own parallels, did he invoke yet other another batch, including one that he had just spurned in the first batch?  Why has he repeatedly demanded a hearing, telling us we’re cowards if we don’t get him one, and then backed out with more taunts when we do and he has agreed to it?  Why the long series of about-faces?  Why, having demanded the hearing, pulled out of it, and declared the case closed, has he taken it up again and again, and backed out yet again? The polite word for such behavior is “mercurial,” or perhaps “elusive,” or maybe even “tactical.” Could his good-cop/bad-cop swings come from design as well as from impulse? We can’t rule it out. The not-so-polite word for such behavior is “evasive.”  It seems to us the right one.

What we have in the end is a sprawling 2,000-page come-on letter from Nigeria and an author who desperately wants it to get read in full and heeded, desperately enough to offer us £1,000 if we can arrange it, outwardly confident that the panel will find it “irrefutably Shakespeare,” yet never willing to state his case compactly, or even uncompactly.  He first hides his needle in the haystack, then refuses to deliver the haystack, disavowing much of its contents and mumbling something about “analogies of theme” and “quality.” 

Our countercase can be stated very compactly. In stylometric terms, Woodstock, Mr. Egan’s claimed Cinderella, has a foot as big as Shaquille O’Neal’s. Woodstock’s 231 ye’s are almost twice as many as can be found in our entire 29-play core Shakespeare baseline combined (126 ye’s).  That’s far too many to be Shakespeare. Woodstock also falls outside our Shakespeare profiles in 61 other tests, 24 more Shakespeare rejections in just one play than in all 29 core Shakespeare plays put together (Tables 1 and 2).  That’s also far too many for Shakespeare. The odds that Shakespeare would produce that much discrepancy from his own norms by chance in just one play are vanishingly low, lower by far than the odds of getting hit by lightning.  Jackson and Lake show that Woodstock is loaded with 17th-century words, looks years later than Richard II (1595), and therefore can hardly be credibly described as a source text for R2. Our tests confirm.  No mainstream scholar has endorsed Mr. Egan’s ascription. Three of the very best – Rossiter, Lake, and Jackson – firmly reject it. No external evidence has been produced to support it.  Mr. Egan himself has disavowed much of the evidence cited in his own book and has tried to pull out of the hearings he demanded, not once, but twice.  Mr. Egan, in demanding this hearing, and agreeing to its rules, assumed a very heavy burden of proof: “to show by clear, convincing, and irrefutable evidence that [Woodstock] is by Shakespeare.”  “That’s how confident I am.”  Timeline, 29.  He hasn’t come close to doing that.  We would urge the panel to rule that he has failed on the merits. If they would like to add their thoughts on other pertinent issues – the date of the play, the closeness of the case, the usefulness, burdensomeness, and fairness of the chosen hearing format, recommendations for future such proceedings, etc.—we would welcome it.  Many of these points might be skirted as obiter dicta in a real judicial hearing, especially an appellate one, but this one is not a court hearing, but an unusual way of trying to settle otherwise nagging scholarly differences, and one persistently and urgently demanded by Mr. Egan.  Having gone to the trouble of twice setting it up a day in court for him, we would think it a waste not just to get a ruling for one side or the other, but also to learn from the parties most closely involved, including Mr. Egan himself, whether the process is worth the time and bother. It is also part of the agreement:  “Panel deliberates and decides in its own time, states its reasons, informs both sides, and announces the results on SHAKSPER [emphasis supplied].”

VI. Lessons. Something should be said about the utility and wisdom of using bets to settle authorship disputes.  No one we know of has tried it before.  Can anything be learned from it?  If so, it might better be judged after the Panel’s ruling than before.  Some of the questions that come to our minds are these:  is there any place for bets in authorship debates?  Can they help settle questions of fact?  Opinion?  Wouldn’t any consensus they might achieve evaporate whenever new, contrary evidence of sufficient weight is found?  If so, would it be any better or worse than what happened through conventional channels with the Funeral Elegy?  Do bets actually reduce transaction costs, or help sharpen and define differences which are otherwise diffuse?  Is settling such differences with bets more of a hassle than with other methods? Is there any advantage to getting disputes settled, or is it always best to leave every question open and let the discussion run on indefinitely for the participants’ recreation?  Is every man forever entitled to his own facts?  Is there any place for other dispute-resolution techniques, such as trials, hearings, arbitrations, votes, or appeals to consensus?  What is gained and what is lost by using such adversary processes?  Would we be better off with designated gatekeepers to preclear new methods or conclusions before they can be considered worthy of discussion?  Do we need to create an index viarum prohibitarum?  In an era underinvested in author-detection methodology, how many authorship questions are actually settled on the merits?  To what extent do beliefs, opinions, alliances, taboos, turf, analogies, market forces, rank, or inertia, more than evidence, do the settling? Do any or all of these serve useful functions?  What would have happened with the present dispute without the bet or the hearing?  Would we have been any better or worse off without them?  Would splitting the difference be an appropriate outcome for this dispute?  For others like it?  We could see some interesting discussions of these and other questions on SHAKSPER, might supplement them with a survey, and suspect that we might learn something from the process.

 

References:

 

Egan, M., ed. (2006). The Tragedy of Richard II: A Newly Authenticated Play by William Shakespeare. 4 volumes. Lewiston, NY, Edwin Mellen Press.

Egan, M. (2007). “Did Samuel Rowley Write Thomas of Woodstock?” The Oxfordian 10: 35-56. http://shakespeare-oxford.com/wp-content/oxfordian/Egan-Rowley.pdf

Egan, M. (2006). The Tragedy of Richard II, Part One, text:  http://www.playshakespeare.com/

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R. J. Valenza (forthcoming).  “Language: Key to Authorship,” The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia

Elliott, W. E. Y. (2011). “Elliott Wager Timeline.”   Appendix 1 in respondent’s brief, Egan v. Elliott and Valenza, Claremont McKenna College Claremont, CA 91711

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R.J. Valenza (2010). “Two Tough Nuts to Crack: Did Shakespeare Write the “Shakespeare” Portions of Sir Thomas More and Edward III?” 

Part I. Lit Linguist Computing 2010 25: 67-83 April 2010

Abstract:  http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/1/67

Part II Lit Linguist Computing.2010; 25: 165-177 June 2010

Abstract:  http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/165

http://www.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/welliott/UTConference/2ToughNuts.pdf

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R.J. Valenza (2004).  “Oxford by the Numbers: What are the Odds that the Earl of Oxford Could Have Written Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays?” Tennessee Law Review 72(1): 323-454. http://govt.claremontmckenna.edu/welliott/UTConference/Oxford_by_Numbers.pdf

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R.J. Valenza (2004a). “Did Shakespeare Write A Lover’s Complaint?  The Jackson Ascription Revisited,” in Brian Boyd, ed., Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson, University of Delaware Press.

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R.J. Valenza (2002) “So Many Hardballs, So Few of them Over the Plate: Conclusions from our ‘Debate’ with Donald Foster.” With Robert J. Valenza.  36 Computers and the Humanities 455 (November, 2002) http://www.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/welliott/Hardballshort.htm

Elliott, W. E. Y. and R. J. Valenza (1996). “And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants.” Computers and the Humanities 30: 191-245. http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/govt/welliott/ATTWNrev.pdf

Foster, D. W. and R. Abrams (2002). “Abrams and Foster on ‘A Funeral Elegy’” http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2002/1484.html.

Jackson, M.P.  (2010). “Some Comments on Michael Egan’s ‘Slurs, Nasal Rhymes and Amputations: A Reply to MacDonald P. Jackson” The Oxfordian 12. Reproduced in our Appendix 3

Jackson, M. P. (2007). “The Date and Authorship of Thomas of Woodstock: Evidence and its Interpretation.” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 46: 67-100. Our Appendix 3.

Jackson, M. P. (2001). “Shakespeare’s Richard II and the Anonymous Thomas of Woodstock.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14: 17-65. Our Appendix 3.

Lake, D. J. (1983). “Three Seventeenth-Century Revisions: Thomas of Woodstock, The Jew of Malta, and Faustus B.” Notes and Queries 228: 133-143. Our Appendix 2.

Rossiter, A. P., Ed. (1946). Woodstock: A Moral History. London, Chatto and Windus.