I read it and said to myself, "No Bard he." I'm talking about the author of A Funeral Elegy, the poem which Donald Foster of Vassar identified in 1995 as being by Shakespeare using computer analysis of word usage.

Statistical analysis is one valid approach to identifying authorship ~ after all, it worked for Foster when he identified Joe Klein as the anonymous author of Primary Colors. But it's currently even more helpful to have a keen ear, and to be deeply familiar with the flavor and nuance of an author's style, as is Gilles D. Monsarrat, the man who debunked the Shakespeare attribution and pointed to John Ford (who wrote 'Tis Pity She's a Whore a wonderful play with Shakespearean echoes). Connoisseurship is a fascinating exercise in the extremes of human pattern recognition, no matter what field it's exercised in. And we've a long way to go with computer technology (I'm guessing we need at least really good weak AI) before it catches up to the human expert.

Now even Foster admits he was wrong about the attribution. And for those experts who bought it (e.g., Harold Bloom) ~ let it be a lesson in humility to you! Read more about it: A Scholar Recants on His 'Shakespeare' Discovery.

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