Computers and the Humanities 32: 491–510, 1999.

491
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic:

How Severe Are the Problems?

DONALD W. FOSTER
Department of English, Vassar College, Box 388, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA
(e-mail: foster@vassar.edu)

Key words: A Funeral Elegy, “A Lover’s Complaint”, anti-Stratfordians, apocrypha, attribution, text
analysis

Absatract. Ward Elliott (from 1987) and Robert Valenza (from 1989) set out to the find the “true”
Shakespeare from among 37 anti-Stratfordian “Claimants.” As directors of the Claremont Shake-
speare Authorship Clinic, Elliott and Valenza developed novel attributional tests, from which they
concluded that most “Claimants” are “not-Shakespeare.” From 1990-4, Elliott and Valenza devel-
oped tests purporting further to reject much of the Shakespeare canon as “not-Shakespeare” (1996a).
Foster (1996b) details extensive and persistent flaws in the Clinic’s work: data were collected hap-
hazardly; canonical and comparative text-samples were chronologically mismatched; procedural
controls for genre, stanzaic structure, and date were lacking. Elliott and Valenza counter by estimat-
ing maximum erosion of the Clinic’s findings to include “five of our 54 tests”, which can “amount,
at most, to half of one percent” (1998). This essay provides a brief history, showing why the Clinic
foundered. Examining several of the Clinic’s representative tests, I evaluate claims that Elliott and
Valenza continue to make for their methodology. A final section addresses doubts about accuracy,
validity and replicability that have dogged the Clinic’s work from the outset.

1. Introduction
The Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic began in 1988 with high hopes
for a major discovery. By means of quantitative text-analysis, Ward Elliott and
Robert Valenza hoped to locate the “true” author of Shakespeare’s poems and
plays from among 37 anti-Stratfordian “Claimants.” The true Shakespeare never
panned out. By the summer of 1990, Elliott and Valenza mutually agreed upon a
conclusion that had been taken for granted by literary scholars before the Clinic
even began: none of the “Claimants” tested by Elliott and Valenza can be credited
with the Shakespeare canon. This came as no surprise to many of us. But despite a
major research effort extending over several years, and despite having arrived at a
perfectly orthodox conclusion, Elliott and Valenza have received scant credit from
professional Shakespeareans.
To Elliott and Valenza, trying to satisfy the Shakespeare establishment must
seem like a catch-22. When they announced to the popular press (in April 1990)
492 DONALD W. FOSTER

that Shakespeare’s plays and poems may actually have been written by Queen Eliz-
abeth (but not by Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere), the announcement was
met with academic ridicule. And when the Clinic ruled out Elizabeth and Ralegh as
well, the news was met with indifference.1 When Elliott declared to the press that
“We are on the verge of a tremendous find – the possibility of confirming eight new
short Shakespeare poems”, that proclamation, too, was ignored, and the moment
passed (Miller). In June of 1994, the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic
ended, not with a bang, but a whimper.
Elliott and Valenza last year complained that even “The leading lights of our
own literature department have described our work as . . . ‘idiocy’ ” (1997, p. 181).
Claremont’s distinguished literary scholars include Robert Faggen and Ricardo
Quinones. Faggen, who served as an advisor to the clinic before throwing up his
hands in despair, called the project “absurd” (Elliott and Valenza, 1993; Miller,
1990). Quinones dismissed the Clinic as “just madness” (Dolnick, 1991). Clearly,
literary scholars can be an unresponsive audience, even a little skeptical, when it
comes to certain kinds of quantitative text-analysis. Bloody but unbowed, Elliott
and Valenza have said that they always offer the same “short rejoinder” to their
critics: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t” (1997, p. 181). My
purpose in this essay is not to reiterate those methodological problems that were
addressed in my previous CHum review (1996b), but to show why the Shakespeare
Authorship Clinic has been dismissed as madness by scholars who served as its
literary advisors.
Elliott (a political scientist) and Valenza (a mathematician) allege that oppo-
sition to their work has been motivated by a “bristly nervousness in English
departments” that Shakespeare didn’t really write the works ascribed to him
(1996a); or else, in my case, by a protective impulse to shield my own work
from cross-examination (1997, 1998). These presumptions are self-serving. The
Shakespeare Clinic’s results provoke opposition because the closer one studies the
testing procedures, the more one becomes aware of arbitrary and chaotic handling
of the gathered data – not just for one or two of the tests but for the entire endeavor.
If the Clinic has failed, then it failed despite the good will and thoughtful advice
of many scholars besides myself, most of whom, I believe, share my sense that the
Claremont project might have counted for something, had Elliott and Valenza not
squandered the opportunity.

2. The Mud
As a reluctant witness to massive sloppiness in the Claremont project and having
been rebuffed in every effort to steer Elliott and Valenza in more rational directions,
I came to view the Shakespeare Clinic, long ago, as a fiasco. Elliott and Valenza
for years refused to take criticism seriously – and now have taken it personally.
Fuming over an unfavorable evaluation of their work, Elliott and Valenza first fired
off an assaultive article, full of invented quotations, depicting me as a bitter, vindic-
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 493

tive adversary. In “Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots”, Elliott and Valenza
describe me as their “close friend” from 1987 through January 1996. Then, quite
suddenly, “our old ally Foster . . . did not think that the world was big enough
or uncertain enough to accommodate both our findings and his.” It is said that I
attacked my good friends with “a blistering, blustering ‘Response’, which [I] had
quietly gotten slipped into the same issue” of CHum as Elliott and Valenza’s 1996a
(1997, pp. 206–7).
Elliott and Valenza have now repeated their imputations, albeit more temper-
ately, in “The Professor Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks.” Before proceeding,
I wish to clear the air of these defamatory personal charges. The facts of my
involvement with the Claremont Clinic are as follows: I have never met, spoken to,
or corresponded with Robert Valenza. I did not meet Ward Elliott until February
1996, two years after the Claremont Clinic had disbanded, and then only for a few
minutes at a literary conference. I had no contact with Elliott’s “team”, nor ever had
an allied “team” of any kind at Vassar, nor ever endorsed the Claremont Clinic’s
work except in a note to the Shakespeare Electronic Conference in 1996 in which
I urged its members, mostly literary scholars, to give Elliott and Valenza a fair
hearing (1996a; cf. Elliott and Valenza, 1997, 1998).
My contact with Elliott, and through him, Valenza, is limited to a desultory
correspondence from April 1987 through December 1994 (plus a short note follow-
ing my CHum review), in which I gave advice when asked. Upon receipt of the
Clinic’s almost-annual reports, I submitted a detailed response, comprising on my
end a dozen letters from June 1987 through December 1994. I answered queries,
urged caution, identified problems. My own perception is that I provided advice to
the Clinic long after other outside scholars gave up on the project. I never intended
a personal slight by my criticism of Elliott and Valenza’s work but gave them the
best counsel that I could offer, dishing it up with frankness and good humor. If
Elliott didn’t like the advice I gave him from 1987 through 1995, he nevertheless
kept returning for more; and he was free to ignore my suggestions – which he did
– without any ill feeling on my end. My otherwise futile labor as an advisor to the
Clinic was repaid in machine-readable texts received from the Clinic, for which I
remain grateful.
In August 1994, Elliott and Valenza published their first comprehensive
overview of the Clinic’s work (1994). Once again – in what was to be my last
response as an advisor to the Clinic – I detailed what I thought were serious, indeed
fatal, problems (Foster, 1994). I urged the authors to commonize their texts and
to address structural flaws in their procedures of testing, lest several years’ work
should again be dismissed as madness. As always, Elliott shrugged off the criticism
with a joke, and did nothing. I regret that Elliott and Valenza now feel betrayed by
an unfavorable scholarly review, but my CHum article contained virtually nothing
that these two scholars had not been hearing from me for years – hearing repeat-
edly, since time and again Elliott cheerfully disregarded my recommendations. My
494 DONALD W. FOSTER

CHum review was largely cobbled together from those old advisory letters, much
of it copied verbatim, including the very phrases that seem now to have rankled.
In “Glass Slippers”, and again in “The Professor Doth Protest Too Much,
Methinks”, Elliott and Valenza insinuate that my commentary in CHum represents
a sudden back-stabbing attack, the result of a supposed disappointment in their
failure to endorse Shakespeare’s authorship of “A Funeral Elegy” in the Clinic’s
final reports. Not so. I have never requested nor do I covet support from Elliott
or Valenza for the Elegy’s Shakespeare attribution. In fact, it was in 1990, before
completing their second year of research, that Elliott and Valenza came out against
Shakespeare’s authorship of the Elegy (Miller, 1990; cf. Elliott and Valenza, 1993,
1994, 1995b, 1996a, 1997, 1998). I continued to advise Elliott and Valenza when
asked, and remain unruffled even now by their opinions concerning the Elegy,
a poem whose Shakespearean attribution seems fairly secure notwithstanding its
splendid failure of the Clinic’s “Leaning Microphrases Test” and the “No × 1000,
Divided by No Plus Not, Test.”
Elliott and Valenza forget that their test-results varied from year to year on the
same poems and plays – and that the Elegy’s success-rate as a “Shakespeare” poem
went up for them in 1995 (when I supposedly got mad), after being down since
1990 (when I was a “good friend”). Elliott recalculated the Clinic’s surviving tests
for the “Shakespeare”, “Apocrypha”, and “Claimant” texts. In his 1995 recalcula-
tion of the Clinic’s six “modal” tests, the Elegy now passed as Shakespeare’s for the
first time, and passed “handily” (1995a). But anyone who guesses I was pleased at
the news would be mistaken, for I knew that the modal tests were simply not valid
as indicators of authorship: the entire modal regime is strongly conditioned by date
and genre (Foster, 1996b).
Apart from uncorrected typographical errors, I stand by everything I have said
about the Claremont Shakespeare Authorship Clinic.2 When I re-encounter, in the
dinning repetition of Elliott’s prose, a few of my less delicate phrases, I do regret
them, but even these found their way into my CHum review by way of letters writ-
ten to Elliott years earlier, letters that did not cause umbrage at the first reading.3
Though Elliott and Valenza now report me as a traitor to their cause, I cannot think
that I have done them an injury. In publishing for CHum’s readership what I had
been telling Elliott all along, my motive was to ensure competency in quantitative
text analysis, not to start a public spat. I might be willing to go over this ground in
more detail if another scholar picks up the personal charges leveled at me in “Glass
Slippers” and “The Professor Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks”, but for now I
prefer to excuse myself from responding to the ascription of dark personal motives
for having published an unfavorable scholarly review.

3. The Madness
Ward Elliott’s brainchild, the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic, was founded in 1987
and began toddling toward a precipice from day one. Its raison d’etre – the pursuit
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 495

of someone other than Shakespeare as the author of “Shakespeare” – was bound to

lead nowhere, and did. But the Clinic’s express goal was less worrisome than its
map for getting there. From the outset the project was compromised by its wildly
irregular copytexts and careless tabulation of data.
The first obligation, of course, was to assemble a body of Shakespearean, Apoc-
ryphal, and “Claimant” texts, consistently edited, from which to collect normalized
data. But after compiling their text-archive, Elliott and Valenza declined to intro-
duce necessary controls for spelling and orthography. A consistently edited text
of the canonical plays and poems was supplied by Word Cruncher’s electronic
edition of The Riverside Shakespeare, but the non-Shakespearean texts in the Clare-
mont archive were never commonized, despite urgent reminders from the Clinic’s
outside literary advisors. Selective corrections would have been just fine. Trainable
student helpers were reportedly on hand who could have commonized only those
textual features pertinent to the Clinic’s tests – but even this was not done, or at least
not with care. The commonizing of texts was long deferred and never completed,
causing tabulations to be far off the mark even for those tests that were central to
the Clinic’s success.4
Elliott and Valenza have acknowledged, ever since the Clinic’s first publication,
that their data depend on inconsistently edited copytexts (1991). The same apol-
ogy was still being offered to CHum’s readers five years later (e.g., 1996b). The
Clinic’s electronic texts, still unedited, are now deposited in the Oxford Electronic
Text Archive, “where they should be freely available to anyone wishing to use
them. Of course, users are free, if they wish, to re-edit and cut the noise level to
more respectable levels” (1996b). That Elliott should recommend such clean-up
procedures for others to perform on his own unedited text-archive is incredible. In
a moment, I will demonstrate the cost of Elliott’s having tolerated unabated noise
in the texts that served as the Clinic’s field of study.
As the Clinic’s first year (1987–1988) drew to a close, the accumulated data
were lost, apparently erased by a student assistant. The year’s report was deferred
until July 1989. In its second year, starting again from scratch, the Clinic focused
on a single test – the Thisted-Efron slope test – which Elliott concluded at year’s
end was of doubtful value (Elliott, 1988, 1989). Robert Valenza came on board
in 1990–1991. Drawing on his experience in radar and signal-processing, Valenza
undertook to adapt a “modal analysis” technique that would match Shakespeare
with one of the “Claimants.” Tinkering with combinations of words (“semantic
bucketing”), Valenza looked for combinations that might identify one of the anti-
Stratfordian “Claimants” as “Shakespeare” while differentiating Shakespeare from
the others. Out of this effort came the “BoB” tests, which were claimed in 1990
as a fatal blow to “Baconian” and “Marlovian” and “Oxfordian” theories that the
Shakespeare canon was written by Bacon, Marlowe, or Oxford. Excited by these
results, Elliott and Valenza became wedded to the tests despite evidence that the
“BoBs” were largely redundant and structurally flawed, being strongly conditioned
by a text’s date of composition (Foster, 1996b).
496 DONALD W. FOSTER

While escalating his commitment to Valenza’s BoB regime, Elliott remained

in hot pursuit of “authorship” tests that no one had ever tried before – “O” vs.
“oh”, the participial endings ’d vs. -ed, or the frequency of exclamation points.
But such variants are largely determined by editors. One by one, the Clinic’s
scholarly advisors bailed, as documented in the Clinic’s revolving door of printed
acknowledgments for 1988–1995b.
After the Clinic shut its doors in June 1994, nothing seemed to change but the
computations. Most of the tests were recalculated in 1995 (Elliott, 1995a; Elliott
and Valenza, 1995b). Sometime in 1996, about two years after the Clinic had
ended, Elliott and Valenza must have recalculated their data once again: “And
Then There Were None” (CHum, 1996a) is substantially a reprint of Matching
Shakespeare (Claremont, 1995b). The uncut text of 1995b is nearly identical to
that of 1996a; only the numbers are different – and there is a startling improvement
in the new figures. All discrepant numbers in 1996a change in the same direction,
demonstrating greater consistency for canonical Shakespeare and higher exclusion
rates for doubtful or non-Shakespearean texts, for the drama as for the poems, over
what had obtained in previous years (1996a; cf. 1994, 1995b).
“Bob4” (a Round One test [1994, 1995b]) is suppressed in Elliott and Valenza
(1996a), reducing 52 Round-One tests to 51. But the deletion of this one test cannot
account for the silent and extensive alteration of data made evident in a comparison
of Matching Shakespeare (1995b) with “And Then There Were None” (1996a).
Summary results have been quietly altered for every round of testing:

Matching Shakespeare (1995b) “And Then There Were None”

(1996a)

Percent of Plays Rejected, 7 Percent of Plays Rejected, 194

Round Tests Sh. core Claim. Apoc. Round Tests Sh. core Claim. Apoc.
One 18 0% 78% 68% One 17 0% 100% 96%
Two 19 0% 94% 75% Two 19 0% 94% 82%
Three 15 0% 92% 89% Three 15 0% 98% 96%

Playwright Claimants: 17 of 17 Excludable, 9 Playwright Claimants: 17 of 17 Excludable,

195
The average [non-Shakespeare] play had 18 The average [non-Shakespeare] play had 19
rejections (35%) from 52 tests rejections (35%) [sic, 37%] from 51 tests

The altered data cannot arise from mere spot-checks of the 1988–1994 testing
procedures, for the numerical changes are quite extensive. Some representative
examples:
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 497

Shakespeare’s ascribed portion of TNK has Shakespeare’s ascribed portion of TNK has
five rejections . . . . The “Hand D” section of four rejections . . . The “Hand D” section of
Sir Thomas More conventionally ascribed to Sir Thomas More, conventionally ascribed to
Shakespeare, has 22 rejections! Shakespeare, has 21 rejections!

The Shakespeare Apocrypha: 27 of 27 The Shakespeare Apocrypha: 27 of 27

Excludable, 10
Finally, the 27 plays of the Shakespeare
Apocrypha . . . average 15 rejections,
. . . Cardenio has 24 rejections and does not
look to us like Shakespeare’s work.
Excludable, 195–6
Finally, the 27 plays of the Shakespeare
Apocrypha . . . average 16 rejections,
. . . Cardenio has 28 rejections and does not
look to us like Shakespeare’s work.

Line Endings, 15 Line Endings, 198

As it happens, feminine endings produced
26% rejections among claimants, none of
them critical to an exclusion, and 14%
rejections among the Shakespeare
Apocrypha, none critical. Open lines
produced 26% claimant rejections, and 54%
Apocrypha rejections.
As it happens, feminine endings produced
43% rejections among claimants, none of
them critical to an exclusion, and 30%
rejections among the Shakespeare
Apocrypha, none critical. Open lines
produced 35% claimant rejections, and 56%
Apocrypha rejections.

Nonparametric Tests, 23 Nonparametric Tests, 202

These tests have . . . a 14–39% rejection rate These tests have . . . a 22–39% rejection rate
for claimants and others for claimants and others

These discrepancies continue throughout sections I–XI of “And Then There

Were None” (1996a). In the last of these sections, the authors detail their latest
findings, from a final 1994 round of tests just before calling it quits on the project.
Those figures, too, are quietly revised in 1996a.
After years of performing their tests on the same samples with problematic
results, the new figures might be cause for jubilation. Oddly, Elliott and Valenza in
1996a neglect to mention the improvement while omitting 1995b from the 1996a
bibliography.5 It is unfortunate that the authors do not explain how they arrived
at the new results – but if even Elliott and Valenza cannot administer their tests
consistently from one trial to the next, their conclusions in the years to come will
be difficult for other scholars to replicate.

4. The Method in It
Not all of the Clinic’s tests are subject to an outsider’s scrutiny – for example, no
independent verification can be attempted on the “BoB” regime until Elliott and
Valenza identify the texts in their non-Shakespearean samples (Foster, 1996b) –
but the data for canonical Shakespeare is easily checked by any enterprising reader
having access to the electronic Riverside Shakespeare, an edition that served as
the Clinic’s control. I have myself spot-checked for accuracy of the raw data, and
was astonished by the methodological sloppiness that Elliott and Valenza have
tolerated in their own work. Take, for example, the Clinic’s reported frequencies
498 DONALD W. FOSTER

for the Clinic’s two “It” tests – frequency of It as the first word of a sentence per
1000 sentences, and it as the last word of a sentence per 1000 sentences. These
“Round One” tests are among those cited by Elliott and Valenza as grounds for
disputing Shakespeare’s authorship of 1–3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus. Anyone
may check the Clinic’s figures (1996a, Appendix One) against the Riverside Shake-
speare. It gives me no pleasure to report that Elliott and Valenza’s figures for these
eight spot-checks (four plays, two tests), record four false rejections (bold print)
and one false pass (underlined):6

1 Henry VI 2 Henry VI 3 Henry VI Titus And.

sentences: 1,311 1,566 1,484 1,186
cited actual cited actual cited actual cited actual
freq. freq. freq. freq. freq. freq. freq. freq.
It as first word 7 8 10 8 9 9 5 10 per 1000 sentences
of sentence
it as last word 5 9 7 8 5 7 9 6 per 1000 sentences
of sentence

Shakespeare scholars may be heartened to learn that Elliott and Valenza’s rejec-
tions for these four canonical plays are produced by erroneous data, which leaves
open a possibility that the test is not inherently defective. But corrected tabulation
will not by itself salvage the Clinic’s two “it” tests. End-punctuation varies so
widely in the Clinic’s “Apocrypha” and “Claimant” texts that they afford no basis
of comparison with the Riverside Shakespeare, and could not do so even if the
Shakespeare data had been accurately reported.
Another error dismissed as trivial in “The Professor Doth Protest Too Much,
Methinks” is the Clinic’s “Whenas, Whereas Test.” This test provides one of the
52 criteria by which Elliott and Valenza discriminate between “Shakespeare” and
“not-Shakespeare” (Elliott and Valenza, 1994, 1995b; 52 tests reduced to 51 in
1996a; reported as 54, 1998). According to the “Whenas, Whereas Test”, if a text
contains no instance of either of these two words (and most plays do not), then
that text receives a pass: it “might-be-Shakespeare.” One strike and you’re out:
if a text contains even one whenas (= when) or whereas (= where) it receives
a “not-Shakespeare” rejection: “The crucial difference is between zero and one”
(1998).
Elliott and Valenza were advised early on that the occurrence or omission of
single words cannot rightly be viewed as evidence for or against Shakespearean
authorship of any text. By way of analogy: Shakespeare in his known writings
rarely uses the words family (n.) or real (adj.). It may be useful to observe that
Shakespeare uses these two words less frequently than many contemporary poets
(even as it may be worthwhile to note that Shakespeare rarely uses whenas or
whereas). But the appearance or omission of family or real or whenas in an Eliz-
abethan text tells us precisely nothing about whether or not Shakespeare wrote
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 499

it. Unlike, say, the contraction, can’t, which was coined long after Shakespeare’s
death, or possessive its, which first caught on during his lifetime, family, real,
whenas, and whereas are words that were known to Shakespeare, and that he
sometimes used. To ascribe not-Shakespeare “rejections” to the texts in which these
words appear is misguided.
This “green-light/red-light” strategy (1997, 1998) for distinguishing Shake-
speare from “not-Shakespeare” has nothing to recommend it except its simplicity.
Unfortunately, Elliott and Valenza do not supply accurate figures even for this
simple test. In their irregularly edited text-sample, some editors prefer the spelling
when as or where as, a variant that Elliott and Valenza frequently skipped in their
tabulations. This identified problem could have been corrected with only a few
hours’ work, either by normalizing the Clinic’s text-samples and then counting
by computer, or by doing a manual recount of the variant spellings.7 Elliott and
Valenza’s mistabulations for the “Whenas, Whereas Test” were perpetuated from
one study to the next, but only as a result of iron indifference (Elliott and Valenza
1994, 1995b, 1996a).
Elliott and Valenza now say that their inaccurate tabulations for whenas,
whereas should not be viewed as a problem: if their computer-searches caught
just one instance of whenas or whereas in a text (red light!), that text was given a
“not-Shakespeare” rejection. So if the Clinic overlooked as many as 8 instances in a
single play (e.g., Greene’s Selimus) it should not matter, so long as just one instance
was counted and reported. But this line of argument begs the question about those
plays and poems in which every occurrence was overlooked by the Clinic – which
was often the case, resulting in many “might-be-Shakespeare” passes for plays
that do not, in fact, pass Elliott and Valenza’s own test. On this grounds the Clinic
issues false passes on even to such familiar plays as Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy
(containing whenas, whereas), Ben Jonson’s New Inn (2 whereas) and Tale of a Tub
(1 whereas), and John Fletcher’s Chances (1 whenas).
Elliott and Valenza insist that their figures are accurate for Shakespeare;
however, the published figures for Shakespeare are no more dependable than for
the “Apocrypha” and “Claimant” cross-samples (1994, 1995, 1996). Elliott and
Valenza write that “Shakespeare uses whereas or whenas in only two plays, 2H6
and Cym.” (1996a); the Clinic records one instance in each, though both plays actu-
ally contain two (2H6 I.ii.58 and IV.vii.34; Cym. V.iv.138 and V.v.435) – and there
are others. Excepting the two instances of whereas at Pericles I.ii.42 and I.iv.70
(of disputed authenticity), one finds whenas, whereas in canonical Shakespeare not
only, as Elliott and Valenza report, in 2 Henry VI and Cymbeline, but also 1 Henry
VI I.ii.84, II.v.76, and V.v.64; 3 Henry VI I.ii.74, II.i.46, and V.vi.34; Comedy of
Errors IV.iv.136; Titus Andronicus IV.iv.92; Merry Wives of Windsor III.i.24; also
at Venus and Adonis 999 and Sonnets 49.3.
The appearance of whenas, whereas in canonical Shakespeare leads the Clinic
into further difficulties. The three instances of whereas in 1 Henry VI are counted,
tabulated, and cited, but Elliott and Valenza have excluded 1 Henry VI from the
500 DONALD W. FOSTER

canon. Titus Andronicus contains one instance of when as (spaced thus in the
Clinic’s own copytext). It, too, is assigned a “not-Shakespeare” rejection, and
banished from the canon. (Titus Andronicus is one of the canonical plays that
Elliott and Valenza “purged” from the Clinic’s Shakespeare baseline in 1994, to
produce more consistent results for the “Play-Validated Tests” [1994].) Of the two
instances of whereas in 2 Henry VI, Elliott and Valenza report one (as noted above)
and conclude that 2 Henry VI may be another doubtful or collaborative play. But
the Henry VI plays and Titus Andronicus cannot be dislodged from the canon by
just one instance of one word that Elliott and Valenza believe to be radically un-
Shakespearean; and if Titus and the Henry VI trilogy are indeed Shakespeare’s, as
most scholars believe, then this verbal behavior is less unusual for Shakespeare,
less valuable as a discriminator, than Elliott and Valenza have indicated.
As I observed a moment ago, Cymbeline contains two instances of when as.
Elliott and Valenza confess as much in a note – but on the same page, in the
corresponding pass-rejection table (1996a, Appendix Three [S]), they list just
one of those two occurrences. They then make an exception for Cymbeline,
neglecting to shade and count even that one tabulated instance in Cymbeline as
a “not-Shakespeare” rejection. Had they counted it as they should have instead of
carelessly omitting it, even this late romance would have received a red flag from
the Whenas, Whereas Test.
Elliott and Valenza acknowledge in a note, but then decline to count, addi-
tional instances of whenas, whereas, in Comedy of Errors and Merry Wives of
Windsor (1996a). The instances of whenas, whereas in Venus and Adonis and the
Sonnets, and the three instances in 3 Henry VI, go unreported altogether (1994,
1995b, 1996a, 1997, and 1998). (Amusingly enough, the Elegy receives a clear
“pass” on Elliott and Valenza’s “Whenas, Whereas” test while Venus and Adonis
and the Sonnets trigger “not-Shakespeare” rejections.) In their final tabulations
(1996a), Elliott and Valenza thus omit 8 of the 15 instances of whereas or whenas
in canonical Shakespeare; the remaining seven canonical instances are reported
but then conscripted to help drive four early Shakespeare plays from the canon.
If Elliott and Valenza had reported their data more fully and pursued their tests
rigorously, Shakespeareans would also have been asked to do without The Comedy
of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, Venus and Adonis and the
Sonnets. Clearly, this is farther than Elliott and Valenza were willing to go; but it
would have been better to have dumped the test altogether than to have suppressed
the inconvenient occurrences in canonical Shakespeare. Such selectivity is what is
meant by “cherry-picking” (Foster, 1996b).
The failure of the “Whenas, Whereas Test” as an attributional marker, as admin-
istered by Elliott and Valenza, is partly a matter of inconsistent editing and careless
tabulation; and partly a matter of the omissions and arbitrary exceptions for Shake-
spearean texts that would otherwise have failed the test. But the underlying problem
is more fundamental, and endemic to the Clinic’s work from 1987 onward. The lack
of theoretical sophistication in the design of the Elliott-Valenza tests is apparent
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 501

from every angle, beginning with the odd notion that one occurrence of one word
(“The crucial difference is between zero and one”) can distinguish Shakespeare
from “not-Shakespeare.” But let’s suppose that Elliott and Valenza had normalized
their texts and compiled accurate tabulations, reporting all occurrences of whenas,
whereas. What then? As administered by the Clinic, the test would still have been
invalid. The extra syllable of the conjunctional affix, -as, appears most often in the
Elizabethan period as a metrical filler, and hence far more often in poetry than in
prose (and more frequently in verse-drama than in plays mostly in prose). It will
be observed further, in a survey of Elliott and Valenza’s own data, that the vast
majority of texts receiving rejections on the Whenas/Whereas test were written
before 1595 (e.g., 1996a, pp. 232–5).
As already noted, Elliott and Valenza take even one offending instance in any
play as a sign that Shakespeare did not write that play, but the appearance of whenas
and whereas in 1–3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors
may only signal that these plays were written in verse, and before 1595, as of
course they were. After 1595, the use of whenas and whereas sharply decreases
not only in Shakespeare, but throughout English literature. Robert Greene uses
these two words more often than most other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights
combined – but Greene died in 1592, just as Shakespeare was getting started. If
Elliott and Valenza had normalized their texts, and then tested Shakespearean texts,
early and late, against contemporaneous non-Shakespearean texts, they’d have been
able to demonstrate for CHum’s readers that the “Whenas, Whereas, Test” is a poor
discriminator between Shakespeare and most other playwrights. This test may have
some usefulness as an attributional marker for Robert Greene, but as employed
by Elliott and Valenza, it cannot serve as an attributional test for anyone at
all.
The Clinic’s simplified “red-light/green-light” procedure becomes even more
strange with such “Round Three” tests as Elliott and Valenza’s “Hark/Listen” and
“See” tests. 1 Henry VI contains 7 instances of the interjectory command, Hark
(Elliott and Valenza report “9”) and 8 instances of the corresponding imperative,
See (Elliott and Valenza report only “6”, enough to trigger “not-Shakespeare”
rejection). Titus Andronicus has 12 See imperatives (“11” are reported), 8 Harks,
and 1 Listen, giving poor Titus another “not-Shakespeare” rejection. The Tempest,
however, has 11 Harks – and though Elliott and Valenza misreport “15” Harks in
The Tempest, the play escapes a “not-Shakespeare” rejection (Elliott and Valenza,
1996a, Appendix 3, tables S and A).8 I cannot find any test based on the River-
side Shakespeare for which Elliott and Valenza have reported consistently accurate
figures.

5. Validity and Replicability

To move through all of Elliott and Valenza’s tests in this manner would be unac-
ceptably tedious. One can, perhaps, make allowances for the inaccurate data,
502 DONALD W. FOSTER

provided that future scholarship bears out the fundamental validity and replicability
of the Clinic’s work. But how much of the regime presented by Elliott and Valenza
actually tests what it purports to test, without static from generic difference or
from disparate dates of composition? Of those tests that can be proved valid, how
many can be replicated by other scholars, and with similar results? One thing is
clear: even if Elliott and Valenza had confined themselves to the most dependable
attributional indicators, someone would have to do the work over again, this time
using normalized texts and avoiding sloppy tabulation.
Which tests can or should be done over? When all text-samples have been
consistently edited, and the data accurately tabulated, Elliott and Valenza’s auto-
mated tests may yet prove convenient to attributional scholarship, for they can be
performed on any text in seconds (e.g., “Grade Level”, frequency of “Hyphen-
ated Compound Words”). A few others, such as the “With as the Penultimate
Word of a Sentence Test”, can be performed rapidly with computer assistance.
If the Clinic’s texts are eventually re-edited with consistent end-punctuation, and
if controls are established for genre and stanzaic structure, it may be that even the
Clinic’s most eccentric discriminators – such as “No × 1000, Divided by No Plus
Not, Test” – will prove useful. But nothing can be inferred concerning these tests
as administered, tabulated, and interpreted by Elliott and Valenza.
It will be futile to repeat even the automated tests on texts that have not yet
been commonized. Take, for example, the “Hyphenated Compound Words” test
(Round One), which Elliott and Valenza describe as “one of our best conventional
tests for poems.” The Clinic reports a consistently higher frequency of HCWs in the
Riverside Shakespeare than in the non-Shakespeare (“Apocrypha” and “Claimant”)
texts. Noting that the Riverside Shakespeare shows greater regularity than the
Clinic’s cross-sample, Elliott and Valenza ask ingenuously, “Could some of the
difference be the editor’s? Again, we can’t tell without re-editing everything . . . ”
(1996a, p. 198). But it’s not quite true to say that we can’t tell. Elliott and Valenza
checked two samples for editorial variance – Edward III and Sir Thomas More. This
very limited experiment indicated that “careful re-editing can more than double
the number of HCWs” (Sir Thomas More with “careful re-editing” increased its
HCWs, by 175%; Edward III, by 89%; 1996a, p. 198). Despite this double red
flag, the remaining 81 dramatic texts and 79 poetry texts in the Clinic’s cross-
sample were not commonized – not even for this one simple feature of punctuation
– the hyphenation of compound words. Yet, despite having perceived their counts
to be highly unreliable, Elliott and Valenza continue to claim this test as one of the
best discriminators between Shakespeare and not-Shakespeare that the Clinic has
to offer.
Immediately following Hyphenated Compound Words in the Clinic’s regime for
nondramatic texts is the “Relative Clauses per 1,000 words” test (1996a, Appen-
dices Four, Five), about which no further information is available (no line-citations
are supplied, nor even separate tallies for who, which, that). The reported frequen-
cies are misreported by as much as 50%, especially in “Claimant” and “Apocrypha”
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 503

texts. It is not clear what went wrong with the Relative Clauses test, but the error in
this case cannot be blamed on editorial practice. It may be that Elliott and Valenza
or their assistants had some difficulty in distinguishing between interrogative and
relative use of who and which, or between relative and demonstrative use of that.
Some poets exhibit a marked preference for which over that even for restrictive
relative clauses (Shakespeare is inconsistent in that regard). Whether the types
and frequencies of relative clauses can be made useful as an attributional test in
Elizabethan poetry and drama is a matter for further study.
The “Feminine Endings” and “Open Lines” tests that follow next in the Clinic’s
battery (Appendices One, Four, Five) are well-established indicators, and useful
ones, provided that the figures are accurate. (The Clinic’s data for Shakespeare’s
Feminine Endings and Open Lines look about right; I have not checked the reported
figures for the Clinic’s “Apocrypha” and “Claimant” texts). Caveats are never-
theless in order with respect to date and genre. Blank verse tends to register a
higher frequency of Feminine Endings than does contemporaneous rhymed verse
by the same poet. Texts written in short, disjoined stanzas necessarily entail a
lower frequency of Open Lines (enjambment) than continuous verse (an example:
Henry Willoughby’s Avisa, having a 4% rate of enjambment, is assigned two “not-
Shakespeare” rejections – but the low frequency of Open Lines in that 1594 text
is partly a function of its stanzaic form). There is also a general chronological
trend: as English prosody became more sophisticated, Jacobean registers a higher
frequency of Open Lines than does verse of the Elizabethan period, irrespective of
authorship.
Other tests in the Clinic’s regime seem impossibly cumbersome. Elliott and
Valenza have dwelt on the Clinic’s “Leaning Microphrases and Clinging Mono-
syllables” tests (1996a, 1997, 1998). They say that I have been stubborn in not
recognizing the importance of these two tests (“Enclitics” and “Proclitics”, 1996a,
Appendix Six), which “worked beautifully” for the 22 of 184 text samples in
Appendix 5 for which the test was completed (1998). But Elliott and Valenza
clearly misunderstand even what it was they were testing. The authors complain
that they should not have been faulted “for getting normal Shakespeare stress
patterns ‘quite simply wrong’ when these were not the point of the microphrases
test” (1998) – which is a little like saying that spelling habits are not the point of a
spelling test. According to Tarlinskaja, stress patterns are precisely the point of the
microphrases test (1987, 1993).
Tarlinskaja’s theory is that certain monosyllabic modifiers “cling” to the
substantive, and retain or lose stress, causing a slight irregularity in the iambic
rhythm. It is principally in the act of oral reading, not in the act of composition,
that monosyllables “cling” to the word following. The “Leaning Microphrases
and Clinging Monosyllables” tests depend entirely on one’s scansion of the poetic
line – and Tarlinskaja is too often mistaken in her assumptions about Elizabethan
scansion, as in the Clinic’s flagship example, “sweet heart”, which is as misguided
today as it was in 1993, when the error was first pointed out to Elliott and Valenza.
504 DONALD W. FOSTER

English words often received different stress than they do in modern English (e.g.,
as-pect’, lam’-ent-able, re-ven’-ue, sweet-heart’).
My objection to the Tarlinskaja tests as administered by Elliott and Valenza has
nothing to do with A Funeral Elegy but with the analysis itself. Elliott and Valenza
admit themselves unable to perform the “Leaning Microphrases and Clinging
Monosyllables Test” with a high degree of accuracy. They claim that Marina Tarlin-
skaja is the only person on earth who can perform this specialized “Russian-school
versometrics”, and they have repeatedly deferred to her authority (1995b, 1996a).
In 1993, after a Claremont student who was trained to do the work evidently
dropped out of the Clinic, Elliott and Valenza enlisted Tarlinskaja herself to analyze
the text of Venus and Adonis and A Funeral Elegy (1995b, p. 201). As a literary
advisor to the Clinic, I was given a copy of Tarlinskaja’s complete annotations.
Here are some representative examples of clinging monosyllables as identified by
Tarlinskaja herself (monosyllables that are not in bold print do not cling to the
succeeding word):

Sample proclitic clingers in Venus Sample proclitic clingers in A

and Adonis:
Look how a bird lı̀es tángled in a net . . .
What seest thou in the ground? Hòld úp thy
head . . .
Màke úse of time, let not advantage slip . . .
The heat I have from thence dòth lı́ttle harm
...
Whàt báre excuses mak’st thou to be gone?
...
Funeral Elegy:
Clàim fı́t respect, that they in every limb . . .
Sò fástened to his reason that it strove . . .
May pattern out òne trúly good, by him . . .
Warrant enough in his òwn ı́nnocence . . .
His younger years gàve cómfortable hope . . .

Sample enclitic clingers in Venus and Sample enclitic clingers in A Funeral

Adonis: Elegy:
Now whı́ch wày shall she turn? What shall May óne dày|láy òpe malice which hath
she say? . . . crossed . . .
If you will sáy sò, you shall have a kiss . . . It pı́cks òut matter to inform the worst . . .

Who being lóoked òn, dùcks as quickly in . . . My trúth stòle from my tongue into my heart
Só glı̀des he in the night from Venus’ eye . . . ...
And those are múch mòre noble in the mind
...

Tarlinskaja (1993) identifies “proud” as an enclitic clinger at Venus 14 (“proud

head”) and as a proclitic clinger at Elegy 175 (“proud height”). The following
passage, which I quote here from the original 1593 quarto of Venus and Adonis and
not from Tarlinskaja’s modernized text, is credited with nine clingers, all proclitics
(see if you can find them!):
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 505

Round hooft, short ioynted, fetlocks shag, and long,

Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostrill wide,
High crest, short eares, straight legs, & passing strong,
Thin mane, thicke taile, broad buttock, tender hide:
Looke what a Horse should haue, he did not lack, . . . (Ven. pp. 295–9)
(Answer: there are three clingers in each of the middle three lines, none in the first
or last.)
As a result of the difficulties in scanning for hidden microphrases, Elliott and
Valenza administered the text to only thirteen “Claimant” and “Apocrypha” texts.
All but one of the thirteen – Marlowe and Chapman’s “Hero and Leander” – failed,
generating “not-Shakespeare” rejections. Results for 162 of 184 remaining samples
are unrecorded, or at least not reported (Foster, 1996b). Elliott and Valenza report
test scores for just four Shakespeare plays, 3 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Richard
II, and The Tempest. The two early plays – 3 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus –
repeatedly failed both types of Leaning Microphrase test (1996a, Appendix Six).9
It was in 1990 that Elliott and Valenza went on record against Shakespeare’s
authorship of “A Lover’s Complaint” and A Funeral Elegy. In 1993 Elliott and
Valenza found that their suspicions were confirmed by Tarlinskaja’s analysis. Both
of these late poems are said by Elliott and Valenza to have failed both types of
Leaning Microphrase test quite miserably. I am happy to concede the point. Hardly
grounds for a spat, these arcane mysteries seem to this reviewer much ado about
nothing.
Still, in reviewing the work that she submitted to the Clinic in 1993, I find
that Tarlinskaja is much more tentative about this material than either Elliott and
Valenza, and far less persuaded than they by its power to distinguish Shakespeare
from not-Shakespeare, as in these marginal remarks on the Elegy, addressed to
Elliott:
“Does look like Sh.!” (p. 7, FE 174 ff.)
“No, it does not look like Sh. in style, after all” (p. 17, FE 464 ff.)
“This looks like Sh., doesn’t it?” (p. 20, FE 574 ff.)
As her last comment, following her work of annotating Venus and Adonis and the
Elegy, Tarlinskaja advises Elliott,
If you decided to do the stress profile and word boundaries, I would do lines
with masculine endings separate from lines with feminine endings. One extra
syllable may affect the whole configuration. (1993)10
Contrary to their latest remarks in “The Professor Doth Protest Too Much,
Methinks”, Elliott and Valenza have never supplied separate figures for masculine
and feminine lines, either for the Elegy or for the Clinic’s few Shakespearean cross-
samples (the figures for which were borrowed from Tarlinskaja’s original 1987
study). But since the one extra syllable of a feminine ending can affect the whole
configuration, and since most literary scholars will share Elliott and Valenza’s
506 DONALD W. FOSTER

inability or unwillingness to compute this test for most of the texts in their study, it
may be just as well to give the Leaning Microphrase a rest.

6. Conclusion
I am sorry that Elliott and Valenza should have so poor an opinion of me as to
suppose that my unfavorable review of their Shakespeare Clinic was motivated by
a difference of opinion concerning A Funeral Elegy. The Clinic’s tests, and the
accuracy of their figures, should be examined for all of the Clinic’s “Shakespeare”
and “Claimant” and “Apocrypha” texts, including the Elegy.11 Elliott and Valenza
have reported five tests that they believe point to non-Shakespearean authorship
of the poem (1990, 1993, 1994, 1995b, 1996a, 1997). I urge CHum’s readers to
consider the Elegy’s failure on those five tests, and on others evidently not yet
reported: Today, “FE still flunks 14 out of 25 validated Shakespeare tests, far too
many, in our view, to make a likely Shakespeare attribution” (1998). I welcome
scrutiny of my own work, have always encouraged free debate of attributional
problems, and shall continue to assist my fellow scholars when asked to do so,
irrespective of their beliefs or tests concerning A Funeral Elegy.
If Elliott and Valenza’s Authorship Clinic casts doubt on a Shakespeare attribut-
ion for the Elegy (and I cannot see that it does), this inference is a small matter when
set beside the Clinic’s more startling conclusion: much of what Shakespeareans
have called “Shakespeare” may represent the work of another writer altogether.
The Elegy is not, after all, the only “Shakespeare” text whose canonical status
is said to be endangered by the Clinic’s findings. Elliott and Valenza say they
have dealt a serious blow to 37 anti-Stratfordian “Claimants” – and to much of
the Shakespeare canon as well. Oxfordian and Marlovian and Baconian groups
have already announced that they are unimpressed, and for once anti-Stratfordians
and Shakespeareans may be in agreement. But this is not a trivial issue: Elliott
and Valenza stand with a raised hatchet – ready, at a nod, to lop the Shakespeare
dramatic canon at both ends, obliging scholars to consider why early and late
Shakespeare plays and poems have done so poorly on the Clinic’s regime. But I
think it’s only a rubber hatchet.
It is not only the early plays that do poorly on the Clinic’s regime, but late
works (“A Lover’s Complaint”, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen; arguably, “A
Funeral Elegy”).12 Elliott and Valenza began their project in 1988 by excluding
what is arguably Shakespeare’s earliest play, 1 Henry VI (c. 1591), and the two last
plays, Henry VIII (1612) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613). 3 Henry VI and Titus
Andronicus were declared “not-Shakespeare” in 1994:
However, apart from [these] two plays which our evidence forced us to remove
from the Shakespeare baseline, we have tried not to tamper with our starting
baseline . . . If we had wanted to be really tough about our hard-core baseline,
and to get baseline rejections closer to one percent, we could have done so with
a follow-on purge, removing from our baseline some or all of four more not-
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 507

so-glaring outliers: The Taming of the Shrew, with four rejections; and Henry
VI, part II, Henry V, and A Comedy of Errors, with three each . . . However, we
did not attempt such a follow-up purge” (1994, pp. 6–7).
Elliott and Valenza were surely wise not to purge The Taming of the Shrew,
Henry V, and A Comedy of Errors from their Shakespeare baseline, but these texts
are not the only remaining outliers. Closer study of the Clinic’s work, including
tests mistabulated or not reported at all, reveals that the early canonical poems
also run into trouble with the Clinic’s attributional tests. In 1992–1994, Elliott and
Valenza circumvented this problem by investigating which of the so-called “Play-
Validated Tests” could be included as ‘Poem-Validated Tests” without having to
report rejections for Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets.
These poems mutually survived eight of the Clinic’s “Play-Validated Tests”: Grade
Level, HCWs, Feminine Endings, Open Lines, Enclitic clingers, Proclitic clingers,
With-as-penultimate word, No × 1000/No + Not, BoB5, and BoB7 (in 1995b,
1996a, Appendix Four, 46 of the 54 “Play-Validated Tests” are thus suppressed for
the canonical poems). Next, “A Lover’s Complaint” and “A Funeral Elegy” were
tested against the eight “Play-Validated” tests that the early canonical poems were
able to pass. This procedure resulted in four rejections for “A Lover’s Complaint”,
and five for “A Funeral Elegy” Elliott and Valenza neglect to mention that these two
late poems pass many of the original 54 tests for which Venus and Adonis, The Rape
of Lucrece, and the Sonnets receive “not-Shakespeare” rejections. In attributional
work this is called stacking the deck. When the Clinic’s full battery of tests is
rigorously applied to Venus, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, these canonical poems do
no better than many “Apocrypha” and “Claimant” texts that are rejected by the
Clinic’s badly gerrymandered regime. Nor does our one Shakespeare holograph
make the cut: Elliott and Valenza believe that Hand D of Sir Thomas More (21–22
rejections) is not even in the right ball park.
Neither, perhaps, was the Shakespeare Authorship Clinic. Elliott and Valenza,
moving from psychiatric and medical to athletic metaphors by which to character-
ize their work, have lately represented attributional scholarship as a fairy-tale-like
pursuit (“Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots”), or as a baseball game, a sport
played out by rival teams before biased umpires, and anything goes. In this cloudy
weather I do not think that the game should go nine innings. Taking a rain check,
I close with Mortimer’s succinct appraisal of the argument that Elliott and Valenza
have chosen as an epigraph for “The Professor.” When Glendower boasts of his
power to call spirits from the vasty deep and Hotspur jibes, “Why so can I, or
so can any man”, Mortimer steps in: “Come, come, no more of this unprofitable
chat.”

Acknowledgements
My work has greatly benefited from the advice and criticism of Rick Abrams, to
whom I am grateful for invaluable assistance as I was writing this essay. Rick has
508 DONALD W. FOSTER

been an important voice in scholarly discussion of A Funeral Elegy, and he has

followed with interest the vagaries of the Claremont Shakespeare Clinic. When
others have become shrill or bumptious, I have drawn on Rick’s bottomless reserve
of calm good humor.

Notes
1 See, for example, Gaskell (1990), Miller (1990), Newton (1990), and Oldenburg (1990); and Elliott
and Valenza (1995b, iii, 5).
2 An uncorrected misprint (my fault, not the editors’) has Elliott and Valenza finally undoing their
project’s “founding character” [sic, for charter]; in a second typo, Elliott is misquoted as saying that
Grade Level is “among out [sic, for our] better tests” (1996b, 248, 250).
3 This may be as good a place as any to observe that many of the quotations ascribed to me by
Elliott and Valenza (1997, 1998) do not appear in the sources cited and are, in fact, invented. Other
phrasing ascribed to me (like “foul vapor”, “certainly wrong”) is mine, but wrenched from the
context, generalized as a comment on Elliott and Valenza’s entire project, and tirelessly repeated
by the authors in what looks like a ritual reenactment of ventriloquized self-flagellation. Readers are
advised to check all quotations against the documents cited. Where no citation is supplied for Elliott
and Valenza’s Foster quotations, the quotation marks are usually scaremarks and no key to what I
have actually said or written.
4 Examples of texts scuttled or compromised by the Clinic’s non-normalized text-archive include
the following examples from Round One: “Grade Level” (i.e., sentence-length), “Rare Words”, and
“New Words” (“Words” treated as character-strings); “Open Lines” (i.e., enjambment); and frequen-
cies of “Hyphenated Compound Words”, “It as the first word in a sentence”, “it as the last word
in a sentence”, “with as the penultimate word in a sentence”, and “the as the penultimate word
in a sentence.” The Round Two and Round Three and Poems tests are likewise compromised by
inconsistent editing.
5 Elliott and Valenza note only that one of the lexically redundant “BoB” tests has been cut, thereby
reducing the Round One regime from 52 tests (1995b) to 51 (1996a), but the exclusion of this one
test does not account for across-the-board improvement. All test-results were evidently checked or
recalculated in revising 1995b for publication as 1996a.
6 It as first word of a sentence: 1H6 I.ii.134, I.ii.136, I.iii.15, I.iii.261, I.iv.118, I.iv.139 (two),
I.iv.141, I.iv.141, III.i.59; 2H6 I.ii.82, II.i.152, II.ii.57, II.iv.102, III.i.119, III.ii.67, III.ii.122,
III.ii.177, IV.i.110, IV.vii.37, IV.vii.113, V.i.182 (plus one stage direction, not applicable); 3H6 I.i.18,
I.i.85, I.iv.59, I.iv.125, III.ii.10, III.iii.2, III.iii.20, IV.i.49, IV.vi.64, IV.vi.101, V.i.12, V.v.11; Tit.
I.ii.244, III.i.91, III.i.265, IV.ii.35, IV.ii.80, IV.ii.81, V.iii.39; it as last word of a sentence: 1H6 I.ii.15,
I.ii.110, I.ii.186, I.ii.209, I.iii.42, I.iii.185, I.iii.186, I.iii.270, I.iv.64, I.iv.131, I.iv.141, I.iv.144 (plus
one s.d., NA); 2H6 I.i.155, II.i.26, II.iii.36, III.i.108, III.ii.146, IV.i.143, IV.ii.6, IV.vii.106, IV.vii.123,
V.i.4, V.i.172, V.ii.25; 3H6 I.i.60, I.i.89, I.i.94, II.i.88, III.ii.47, V.v.55, V.v.58, V.v.73, V.v.74, V.vi.79;
Tit. II.i.42, II.i.97, II.iii.3, II.iii.247, III.i.203, IV.ii.24, IV.ii.86, IV.iii.115, IV.iv.82, V.i.96, V.i.110,
V.iii.29 (plus one s.d., NA).
7 In normalization it is necessary to weed out, by direct inspection, all instances in which “when as”
is not equivalent to “whenas” (= when) but syntactically distinct (“when, as I said before . . . ”).
8 Respective instances of the hark/listen interjection appear at 1H6 I.v.27, III.iii.29, III.iv.37, IV.ii.39
(2), V.iii.175, V.iv.55; Tit. II.i.99 (2), II.iii.40, III.i.225, III.ii.35, IV.ii.162, V.ii.180, V.ii.186, II.iii.139;
Tmp. I.ii.381 (2), I.ii.317, I.ii.385 (2), I.ii.405, I.ii.496, III.iii.18, IV.i.257 (2), IV.i.261. Respective
instances of imperative see appear at 1H6 III.i.137, III.ii.29, III.iii.49 (2), III.iii.74, V.iii.13 (2),
V.iii.24; Tit. I.i.142, I.i.341 (2), IV.i.10 (2), IV.i.50 (2), IV.i.54 (2), IV.iii.70 (2), IV.iv.14.
9 Elliott and Valenza report also that “The published enclitic rates for all of The Winter’s Tale (1611)
THE CLAREMONT SHAKESPEARE AUTHORSHIP CLINIC 509

and the “later substrate” of Titus Andronicus (1594 or earlier) fit well within [the Clinic’s] profiles
(1996a, p. 201).
10 Tarlinskaja’s analysis extends also to rhyme. At FE 309-11, the feminine rhyme, “bonds of unity /
. . . / grave immunity” is said by Tarlinskaja to be a “strange, non-Sh. rhyme.” By way of comparison,
The Rape of Lucrece contains such rhymes as opportunity: quality (874-5), opportunity: infamy (902-
3), opportunity: enchained me (932-4), opportunity: cry out for thee (1063-5).
11 For example: Elliott and Valenza report that their mistaken index for LC on the “no/no+not test is
off by only “nine-tenths of one percent.” The index as reported in Elliott and Valenza (1995b, 1996a)
is actually off by nine percent (111 instead of 120). Responding to their misreported figures for FE
on the same test, Elliott and Valenza protest that “Foster’s count of 43 not’s which is two over the
actual count” (1998). The authors have simply forgotten the two prose instances at ded. 16, 19.
12 The Clinic’s failure to establish continuity or congruency between early and late Shakespeare
may be the Clinic’s greatest liability. That I am to blame for this problem, by having told Elliott to
exclude canonical texts from the Clinic’s Shakespeare-baseline, is a charge that puzzles me (Elliott
and Valenza, 1996b, 1997, 1998). Elliott’s recollection on this point is quite mistaken. I noted that the
following passages are widely considered by scholars to be non-Shakespearean: Mac. III.v and IV.i.
39-43, 125-32; Per. I–II; portions of H8, TNK, and Tim. (Foster, 1987). I do not think that this was
bad advice for the Clinic’s base-line, then or now; but the whole point of the Shakespeare Authorship
Clinic was to develop tests that can distinguish “not-Shakespeare” from “might-be-Shakespeare.”
Had I actually given the Clinic a bum steer on canonical matters in 1987 or thereafter, I would have
thought that the misdirection would emerge in the course of research.

References
Dolnick, E. “The Ghost’s Vocabulary”. The Atlantic Monthly (Oct. 1991), 82–86.
Elliott, W. Letter to the author (August 1988) Unpublished.
Elliott, W. Letter to the author (April 3, 1995a) Unpublished.
Elliott, W. Letter to the author (April 1996b) Unpublished.
Elliot, W. “Shakespeare Clinic Evaluation Report, [1987–89]” (September, 1989b) Unpublished.
Elliott, W. and R. Valenza. “And Then There Were None: Winnowing the Shakespeare Claimants”.
Computers and the Humanities, 30.3 (1996a), 1–56.
Elliott, W. and R. Valenza. “Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots”. Shakespeare Quarterly (1997),
177–207.
Elliott, W. and R. Valenza. Matching Shakespeare, 1994: Computer Testing of Elizabethan Texts
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