SOURCE: "W[illiam] S[hakespeare]'s 'Funeral Elegy' and the Turn from the Theatrical," in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 435-60.

In the following essay, Abrams argues that signs of Shakespeare's authorship of the poem "The Funeral Elegy " are evident in the poem's allusions to the theatrical profession and to Shakespeare's works. Abrams also maintains that the poem's narrator reveals "biographical coincidences" which point to Shakespeare, as the elegist.

On 25 January 1612 in Exeter, after a day's drinking with two friends, a thirty-year-old Devonshire country gentleman, William Peter, was murdered. Nineteen days later in London, Thomas Thorpe, the publisher of Shakespeare's Sonnets, registered as ready for publication a 578-line poem entitled A Funeral Elegy in Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter. This poem, signed W. S. on the title page and in the dedication, was introduced to Shakespeare studies by Donald Foster who...