By Mike Sula
During his research Foster came across the poem “A Funerall Elegye In Memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter,” which was privately published in 1612 in honor of a murder victim. “The writer was either imitating or pretending to be Shakespeare, because there were many little grammatical oddities that appear in Shakespeare and rarely anywhere else,” he says. “I spent a long time trying to track down the external evidence, and I wrote my graduate dissertation on it, saying even though this poem doesn’t add anything to Shakespeare’s reputation, there’s a good chance that he wrote it. In the meantime there had been a whole string of supposed Shakespeare discoveries in the press, none of which was widely credited. When my book was done I didn’t care to create one more controversy and look like the man with the bucket and broom at the end of the parade, so I published it [in 1989] with very little fanfare.”
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“Most of us are unaware of the degree to which our language is a bricolage–a taking of this and that, little bits of language, phrases, and so forth,” Foster says. “If you watch a film or read a book, some of the material you’ve just consumed is likely to pop up in your writing. As writers we all like to think of ourselves and our muses as being isolated from that kind of influence. But it almost always happens inevitably, especially with the kind of unsophisticated writers I’m often asked to look at. In the Unabomber case, particular articles from Scientific American and Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and a number of texts going back to the 70s or earlier were showing up in Kaczynski’s recent writings as well as the Unabomber’s writings. That kind of common source material for an anonymous text is pretty significant as attributional evidence.”
The day after the broadcast Foster wasn’t worried. “I think my past work more than speaks for itself,” he said. “I watched the show, and I was fine with it. It turned out to be not as bad as it was rumored to be.” He isn’t likely to say much more about the Ramsey case Saturday night, when he lectures at the Arts Club of Chicago to benefit the Chicago Vassar Club’s scholarship fund (847-835-2730), but he does plan to discuss some of his other cases. “I’ll be closing with some kind of larger concern about the role of free speech and anonymity in our culture, and how anybody can say anything anytime about anyone and publish it on the Internet,” he added. “The Internet has been this huge experiment in radical free speech, and I don’t think it’s been entirely satisfactory. When you come across something on the Web there’s no way of knowing whether it’s a hoax or true or an opinion. But I have mixed feelings about it. I’m a great believer in free speech, and people have rights in our country. The truth has a way of working itself out.”
