Records of Early English Drama/ Victoria College/ 150 Charles Street W
Toronto Ontario Canada
Phone (416) 585-4504/FAX (416) [log in to unmask]
http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~reed/reed.html => REED's home page
http://www.epas.utoronto.ca:8080/~reed/reed-l.html => REED-L's home page
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 11:58:18 -0400
From: Jeff Powers-Beck <[log in to unmask]>
To: Multiple recipients of list FICINO <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Funeral Elegy Project
PROJECT W.S.
Did he or didn't he?
That was the question taken up by English 4957/5957, a course on
literature and computers at East Tennessee State University. The
special topics course, entitled "Poetry, Print, and Hypertext,"
participated in the Internet debate as to whether William Shakespeare
wrote "A Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter." Recently, Professor
Donald Foster of Vassar College made national headlines for using a
computer database called Shaxicon to attribute the poem to Shakespeare.
The seven ETSU students in the course studied the 1612 poem,
corresponded with Foster via e-mail, and then answered three questions
in a World Wide Web project: Was the elegist W.S. the dramatist
William Shakespeare? Is "A Funeral Elegy" a significant or interesting
poem? And, if Shakespeare wrote the elegy, what does it say about his
life and work?
In addition to answers to these questions, Project W.S. offers the
complete text of the 578-line poem, the students' commentary on some
fifty lines of the poem, photographs of the students, other graphics,
and a thorough bibliography. The student Internet project is located
at http://www.east-tenn-st.edu/~english/projws.htm.
Dr. Jeffrey Powers-Beck, Assistant Professor of English and the
instructor of English 4957/5957, serves as Project W.S. Editor.
For the students and Dr. Powers-Beck, Project W.S. was certainly not
_Much Ado About Nothing_ or one of _Love's Labour's Lost_.
E-mail responses to Project W.S. may be addressed to
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