Shakespeare and the Peters in History (1998)

Editor's Note Scholars participating in the Forum on A Funeral Elegy (Shakespeare Studies 25) were invited to respond to any points raised in that general discussion. The responses of those who accepted this invitation are presented below. With a freedom that is hardly warranted by the fullness of the available evidence, a few scholars have indulged in fantasy about William Peter. Leah Marcus considers the Elegy in its cultural context and, rising above hysteria to history, rightly endorses a Shakespearean attribution; yet even Marcus's welcome Plea for Literary History has its lapses. At one point Marcus determines that William Peter was considerably more prosperous than his killer, Edward Drew.(1) She bases her inference on my observation in Elegy by W.S. that while Peter carried a fashionable rapier, the Drews had only swords. Had I foreseen that so much would be inferred from so little, I would have couched the remark. By the standards of the better-heeled Devon gentry, Will Peter was hard-pressed. Though he was the first descendant of Mayor John Peter to graduate from university, he attended on a fellowship. When Otho Peter died in 1607, William as the younger son inherited 100 [pounds sterling] outright, plus poor land in Marldon and Ipplepen having an annual income of just 5 [pounds sterling]. Peter's financial situation improved by his marriage to Margaret Brewton in 1609, but barely.(2) Shortly after his funeral, his widow was ordered to confer with the Orphans' Court of Exeter to answer for her husband's desperate debts.(3) Those debts were paid through her subsequent marriage to Edward Cotton--but Cotton received Peter's property. The two daughters, Rose and Margaret, married poor.(4) By way of comparison, Peter's killer, Edward Drew, inherited in 1598 the chief messuage, mansion house, barton, and demesne lands of Combe Rawlegh, Devon. His three sisters received 1,800 [pounds sterling] just for their wedding gifts (cf. Will Peter's 5 [pounds sterling] income). John and George Drew, younger sons, received annuities for life (John, 30 [pounds sterling], and George, 40 [pounds sterling]); and the eldest son, Thomas, received everything else--a sizable fortune in real estate.(5) Their mother, Bridget, even in her widowhood received a pension of 20 [pounds sterling] granted by Queen Elizabeth to her husband (the error was discovered in 1603 by the Privy Council and the pension halted). Marcus was drawn into a discussion of A Funeral Elegy by circumstance. Her own ongoing work demands--as does every scholar's--her best attention. She could not have gleaned the above information from published sources, nor should she be expected, upon being enlisted to review claims for the Elegy, to book a flight to London and then motor down to Devon, where such evidence can be mined. Still, there is something substandard in the assumption that William Peter's and Edward Drew's relative wealth can be weighed by consulting a trivial fact such as the weapons they carried on a particular day. This judgment is so far beneath Marcus's usual shrewdness that it can only be ascribed, I think, to a notion generated by the media that the attribution of A Funeral Elegy was achieved by computer. That the media would take this approach is inevitable. The World Wide Web is swarming, and as I write in the summer of 1997, technology stocks drive the market higher. Academics, encountering crass dreams of a computer-appointed rosy future, may seek a rational foothold outside the madness. Hence, I imagine, Marcus--assuming that the computer has presumed to speak oracularly--makes her stand for old-fashioned literary history. But to rely on Wallace Macaffrey's 1958 text on Exeter for information on the Devon gentry is too old-fashioned, as Marcus herself knows: at the end of her essay she cites the perfectly reliable 1963 text of Mark Eccles, but even there displays scruples, noting that everything found in Eccles needs to be checked against the manuscript sources. …