Initially Foster did not claim that his identification was definitive, but in 1995 another Shakespeare scholar, Richard Abrams of the University of Southern Maine, published an article strengthening Foster's claims of the Elegy's Shakespearean authorship. The book was published instead by the University of Delaware Press in 1989. Foster was not given their names, following normal practice for peer review, although he later related that he was able to identify the reviewers based on the language of their reports. Relying on the internal evidence of the text, Foster argued that Shakespeare could be the author and submitted a manuscript about the Elegy to Oxford University Press, but two experts recommended against publication on the grounds that such evidence was insufficient to establish authorship. Thorpe, the publisher of the sonnets, had registered this work with the London Stationers, giving the author's initials as "W.S.". This was a 1612 poem, A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter, and would have been the first new Shakespeare identification in over a century. While pursuing his research into these initials, Foster came across another work that led him to believe he had identified a previously unknown Shakespeare piece. Foster pointed to Shakespeare's initials being similarly abbreviated in other documents, as well as contemporaneous publications that misspelled authors' initials in the error-filled manuscripts of the time. Foster argued that the initials were meant to read either "W.S." or "W.SH." for Shakespeare himself, the dedication presumably having been written by Thorpe. Though not the first to articulate the possibility, his article appeared in the Publication of the Modern Language Association in 1987, after he joined the Vassar faculty.
While in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Foster formulated a theory that it was a typographical error. has aroused much speculation over the years. W.H." as the "onlie begetter" of the sonnets, and the identity of W.H. In the edition published by Thomas Thorpe, a dedication appears to "Mr.
2 Literary analysis in contemporary cases.