And I'm not, for the most part, talking about stylistic errors-word choice, tone, repetition. That's a different matter, too. I'm talking about factual errors, quotation errors and, to some extent, conceptual errors and how to correct them.

I've been thinking about this subject for a number of reasons. For one thing, the new realm of the "blogosphere" has focused attention in a more vigilant way on the errors made by "dead-tree journalists"-and by other bloggers as well. The ease of making corrections on the Web has made the exposure of errors made by dead-tree journalists-and the pressure to correct those errors-greater than ever. And it has opened up a whole new set of questions about the correction of errors. For instance, should a dead-tree publication correct its errors on its Web site as well as its hard-copy edition? Should an effort be made to attach corrections to the LexisNexis version of a piece? And even if one did that, is it possible to chase the uncorrected versions of a story proliferating on Web sites in the expanding universe of cyberspace outside a gated community on the Web like LexisNexis?

In addition, the Year of the Error has brought us the rise in prominence and influence of ombudsmen at major metropolitan dailies, culminating with The Times naming a "public editor," in part to respond to readers' complaints of error, although his brief extends to the tricky gray errors of emphasis, balance, agenda and judgment as well.

I'll get into some of that in a moment, but I wanted to mention another reason I've been thinking about error. By chance, I'd picked up a copy of Scott Turow's way-underrated novel, Reversible Errors . I say "underrated" because, while it received excellent reviews when it came out in 2002, nonetheless when I came upon it in a Borders recently, it was filed in the mass-market "Mystery/ Thriller" section rather than "Fiction/Literature," where it deserves to be as much as any number of titles in that section I could mention.

I admit that while I was an admirer of Mr. Turow's early works, I'd missed a few of the latest and was surprised at just how good Reversible Errors was: one of the most convoluted and ethically complex of his works. One which, without preaching or sentimentality, makes the case that the best argument against capital punishment is error, human fallibility. That even the most well-intentioned investigators for prosecution and defense can make errors, and when someone is executed because of one or more of those errors-and the failure to recognize or admit them-it is by definition an irreversible error.

Errors made by journalists, by contrast, are rarely life-and-death matters and rarely irreversible. In fact, they are eminently reversible, although they are, for a wide range of reasons, not always reversed. And here is why the Turow novel is particularly relevant: Perhaps if errors in journalism weren't regarded as a capital offense, a mortal shame, there would be less reluctance to admit them and correct them. Maybe if dead-tree journalists adopted the spirit of the blogosphere, the spirit of humility that admits, "I'm human, I make mistakes, I'm happy if you correct me because we're all engaged in the search for truth together," then we'd all be better off.

Or if journalists adopted the spirit of scholarship exemplified by Professor Donald Foster when he admitted he'd made a very big error. Mr. Foster, you might recall, made a spectacular retraction of his attribution to Shakespeare of a nearly 600-line "Funerall Elegye," an attribution that helped make his reputation as "literary sleuth," an "Elegye" that was included (with reservations by editors) in three major American editions of the complete works of Shakespeare. (See my June 24, 2002, column on the subject).

When Mr. Foster retracted his Shakespeare attribution (because the work of another scholar had convinced him the "Elegye" was probably by John Ford), he wrote a beautiful sentence to introduce his confession of error: "No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."

At the deepest level, such an attitude reflects the philosophical stance of the late philosopher of science, Karl Popper: that the search for truth proceeds by means of falsification . That nothing can be called truthful unless it's stated as a falsifiable proposition and continues to survive efforts to falsify it.

But for a long time, "dead-tree journalists" have been made to feel that to admit a mistake was tantamount to admitting they or their institutions were human, not the repository of Unchallengeable Truth. Perish the thought.

Before I get further into some of these questions, I want to talk about my own relationship to error-and what I've come to call the Two-Minute Warning Syndrome. (I'm a big pro-football fan.)

It's curious to me now, but when I first started writing, I was less obsessed about making errors-I guess because I was just so happy to break into print. And more because of luck (and skillful fact-checkers), I don't think I made an inordinate number of errors. I still don't think I make an inordinate number-thanks again to luck and skillful fact-checkers-but I'm way more obsessed by the possibility. Or, to put it more accurately, desperately haunted by the specter of them.

So I spend much more time worrying about getting facts right, combing through my pieces, rechecking things-but nonetheless I know that it's still possible for errors to slip through, to creep in, however diligent a team of editors, fact-checkers and copyeditors you may have working with you. This is why I always read every stage of a piece all the way till they virtually have to tear the second galley from my cold, dead hands. But this is also why some imp of mischief in my psyche has devised a special kind of self-torture-the one I've come to think of as the Two-Minute Warning Syndrome.

It often strikes after I've read the second galley and it's time to let go and I'm trying to relax and wind down from closing a piece. And then, usually two minutes before the piece is shipped off to be printed, or some such gallingly late moment in the process, a question will suddenly surface from my unconscious. It may be the most minor of facts or dates or quotes, or perhaps a manner of phrasing that shifts the tone or meaning-and I'll feel an almost electric shock of alarm. Often, when I hastily check or recheck what has alarmed me, I find there was no cause for alarm. But not always. Sometimes I'll discover I made a mistake, and it will become a cliffhanger as I wait to learn whether it's too late to do anything about it.

I'll end up making hectic calls to whatever periodical is involved from wherever I am trying to get the change made, while everyone else in the paper is racing to get it out in time for the delivery trucks. And most of the time, I'm lucky to work with people who will put up with it-to a point-because they feel that getting it right is as important as getting it out on time.

Sometimes the Two-Minute Warning is about the way I chose to phrase something or characterize it, a stylistic matter, a cut I had to make, and I've come to think that, at that point, you just have to learn to live with it. (Although I've always believed that somebody would make a lot of friends in journalism if they established a Web site for what you might call the "director's cut" of an article, the writer's preferred, pre-cut version. I know I'd love to get the original, admittedly overlong 30,000- word version of my piece on Hamjlet textual scholars on the Web, for those clamoring hordes of people not satisfied with the approximately 10,000-word version that appeared in The New Yorker .)

But sometimes it isn't possible to correct a factual error in time, sometimes it's a key detail or quote-and no matter how minor in the overall scheme of things, it will ruin the entire experience. Leaving you lacerating yourself for not thinking of it until after the Two-Minute Warning. That's why I've come to envy bloggers, who can update and revise instantly.

One too many cliffhangers can leave your nerves raw. I know I'm not alone in this. I know a number of writers who suffer from some version of the syndrome, usually because their conscientiousness has turned into hypervigilance, which can be good-but it's hard to turn it off short of psychosis, not to mention pissing off the entire production department.

I'd like to think of it as part of "my process," but really, there should be a better way. (One prominent writer I know has said that he will often show the pre-pub version of his piece to the people he writes about. It's a good way of eliminating some errors, but can lead to sources trying to respin their original thoughts and, in some cases, skew their original truth-thus creating more significant distortions at times. It's sort of the larger version of the long-standing reading-back-quotes-to-sources controversy.) And then what do you do when you've made a mistake, or you've had one called to your attention? I've always respected Steven Brill for the aggressive corrections policy in his publications: If it's a correction of substance, it should run as prominently as the original story. (I just learned from a Washington Post editorial on the Romenesko site that the late Post editor Philip Geyelin was a pioneer in arguing that newspapers should be more open to corrections.)

It's not the only correct way to make corrections; most newspapers have regular corrections departments these days. Slate publishes a weekly roundup of corrections in addition to inserting corrections noted as such (rather than just invisibly changing the error) into the original online version of the piece.

The Brill policy can sound hard-nosed, and it can be embarrassing to the reporter involved, but it's fair to the reader and the subject. And, in a deeper sense-however temporarily embarrassing to the writer or editor who made the error-it's more compassionate in the long run. Compassionate? Because the subtext of the Brill policy, it seems to me, is that journalism is a search for truth, not a crusade to prove that you are always right. And that the search for truth is a process of assertion and falsification that admits the fallibility of journalists and journalism, which is, as it's famously been called, "the first rough draft of history." It shouldn't be shameful to correct a first rough draft. And making an admission of error less shameful and more a routine part of the process is good for writers and for readers, who will be likely to view journalists as less arrogant and more trustworthy. Fallible human beings like themselves. That doesn't mean slacking off or lowering standards; it really means rewarding people for being more conscientious.

Because, of course, it's impossible to be right all the time. I've always liked the couplet from Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man" about the way we're all condemned to fallibility: "Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled,- / The glory, jest, and riddle of the world …. "

Of course, the difficult part comes in distinguishing purely factual mistakes (usually easy) from misjudgments, or from judgments made by a questionable interpretation of the facts (usually hard). The Times adopted a system that essentially dealt with the former through "Corrections" and the latter through "Editors' Notes."

Which brings us to The Times' decision to engage a public editor, somewhat similar to the ombudsmen that many other major dailies have enlisted. I know that one writer friend of mine felt sorry for journalists she felt would be held up for shaming by a public editor. And another writer friend felt that editors at serious newspapers had so much trouble fending off the pressures of advertisers, corporate interests and organized pressure groups that ombudsmen in general would be used as vehicles for focusing undue influence on reporting that challenged vested interests. I don't think that's been the case so far, and although I empathize with those first subjects of the public editor's scrutiny, I think that ultimately both readers and reporters will benefit from an independent airing of issues, one that is not beholden by fear or favor to the editorial hierarchy. I think that, on balance, it's an extension of the philosophy that everybody benefits-reporters included-by more rather than less examination of the first rough draft of history. On the other hand, I would suggest that reporters challenged by ombudsmen should perhaps have a forum on the papers' Web sites to discuss or disagree with such judgments.

One thing many people don't realize is that magazines are far more likely to fact-check what they publish than newspapers and book publishers. Not all magazines maintain staffs of fact-checkers, but very few newspapers do ( The Observer is one, thank God), and very few publishers as well. (When I was preparing Explaining Hitler for publication, I engaged, at my own expense, an experienced fact-checker to double-check things, as a number of book authors I know have done.) Some publishers and newspapers ask copyeditors to do some minimal fact-checking, but things can slip through even the dedicated fact-checking departments at many magazines. And some zines, often the scrappy journals, take their cue from Michael Kinsley's famous statement when he was editing Slate :

" Slate does not have a fact checking department or 'fact checkers' so labeled. We do have a group of people whose duties include making sure our writers are as accurate as possible. They are called 'writers.' And we have another group of people who skeptically examine what our writers produce and try to catch errors of fact …. These people are called 'editors.'"

The cyberspace era has added a new dimension of trickiness to correcting errors. It's easy for self-publishing bloggers, but what about dead-tree publications that have Web sites for the cyber-publication of their hard-copy pieces? You can correct it on the hard copy in the next issue with an "Erratum" notice. But then should you correct it on the Web site as well?

And if you correct it on the Web site as well, should it be by correcting it in the text , or with a note afterward? If the former, aren't you then making it seem as if you never made a mistake (to say nothing of the fact that you've launched two different versions of the piece into cyberspace)?

And what if it's discovered much, much later-after the piece has been pulled off the publication's Web site but is still flying around cyberspace? Is there any point to correcting it? Should there be some way of attaching an erratum tail to its kite? And if so, should this apply to all errors, and if not, what's the threshold for cyber-correction, the statute of limitations?

Some publications correct on the hard copy but not on the Web version; others do both. Shouldn't there be some standard way of handling this, as more and more of what is published on paper enters the universe of the Web? (And shouldn't reporters who are erroneously traduced by letter-writers not on the basis of differing opinions but of demonstrably false assertions have a chance to respond? Some publications offer their writers this right, some don't. Should letter-to-the-editor writers be held to the same standards of falsification as the professionals if their assertions are launched into cyberspace?)

And what about book publishing? Most reviewers read so-called "uncorrected bound galley" versions of the book, which are accompanied by warnings to check any assertions made about the book in their reviews with the final corrected version-a warning often ignored by reviewers whose lead time often requires them to write about the galley version without seeing the final book. Writing books, like writing articles, is a process in which the writer can change his or her mind, and add or subtract from the galley version-but, in most cases, doesn't get to go over the bound-galley version, which means the writer can't catch errors or add any last-minute but crucial thoughts before review copies are sent out.

I know that when my last book, The Secret Parts of Fortune , was published, there were a few accidental typo-like errors in the bound galleys that changed the meaning or garbled the sense of what I was saying in the introduction, and I felt so strongly about getting the sense right in those bound galleys that I actually took a ballpoint and hand-corrected some of them before they were sent out.

And then what about the errors that you don't catch in galleys? Correcting errors in already published books is difficult. (Should publishers consider doing it on their Web sites?) Scholarly publishers, and sometimes mainstream publishers as well (although far more rarely), sometimes include "erratum slips" if a significant error is caught in time for the first edition. Some will correct it in subsequent editions, if subsequent editions there are. The whole thing is too nerve-wracking.

And even though bloggers can almost instantaneously self-correct or "update," some of them do it in separate posts, leaving the problem of many people linking to an earlier, error-marred post before the error is noticed and corrected-and so the beta version, so to speak, escapes beyond correction. Should bloggers somehow link to all those who linked to them before they corrected the error to make them aware of the correction after it's made? I don't even know if that's possible.

I don't have the answers to all these questions. I just raise them because I'd like to hear what other people who think about these things (journalists, bloggers, J-schools and readers) have to say-and because evolving some rough standards might make things fairer for readers and writers alike. So take it away, Jack Shafer of Slate , Jay Rosen of N.Y.U., Cynthia Cotts of The Voice -blogger pioneers Mickey Kaus, Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds-all you smart people who think about these things … take it away, please . I'm sick of my Two-Minute Warning Syndrome.

By the way, I've tried to include very few facts in this essay, but that's no guarantee I haven't made a mistake. I hear the Two-Minute Warning clock ticking now ….

And I say this not merely because it vindicates my own long-standing and lonely position (lonely at least in the U.S.), argued repeatedly in these pages, that Mr. Foster was mistaken in his attribution of a long, tedious and sententious 1612 poem called "A Funerall Elegye" to Shakespeare. As I wrote five years ago in The Observer , the "unseemly rush to certitude in America … will come to be seen as regrettable, even embarrassing."

But before going further, we should pay tribute to Mr. Foster for his courage and intellectual honesty in admitting that he made a mistake. And for a beautiful sentence about true scholarship that he wrote to sum up his sentiments.

In his June 12 communiqué to a small-circulation discussion list for Shakespeare scholars (Shaksper.net), in which he first (semi-)publicly disclosed his reversal, Mr. Foster said, "No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."

It's a line that should win him more admirers than any so-called discovery, and it's a line more scholars should take to heart. It's a line about the way truth is often discovered through the dialectical process of making claims, recognizing error and often thereby discovering new truths. In this case, the new truth, Mr. Foster now concedes, is that the "Elegy" he claimed for Shakespeare was actually more likely written by John Ford, a Jacobean dramatist.

Mr. Foster, for those coming late to this controversy, is the Vassar academic who built a reputation as a "literary sleuth"-"the world's first literary detective," as the publicity for his recent book, Author Unknown , calls him-on his 1995 "Shakespearean discovery" (as the media hailed it), and on his subsequent 1996 unmasking of Joe Klein as "Anonymous," the author of Primary Colors. Mr. Foster's reputation as a "literary sleuth" has led to his being consulted by investigators, including the F.B.I., in high-profile cases involving disputed documents-the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, the Unabomber case and, most recently, the anthrax letters. Or, as The Times of London put it, "F.B.I. Agents Take Lessons in Detection From Shakespeare Super-Sleuth."

He's also continued to investigate literary mysteries, including the authorship of "The Night Before Christmas" and the curious "Wanda Tinasky" letters, which some-myself included-speculated might be the pseudonymous work of Thomas Pynchon, but which, as I conceded in these pages last year ( The Observer , Sept. 17, 2001), Mr. Foster has definitively proved, in a virtuoso display of energetic literary scholarship, were the work of a different, albeit sinister and fascinating figure.

I'd concluded my original Wanda Tinasky speculations on a note of agnosticism: "I can't make up my mind. But I do know that if Wanda is not Mr. Pynchon, she or he, whoever she is, ought to step forward to be honored for capturing … the spirit of Mr. Pynchon in her prose." The fact that Mr. Foster misrepresented my agnosticism (in his chapter on the Wanda case in Author Unknown) as the kind of no-doubt certainty he expressed about the "Elegy" did not prevent me from hailing him for his discovery of the real "Wanda."

But since 1995, Mr. Foster has never expressed the slightest hint of agnosticism, or anything less than total certainty, in his attribution to Shakespeare of the wretched "Funeral Elegy," and he has often been contemptuously dismissive of his critics for daring to disagree. All the more shocking, then, to read his announcement in that June 12 post to the Shakespeare discussion list that he'd been convinced of his error by a single scholarly article.

The article in question, which appeared in the May issue of The Review of English Studies, was entitled "'A Funeral Elegy': Ford, W.S., and Shakespeare," written by one G.D. Monsarrat of the Université de Bourgogne. In it, Mr. Monsarrat argues that the author of the "Elegy," the mysterious "W.S." (the only byline on the poem), was actually John Ford-a conjecture I advanced four years ago in the Jan. 19, 1998, Observer , on the basis of a letter to The Times Literary Supplement from the British literary scholar Brian Vickers. Mr. Vickers' forthcoming book on Donald Foster and the "Elegy," Counterfeiting Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press), also makes a powerful case for Ford-and according to Mr. Foster's June 12 post, was an additional factor in his decision to make his retraction now.

Mr. Foster told the Shakespeare scholars' list that "I know good evidence when I see it"-and thus, on the basis of Mr. Monsarrat's evidence, he withdrew the attribution, conceding that "the Elegy looks like the work of the Jacobean dramatist John Ford." Amazing!

I still believe that Mr. Foster went wrong only when he was seduced into shifting from an agnostic-but-leaning-toward-Shakespeare position in his original 1989 book on the question ( Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution ) by the siren song of statistical analysis, or "stylometrics." I believe he was led astray by overreliance on his digitized database, the one he called SHAXICON. In effect, I think he was conned by SHAXICON into adopting a definitive claim. And the media was cowed into acquiescence because of a misplaced awe of "computerized analysis"-even though Mr. Foster is correct in saying that he brought more than a computer to his scholarship.

In Author Unknown , Mr. Foster also credits his shift from agnosticism to certainty to what he calls a "close reading" of the "Elegy" by his colleague Richard Abrams of the University of Maine. (Mr. Abrams joined Mr. Foster in communicating to the Shakespeare discussion list his conviction that the Monsarrat article had disproved the case for Shakespeare's authorship.) In any case, the unconvincing "close reading" that helped Mr. Foster to make his erroneous leap into certainty suggests that "close reading" is not a science, but an art.

But the issue of close reading-what is or isn't true close reading, as well as the virtual abandonment of close reading by American academics-is, I believe, at the heart of the controversy, and of the lessons to be learned from Mr. Foster's retraction.

In the days after reading the posting, I was able to get hold of the Monsarrat article and to reach Brian Vickers in Zurich, Switzerland, where he is chair of English Literature at the Centre for Renaissance Studies at a university there. Mr. Vickers was able to fill me in on the origin of the article that led to the Foster retraction.

Mr. Monsarrat is a scholar specializing in English Renaissance literature, and he has written extensively on stoicism in English literature-work in which John Ford played an important role. Ford is best known for his dark incest and revenge drama, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore , but he's also the author of a number of religious and devotional works, including several funeral elegies.

According to Mr. Vickers, Mr. Monsarrat was at work on the final volume of a new French bilingual edition of the complete works of Shakespeare when he was forced to confront the "Funeral Elegy" question. His French publishers were swayed by the fact that three mainstream American academic publishers had included the "Funeral Elegy by W.S." in their Complete Works of William Shakespeare editions in the wake of uncritical front-page publicity about Mr. Foster's attribution. (One would hope that these publishers-Norton, Riverside and Addison-Wesley-will now include an "Erratum" slip in current editions and remove the poem from future ones.)

Including the "Elegy" was, in effect, a marketing ploy by the American publishers ("Get yer brand-new Shakespeare poem here!"), forced through despite the reservations of their editors, and Mr. Monsarrat's French publishers wanted to follow suit.

But then Mr. Monsarrat read the poem.

"As he worked on translating the 'Elegy' into French," Mr. Vickers told me, "Monsarrat began to find that in virtually every line of the 'Elegy' there were parallels to Ford coming to mind. Not just verbal-since he's written on English stoicism, he found echoes of Ford's version of stoic philosophy."

This led Mr. Monsarrat to study both the "Elegy" and Mr. Foster's attribution of it to Shakespeare more closely. He found that Mr. Foster's explanation for the parallels to Ford-that Ford had plagiarized from the "Elegy"; plagiarized from Shakespeare, in effect-didn't hold up. He re-examined the lines that Mr. Foster claimed showed an overlap between Shakespeare and "W.S.," the author of the "Elegy." What Mr. Monsarrat found was that, when examined in context, many of the overlaps were actually more characteristic of Ford's idiosyncratic use of the words than Shakespeare's. In other words, where Mr. Foster, in effect, relied on statistics, on counting the apparent Shakespeare overlaps, Mr. Monsarrat did a close reading of the context and found Ford's voice instead. Consider the following examples:

There is, in the "Elegy," the phrase "pure simplicity." While the word "simplicity" appears in both Shakespeare and Ford, Mr. Monsarrat says, "Ford … used the word with synonymous adjectives, 'Artlesse simplicitie' … 'spotlesse simplicitie' …. Shakespeare never uses the expression ['pure simplicity'], and only uses 'simplicity' with pejorative adjectives: 'Twice-sod' simplicity … 'low simplicity'" (my italics).

Then there's the metaphoric use of "bread": "Foster considers that 'the bread of rest' [in the 'Elegy'] is an echo of 'the bitter bread of banishment' [in Shakespeare], but it is in fact closer to Ford's 'Sweet is the bread of content,' and 'sleepe of securitie is a bread of sweetnesse.' In Shakespeare the bread is 'bitter,' in Ford it is pleasant."

In the preface to his forthcoming Counterfeiting Shakespeare , which he faxed me from Zurich, it's evident that Brian Vickers uses a similar argument. In Ford, "a word like 'steadiness' is not a linguistic counter [my italics] … that can be found with an electronic search function, but a term having specific connotations within a philosophical system"-connotations that Mr. Vickers, like Mr. Monsarrat, argues were ignored or simply gotten wrong by Mr. Foster in his reliance on counting.

I was particularly pleased to see that Mr. Monsarrat clinches his argument with a passage from Ford that contains the phrase "a funeral elegy of tears"-a line from the play The Lover's Melancholy , a line which I'd found and cited four years ago in my argument for Ford over Shakespeare.

The irony, for Mr. Vickers (something that Mr. Foster himself notes in his retraction), is that in Mr. Foster's 1989 Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution , his first book on the subject, Mr. Foster himself cites much evidence that Ford might have written the "Elegy"-evidence that he says he "scoffed at" on statistical grounds.

Mr. Foster now says in his retraction that he had not "yet determined where I went wrong with the statistical evidence." But in fact, Mr. Monsarrat's essay makes it clear: It was in favoring statistical evidence in the first place-counting the number of shared references, the "rate of enjambment," etc. It was in favoring a quantitative approach over a qualitative attentiveness to the context in which the shared words appeared, and the different colorations these words are given in their respective uses by Shakespeare and Ford. In short, in counting rather than close reading.

Reading (and misreading) is crucial to Mr. Monsarrat's critique: "It is a great pity," he says, that "Foster became (partly) aware of the strong link between Ford and the elegy only after he had attributed its authorship to Shakespeare. By then positions had become entrenched and this led him to a complete misreading" of one of Ford's poems. Mr. Foster's failure to read closely, Mr. Monsarrat says, results in "a travesty of Ford's poem, and I feel that this tends to make one regard with suspicion his whole argument attributing the elegy to Shakespeare." It's true that once Mr. Foster became famous for his Shakespeare attribution, he tended to be intolerant of his critics' opinions to the contrary. But I think Mr. Monsarrat is a little harsh here on Mr. Foster, who I believe is capable of doing quite intelligent close reading when he's not being led astray by SHAXICON's close counting . (Mr. Vickers also argues that SHAXICON is too narrow a sampling of English Renaissance literature to play the kind of decisive role that Mr. Foster gives it.*)

In some respects, it's hard to blame Mr. Foster. I know that when I first read the "Elegy," the excitement caused by this purported Shakespeare discovery inclined me to give it (and Mr. Foster) the benefit of the doubt. And it's true, as Mr. Foster points out in his retraction, that Mr. Monsarrat does not solve the remaining mystery of the "Elegy": Who was the mysterious W.S.? If he wasn't William Shakespeare, then why would John Ford sign the initials "W.S." to his work?

My theory of the Ford/W.S. problem was suggested four years ago by a conversation with Don Foster himself. He was trying to dissuade me from my conjecture that Ford wrote the "Elegy" by asking me why Ford would have signed it "W.S." As I wrote back then, Mr. Foster "told me he'd uncovered previous unknown links between the dead guy, William Peter [the murdered man the 'Elegy' was written about], and Shakespeare. So both Ford and Shakespeare knew the dead guy," I wrote. "But Ford knew him better. And Ford and Shakespeare knew each other. Suddenly it occurred to me: John Ford ghost-wrote the 'Elegy' for Shakespeare ." The family of the dead man, knowing Shakespeare a bit, might have asked the renowned bard, through Ford, to write the "Elegy." And Shakespeare, with no appetite for the task, might have asked Ford, who was something of a protégé and knew the dead man better, to dash something off and sign it "W.S." to make the family-and the public-think Shakespeare had written it.

It turns out that Mr. Monsarrat also believes a Ford-as-ghostwriter theory, although he tentatively suggests, in a footnote, that the man who asked Ford to ghost the "Elegy" may have been a cousin of Ford's, William Stradling.

Mr. Vickers believes that we may never solve the mystery of who W.S. was, except to say that he was not William Shakespeare.

But what about the larger mystery: Why were American academics such sheep when it came to accepting en masse-or at least not objecting, as many English scholars did-to Mr. Foster's "Shakespearean discovery"? After all, it's not just the authorship of one poem at issue here. Rather, it goes to the heart of who Shakespeare was as an artist: inclusion of the "Elegy" in the Shakespearean canon would compel a re-evaluation of the entire evolution of Shakespeare's thinking on spiritual questions, a re-evaluation of the entire corpus of his work, since the "Elegy" would represent not only one of his last major works, but one of his most personal.

If Don Foster can admit his mistake, perhaps American academia can admit its mistake: the uncritical substitution of postmodern death-of-the-author sophistry for serious scholarship. (For anyone who doubts that sophistry is the foundation of so much of what passes for Theory in the academy, I heartily recommend Brian Vickers' devastating dissection of the philosophical groundwork of postmodern theory, Appropriating Shakespeare .) The reason that postmodern death-of-the-author theory has incapacitated those in its thrall from making authorship judgments is that authors are now considered irrelevant, mere "constructs" of hegemonic power relations. Perhaps Mr. Foster's retraction will signal the death of death-of-the-author sophistry.

Of course, I've optimistically imagined that such a turning point was upon us before. Two years ago, in the Times Book Review , I published an essay hopefully suggesting that the reign of theory in academia-or at least in Shakespeare studies-might finally be on the wane ("The Play's the Thing, Again," Aug. 6, 2000). It too was prompted by a kind of retraction, a rueful, witty reconsideration (at a Shakespeare Association of America seminar) by a prominent postmodern theorist, who said: "Our institutionalized solidarity in bashing the 'bourgeois subject' has to some extent calcified us into an elite corps of yuppie guerrilla academics."

Mr. Foster, of course, is not a postmodernist, and he bears no responsibility for the reign of Theory. At his best, he's a superb old-fashioned scholar who believes in bringing a wide range of criteria to bear on literary study. (He tells us in Author Unknown that he learned much about the importance of context from his big mistake in the Jon Benet Ramsey case, where he also had to retract his original conjecture about the authorship of the ransom note.)

But maybe Don Foster's stunning retraction of his Shakespearean attribution will be the wake-up call that's needed for academics to re-open "debate about what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare [and] what makes language poetry and not doggerel," as I put it five years ago. In this light, there is one disturbing element in Mr. Foster's mostly gracious retraction, one more grudging than graceful: his continuing mischaracterization of his critics as being guilty of "bardolatry." It's a red herring-his way of dismissing the very idea of literary quality as a factor in making an attribution.

Once again, Mr. Foster seems to indicate he believes that critics of his attribution rejected it mainly because, as he says in his June 12 post, "Shakespeare was simply not a man to write that sort of thing"-i.e., because of "bardolatry," the belief that Shakespeare could never write badly.

It's certainly not a position I've taken. In my Times Book Review essay, I praised the way Frank Kermode, the British Shakespearean, put it in Shakespeare's Language : We must acknowledge that Shakespeare is capable of writing badly or opaquely at times-that some of Shakespeare is better and some of it is worse. If we want to be able to say that Shakespeare is a better poet than Ford, we have to admit the possibility of value judgments. Of course, literary value is not a matter of science; it's not something that can be measured by SHAXICON. But it's there .

My suggestion is that for someone like Mr. Foster, who has shown such admirable humility in admitting his mistake, it's perhaps not appropriate to sneer at his opponents' criteria for judging his attribution of the "Elegy"-especially since, as it happens, they were right and he was wrong. Maybe they didn't just happen to be right for the wrong reason, as he suggests. Perhaps he has something to learn from them.

Still, all of us, scholars and readers, have something to learn from Donald Foster, from the courage of his retraction and the memorable way he phrased it: "No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar." I think we can all rejoice in the fact that Donald Foster, now more than ever, deserves to be called a scholar.

In little more than a month, George Lucas' vast, digitally rendered sci-fi fantasy will hit the screens to the kind of unblinking hosannas never before accorded a movie made essentially for kids. And like some fin de siècle sci-fi-pics-that-would-be- Star Wars (see–better yet, don't– Godzilla , Antz , A Bug's Life , Batman & Robin , Jurassic Park , etc.), anything having anything to do with the new film is suddenly, fetishistically "collectible." The press, in its infinite ambivalence, has dutifully lined up to "cover" the event, running the same carefully respectful interview with writer-director, visionary-businessman, all-around pleasant family guy George Lucas over and over and dutifully printing the same photos of the actors and the computer-generated galaxy where the action takes place.

All of which should lead to a soul-searching philosophical question for editors and reporters: In the competitive rush to cover The Phantom Menace as a legitimate pop cultural phenomenon, has the media become little more than merchandising enablers–in a word, shills–for the film?

By now, it's pretty much a moot point. Everyone wants a piece of the action: Vanity Fair (Annie Leibovitz photo spread in February; Natalie Portman profile in May), Entertainment Weekly (preview article and photo spread), Wired (interview with Mr. Lucas in February 1997 and May 1999, along with an article on the computer geeks behind the film), GQ (Ewan McGregor profile), Premiere (a "special collector's issue"), The New York Times (profile of Mr. Lucas and separate Q.&A. session with same in the Sunday Arts & Leisure section), The New Yorker (profile of Mr. Lucas), 60 Minutes (profile of Mr. Lucas). The New York Post , copying USA Today , does a daily Star Wars countdown feature. Vogue has a "fashion spread" in its May issue featuring the outfits Natalie Portman wears as Amidala, the teenage queen from the planet Naboo ("an intergalactic fantasy of otherworldly beauty"). Even Metropolitan Home is running a photo illustrating the inside of a luxury box from the "pod races" scene in the movie. It was Lucasfilm's idea.

Yes, it's the selling of Star Wars. But the new movie will probably be successful, anyway. So, it basically amounts to the selling of Vanity Fair , Premiere , The New York Times , 60 Minutes , etc.–all of them riding the great Phantom Menace behemoth to the bank.

"What we're seeing is the publicity machine trying to develop something that's commensurate to the anticipation for the movie," said Neal Gabler, author most recently of Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality . "So what do you do? You kind of lift a little corner of the sheet over the statue … But really, more than the media generating this, they're in a sense catching up to it."

"I think that, obviously, George Lucas holds all the cards here," said Premiere editor in chief Jim Meigs, who gave over almost his May "Special Collector's Issue" to the movie, with four separate covers to appeal to Star Wars obsessives. Mr. Meigs had been negotiating for two years, he said, to allow for the many pages of coverage Premiere heaped on the movie, including a few odd-looking "exclusive" computer-generated photographs. But he was beaten by Vanity Fair , which was given first dibs at shooting the set by George Lucas, in part because the director knew Ms. Leibovitz. "It was pretty clear that we'd be the most prominent of the second wave," said a somewhat humbled Mr. Meigs. He thinks Lucasfilm released the information so that it ended up in "reasonably classy" magazines before the movie opens and, presumably, all hell breaks loose.

To hear some journalists tell it, getting in on the hype was not as fun as it looks. "They are the most micro-managing, fascistic, incredibly controlling organization," said one magazine writer who had to deal with Lucasfilm. "It was a slow and highly negotiated process," said John Seabrook, who wrote about George Lucas in The New Yorker in 1997. "They are just very controlling."

Which is why in interviews Mr. Lucas gives the same pat statements about the faults of the studio system, the future of digital filmmaking, how he's just "telling stories" in his films and how fulfilling his family life is with his adopted children. Indeed, Mr. Lucas gets testy about anything else and is quick to dismiss "the media" and "the Internet" in the same breath. After his piece came out, Mr. Seabrook received a call from Lucasfilm informing him that an obscure English newspaper had plagiarized some of his piece. The New Yorker hadn't noticed, but the folks at Lucasfilm were watching … closely.

Out in the paternalistic 3,000-acre archipelago of Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, Calif., where Lucasfilm is headquartered, things presumably look a bit different. As everyone contacted by Off the Record pointed out, they control all access to the movie–to the point of digitally manipulating photos to add fictional characters to the magazine portraits and sending along Lucasfilm handlers to make sure the actors were presented in costume correctly.

"I think that Star Wars has something for everybody," said Lynne Hale, the director of communications at Lucasfilm who has orchestrated the media placement. "There's so much artistry in Star Wars that when we were thinking about" where articles should be written, she said, Lucasfilm didn't just go to the movie magazines. And because "there's tremendous interest from publications in Star Wars ," Ms. Hale said, Lucasfilm had its hand on the spigot, regulating which media outlet got what and when.

"A lot of these guys from the 70's are sort of legends now," said Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood . "If you made Star Wars , you're going to be treated like an emperor … It's more intense because this is the Holy Grail, so they get anything they ask for."

Wired editor Katrina Heron went up to Lucasfilm headquarters twice in the process of putting together what became the magazine's May cover–which featured a head shot of Mr. Lucas by Andres Serrano over the cover line "Believe the Hype" and a fold-out of a blurry, computer-generated picture of a 500 m.p.h. drag race across the desert floor that Wired wanted exclusively. ( Premiere ended up getting the same picture.) Ms. Heron said that because Wired was focusing on the computer-appreciation aspect of the movie in a "unique" way, and had written about Mr. Lucas in glowingly technical terms in February 1997, it wasn't that hard to get Lucasfilm to cooperate this time. So, why did the magazine engage in such overt, if hackneyed, cheerleading on its cover, enjoining readers to "Believe the Hype"? Ms. Heron said it was both about the technology in the film and also how "my writer saw portions of the movie and we thought the movie was going to be really great."

Ms. Hale said she couldn't comment on why Vanity Fair got the first look at the Phantom Menace set. But judging from the meager riff tapped out by David Kamp, built upon a few sidelong musings from Mr. Lucas ("I've gotten much better performances out of my aliens this time"), the magazine didn't get access to much else. The New York Times coverage was more substantive, if unsurprising: a 3,000-word feature, plus a 3,000-word Q.&A. session, on March 21, written by Orville Schell, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. And Lesley Stahl's gushing, two-segment piece on 60 Minutes on March 28 was singularly dull. (Ms. Stahl to Mr. Lucas: "You remind me of my girlfriends who work and have children!")

Substantive journalism doesn't seem to be encouraged. CNN and Fortune are set to do a piece for the news network's Newsstand show timed to the release of the movie, but according to one person interviewed for the piece, they aren't getting much support from Lucasfilm because the company doesn't want people delving into the money and marketing side of The Phantom Menace . (Spokesmen for Fortune and CNN's Newsstand did not return calls for comment.) In the end, Vanity Fair polybagged its February issue like it was pornography. "People were buying two copies of it, one to open and one to keep for the future," said Vanity Fair spokesman Beth Kseniak. Apparently, the polybag ploy worked; the magazine sold 541,000 copies on the newsstand, which, Ms. Kseniak said, was their fifth best-selling issue ever.

After it's off the newsstand, Mr. Meigs said that Premiere is going to polybag and sell its four covers together "for pristine storage." "Having four covers, on one level it's a gimmick to appeal to the obsessive fan," he said. "But it's not just another movie. It's more than that."

Tell that to New York Post reporter Bill Hoffman, who's been writing the countdown since March 28. "I'm not even a big fan," he said. But as he struggles to come up with things to write about, he's meeting the teeming multitudes who are. "These people are nuts ."

The music section in the April 13 Village Voice features three articles pondering the phenomenon of Jo Jo Dancer, a.k.a. the Gay Rapper, the angry, self-appointed critic of rock critics who recently distributed "The Rock Critical List," a samizdat rant targeting certain writers and some aspects of the rock crit profession in general. Two of the three pieces were first-person rock crit reactions, but the third, by Jeff Howe, claimed to have done a close textual analysis of "The Rock Critical List" and the writer whom Off the Record reported on March 17 was being thought of as the prime suspect among his peers: Spin senior editor Charles Aaron. However, a close textual analysis of Mr. Howe's piece might bring to mind another writer–namely Vassar College professor Donald Foster, the Shakespeare scholar who analyzed the novel Primary Colors for New York magazine in 1996 and figured out Joe Klein wrote it. That's because Mr. Foster did, in fact, do the textual analysis for the piece. Voice music editor Chuck Eddy told Off the Record that Mr. Foster's "agent didn't want him in there," so his name was taken out of the piece. Mr. Eddy also said Mr. Foster wasn't paid for his work. Mr. Foster didn't return calls for comment, but his agent, Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic, copped to his client's identity. "Oh, O.K., you've caught us," he said.

Somewhere, Jo Jo is smiling.

Not all of associate editor John Podhoretz's innovations in the New York Post 's features pages have been appreciated by a certain crotchety segment of the tabloid's staff. Exhibit 1: Back in December, he moved Susan Brady Konig (daughter of Page Six inventor-turned-novelist James Brady) out of the opinion section and gave her a twice-a-week column in the rechristened Living section, where she could discuss her vaguely upscale family and chat about the issues of the day. (April 12: "I'm pretty disappointed about Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi. I thought their marriage would last …")

Ms. Konig works out of her home and would seem to be a part of Mr. Podhoretz's ambitions to make the Post a less gritty read. Indeed, she even refers to things she's read in The New York Times in her column–a form of class treason at the Post . So, several weeks ago, pro-grit (and thus, anti-Podhoretz) reporters pasted a makeshift Konig-watch thermometer on a wall in the city room, making a mark every time she refers to The Times in her column. "The whole column's based on The Times !" complained one newsroom critic.

When reached by Off the Record, Ms. Konig hadn't heard of her fan club back at the paper, perhaps because, as she put it, about the only time she ever leaves her house is to go get a copy of The Times . "I don't think I've made any Times references in the last couple of weeks," she said, before admitting, " The Times is a fabulous source, I will say that."

Mr. Podhoretz did not return a call for comment.

It's a dispute about what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, what makes poetry "Shakespearean," what makes poetry poetry -what makes it a source of wonder, challenge and amazement that speaks across centuries, as opposed to lines of leaden hack-work laden with dimwitted piety that happen to rhyme or scan and are set out in stanzas. And it's a dispute about whether a computer can tell the difference.

To me, it's not an argument about whether every line of Shakespeare was touched with pure genius; I've always felt some of the early sonnets, for instance, are lame and strained. But they're only 14 lines long: The real issue is whether Shakespeare was capable of being that bad for 578 lines at a time. It's one thing for a poet to go on autopilot for a stanza or three, it's another to produce 578 lines of virtually unadulterated dimwitted drivel-the Moby-Dick of drivel.

When I last wrote about this issue a year or so ago, the forces in favor of the Elegy seemed to be carrying the day, at least here in America, where I have been virtually the only voice speaking out unequivocally against it. The publishers of three new editions of the complete works of Shakespeare (perhaps intimidated by the supposedly scientific computer-generated "proofs" of the attribution) have included the wretched Elegy in what I believe were ill-advised attempts to cash in on the publicity over the Elegy and demonstrate how au courant they were. Although, as I've pointed out in the past, in each case the obviously abashed scholar-editors of those editions were uncomfortable enough to distance themselves from the inclusion as an endorsement of the attribution to Shakespeare. Instead, they either sneered at the Elegy , or characterized the inclusion with weasel words about how it would provoke debate about the "meaning of authorship" and other temporizing blather.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the tide of opinion was running in the opposite direction, with most leading British Shakespearean scholars dissenting from the attribution of the seamlessly second-rate Elegy to Shakespeare. Lively debate in the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement in particular produced several alternate candidates, although the one that most caught my interest was announced last year by Prof. Katherine Duncan-Jones of Oxford-a formidable figure in the field and editor of the highly regarded Arden edition of Shakespeare's sonnets. She had found the true "W.S.," she said. Not Shakespeare, but a little known Puritan preacher named William Sclater. Ms. Duncan-Jones promised to elaborate a convincing proof of her Sclater candidacy in a forthcoming symposium on the elegy, to be published in Shakespeare Studies .

Which brings us to the first exciting new development: the False Alarm, the Premature Surrender Claim. It almost knocked me out of my chair when I came upon a new letter in the Dec. 5, 1997, issue of the TLS from Ms. Duncan-Jones. In an almost casual aside, she remarked that she had received a letter from Prof. Donald Foster (the Vassar scholar who claimed in 1995 to have proved that "W.S." was Shakespeare with the aid of a computer database called Shaxicon)-a letter in which he congratulated her on her essay in Shakespeare Studies identifying "W.S." as the Rev. William Sclater. "The truth sometimes turns out to be stranger than fiction," she quoted Mr. Foster telling her, implying that he was conceding the truth of her Sclater theory.

I was stunned by Ms. Duncan-Jones' letter. It seemed to indicate that the chief proponent of the attribution of the Elegy to Shakespeare was conceding defeat. But I couldn't quite believe it (however much I might have wanted to), so I tracked down Mr. Foster, who was vacationing in Florida over the holidays. He confirmed my suspicions: He had not in any way conceded defeat to Ms. Duncan-Jones. In fact, he claimed he had plenty of ammunition to blow her out of the water: He could disprove her key contention that her candidate, William Sclater, was linked to William Peter, the subject of the Elegy , through Puritan religious ties.

I won't presume to pronounce judgment on that issue between Mr. Foster and Ms. Duncan-Jones, but I will say, much as I disagree with Mr. Foster on the Elegy authorship question, I think he was wronged by Ms. Duncan-Jones. Anyone reading her letter would get the misleading impression that Mr. Foster had surrendered. Such a tactic is surprising and disturbing, but perhaps an indication of how high passions run on this question.

And it looks like the fever pitch of passion and intrigue is not going to diminish. I was in the midst of studying Ms. Duncan-Jones' case for William Sclater as W.S. in Shakespeare Studies (and finding it disappointingly far less conclusive than I'd hoped) when I came upon another outburst of contentious polemic on the letters page of the TLS , this one introducing an entirely new candidate for the mysterious W.S.

This was a letter posted from Zurich by Prof. Brian Vickers, a well-known Shakespearean scholar who was one of the first Britons to weigh in against Mr. Foster's Shakespeare attribution of the Elegy . Mr. Vickers' letter drops a couple of bombshells that portend even more bitter battles to come. One is that he's working on a book about the whole Elegy controversy with the sure-to-inflame title Counterfeiting Shakespeare: The Politics of Attribution . "Counterfeiting" is strong language: It suggests deliberate falsification, rather than (what I'd suggest) sincere but misguided enthusiasm on the part of the Shakespeare-attribution partisans.

But in any event, the second bombshell Mr. Vickers drops in his letter is the unveiling-or revival-of a powerful new contender for authorship of the elegy: John Ford.

Most readers will be familiar with Ford as one of that dark and brilliant company of Jacobean revenge dramatists. Ford is best known for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore , a play which memorably features an incest-crazed brother running into a fifth-act scene with his pregnant sister's bloody heart on his dagger.

Mr. Vickers calls Ford "the strongest candidate yet" and reminds us that in Mr. Foster's 1989 book, A Study in Attribution , "Foster recorded that Ford, born in the West Country and [like the dead guy, William Peter] educated at Exeter College, Oxford, was certainly known to Peter and his family, and he [Foster] even showed that A Funerall Elegie (1612) shared many phrases, indeed whole lines, with Ford's poem Christes Bloodie Sweat (1613). But Professor Foster dismissed the parallels as showing that Ford plagiarized from the Elegie without ever considering Ford as the author of that poem."

In addition, according to Mr. Vickers, Leo Stock, one of the foremost John Ford scholars, has lent weight to the Ford candidacy. Now, nobody would love to see the Shakespeare attribution exploded more than I, but my initial reaction to the Ford candidacy is similar to my problem with the Shakespeare candidacy: He's too good a writer to have perpetrated this epic crime against poetry, this brain cell-killing assault on the senses, this challenge to the limits of human tolerance for tedium.

I went back and reread ' Tis Pity She's a Whore and found myself exhilarated by its feverish over-the-top transgressive hysteria. Way too good for "W.S." Then I plunged into one of Ford's earlier plays, The Lover's Melancholy , one I'd never read before, one I was thrilled to discover was inspired by one of my favorite works in the language, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy . To my melancholy disappointment, The Lover's Melancholy fell far short of its source's incomparable brio, its wild and crazy mixture of crackpot scholarship and confused yearning. It was at times stilted, at times sententiously conventional, at times awkward and dull. While it never approached the abysmal depths of poetic decrepitude the Funeral Elegy sustains for intolerable lengths of time, it had a certain je ne sais quoi of amateurish badness that made it just possible, just conceivable, that the same author might -after suffering a serious concussion, say- have composed the Funeral Elegy . (The play even contains the phrase "a funeral elegy of tears.")

Then I looked more closely at Mr. Foster's description of the relationship between Ford and Shakespeare. "Ford was Shakespeare's most ardent epigone," Mr. Foster wrote. Not only did Ford model his drama on Shakespeare and echo him repeatedly, he even wrote for Shakespeare's acting company, the King's Men. I sense there might be an answer here.

I called Mr. Foster to get his reaction to the Ford candidacy. While I disagree with him on the Elegy , I admire the comprehensiveness of Mr. Foster's erudition and his scrupulous, scholarly intellect; I only regret he allowed himself to be swayed from original agnostic position on the authorship of the Elegy .

In any case, Mr. Foster raised an obvious and powerful objection: Why the hell would John Ford, who was known to the family of the dead William Peter, sign the elegy W.S. instead of John Ford or J.F.? Good question. It stumped me for a while. But it seemed like there was so much evidence of Ford's closeness to the Peter family, clear evidence of his having written previous funeral elegies, of his connection to a playwright named W.S., that there had to be a solution lurking in the tangled data.

It was something new Mr. Foster said he'd discovered that suggested to me a novel solution to the puzzle. He told me he'd uncovered previously unknown links between the dead guy, William Peter, and Shakespeare. So both Ford and Shakespeare knew the dead guy, but Ford knew him better. And Ford and Shakespeare knew each other. Suddenly, it occurred to me: John Ford ghost-wrote the Elegy for Shakespeare .

Consider this scenario: In 1612, Shakespeare's a few years from his death, he's hardly writing at all any more, he's more an investor in his acting company than a working playwright, he prefers to spend his time in rural Stratford engaging in litigious quarrels with the rubes up there.

Aspiring playwright and poet John Ford comes to Shakespeare and says: William Peter's died, his family has asked me to ask you, O great bard of our age, to write an elegy commemorating his death; you know, maybe the usual 600 lines or so. Shakespeare would rather die than undertake the task himself for someone he knows far less well than Ford does. So he tells Ford, Why don't you work something up and sign it for me? Sign it "W.S." Who will know the difference? Ford's not too happy with this commission, it's the worst of all possible worlds, he has to write the damn thing and he doesn't get the credit. But he wants to write for Shakespeare's acting company. So Ford takes his resentment out on the Elegy -he cranks out some torturously blathering, sententious twaddle full of bloated, self-satisfied piety with a few subtle gibes at the theater and theatricality to express his disgruntlement with Shakespeare and the whole ghost-writing deal.

Voilà! The wretched Funeral Elegy by W.S. I think I just may have solved the damn thing.