There is a professor at New York's Vassar College who clearly knows his Shakespeare, perhaps not as well as he thought he did until a week or so ago, but at least well enough to recall Touchstone's advice in "As You Like It": "Let us make an honorable retreat, though not with bag and baggage, yet with scrip and scrippage."

Honorable retreats -- that is, graceful and unforced admissions of error -- are rare enough in human affairs to be newsworthy, even if they occur, as this one did, in the hothouse world of Shakespearean scrip and scrippage. It is fitting that the wider world take note of the incident that has set literary scholars buzzing and learn a lesson from the man at the center of it.

Maybe you missed the story (it was a fascinating one, but hardly the stuff of headlines, even in a slow week). It all started back in 1995, when Professor Donald Foster unearthed "A Funeral Elegy," a poem that he declared had been written by Shakespeare. Now those of us who do not live and die by such things might not think this claim particularly momentous. We would be wrong. If Shakespeare's authorship of this long and rather dull poem could be proved, it would be huge news for scholars, for two reasons: First, the canon is pretty well established; new Shakespeare "finds" don't happen every day. Second, it would boost the case of those scholars, the majority, who believe that Shakespeare wrote the works historically attributed to him, and it would undermine the case of the so-called Oxfordians, who think the Earl of Oxford wrote them. Oxford died in 1604, but the Elegy is dated 1612.