One aspect of Donald Foster's 1989 monograph which evidently impressed many readers was the quantity of statistics it assembled. Every possible issue was quantified, percentages or ratios were calculated for an amazingly wide range of linguistic markers, and there are twenty-five statistical tables. A typical example of this quantification process is Foster's computation that the Funerall Elegye contains ‘twenty-two compound words, for a net frequency of 5.1/1000 words, as opposed to 4.4 in The Winter's Tale and 5.5 in The Tempest …’ (1989, p. 97). That example is one of many in which Foster placed a statistic derived from Shakespeare alongside one from the Funerall Elegye, silently claiming that stylometric data established Shakespeare's authorship of that poem. Foster's statistical procedures, however, are flawed in many respects. He himself showed some awareness of the criticism often voiced, that even ‘striking verbal parallels’ would not amount to ‘proof’ of authorship:

Those are admirable principles, but we can now see how little Foster did to realize them.