Foster's treatment of diction is a major prop in his claim that the Funerall Elegye ‘is formed from textual and linguistic fabric indistinguishable from that of canonical Shakespeare’ (1996a, p. 1082). The term ‘diction’ is something of a misnomer, however, since Foster used it to discuss matters of vocabulary, rhetoric, compound words, verbal parallels, and much else. In 1989, under this heading ‘Diction’, Foster put forward several linguistic items which, he claimed, are unusually prominent in both Shakespeare's works and in the Funerall Elegye (pp. 93–105). As two of his keenest critics pointed out, Foster's method essentially consists of identifying some ‘rare Shakespeare quirk’, recording that he has found no other example of this quirk other than in the Elegye, and proceeding

Notionally, Foster also attempted a negative check in some cases, by referring to a database that he had assembled, consisting of a ‘Cross-Sample’ of English verse elegies published between 1610 and 1613 (Foster 1989, pp. 80–1, 132–54). This was only a small excerpt from the larger ‘Checklist’ he had compiled, of ‘English Memorial Verse, 1570–1630’ (pp. 80–1, 132–54).