A SHAKESPEARE AUTOGRAPH.•
A FRAGMENT of a play, in Shakespeare's own handwriting, is preserved among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum. Such is the proposi. tion which the-ex-Director sets himself to prove in this modest essay. In his youth, the author says, he predicted that we might live to see a contemporary copy of one of St. Paul's Epistles unearthed in Egypt and a Shakespeare manuscript brought to light in a Warwickshire country house. The Pauline Epistle has yet to appear, but the Shakespeare manuscript—if it really be one—has boon on the shelves of the British Museum since its foundation and only awaited recognition. This manuscript, Harlcian 7368, contains part of the play of Sir Thomas More by Anthony Munday, with additions or alterations by five other hands, and may be dated about the years 1598-1600. It is well known to scholars, as it has been printed four times and also reproduced in facsimile. It is of interest both for the light which it throws on the methods of Elizabethan playwrights and also for its possible connexion with Shakespeare, to whom the speech of More to the unruly London apprentices has been frequently attributed. The three pages of the MS. containing More's entrance and his speech are written in a hand unlike the rest, and were first identified, conjecturally, as Shakespeare's autograph in 1871 by Richard Simpson, whose views were supported by Spedding, Bacon's learned biographer. What Sir Edward Maunde Thompson has done is to examine the handwriting critically in every detail—with facsimiles of the three pages for the reader's guidance— and to compare it with the six known signatures of Shakespeare, three of which are on legal documents while three others are on his will. It might be thought that these signatures, hurriedly scrawled on deeds, would afford little material for a decision. But an accomplished palaeographer like Sir E. M. Thompson can turn this imperfect evidence to good account. He shows that Shakespeare wrote the native English hand which he had been taught at his country school, and not the Italian hand which the courtiers and scholars of his time affected. Shakespeare wrote badly, but he indulged now and then in the fanciful flourishes of the scriveners and he preferred the long Italian " s " to the • Shakespeare* Handwriting. A Study by Sir Edward Mann& Thompson, O.C.B. Oxford : at Use Clarendon Press. [104. 64.1. pet.] native variety. The peculiarities which are manifest in the signatures of 1612-10 are obvious also, when they are pointed out, in the Harleian manuscript. Sir E. M. Thompson does not concern himself with the literary merit of the scene. Much, however, depends on this, for if Shakespeare was not the author, then the three pages are not, after all, in his writing. On the whole we should say that the trained instinct would accept the episode as Shakespearean—the decision must be a matter of instinct rather than of exact science. The talk of the riotous crowd, whose grievance, it may be said, was the continued presence of aliens in the City, is spirited stuff, and More's speech, apart from its plausible argument, has some strong lines. Take• the following, where More replies to the mob's demand for the expulsion of the aliens— we adopt the modern spelling:—
"Grant them removed and grant that this your noise Rath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs, and their poor luggage Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed.
What had you got Y I'll tell you, you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled, and by this pattern Not one of you should Jive an aged man. For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With selfsame hand, self reasons and self right, Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes, Would feed on one another."
Shakespeare might well have written that passage, and More might have spoken it. The authorship being granted, it becomes easy to accept Sir Edward Maundo Thompson's painstaking demonstration of the resemblance between the handwriting of the fragment, itself far superior to anything else in the play, and Shakespeare's signatures. He has at least made out a very strong case, which we should all like to decide in his favour, for his belief that the National Library contains a genuine Shakespearean manuscript. If Shakespeare, as a member of the theatrical staff, was not above patching a play by so poor a writer as Munday, the whole question of his connexion with the historical plays long included in the Shakespearean canon may have to be reconsidered. From thia point of view it is better that the first Shakespearean manu- script should be a purple patch for another man's play and not a passage from one of his own works. We would rather have had the author's draft of Handel, though that, we fear, was long ago thrown into the waste-paper basket of some Jacobean printing-office. But the fragment of Sir Thomas More is a literary treasure of the first magnitude, and Sir Edward Melinda Thompson's account of it deserves all praise.
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