[MUSIC] When it comes to the work of Diana Price on literary paper trails, there is one item which many orthodox scholars disagree with, and that is the claim that Shakespeare left no manuscripts in his hand. Most, but not all, orthodox scholars believe that we have a sample of Shakespeare's handwriting in a play called Sir Thomas More. Sometime in the late 16th century, a playwright called Anthony Munday wrote a history play which we know as Sir Thomas More. We have the manuscript of this play, and it shows that the text was altered by several people who can be differentiated by their handwriting. When the manuscript was first analyzed, the writing of each contributor was given a letter of the alphabet: Hand A, Hand B, Hand C, etc. A person identified originally as Hand D added three pages to the manuscript. In the second half of the 19th century, it was first suggested that Hand D might have been William Shakespeare. But before we go further, let me give you some background to this apparent discovery. In 1857, Delia Bacon launched the Shakespeare authorship question by publishing a book called The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, which proposed the works had been jointly authored by a number of different writers, possibly under the direction of her namesake, Sir Francis Bacon. Her doubts about the authorship of the Shakespeare works, like the doubts of many people before and since, had been provoked partly by the absence of personal and contemporaneous testimony linking the supposed author to the works attributed to him. One of the things that seemed most problematic was the absence of any manuscript or partial manuscripts in Shakespeare's own hand. It is probably not surprising, therefore, that the search for such evidence intensified at this point. And that in 1871, 14 years after Delia Bacon's book was published, a scholar claimed to have found a piece of the missing evidence. The suggestion was that Shakespeare had made the additions to Sir Thomas More, because elements of Hand D could be matched to William Shakspere's six signatures. Remember what we learned about confirmation bias, and how it leads people to search for evidence that backs up what they already believe. The arguments made for this theory were not strong, however, and the authorship question rumbled until in 1920 it received a strong boost from the publication of J Thomas Looney's book, Shakespeare Identified. Which proposed Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author of Shakespeare's plays and poems. Oxfordianism became very popular, and those who were persuaded by Oxfordian theory included many prominent figures, including the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. The need to shore up the traditional authorship at this point became intense and three years later, a group of scholars published a book of essays, all of which argued from different perspectives that Shakespeare did indeed have a hand in Sir Thomas More, and attempted to demonstrate that Shakspere was Shakespeare by tying the signatures to the manuscript. This was explicitly in order to counter the growing interest in the authorship question, and Oxfordian theory in particular. In the introduction to the volume, the editor A W Pollard wrote: "if Shakespeare wrote these three pages, the discrepant theories which unite in regarding the Stratford man as a mere mask concealing the activity of some noble lord come crashing to the ground."" In the next lecture we'll look at the evidence and arguments in detail. [MUSIC]