There are three types of evidence which have been used to identify
Hand D as Shakespeare: handwriting, spellings, and content.
All of these have inherent problems as we shall see.
The handwriting argument, which is completely
critical to demolishing the authorship question,
attempts to establish Shakspere as Hand D. Paleography,
the study of handwriting,
is an established practice for identifying the authors of manuscripts.
To determine that Hand D is
the handwriting of William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon,
one must compare it with a suitable sample.
The only sample of his handwriting consists of the six signatures,
which are, as we've seen, inconsistent as the signatures of a single person will often be.
We must begin with the assumption that they are all by
William Shakspere because every one of them is on a legal document,
which the person in question would normally sign for themselves.
There is an immediate problem, though.
Six signatures - the same two words repeated six times and
the additional words "by me" - does not constitute an adequate sample size for comparison.
Paleographers would not normally consider matching to such a small sample.
They would also not attempt to match this text to
these signatures because they were not written at a similar time.
The text was originally dated to 1593 or 1594,
whereas the signatures were produced around 20 years later.
Handwriting changes over time and in a 1911 edition of Sir Thomas More,
the editor, looking for sample handwriting to match against Hand E,
discounted a letter by Thomas Decker for
exactly this reason, because the letter was written in 1616,
the same year as three of Shakespeare's signatures.
This is one of many examples of scholars
suspending normal scholarly standards when they are working on
Shakespeare because of how important it is to
them that the orthodox authorship attribution is upheld.
So already, as you can see,
the paleographic argument to establish Shakspere as Hand D is a little suspect
because it requires scholars to break
the usual rules pertaining to sample size and dating.
Nevertheless, let's see what similarities between
the two sets of handwriting scholars have found. There are four.
One, a form of joined 'ha' featuring a spurred 'a' found in Shakspere's first signature,
the one on the court case deposition.
Two, the upstrokes on the 'm' and 'w' of
Shakspere's sixth signature from the final page of his will.
Three, a form of 'w' found in Shakspere's sixth signature,
an upstroke traced over a downstroke.
Four, an eccentric formation of 'k' in all of Shakspere's surviving signatures.
Giles Dawson looked for these Hand D features in
a collection of 250 Elizabethan and Jacobean letters.
The peculiar 'a' formation noted in the first signature
and in some places in the Hand D addition
- a sharp point touching the upstroke and forming the flat bottom of the letter 'a' - is
caused when a loop to a spurred 'a' (a common feature of handwriting of the period) goes wrong.
Dawson found twelve letter writers who used spurs,
but none where it had gone wrong to create the flat-bottomed 'a'.
This doesn't mean, however,
that Shakspere and Hand D are the same person.
The second and third features are really a single feature and a variant of it.
Occurring only on the final signature on Shakspere's will,
there are upstrokes on the small 'm' of me,
and the capital 'W' of William,
the latter beginning with a retraced downstroke.
The Hand D writer makes upstrokes on certain initial letters,
including some 'm's and 'w's,
a few of which also begin with the downstroke.
Giles Dawson found upstroke in seven of
the 250 letter writers whose handwriting he studied.
But he did find their incidence low compared with
the incidences (approximately half on 'm' and 'w') in
Hand D. But the 'w' with an upstroke
retraced over the downstroke occurs only on the final signature of the will.
The other 'w's do not all have upstrokes,
and where they do, they are differently formed.
Strictly speaking, the comparison between
the capital 'W' of the signatures and the small 'w' of Hand D should be
discounted in any case; normal paleographic standards
disallow the comparison of small letters with their capital equivalents.
What's more, the upstroke and downstroke
features only come from the phrase "By me William",
a phrase that is seemingly in different and more controlled handwriting than,
for example, the William on the previous page.
It has been suggested that Shakspere was ailing to
the degree that after struggling to sign the first two pages,
"By me William" was written for him by the clerk.
In which case, it would be the clerk's handwriting,
which accounts for the second and third features of
the four features also found in Hand D. The fourth feature,
the eccentric formation of the letter 'k', is present in four of the six signatures.
It looks a bit like a letter 'b'.
None of these 'k's would be recognizable as 'k's out of context.
Dawson looked at every 'k' in 40 specimens of
handwriting and perceived that none of them looked like Shakspere's
'k'. Dawson determined that in 147 lines of Hand D, the writer used 'k' 34 times:
11 were normal, 10 abnormal but recognizable out of context,
two looked like 'b's,
and two looked like 'l's.
So whereas 67 percent of Shakespeare's 'k's
looked like 'b's just six percent of Hand D's did.
If levels of incidence are supposed to be significant in the case of upstrokes,
why is the disparity in levels of incidence not a reason to dismiss
the b-shaped 'k'? This handwriting argument is problematic for other reasons.
The different types of writing and the different conditions under
which they were executed have not been taken into account.
Letters in the period tended to be written with a certain care,
whereas the Hand D additions bear the signs of someone writing at speed.
A signature, on the other hand,
is a particular kind of writing that often bears little
or no relationship to a person's regular handwriting.
Three of these four shared peculiarities only
occur in a single Shakspere signature and not the other five.
Scholars are asking us to consider a single match of significance,
when there are five signatures where that feature is not matched.
Even if the total sample size were not an issue
(but it is), you might more accurately describe such a match as an anomaly.
Finally, we should ask, if these four features are
the only similarities between Shakspere's signatures and Hand D,
should we not logically consider the discrepancies?
McDonald P Jackson says we simply can't evaluate them.
"The significance of shared peculiarities can be evaluated,
whereas disparities between the signatures and Hand D cannot,
since they might be accounted for by the contrasting nature of
materials: Hand D's pages are the 'foul papers' of a play-scene,
whereas the signatures are formal appendages to legal documents,
and two of them are constrained by the width of parchment rectangles,
set each with a waxen seal, on which they are penned.
Signatures are, in any case,
rather special pieces of writing."
If the contrasting nature of the materials are valid reasons why
the disparities between Hand D and the Shakspere signatures cannot be evaluated,
why is this contrasting nature not equally a reason for
discounting their very few and inconsistent shared features?
But the palaeographic argument is not the only leg of
the three-legged stool on which Hand D as Shakespeare sits.
In the next lecture,
we'll look at arguments connected to spelling.
Ros BarberDr
