- "Hand D" in
the manuscript of Sir Thomas More:
- Is it a "literary
paper trail" for Shakspere?
A reader on Amazon.com criticized the book for failing to
address more fully the case for "Hand D" as Shakspere's
in the manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More. In
retrospect, I agree with that criticism. This page attempts to
remedy that deficiency.
The Shakespeare Authorship Home page, which vigorously defends
the orthodox biography, informs its readers that "since the
1870s, Shakespeare scholars have suspected that one of the hands
("Hand D") in the manuscript Elizabethan play Sir
Thomas More is that of William Shakespeare. Over the years,
enough evidence has been accumulated that most scholars today
believe that Hand D is indeed Shakespeare's. The most important
gathering of evidence was the 1923 collection Shakespeare's
Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, edited by Alfred
Pollard, which contained an impressive array of evidence
suggesting Shakespeare's authorship from many different
perspectives: handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, imagery, etc."
(David Kathman's essay on this subject is at shakespeareauthorship.com/more.html.)
Many orthodox scholars, including Shakespeare's two most
recent biographers, indeed believe that "Hand D" in the
More manuscript is Shakspere's. Park Honan makes several
statements based on that assumption (Shakespeare, A Life, 45-46,
170-72, 305). In his biography William Shakespeare: The Man
Behind the Genius, Anthony Holden reproduces in facsimile a
page of the More manuscript, and his caption identifies
it, without qualification, as the only known fragment of a play
in Shakspere's handwriting. If Holden and Honan (and Kathman) are
correct, if the fragment is an authorial manuscript in
Shakspere's handwriting, then the biographer has documentary
evidence to prove that Shakspere was indeed the playwright.
However, the "impressive array of evidence" for
Shakspere's as "Hand D" in Sir Thomas More
does not stand up under scrutiny.
In my book, I make reference only to the deficiency in the
paleographic case for "Hand D" as Shakspere's, i.e.,
the absence of a reliable control sample of Shakspere's
handwriting with which to make an identification. That deficiency
renders the principal argument untenable. However, none of the
other arguments that has been advanced provides good evidence of
Shakspere's hand in the More manuscript, either. I will
summarize the fundamental difficulties by citing four scholars (one
anti-Stratfordian and three orthodox) and their arguments.
One, Gerald E. Downs analyzed an underlying assumption on
which the case for "Hand D" has been based: the
assumption that the manuscript is authorial. Downs demonstrated
that the handwriting exhibits characteristics or idiosyncrasies
consistent with scribal transmission. He agrees with earlier
scholars (B.A.P. Van Dam and L.L. Schücking) who conclude that
"Hand D" could be that of a scribe rather than author.
If there is no way to be sure that the manuscript is an authorial
composition rather than a scribal transcript, then one key
assumption supporting the case for Shakespeare is already
compromised ("The Book of Sir Thomas More in My
Book," paper presented at The 2nd Shakespearean Research
Symposium, Detroit, October 2000).
Two, the date of composition of the manuscript is open to
question. In her article "Playwrights at Work: Henslowe's,
Not Shakespeare's, Book of Sir Thomas More," Carol
Chillington argues for "a date later than 1601" (455),
rather than the early 1590s, on the basis of the known
collaborative history of Thomas Heywood (447), on notations in
Henslowe's diary, and on topical allusions. She also argues that
a later date for the More manuscript cannot be explained
away as being a revision of an earlier but unperformed play (450).
Chillington cites two other scholars who propose a later date,
despite A.W. Pollard's concern [on which more below] that "if
More can be proved to be as late as 1599 [Pollard]
should regard the date as an obstacle to Shakespeare's authorship
of the three pages so great as to be almost fatal" (444).
Since a later date of composition is a possibility, another key
assumption underlying the case in favor of Shakespeare is further
compromised (English Literary Renaissance 10:3, fall
1980: 439-79).
Three, and most importantly, the paleographic argument, which first propelled the
hypothesis forward in 1916, is thoroughly re-examined and refuted
by
Michael L. Hays
("Shakespeare's Hand in Sir Thomas
More: Some Aspects of the Paleographic Argument," Shakespeare
Studies 8 [1975]: 241-53), who exposes logical fallacies and
inconsistencies in the cases advanced by E. Maunde Thompson and W.W.
Greg . Hays points out that nonpaleographic arguments were
introduced to corroborate the paleographic case, but
that these other arguments "cannot strengthen the
paleographic arguments themselves." The paleographic case
for "Hand D" cannot be made, because a control sample
of Shakespeare's handwriting, sufficient to make an
identification, does not exist. Even if the reader is baffled by
technical handwriting analyses, that one obvious impediment is
easy enough to understand.
Finally, a recent article in a Canadian journal, Florilegium,
summarizes the case for "Hand D" as a “very
successful resistance movement against the anti-Stratfordians
that was led by A.W. Pollard from 1916 to 1923” (125). In
1923, Pollard edited and published a collections of essays in Shakespeare’s
Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More. For this collection, he
recruited W.W. Greg (who argued on paleographic grounds), John
Dover Wilson (on bibliographical-orthographical grounds), and R.W.
Chambers (on stylistic grounds). But the respective arguments of
these authorities “are each admitted by advocates of Pollard’s
case to be inconclusive. Yet as each kind of argument is
abandoned, the advocates gesture toward the other disciplines for
the conclusiveness that the now-abandoned field cannot provide”
(137-38). The article identifies the various arguments that were
developed, handed down, and embraced by those who were inclined
to accept them, not because they were valid, but because they
provided a defense against the anti-Stratfordian challenge,
coming back then from Sir George Greenwood and Mark Twain. I
quote from the final paragraph in this article:
- “In much Shakespeare editing today, authorship of
the work is credited to Hand D, to whom Shakespeare’s
works can be assigned only through an argument from 'cumulative
evidence' — all of which evidence has been dismissed
as inconclusive by Shakespeareans themselves” (141).
The author of this article is Paul Werstine ("Shakespeare
More or Less: A.W. Pollard and Twentieth-Century Shakespeare
Editing," Florilegium 16, Carleton
University, Ottawa, 1999: 125-45).
In short, in the absence of any personal literary paper trails
for Shakspere, orthodox scholars attempted to manufacture one.
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