Shakespeare’s Manuscripts Shakespeare’s Manuscripts Author Madisen Crandall Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England EncyclopediaEMEE

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The Lost Manuscripts

Much controversy surrounds Shakespeare’s manuscripts, or rather the almost total lack of manuscripts in handwriting demonstrated as William Shakespeare’s. Only one part of a single play, The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, exists in Shakespeare’s hand. Unfortunately, information about the dozens other manuscripts of plays and poems is composed of conclusions based on extensive speculation by scholars and many assumptions based on legend.

Conspiracy and Controversy

Without the original manuscripts of Shakespeare’s writing, scholars and readers have been left to consider many possibilities concerning his work. The largest of these debates is usually called the authorship question. One theory, which is not accepted by the vast majority of experts, suggests that a lack of sufficient documentation from Shakespeare’s time, combined with his overall lack of higher education, means that the Man of Stratford, as these theorists call him, is not the author we know as Shakespeare. Long lists of potential Shakespeares, including the Earl of Oxford Edward deVere, Sir Francis Bacon, and Queen Eizabeth I, have been put forth by a variety of conspiracists. Yet the lack of documentation that theorists believe disproves William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon as the author can also be used to combat any other candidate suggested to be the true author of the plays and poems. Without the original manuscripts in Shakespeare’s hand, neither side can conclusively prove their point. However, consensus among the most prominent scholars worldwide supports the view that the son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden was indeed the author of the works including Hamlet, Macbeth, and Twelfth Night.

The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore

One clear piece of evidence exists that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the writer of the 39 plays and numerous poems attributed under this name. This evidence comes in the form of the only existing manuscript believed to be an original manuscript of Shakespeare’s: a fragment of a play called The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore. As were many plays of the era, this one was co-authored by a number of playwrights and revised as they collaborated.

Based on handwriting analysis, three pages of this play are believed to be written in the hand of William Shakespeare, called Hand D by scholars. Experts compared legal documents of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, which include a handful of signatures, to the handwriting on these pages. They concluded that the handwriting was a positive match.

The play, which was originally written by Sir Anthony Munday between 1596 and 1601, is about the Lord Chancellor Thomas More being sentenced to death after refusing the legitimacy of King Henry VIII. The pages attributed to Shakespeare are believed to have been added after 1603. The revisions made, which include a total of 147 powerful lines about refugees in the middle of a riot scene, are believed to be the only existing original manuscript of Shakespeare.

Why All the Secrecy?

Why has so little documentation of Shakespeare’s talent survived? Here are some factual items that explain away some of the secrecy: There are six surviving signatures of William Shakespeare. These signatures have been crossmatched with the handwriting found in The Book of Sir Thomas Moore. Fellow actors and lifelong friends of William Shakespeare produced a compilation of his works which we call the First Folio seven years after his death; it included works such as Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, and Julius Caesar. The author Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare personally, calls him the sweet swan of Avon and attests to his talent as a writer in a dedicatory poem, To the Memory of Mr. William Shakespeare and What He Hath Left Us, which appears in the in the First Folio. There are two portraits in existence of Shakespeare with authentic claim, one called the Chandos portrait and the other the engraving by Martin Droeshout that appears in the First Folio. They were created by different artists and at different times in his life but are nonetheless similar to one another, as well as similar to the monument in Holy Trinity Church where Shakespeare was buried. His family and friends erected the monument, so it is probably a good likeness. The style in which Shakespeare writes has been extensively studied and noted in all of his authenticated works. Currently, artificial intelligence and other forms of machine learning have identified style patterns, as well as words and phrases, that only Shakespeare uses. Many documents survive from the 16th and early 17th centuries that concern Shakespeare’s background in the theater both as an actor and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which became the King’s Men in 1603. These facts that demonstrate that the Man of Stratford was a well-known author in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods will not quell the debate about English literature’s most famous playwright, but the consensus of experts is that all this worrying about the details of his life or lack of original manuscripts is really just much ado about nothing.

Key Print Sources Purkis, James. Shakespeare and Manuscript Drama: Canon, Collaboration, and Text. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Sharpe, Will. Shakespeare and Collaborative Writing. Oxford University Press, 2023.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. Shakespeare’s Manuscripts. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/manuscripts.html. Marche, Stephen. The Shakespeare Algorithm. The New York Times. 28 Nov. 2021. Stewart, Doug. To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare. Smithsonian Magazine. 1 Sep. 2006. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/to-be-or-not-to-be-shakespeare-127247606/.