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 Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Madisen Crandall, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Daily Life Education Education Literacy Literature and the Arts Dedications Manuscripts Publication Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. Created File. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Madisen Crandall Madisen Crandall

Madisen Crandall was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
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/.