University of Virginia Library

In the summer of 1986 the scholarly world was intrigued by the announcement of a major discovery: the manuscript of a hitherto unknown play by John Webster. In fact, what had been discovered in the muniment room at Melbourne Hall in Derbishire was an unidentified fragment of a play, which the co-discoverer, Mr. Felix Pryor, came to believe was by Webster. Mr. Pryor wrote a lengthy sale-catalogue describing the manuscript, and arguing for Webster's authorship of it, for Bloomsbury Book Auctions. This firm attempted to auction the manuscript on June 20, 1986, and set its anticipated price as between £200,000-£400,000; in the event, it did not reach its reserve, and as yet remains unsold. Thanks to the courtesy of the Marquis of Lothian, and the Trustees of the Melbourne Garden Charities, we have been enabled to make a fairly detailed examination of the manuscript, and to consider the question of attribution in greater depth. This article is a report on the results of that investigation.

First, a slightly more detailed recapitulation of the events of 1986 will help to clarify the questions under investigation. The Melbourne Manuscript, as the document has come to be known (hereafter in this article simply the MS), was discovered in 1985 by Mr. Edward Saunders, who was sorting through the correspondence of Sir John Coke at Melbourne; Mr. Saunders then invited Mr. Pryor, who had formerly been a member of the staff of Sothebys, to attempt to identify it. Coke's letters were tied up in packets and kept in the Hall's muniment room; the MS under discussion had been used as wrapping paper for one of these packets (the words "Packet 3.", in pencil, are visible on the upper left corner of fol. 2v).[2] For reasons which are not entirely clear, no scholarly expert on Webster, or on the Jacobean drama in general, was permitted to examine the MS in any detail prior to the auction attempt. Professor Richard Proudfoot was permitted to inspect it, albeit rather cursorily, and wrote an announcement concerning it in the Times Literary Supplement.[3]

The abortive auction followed on 20 June. Early in July Professor I. A. Shapiro challenged the attribution to Webster, in a letter to the TLS, in which he declared bluntly that "there are no grounds for attributing [the MS] to Webster, or to any pre-Restoration dramatist other than Shirley".[4] Shapiro's argument, which will be discussed in detail below, was based on the fact that the subject of the MS was derived from the same source-material as James Shirley's play The Traitor; Shapiro believes that the handwriting of the MS is Shirley's, and he further demonstrated a plausible scenario to account for the MS's coming into the Cokes' possession. It is true that a central problem in Pryor's attempt to identify the MS as Webster's is that no Webster autograph of any kind exists. Shapiro (after a brief reply by Pryor[5]) expanded on his argument in a second letter on 8 August, which was responded to by Proudfoot, who was not persuaded by Shapiro's arguments.[6] The issues raised in this correspondence will be addressed presently. At the time of writing, the matter rests at least so far as public debate on the MS is concerned.

The net effect of the dispute has been unfortunate: it has drawn attention away from the indubitable fact that the MS is a fragment of foul papers from the Jacobean period, the only such fragment ever to have come to light[7] (a fact which alone makes it of inestimable value, no matter who wrote it). Instead it has focussed debate upon the matter of authorship, a question which, past experience should have warned everyone, is unlikely to be susceptible of rapid and universally-accepted conclusions. We address both issues in this article, but to redress the balance so far struck, treat the first as the more important.