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.
