University of Virginia Library

Palaeography

The MS is written in a mixed hand, chiefly secretary, with a fair number of italian (or italic) forms. Dating such a hand is extremely difficult; the most that can be said is that it is highly unlikely to be earlier than 1600, and (in view of the nature of the document) also unlikely to be later than 1630. But of course if the writer was old, or old-fashioned, it could be later. There is nothing inherently impossible in the writing alone to prevent its being dated around 1610.[20] The best compendium of holographs from the period is Greg's English Literary Autographs, a set of excellent facsimiles of the hands of known authors, and the natural first quarry for comparisons. It is interesting how few of the well-known dramatists failed to leave some scrap of their writing for posterity: Greene, Beaumont, Webster, Ford, and William Rowley are about the only men of note in the period for whom the record is blank. It is much to be hoped that no one will suggest that the MS might be by Greene, Beaumont, or Rowley; even on Shapiro's despised stylistic grounds alone such an attribution seems self-evidently impossible. Ford, actually, is not any likelier; but then, at this level of comparison, neither is Shirley, whose extant dramatic works do not at all resemble the dramaturgy represented by the MS.[21]

Of the thirty-seven hands illustrated in the Dramatists volume of Greg's survey, not one looks seriously like the MS. Field's has some general resemblance, but the formation of th is totally different. Shirley, Fletcher, and Middleton are found in Volume 3 of Greg, and our initial reaction was that none of these were possible candidates either. Professor Shapiro's authority, however, demands a re-consideration, and requires a short summary of his published arguments. His assertion that "anyone competent in handwriting of the period will agree" that the MS is in the same hand as that found in Greg, No. XCV(d) is, however, rather extreme (especially in view of the fact that he was relying on the much-reduced facsimile of the first page of the MS printed as a frontispiece to the sale catalogue).[22]

His subsequent letter (22 August 1986) draws attention to other documentary evidence. There is an autograph Latin attestation and signature

of Shirley's, dated 1623, in an elegant italian hand, from the Hertford-shire County Record office; there is the Bodleian manuscript of his poems (MS. Rawlinson Poet. 88); and from Longleat documents relating to the organization and performance of the masque The Triumph of Peace: these are reproduced in a good modern edition by the musicologist Murray Lefkowitz.[23] This last, Shapiro declared, "puts beyond doubt, should any remain, that [Shirley] wrote the 'Melbourne Manuscript'", and, he maintained, demonstrates that the script found on plate VIII of Lefkowitz's edition is "unquestionably" the script of the MS. We do not agree at all with this asseveration. Part of the difficulty in making any identifications is that Shirley wrote both secretary and italian hand (and its development, the "round" hand),[24] and that much of his italian or round writing is of a formal, calligraphic nature. Like most writers in this period, he often wrote a "mixed" hand, in which secretary forms co-exist with italian, or vice-versa. The Longleat is of this nature: we were not able to see the original of this manuscript, but Lefkowitz's facsimile is quite good. It reveals a script largely italian in its letter-forms, though certain letters are secretary; the letters are cursively formed, but detached rather than linked together. It thus presents so totally different an appearance from the cursive mixed secretary of the MS—as one might say, the entire ductus is different—that we feel that any claim that their scribes were the same should be made, if at all, only with caution and reservation.

Comparison of letter-forms alone has been recognized as an inadequate guide to identification of scribes; it is preferable to examine entire lexical units such as words, or at least letter-combinations, as well as considering individual letters. Most of the material on Lefkowitz's plate VIII consists of proper names, none of which occur in the MS, but there is also an inscription, "The figure for | the first going | vp to the state". There are plenty of examples of "for" in the MS, none identical with this; there are four examples of "first", all distinctly different (the Longleat version is almost pure italian): when the MS forms the word the same way, the last two letters are always a digraph, with a characteristically low bar for the t, extended into a tail. There is a clear "state" in l. 24 of the MS, a much less clear "states" in l. 123, and a good "statesmen" in 128. The formation of the st in both ll. 24 and 128 shows that the connexion between the s and the t is formed in the MS with the direction of the pen's movement opposite to that in the Longleat, and the terminal e in the MS is looped, while in Longleat it is in a common secretary form which is found frequently in Shirley, but nowhere in the MS: an opened form, made something like two (modern) cs one above the other. This e is characteristic of the Longleat script.

There are indeed some similarities between the letter-forms of the MS and the Longleat: the first word, "The" has a superficial resemblance to the MS's use of the word in, for instance, ll. 2 and 10, but in both of these examples (and elsewhere) the cross of the T is lower than the upstroke of the h. The capital P is strikingly similar, but is not the same: Shirley forms it in two strokes: a descending vertical with a serif to the right or the left, and a loop starting from halfway down the descending stroke and swooping elegantly over the top. The MS makes a P in a single stroke, beginning with the downstroke, making a serif from right to left and then carrying the stroke up and backwards to cross the downstroke and curve over the top of the letter. The word "Page" occurs both in Longleat and in the MS (l. 16, where it is cancelled, but perfectly legible), and these illustrate the difference in the letters admirably; they also show the difference in the letter e. Nor do the capital Ls look identical to us: those in the Longleat have a foot which may drop down (as in "W. Lawes"), or curve down then up again (as in "J. Lawes"), or else flat (as in "Laughton"). The MS has numerous capital Ls, thanks to the character Lorenzo; the characteristic form of the foot of the letter is a sinuous line, beginning with an upward movement, curving down, and then flattening or curving up again. "Ladies" in l. 69 is a good example, as is the "Lorenz." speech-prefix in l. 49, and the "Loren." prefix in l. 99. This form of the letter is not found in Longleat, much less the form in l. 75, where the foot is begun with a little loop to the left of the descending stroke. The Ls in the calligraphic Rawlinson MS are quite different; the two Ls on the last two, more current, pages, resemble that in "J. Lawes" in Longleat, but not those in the MS.

More important than any other Shirley document, however, is the play The Court Secret, the manuscript of which is held in the library of Worcester College, Oxford.[25] Since R. G. Howarth's work on the play, this has been regarded as a scribal manuscript, to which additions and corrections had been made in a late mixed secretary hand, which Howarth reasonably concluded was Shirley's:[26] it was from the final, secretary-hand page of this manuscript that Greg drew his facsimile, plate XCV(d). We examined the entire manuscript directly, with a full-size photograph of the Melbourne MS to hand, and in our opinion the handwriting of the secretary additions to The Court Secret is not the same as that of the Melbourne.

Most of the corrections in The Court Secret consist merely of deletions, but there are some score of secretary-hand interpolations.[27] These differ from each other to some extent partly because of their being crowded into margins and between lines. But they share a family resemblance;

some of Shirley's very characteristic letter-forms are present, such as the e noted above. The other e commonly used is a Greek e, and there is an r not dissimilar in shape to it. As has been noted, Shirley's capital P is at first glance very like that of the MS, but is usually made with a flat foot; the MS's P loops back through the descending stroke. The th form varies, but none of Shirley's resemble those of the MS. Shirley's secretary handwriting in the play is very nearly vertical, while that of the MS is much more slanted, though to some extent that is circumstantial, deriving from the cramped conditions in which Shirley was correcting The Court Secret. Instead of the double long s used in the MS, Shirley uses a long s-short s combination (of course the corrections to The Court Secret are later in date than the MS is presumed to be). In the nature of things, there are similarities between the The Court Secret hand and that of the MS. On fol. 10r of the play, the word "ruine" has a flourish above the e not unlike some of those in the MS; there are other examples. In the additions on the blank final recto (the page Greg reproduced), in the fourth line the double f resembles the MS's way of forming these letters.

The words which exist both in the secretary-hand corrections to The Court Secret and in the MS provide the best sources for comparison, and by great good fortune there happens to be a character called Alphonso in both. The name is written in the annotations in The Court Secret on fol. 17r and three times on fol. 18v; each written form is marginally different, but all are basically similar. The MS uses the name twice, and an abbreviated form of it as a speech-prefix once, all in the first six lines. The capital As of the MS are narrower in their spread than Shirley's; the p is not closed, the h not as looped, and (most obviously) the MS uses a long s where Shirley uses an italian one. Capital A crops up twice again in The Court Secret: on the blank final recto both times it has little serifs; the MS has a number of capital As, none quite like this. The word "happinesse" occurs in both texts: l. 22 of the MS, and ll. 6 and 9 of the final page of The Court Secret. The writing could scarcely be more dissimilar, with Shirley's neatly looped hs, slightly differently formed, but perfectly consistent double ps, the characteristic "double c" es, and the long s-short s combination; the MS has an unlooped h, two wild flails for the ps, one normal secretary e and one italian, and a grandly soaring double s digraph, a form of s common in the MS and nowhere to be found in The Court Secret. Theatrical words like "Enter" and "Exit" also occur: the two "Exit"s on fol. 2r are worth comparing: the t of the first, looped up to the right to form the cross-stroke, is unlike any in the MS, but that of the second is a little more like some of the MS's ts, except that Shirley makes the bar near the middle of the letter, and the MS almost at its foot.

Shapiro argues that Shirley, having been the employee of a professional scrivener, Thomas Frith, was trained to write different kinds of scripts fluently. This may very well have been the case, and it is not hard to believe that the elegant letter-forms and controlled tempo of the various examples of script that no-one disputes to be Shirley's, such as the Rawlinson and Longleat manuscripts, look like the work of a man with professional rather than merely school training. This being the case, it is not surprising to find that when Shirley is writing more casually, as in the corrections to The Court Secret, his writing remains relatively tidy and well-paced. It is a long way from such good writing to the characterful but erratic and careless script of the MS, which in our view is unlikely to be the work of a trained scrivener, even at his most insouciant.

Shapiro believes that the writing of a document intended for the scribe's eyes only will be ipso facto of a different order of neatness and legibility from any document intended for others to read. This may be true, or it may not: there are historical examples both ways, which of themselves have little bearing on this case. But there is a grave difficulty inherent in the argument, namely, that because the MS is "foul" its letter-forms will necessarily differ to a greater or lesser degree from those in the scribe's formal or public writings. If carried to a reductio ad absurdum, it would appear that Shapiro is asking us to accept the MS as Shirley's because its letter-forms are different from Shirley's. To state it thus is unfair; he, no doubt, would formulate it that the MS letter-forms are recognizable as variants of Shirley's "public" forms, the variation occasioned by the nature of the MS. We feel that in a case like this, the argument is not strong enough to carry conviction. What is needed are several letter-forms or combinations which are absolutely unique to Shirley, and which occur in exactly the same form in the MS. In our opinion, Shapiro has not been able to satisfy this stringent criterion, and consequently, in our judgement, the identity of the scribe of the MS remains open on palaeographical grounds.