Penmanship is not the same as authorship. As I mentioned in an earlier lecture, not every hand in Sir Thomas Moore was an author's hand. Scholars agree that Hand C was a copyist, a scribe whose additions were not his own invention. If you've already decided that hand D is Shakspere and that Shakspere is Shakespeare, then it follows that Hand D is an author, not a scribe. But if we look at the evidence of the manuscript itself, immediately we find a problem. And it's as simple as this: Hand C, a copyist, corrected hand D. Think about that for a moment. If the manuscript was revised in 1593-4 when Shakespeare was a junior author, it would still be somewhat peculiar. But many scholars now argue that these additional pages were written 10 years after that, which would mean that if Hand D is Shakespeare, Hand C, a scribe, was correcting the author of Hamlet, King Lear and Othello. Would Shakespeare, at the height of his powers, really write a passage that is such nonsense (and as written it really is nonsense) that a scribe, apparently despairing of making any sense of it, crosses through three lines and replaces them with, "Tell me about this"? There is another explanation advanced by orthodox Scholars who are not persuaded that Hand D is Shakespeare. This explanation begins by noting the strong similarity between Hand D and Hand C. Before W W Greg's 1911 edition of the book of Thomas More, these were not recognized as two distinct hands but as the writing of the same person on two different occasions. In 1911, Greg distinguished these hands as two different individuals on the basis of, quote, "a slight difference in the tendency to form a single letter one way rather than another", something which might just as easily be accounted for by the same person's handwriting having altered after a space of time. Then in 1923, the campaign to make Hand D Shakespeare was launched and the separation between C and D grew exponentially. There are number of scholars who think this distinction, never the subject of a serious study, should be reappraised. One might object that a playwright wouldn't need to correct themselves; they would understand what they had written and not therefore make the correction that C does of D. But C is not a playwright, he is, as you will remember, a scribe. Hand's C correction of Hand D makes sense as that person's correction of lines he had copied incorrectly in the first place. The lines that have been corrected shows signs of 'eye-skip', an indication of a text that has been copied, not composed. Eye-skip occurs when a passage contains the same word in more than one place and the copyist, switching between texts, lands on a later instance of the word, skipping what occurs in between. Eye-skip is what has made these lines of the hand D text into nonsense which he later (as 'Hand C'), with no original for reference, cannot understand and must simply strike out. The very presence of an eye-skip error in the Hand D text suggests that this is a scribe, not an author in the act of composing. Hand D, just like Hand C, uses phonetic spellings, indicating that the text has been expanded from some kind of shorthand. Before 1911, it was taken for granted that these two hands were from the same person at different times. But as the belief in Hand D being Shakespeare grew in the scholarly community, Hand C and Hand D began to be seen very differently. Beliefs have the effect of altering the way we see things. And though these two hands are almost in every respect the same, the difference between Hand C and Hand D began to be perceived as the difference between a scribe and a genius. There is no evidence that Hand D is composing what he is writing, though many scholars have claimed they see signs of exactly that. But before Hand D became Shakespeare, the editor of the most scrupulously scholarly edition of the play, W W Greg, wrote of Hand D that, "The writer has no respect for, perhaps no knowledge of, the play on which he is working. His characters are unrecognizable. He is indifferent to the personae. He writes 'other' and leaves it to C to assign the speech to whom he pleases." E Maunde Thompson echoed Greg's sentiments in a paragraph that begins, "It is obvious that the writer, Hand D, is a careless contributor." If Hand D is a copyist, this makes complete sense. It also makes sense if he and Hand C are the same person. But does it make sense if Hand D is Shakespeare? Is it conceivable that Shakespeare's characters would be unrecognizable or that he would be indifferent to the personae of a play he is writing? Of course, if you could allow room for the authorship question, Hand D and C could be Shakspere without being Shakespeare. The paleographic and spelling arguments do not of themselves exclude the idea that Shakspere in his capacity as a broker copied out someone else's play. And as for parallelisms, even if we could prove that the additions to Sir Thomas More were written by the same person who wrote Coriolanus, we could not prove that they were composed by the person adding them to Sir Thomas More's manuscript. In summary, all three legs of the Hand D As Shakespeare stool are wobbly and easily broken. The linkage of Shakspere to Hand D through handwriting depends on breaking paleographic rules on both dating and sample size, ignores that signatures and manuscripts are very different kinds of writing, focuses on shared features rather than disparities, ignores levels of incidence which are out by a factor of ten, and neglects to mention that three out of the four shared features only occur in one of the six signatures. The linkage of Hand D to three Shakespeare plays through spelling ignores an alternative explanation that he is a theater company scribe, which is suggested by the fact that his spellings are phonetic. It ignores the fact that Hand D's substantial list of unique spellings argues against Hand D being a well-read author used to seeing the more standardized spellings used in books. The linkage of Hand D to Shakespeare through parallelisms with three Shakespeare plays adopts a method that is not usually admitted as a valid method of establishing attribution and cannot accommodate the fact that some of the parallels are to scenes now being attributed to Christopher Marlowe. All three strands of the Hand D argument ignore good evidence that Hand D is a scribe - indifference to characterization and speech attribution, showing evidence of eye-skip, and the phonetic spellings that arise from expanding shorthand - and that he is, in fact, an earlier incarnation of the established scribe Hand C, as suggested by that hand's brutal correction of a nonsense passage he produced. The handwriting, after all, is different by one small feature of the kind that might easily change with time. So, why do you think that so important an institution as the British Library would represent Hand D in Sir Thomas More as a sample of Shakespeare's handwriting?
