Just a begging letter, or is it in the Bard’s hand?

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 15

Just a begging letter, or is it in the Bard’s hand?

By

ELIZABETH GRICE

“Sunday Times”

A scholar and cryptographer, Eric Sams, believes he has stumbled on a letter written by William Shakespeare, acting at the age of 28 as humble secretary to the Earl of Southampton, which has been. lying unrecognised in the .British Library for 174 years. If‘he is right, it will be a big 'victory for the “Southamptonites” — the literary faction that identifies the earl as "Mr W. H.” mysterious “Friend” and dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The identity of the Friend has vexed scholars for centuries. It would also transform a fairly inconsequential late sixteenth' century business letter into a priceless national treasure. “It would be the most exciting thing imaginable,” Sams says. “1 firmly believe the odds are in favour. I am not a paleographer, (expert in old handwriting). I am just saying to the experts. ‘Over to vou.’“ The letter is dated June 26, 1592, and signed “H. Southampton” in a strong italic hand. The body of the letter is in a smaller, native English hand, of a formal secretarial style but with certain tell-tale personal flourishes. In generaLcharacter and in detail, Sams found it startlingly like the only examples of handwriting accepted as Shakespeare’s: 147 lines of a play called Sir Thomas More, and six signatures. ‘ The prospect of adding one sheet to the pathetic sum total of Shakespeare's surviving handwriting will .start an academic controversy at

least as fierce as a similar one in the 1920 s which locked paleographers in restrained combat for years. , The document, a poljte begging letter, is addressed to Myhill Hickes, an architect and secretary to Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer. Southampton, then only 18, was still Burghley’s ward and wrote asking Hickes to lean on Burghley, for money to repair “my Manor house at Beaulye,” which was “lyke to fall in greate decaye and daunger to be lost throughe wante of meanes . . Sams does not think the letter was actually dictated to Shakespeare, but that Shakespeare made the fair copy. “My’ impression is of a rough hand with lace at the wrist.” He bases his theory on minute scrutiny of every dot, dash, and curlicue. Sams points out more than 50 separate and definable Shakespearian particulars — 20 of them quite uncommon and a dozen which have been identified by experts as specifically Shakespearian. Circumstantial evidence also appears to be strongly on his side. It is generally believed that Southampton's household in The Strand in about 1592 included Shakespeare. Moreover, in June of that year, theatres were closed because of civil unrest and the Plague, so a struggling playwright (still with only one play to his name) would be glad of casual To his delight, Sams has discovered what he sees as significant verbal echoes: two of the sonnets (dated variously at 1592 or 1596), echo the letter’s reference to a decaying mansion. They are Sonnets 10 and 13. By training, Sams is a code-breaker and a master of shorthand systems. During the war he worked in the Intelligence Corps, breaking ciphers.. He knows Samuel Pepys’s shorthand back to front. He is also a distinguished musicologist. When he retired early from the civil service because of ill health, music and musical

cryptology became a fulltime pursuit. Sams claims that it is his old civil servant’s discipline — ‘’call for the previous papers” — which led him to the Shakespeare-Southamp-. ton letter in the first place. On February 23, he was pursuing a personal theory about the sonnets in the British Library, and decided to "call for the papers” -- folio 180, volume 71 of the Lansdowne manuscripts. These are a collection of 1245 volumes of manuscripts, covering the Burghley papers, sold to the library in 1807 by the Marquis of Lansdowne. Sams explains: “I took with me a book on Shakespeare's handwriting. It was open at the facsimile from Sir Thomas More. I was struck by the similarity of the hands. It wasn't exactly a blinding flash — I’ve learnt not to trust those — but it was exciting. Then I checked through the rest of the Lansdowne manuscripts from 1580 to 1600. about 1500 hands in all, and I found no English copybook hand to match it.” « First of all,, it was the dramatic descenders, the

long down-ward strokes on the letters s, f and p, which attracted Sams’s attention in both documents. But his .strongest clue was Shakespeare’s habit of beginning the decorative upstrokes of the letters i, m, n. v;- and w with downstrokes. This habit leaves hooks, loops, needleeye effects or just a thicken l ing. One of Shakespeare’s signatures has just such a nee-dle-eye on the W of William. It is a formation so far found only in Shakespeare’s hand. Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, one of only two Shakespearians who has published an analysis of Shakespeare’s handwriting, wrote in 1916: “We should certainly be prepared to find such introductory upstrokes in any manuscript emanating from Shakespeare's hand.” Sams says another shared symbol of the documents is the long Italian s, said to be a personal peculiarity of Shakespeare. In the Southampton letter it occurs at the end of the second line in the word ‘‘parcells.” He is also impressed by the curly flourishes after a. final e and s, ending in a dot. "The two hands share exactly the

same alphabet,” Sams sums up, “with each letter exhibiting the same variants.” Peter Croft, librarian at King’s College. Cambridge, and a distinguished authority on autographs, said last week: “I’d love to think he was on to something. I bounced up to London when I heard about it. But I have considered the letter very seriously and I do not think it is by Shakespeare. “The resemblances are stereo-types. They show that Shakespeare and the scribe of the letter had both learned to write according to the same basic model. The resemblances are of a generic type. What matters is the differences.” Croft was nevertheless impressed by the needle-eye upstrokes. The Sams thesis is going to the Elizabethan scholar Dr A. L. Rowse, and to expert paleographers. Rowse said that he could not pronounce without seeing a photocopy of the letter. Sams is ready for his adversaries. “I welcome independent investigation and comment. The question has, after all, enormous interest and significance. Why should it not bt .aired and discussed?”