SHAKESPEARE RELIC

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 93, 16 October 1943, Page 4

SHAKESPEARE RELIC

BOOK WITH SIGNATURE

The discovery of a new signature of Shakespeare was announced recently by the John Rylands Library by Dr. Joseph Quincy Adams, director of theFolger Shakespeare Memorial Library/ Washington, It is in an otherwise unimportant book bought for the Washington library at Sotheby's five years ago. The book was Lambarde's Apaxionomia of which the Folger already had a fine copy, and it was being discarded when on the inside of the front vellum cover it was noted: "Mr. Wm. . Shakespeare lived at No. 1 . Little tk Crown Street, Westminster. N:B. near M Dorset steps St. James Park." w On this apparently irrelevant entry it is remarked by Dr. Adams that "the statement that Shakespeare had once had lodgings in Westminster (where Ben Jonson is known to have resided), has not elsewhere been made." Not until the library's binder came to iron out the crumpled title-leaf was point given to the apparently insignificant reference to the poet's address, and then there was revealed the signature "Wm. Shakespertf" "which had here- . tofore been entirely. concealed in* numerous tiny wrinkles." • Dr. Dawson, the Folger's paleographer and curator of manuscripts, says: "It is difficult to see how this signature could be the work of a forger in any period. No one jotting down Shakespeare's name on the title-page at a date before 1800 could by accident have made it resemble so closely the dramatist's signature, nor could another 'William Shakespeare' have done A so. Finally, no notice of the presence ■ of the signature, which, before the ■ book was damaged by water and its^ title-leaf crumpled, must have been ] considerably clearer, has ever been re- * corded—a fact ( that argues strongly J the 'United States J Archives submitted the writing to exhausitve tests, including detailed comparison with the six known signatures of the poet, and decided that it is genuine, and so Dr. Adams concludes with this comment: "It would be a pleasant but, I fear, an unlikely guess^ that the author, Lambarde, presented^" the volume to Shakespeare with the | injunction-to. keep it since the edition I was exhausted and not 'like to be renew'd'—a prediction that proved to be true. Shakespeare is thought to have been familiar with Lambarde's 'Eirenarcha,' and Queen Elizabeth is known to have conversed with Lambarde ,on one occasion about the dramatist's 'Richard IF and its formance in connection with the Essex* rebellion. That the two,men of letters in the small world of literary London knew each other is hardly to be doubted, and that Shakespeare was interested, as was Ben Jonson, in AngloSaxon seems highly likely. We must be content, however, with the likelihood that here at last we have a volume that was once actually in the, possessoin of the poet."