Eric Rasmussen is reluctant — really, really reluctant — to draw any big conclusions from his newly unearthed manuscript that might have been written in pen and ink by William Shakespeare.
Even so, Rasmussen believes the single handwritten page he purchased at an auction of antiquarian documents not long ago holds promise to help scholars understand some of the mysteries surrounding the life and work of one of the world’s most famous playwrights.
Rasmussen, regents teaching professor and foundation professor of English at the 鶹ӳ, is among the world’s preeminent scholars on early texts of Shakespeare’s work. He’s also a collector of Elizabethan and Jacobean documents from the decades on either side of the year 1600.
So it’s no surprise that he made a $100 bid — the only bid, it turned out — when a small handwritten page from the 16th century came up for sale at an auction house in Social Circle, Ga., that specializes in old manuscripts.
But when Rasmussen received the manuscript and began studying it carefully, he quickly identified a quirk of handwriting that scholars long have associated with Shakespeare, and only with Shakespeare. The playwright wrote with a distinctive, looping hand whenever he encountered words with a combination of the letters h and a — words such as “that,” or “shalt,” or “hang” or “Shakespeare.”
That looping “h-a,” in fact, long has been cited as one of the primary pieces of evidence supporting the belief that Shakespeare was one of several authors of a play known as “Sir Thomas More” written around 1600. Now housed at the British Museum, the manuscript of that play — the only document believed to contain Shakespeare’s handwriting outside of a few signatures on legal documents — includes numerous instances of the distinctive “h-a.”
Scholars who studied thousands of manuscripts from Shakespeare’s era haven’t found another single instance of that looping “h-a,” and one leading researcher described the chances of finding one as “astronomical.”
Rasmussen beat those odds and has published his discovery in the September issue of the leading scholarly journal, “.”
Handwritten text covers both sides of the 7-inch by 5-inch manuscript he acquired. The text itself is a portion of a previously unknown English translation of a Catholic theological text written in the 5th century by the French monk Vincent of Lerins.
Importantly, the text includes numerous instances of the distinctive looping “h-a.”
That, Rasmussen said, raises two possibilities:
The first possibility: The newly discovered manuscript is, indeed, in the handwriting of Shakespeare. That would be a spectacular find in a world that knows of only six Shakespearean signatures on legal documents along with the possibility of the three handwritten pages of “Sir Thomas More.”
But that possibility, in turn, raises a host of new questions. Why, for example, was Shakespeare copying a centuries-old text written by a Catholic monk, especially at a time when possession of Catholic texts was largely forbidden in England?
Rasmussen wonders if Shakespeare might have worked as a professional scribe early in his career. Nothing at all is known of the playwright’s life between 1585, when he was 23 years old, and his arrival on the London stage in 1592. The possibility that he was a scribe, even if the only evidence is the single small page owned by Rasmussen, would begin to fill in those blank years.
The second possibility: The manuscript actually isn’t in the handwriting of Shakespeare. The swooping “h-a” isn’t unique to Shakespeare after all.
If that’s the case, Rasmussen said, untold numbers of books, articles and dissertations that attributed parts of the play “Sir Thomas More” to Shakespeare will be undermined. The words of the play, especially its oft-quoted plea for compassion for immigrants, would remain unchanged. But they no longer would necessarily be regarded as Shakespearean.
Many readers would feel the loss.
“The world at large celebrates Shakespeare’s enduring relevance, specially exemplified by his nuanced understanding of issues of immigration and nationalism,” Rasmussen said. “We want Sir Thomas More’s timeless speech — what ‘The International Rescue Committee’ called ‘Shakespeare’s Rallying Cry for Humanity’ – to have been written by, well, Shakespeare.”
So far, other leading Shakespeare scholars around the world have reserved judgment on either of the possibilities, although they’re intrigued by Rasmussen’s findings.
In the meantime, one other big mystery remains: How did a little piece of manuscript possibly containing the handwriting of William Shakespeare end up at an auction house in Social Circle, Ga., a town of 5,000 some 45 miles east of Atlanta?
That, Rasmussen said, probably always will be unknown. He surmises that a Catholic English family seeking to protect themselves from Protestant persecution might have hidden the page and the rest of the document from which it came.
But in the end, he said, no one ever will know the 400-year travels of that little 5-by-7 sheet with its distinctive “h-a.”
Please review the September 2024 issue of “” for Rasmussen’s full scholarly article about the Shakespeare manuscript.
