New Shakespeare Lines Discovered?

But now, a professor at the University of Texas says he has found something closer to definitive proof using a more old-fashioned method: analyzing Shakespeare’s messy handwriting.

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

In a terse four-page paper, to be published in the September issue of the journal Notes and Queries, Douglas Bruster argues that various idiosyncratic features of the Additional Passages — including some awkward lines that have struck some doubters as distinctly sub-Shakespearean — may be explained as print shop misreadings of Shakespeare’s penmanship.

Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor.

Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor.

In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author.

In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author.

This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick.

This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick.

Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. Bate are including “The Spanish Tragedy” in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new edition of Shakespeare’s collaboratively authored plays, to be published in November.

If embraced by the broader world of Shakespeareans, the Additional Passages would become the first largely undisputed new addition to the canon since Shakespeare’s contributions to “Edward III” — another play that some have attributed to Kyd — began appearing in scholarly editions in the mid-1990s.

Three years ago, some scholars were skeptical when the Arden Shakespeare published “Double Falsehood,” an 18th-century play whose connection with a lost Shakespeare drama had long been debated, in its prestigious series.

Tiffany Stern, a professor of early modern drama at Oxford University and an advisory editor for the Arden Shakespeare, praised the empirical rigor of Mr. Bruster’s paper, but said that some new attributions were driven less by solid evidence than by publishers’ desire to offer “more Shakespeare” than their rivals.

Tiffany Stern, a professor of early modern drama at Oxford University and an advisory editor for the Arden Shakespeare, praised the empirical rigor of Mr. Bruster’s paper, but said that some new attributions were driven less by solid evidence than by publishers’ desire to offer “more Shakespeare” than their rivals.

“The arguments for ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ are better than for most” putative Shakespeare collaborations, Ms. Stern said.

Elizabethan theater was intensely collaborative, with playwrights often punching up old plays or working with other dramatists to cobble together new ones, in the manner of Hollywood script doctors.

The idea that Shakespeare may have written the Additional Passages — which include a “Hamlet”-like scene of a grief-maddened father discoursing on the death of his son — was first broached in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The idea that Shakespeare may have written the Additional Passages — which include a “Hamlet”-like scene of a grief-maddened father discoursing on the death of his son — was first broached in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

But that claim remained a distinctly minority position well into the 20th century, even as scholars began using sophisticated computer software to detect subtle linguistic patterns that seemed to link the passages to Shakespeare’s other work.

Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.

Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.

Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.

Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism.

Scholars have long cited the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s handwriting — surviving mainly in three densely scribbled pages held in the British Library that are widely attributed to Shakespeare — to understand oddities in the earliest printed versions of his plays.

(In the 1604 quarto version of “Hamlet,” for example, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is called “Gertrad” — probably a reflection, Mr. Rasmussen said, of Shakespeare’s tendency to close up his u’s and drop his final e’s.)

He also cites nine textual “corruptions” (like “creuie” instead of “creuic,” modernized as “crevice”) that he believes can be explained as misreadings of Shakespeare’s handwriting.

During a moving speech, the grieving father, Hieronimo, meditates on the nature of a father’s love for his son.

The 1602 quarto renders it: “What is there yet in a sonne?

But that baffling “I, or yet,” Mr. Bruster argues, is likely a misreading of “Ier” — an abbreviation indicating the line is spoken by Hieronimo, a name that in Shakespeare’s time was sometimes rendered as Ieronimo.

Finding some of Shakespeare’s lines embedded in another writer’s plays may not carry the frisson of announcing the discovery of a previously unknown poem entirely by Shakespeare.

But Mr. Bruster’s paper reflects current scholarly interest in Shakespeare as a playwright who frequently collaborated with others — including, Mr. Vickers has controversially argued, on plays we think of as coming solely from his own pen.