The Review of English Studies/Volume 1/The Revels Books: The Writer of the "Malone Scrap"

THE REVELS BOOKS: THE WRITER OF THE “MALONE SCRAP”

By D. T. B. Wood

The genuineness of the suspected Revels Books was supposed by many to have been settled on internal evidence by Mr. Ernest Law’s pamphlet Some Supposed Shakespeare Forgeries in 1911. The controversy was recently revived by the indefatigable protagonist of the doubters, Mrs. Stopes, opposed by Mr. W. J. Lawrence. The most detailed and balanced account of the whole matter may perhaps be found in Dr. E. K. Chambers’ Elizabethan Stage. He is careful to point out the importance of the Scrap.

I must apologise for intruding in the field of Shakespearian scholarship with so little equipment. I do not propose to follow Mr. Ernest Law or Mrs. Stopes through the labyrinth of dramatic representations. The clue I hope to provide may make it unnecessary.

Some months ago I was shown the Books for the first time by two partisans of opposite factions. One in one ear and one in the other told the whole tale. I was drawn irresistibly to a fresh examination for myself. I found no detailed description of the outward and visible points of the documents, and proceeded to make one.

The papers were of the period, and the water-marks easily identified. The paper in each gathering was the same throughout, and the make-up of the packets precluded forgery except on a page originally left blank. I was left, however, with a vague impression against their genuineness on the ground of discrepancies in the forms of letters, on peculiarities in the arrangement of the matter, and the general “woolly” appearance of the 1604–5 play-list.

I saw that the matter was pivoted on the identification of the writer of the Malone Scrap. I tried Malone, the younger James Boswell, and others whom I thought likely, but by some freak of fortune omitted the name of the undoubted writer.

I

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The Malone Scrap.
Bodleian Library.
Malone MS. 29, f. 69^v.

Assuming for the moment forgery, the likeliest criminal seemed to be Payne Collier. He made in his Defence in 1860 continual appeals to the fact that Malone had seen and copied entries said to have been forged. One of these copies—the list of players (including Shakespeare) at Dulwich—was said by him to be in a printed book (Malone’s Inquiry), then in the hands of Payne Collier and now in the British Museum. It was not in Malone’s hand.

At the same time, in a critique by Payne Collier on Thomas Churchyard, annotated and corrected by himself, I found a sonnet on Sydney, which he said was inserted on a blank leaf in Thomas Churchyard’s A true Diurnal Historicall. … The curious thing was that the alterations in the sonnet were little less than a complete re-writing, impossible to any one but the author.

Were these two insertions “plants”?

Was the Malone Scrap another “plant”?

I examined Sir Frederick Madden’s correspondence at the British Museum, which contains a number of letters of Payne Collier in a hand not very dissimilar to that of the Malone Scrap. I was confronted almost immediately in 1839 by paper similar to that of the Scrap. The Malone MS. 29 in which it was found came to the Bodleian in 1838. I was courteously permitted to look at the Bodleian registers, and found that Payne Collier was there in 1842, the year in which Cunningham published the Revels Books. The prop seemed a little weakened. It was necessary to destroy or to strengthen it. Hence my letter to the Times on July 2, 1924. I hoped controversy would settle the matter. It has; but not as I imagined. I continued my investigations, expecting, I will own, to pin another forgery upon Payne Collier.

I had by this time all the nuances of the hand of the Malone Scrap at my fingers’ ends. I was looking at the letters of Sir William Musgrave, of the Audit Office, to which the Books belonged, when my attention was drawn to the marked similarity of two characteristics, the small n’s (n.) with a straight tail and the small d’s () curved with a curl at the top (see facsimiles). Was this the hand? A close comparison of every letter with the hand in that immense accumulation made by Musgrave, the Musgrave Obituary, showed a fairly good agreement. Letters which differed at first sight were found to be written both ways; and two or three other marked characteristics appeared in both hands—the way in which the writer draws up final a, e and r. I was finally convinced by finding the rather curious V which occurs twice in Venice in the Scrap. The unbeliever suddenly became a convert, and began to orient himself to the points of the new situation. The difficulty of the paper solved itself when the identical water-mark appeared on paper adjacent to one of Musgrave’s letters. The accompanying facsimiles show the general appearance of the two hands to be similar, and any one who makes a more critical examination will probably have little doubt that the hands are the same. It is hardly necessary for me to emphasise particular points, for practically every letter found in the Scrap can be paralleled in the facsimiles ii and iii, here given of Musgrave’s writing: but special attention may be drawn to B, E, G, H, K, L, Q, and to the frequent use of dashes in place of stops.

The position, therefore, now is that Malone received the Scrap from Sir William Musgrave (who died in 1800) somewhere about the year 1791, when Malone inspected the records of the Master of the Revels. It remains for myself or another to unearth a letter of Malone or Musgrave alluding to the matter.

How the identification of Musgrave as the writer of the Scrap affects the question of the genuineness of the Revels Books I should like to be allowed to discuss later. It may be pointed out that Halliwell Phillipps, who first brought the Scrap to notice, still regarded the Revels Books as forged.