Werstine on Thompson and Greg
Tom Reedy
identification of Hand D in his book, *Shakespeare's Handwriting*. In
it he spends 63 pages minutely analyzing the six generally accepted
signatures of Shakespeare and the three Hand D pages in the *More*
manuscript. I'm not going to go into the details of Thompson's
analysis, but he makes the well-known conclusion that Hand D is
Shakespeare's based on the fact that the character of the six
signatures is consistent with the writing of Hand D and that both the
signatures and Hand D share some letter formations and
characteristics.
Werstine tries to counter Thompson's effort by referencing three
reviewers:
BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE
Reviewers, including those writing in the pages of Pollard's own
journal *The Library*, were not persuaded. J.A. Herbert's review there
urged that "great caution must be used in deducing the identity of two
handwritings from the occasional occurrence of the same unusual forms
in both" (100), and Percy Simpson's Library article on "The Play of
'Sir Thomas More' and Shakespeare's Hand in it" was equally restrained
in assessing Thompson's achievement: "the utmost that it is safe to
assert is that the scene is not unworthy of Shakespeare" (93). The
antiStratfordian George Greenwood responded in TLS with a predictable
dismissal of Thompson's work ("Sir E. Maunde Thompson on
'Shakespeare's Handwriting ... ).
(127)
END BLOCK QUOTE
Except for Greenwood, who he doesn't quote, the only thing Werstine
has here are expressions of traditional scholarly caution, which
apparently is a weakness to Werstine. If the quotations used by
Werstine are the strongest statements against Thompson he can find
(and I'm sure he would use the strongest), using them to base his
statement of "Thompson's inability to prove on paleographical grounds
that the so-called 'Hand D' pages in the *More* manuscript were
written by Shakespeare" is a big stretch (128). The fact that
traditional scholars disagree is nothing new, but Werstine takes it to
mean rejection, but examples of scholarly caution are not proof that
individual arguments have been disproved.
So the caution of two other scholars is sufficient for Werstine to
discredit Thompson, but Thompson is persuasive to Werstine when he
disagrees with Pollard, in the traditional antiStratfordian pattern of
using selective evidence, as in the following:
BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE
It is a tribute to Pollard's skill in controversy that he was able to
figure Thompson's work as supported by and supporting Wilson's and his
own, especially because Thompson had already disagreed in print with
Pollard and Wilson's cherished belief that, to quote Wilson again,
"many of the good quarto and folio texts were printed direct from
Shakespeare's manuscripts." This belief was the basis for Pollard and
[J. Dover] Wilson's assumption that slips of the pen in the three
allegedly Shakespearean pages of the *More* manuscript might be used
to explain the origin of misprints in the early printings of
Shakespeare's plays, but Thompson's model of manuscript culture gave
no countenance to such a belief. As Thompson had written, "Curiosity
naturally arises (aside: this seems to be a favorite phrase of early
20th century Shakespeareans. T.R.) regarding the extent to which the
obscurities and errors in the texts of [Shakespeare's] plays that have
been transmitted to us from the earliest printed collection may be due
to misreading of his autograph MSS. Although the editors of the First
Folio of 1623 announced in their preface, with perhaps intentional
vagueness, that they had "scarce received from him a blot in his
papers," and thereby may have intended to lead their readers to
believe that they had had access to Shakespeare's originals (would
that they had!), we may be extremely doubtful whether they had a
single shred of the poet's own MSS before them. The autographs of the
plays would have ceased to have any practical value after they had
been transcribed for the acting copies, and were probably thrown
aside" (Shakespeare's England 298).
(129)
END BLOCK QUOTE
The ridiculous last sentence is exactly the type of pronouncement of
which Werstine has spent considerable time and effort in other papers
trying to disabuse the scholastic community, but here it suits his
purpose, so he lets it pass.
Instead of pointing it out, Werstine uses Thompson to accuse Pollard
of dishonesty by saying, "Thompson's position was incommensurable with
Pollard and Wilson's belief that Shakespeare's holographs had been
preserved by his acting company, which had given them to stationers to
use as copy for the early printed texts of the plays; however, in the
interest of holding up the Shakespearean side against the
anti-Stratfordians, Pollard swallowed any disagreement with Thompson"
(130).
Werstine gives a dishonest impression when discussing the
paleographical contributions of W.W. Greg. He accuses Greg of
dishonesty and implies that Pollard used his "skill in controversy"
to gloss it over, but Werstine withholds some of the relevant
information in the time-honored antiStrat tradition.
Werstine says about Greg, "Unlike the other contributors to the book,
Greg refused to commit himself to the identification of Shakespeare as
the writer of the Three Pages. In doing so, he maintained the position
that, as Wilson was later to recall, he had taken since the
publication of Thompson's 1916 book: '[A]t that date Greg was probably
one of the two or three scholars in the country competent to judge,
and he was at first inclined to reserve his verdict' ("The New Way"
74). But such was Greg's bond to Pollard that Greg did not at this
time alienate himself from his fellow contributors by expressing
disagreement" (131).
But Greg had "reserve[d] his verdict" long before the publication of
Thompson's book, a fact Werstine leaves out. In 1911 Greg had
classified the different hands in the *More* manuscript for the Malone
Society's collotype publication of the play.
In the Malone edition, Greg wrote about Hand D, "These hasty pages of
D's have individual qualities which mark them off sharply from the
rest of the play. There is wit in the humours of the crowd, there is
something like passion in More's oratory. So striking indeed are these
qualities that more than one critic has persuaded himself that the
lines in question can have come from no pen but Shakespeare's. The
possibility acquires additional interest from the fact that the
passage is undoubtedly autograph. Here possibly are three pages in the
hand that so many have desired to see. The question is one of
stylistic evidence, and each reader will have to judge for himself. I
DO NOT FEEL CALLED UPON TO PRONOUNCE [emphasis mine. TR]: but I will
say this much, that it seems to me an eminently reasonable view that
would assign this passage to the writer who, as I believe, foisted
certain of the Jack Cade scenes into the second part of *Henry VI*."
Greg wrote this in 1911, and far from obfuscating Greg's
disinclination to judge, Pollard reproduces the entire passage on page
8 of *More*!
Werstine goes on to accuse all three, Pollard, Wilson and Greg, of
dishonesty. Given what I have laid out so far, HLAS readers can judge
the truth of Werstine's statement about Pollard's "skill in
controversy," ". . . Pollard managed wonderfully to produce an
apparent consensus among the contributors to his 1923 book -- he and
Wilson kept silent about their disagreement with Thompson about the
nature of the manuscripts from which Shakespeare's plays were set, and
Thompson kept silent as well; meanwhile Greg continued to reserve his
judgment without explicitly calling attention to his doing so"
(131-32).
Greg didn't have to "explicitly call attention" to his reservation of
judgment; Pollard did it for him, a fact Werstine leaves out.