While I do generally like the new livejournal comment tracking system, I must remember that now I’ve turned off the old system, I no longer get automoatic notification of replies to my comments on other people’s journals, or of comments to my posts in places other than
A couple of belated replies going out now (to
Ad 5: Hand D:
Based on your statement that Sir Edward Thompson’s attempt to identify Hand D as Shakespeare’s “has little credibility”, I must assume you didn’t look very closely into his essay. It has less than little credibility: it is an outright farce. Thompson identifies but one single letter “a” as Shakespeare’s (which was severely refuted by Samuel A. Tannenbaum, an orthodox scholar) and thereupon concludes that the other letters are also likely to look like Shakespeare’s. So out of 26 letters he has found one (contested) letter. And his study is still the basis of the attribution of Hand D to Shakespeare (not all orthodox scholars agree). The first, to my knowledge, to suggest in 1871 that Hand D might be Shakespeare’s was Richard Simpson. Until about 1911 none of the leading scholars thought the suggestion worth considering. Until the Baconians started questioning Shakespeare’s penmanship.
Ad 8:
The idea of Burghley meddling with Meres’s manuscript is not a sound one. The main “bosses” of the Stationers’ Company were the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. I’m having some doubts as to whether the “Comparative Discourse” is actually Meres’s and not Nicholas Ling’s or Cuthbert Burby’s (because of the jingling gossip in the last paragraphs and a few other curiosities). But please note that Meres’s Palladis Tamia was a commonplace book, the second of a series of three. A commonplace book is a book that gathers quotes from other books, a collection of citations. This principle was continued into the “Comparative Discourse”. Most of what was said there had already been said before elsewhere (Puttenham, Roger Ascham, William Webbe, et al.). Meres’s borrowings are often verbatim.
Moreover, it is utterly unlikely Burghley would have intervened. Meres probably started his translation of citations after the completion of his translation of Luis de Granada’s A Sinner’s Guide, which was c. May 1598. Palladis Tamia was entered in the SR in September 1598, Meres wrote his dedication in October 1598. Burghley dies early in August 1598 and was already in very bad health months before. The hypothesis he would have intervened for what to him must have been a trifle, especially in the condition he was, is outlandish.
Ignoto