escape notice. The difference between the polished short a and the slightly longer vulgar pronunciation need not have been so great as the difference between British and American words like contrary, literature. The evidence of the modern Romance languages often belies the statements of Latin grammarians and the practise of Latin poets. It is legitimate to draw conclusions as to a Vulgar Latin phenomenon from results that seem to require its existence. The University of North Carolina. RECLAIMING ONE OF SHAKSPERE'S SIGNATURES BY SAMUEL A. TANNENBAUM I That the reclamation of anything so precious as a genuine Shaksperian relic is a task not unworthy of any student's or antiquarian's labors will, considering the veneration in which the greatest of English dramatic poets is held and the scantiness of such relics known to be in existence, be generally admitted, even if only on sentimental grounds. But to scholars who devote a large part of their time and energies to the study of the great master's life and work, the reclamation of one of his signatures, especially one that was in all probability written almost a decade before the earliest of those generally known to be authentic, is a matter of considerable value from the standpoint of scholarship. A knowledge of more of Shakspere's handwriting characteristics would enable students not only to pass with greater confidence on the question of the Shaksperian authorship of documents now extant or yet to be discovered, but also to understand how some of the corrupt readings got into the early quartos and the first folio, and, consequently, to suggest suitable corrections of the text. Of these the former is unquestionably the more important. Excluding William Henry Ireland's longer and more ambitious Shakspere manuscript forgeries (deeds, letters, contracts, receipts, a confession of faith, plays, parts of plays, a catalogue of books, an autobiographic diary, etc.), and some verses concocted by John P. Collier, there are scattered throughout the world to-day a little more than one hundred books purporting to contain either Shakspere's signature or his signature and annotations in his hand, not less than seventy-five of these being unquestionably of Ireland's manufacture. The British Museum contains two manuscripts (Harl. 7368 and Sloane 1090) which have been attributed to Shakspere by some scholars. A few writers (Col. Jeaffreson, Mr. Yeatman, Miss Thumm-Kintzel) have contended that Shakspere wrote his will with his own hand. Two other legal documents, one of them now preserved at the Birthplace Museum in Stratford, have been supposed or alleged to contain one the poet's signature and the other his endorsement. One graphologist was of the opinion that Shakspere himself wrote the purchase-deed and the mortgagedeed relating to his purchase of a house near the Blackfriars theatre. Malone seems to have had some information concerning a Shakspere manuscript in France. The Earl of Northumberland owns a manuscript volume whose "index page" has been said (ThummKintzel, Mr. Wm. Thompson 1)-on grounds wholly lacking in validity to contain about a dozen of Shakspere's scribbled signatures and a line from the Rape of Lucrece in his handwriting. The Bodleian Library recently exhibited a scrap of paper, the closing lines of a letter, for which the owner claimed a Shaksperian authorship. Years ago a London jeweler exhibited a fragment which he said was the conclusion of a letter written and signed by the immortal William himself. And Madame Thumm-Kintzel, the graphologist previously referred to, was of the opinion that William Shakspere, in the capacity of secretary to Sir Francis, wrote not only Bacon's Promus of Formularies and Elegancies (about fifty small folio sheets preserved at the British Museum,— Harl. MS. 7017) but also his letter to Sir John Puckering (Harl. MS. 6997, f. 72). In the latter half of the nineteenth century there were some rumors of the existence of two letters written by Shakspere, one of them to Anne Hathaway. And only a few months ago Captain William Jaggard of Stratford-on-Avon informed me of his discovery ("on the fly-leaf of a pamphlet sermon dated 1610 by Lancelot Andrewes ") of a six-line quotation from Du Bartas's Quatrains of Pibrac in what he thinks may be Shakspere's hand and for which, he says, he has refused an offer of £20,000! 2 The above list makes no reference to the six unquestioned, i. e., generally accepted as authentic, autographs with which all Shakspere scholars and many laymen are familiar. One of these (herein referred to as "Deposition ") is the hurried and abbreviated signature on a deposition made on May 11, 1612, and now preserved in the Public Record Office, London. The second one is attached to the purchase-deed of the house in Blackfriars, is dated March 10, 1 Shakespeare's Handwriting, by William Thompson, in "The Quarterly Review," April 1925, vol. 243, pp. 209-26. 2 All these and other claimants for the distinction of a Shakespearian paternity are fully considered in my forthcoming book, Shakspere's Autographs, Genuine and Questioned. 1612-13, and is preserved in the Guildhall Library (and hence herein referred to as "Guildhall "). The third ("British Museum") occurs on an insufficiently cured strip of parchment attached to the mortgage-deed relating to the Blackfriars purchase, is dated March 11, 1612-13, and is preserved in the British Museum. The remaining three ("T1," "T2,” and “T3") occur severally on the three pages of the poet's will, dated March 25, 1616, and are preserved in Somerset House, London. These six signatures are the only extant specimens of handwriting which are known positively to have been made by the dramatist's own hand and which therefore constitute what handwriting experts call our "standard for comparison," i. e., the standard by which the genuineness of any alleged specimen of Shaksperian calligraphy must be tested and with which it must tally if it is to be accepted as authentic. These "unquestioned autographs," considerably enlarged, are reproduced in facsimiles 3 to 7 and 10 to 12. (For additional comments on them the reader is referred to my essay, Shakspere's Unquestioned Autographs and the Addition in Sir Thomas Moore,' in Studies in Philology, April 1925, pp. 157-8.) II Among the many books bearing what purports to be the signature of William Shakspere, in full or in some abbreviated form, on the title-page, fly-leaf, or somewhere within the book, there is one, a copy of the 1603 edition of John Florio's English translation of Montaigne's Essayes, which is of greater interest and value than all the others combined, inasmuch as the signature (cf. facss. Nos. 1 and 13) adorning "what was originally its first fly-leaf (but is now a lining paper of the cover)" is, in the present writer's opinion, unquestionably genuine. Of this volume's history all that is known is that it was the property of the Reverend Edward Patteson of East Sheen, Surrey, who, having been persuaded in 1836 to show the volume to Sir Frederic Madden, then Librarian of the British Museum, and "the greatest authority of his day on ancient handwriting," told Sir Frederic that it had been bequeathed him by his father, the Reverend Edward [? Edmund] Patteson of Southwick, in Staffordshire. "How or when this gentleman," says Sir Frederic,3 "first 3 Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere, and the Orthography of |