Shakespeare Might Have Written Additional Passage to Spanish Tragedy

choi

Jennifer Schuessler, Much Ado About Who: Is It Really Shakespeare?   Further proof of Shakespeare’s hand in ‘The Spanish Tragedy.’ New York Times, Aug 13, 2013 (front page).
www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/arts/ ... panish-tragedy.html
(a professor at the University of Texas,“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. ‘What we’ve got here isn’t bad writing, but bad handwriting,’ Mr Bruster said in a telephone interview")

Note:
(a) "For nearly two centuries, scholars have debated whether some 325 lines in the 1602 quarto edition of Thomas Kyd’s play ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ were, in fact, written by Shakespeare."
(i)
(A) book size
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_size
(folio> quarto> octavo; quarto: 9 1/2" (242mm) x 12" (305mm))
(B) quarto
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarto

Still do not understand “quarto” after reading this Wiki page? See the next two.
(C) Florence O Bean, Bookbinding for Beginners. School Arts Publishing Co, 1914
www.aboutbookbinding.com/binding/Binding-Book.html

showed ONE side of the full 'blanksheets.’
(D) For a left-to-right writing system (such as English), the page order and orientation of quarto for BOTH sides of ‘blanksheet” can be seen in
http://www.aboutbookbinding.com/Amateur/Folding-Paper-2.html

These (page order and orientation) will be different for a right-to-left writing system (eg Arabic and traditional Chinese).
(ii)
(A) Thomas Kyd
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kyd
(1558-1594; Although well known in his own time, Kyd fell into obscurity until 1773 when Thomas Hawkins (an early editor of The Spanish Tragedy) discovered that Kyd was named as its author by Thomas Heywood in his Apologie for Actors (1612))
(B) The Spanish Tragedy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Tragedy
(established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy; section 9 The 1602 additions)

(b) Brian Vickers (literary scholar)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Vickers_(literary_scholar)

(c) “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.”
(i) Shakespeare Apocrypha
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Apocrypha
(section 7.4 A Funeral Elegy: the true author was probably John Ford)
(ii) John Ford
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ford_(dramatist)
(1586–c 1639)

(d)
(i) Arden Shakespeare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arden_Shakespeare
(Arden was the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother, Mary, however the primary reference of the enterprise's title is named after the Forest of Arden, in which Shakespeare's As You Like It is set)
(ii) Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the complete Shakespeare

Royal Shakespeare Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Shakespeare_Company
(based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England; The RSC’s history began with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which was the brainchild of a local brewer, Charles Edward Flower [who donated land and in 1875 solicited donations. Memorial Theatre opened in 1879 but burned down in 1926])

(e) "Shakespeare’s contributions to 'Edward III'"
(i) Edward III (play)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_(play)
(ii) Edward III of England
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_of_England
(1312-1377; reign 1327-1377; battled with Scots; he declared himself rightful heir to the French throne in 1337, starting what would become known as the Hundred Years' War [1337-1453])

is a Plantagenet king [House of Plantagenet: 1126-1485].

(f) "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.) * * * In his paper, Mr Bruster identifies 24 broad spelling patterns * * * that occur both in the Additional Passages, for which no known manuscript survives, and the Shakespeare handwriting sample in the British Library."
(i) Sir Thomas More (play)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_More_(play)
(section 1 The Manuscript: "Hand D: a three-page scene;" section 3 Evidence for Shakespeare's contribution)
(A) Thomas More
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More
http://shakespeareauthorship.com/survival.html
(1478-1535; wrote Utopia, published in 1516; beheaded by Henry VIII)
(B) Doug Stewart, To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare; While skeptics continue to question the authorship of his plays, a new exhibition raises doubts about the authenticity of his portraits. Smithsonian Magazine, September 2006
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/shakespeare.html
("The greatest manhunt in literary history [for Shakespeare's handwriting] has turned up no manuscripts, no letters, no diaries. The only definitive examples of Shakespeare's handwriting are six signatures, all on legal documents. Of course, few letters or diaries of commoners from that time have survived") (internal quotation mark omitted)

There is no need to read the rest of this Smithsonian article.

(ii) Gertrude (given name)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_(given_name)
(is derived from Germanic roots [ger and þruþ, respectively] that meant "spear" and "strength" [together translated as either "spear of strenth" or "strong spear']; "Trudi", originally a diminutive of "Gertrude", has developed into a name in its own right)