Script Post-Post Script

My thanks to Rick Allen for a link to the arguments the Stratford-Shaksper industry has used to assert that the "Hand D" section of Thomas More is in the handwriting of Wm. Shaksper(e) of Stratford, thus giving him what he, otherwise, entirely lacks, any evidence of literary activity.

The arguments they use have to be radically limited in number, since their comparison sample, assumed to be the actual hand of the businessman of Stratford are his six signatures as reproduced in an earlier post below.  Even more radically restricted in that, they are based in the comparison of things such as a single letter "a" in ONE of the signatures with "a" as written by "Hand D".  Also there is the matter of an initial upstroke on the capital "W" as found on some, not all of the signatures with lower-case "w" as written by "hand D".   Though, as with so much of the "evidence" depended on by the Stratford industry that is supposed to be an unreliable and, therefore, not allowed practice in the rules of handwriting analysis - at least that's what I've been able to find out.

This paper asserting that "Hand D" is more massively evidenced as being in the hand of the sometimes courtier, diplomat and brother in law of Francis Bacon Henry Neville entirely knocks the assertions of the Stratfordians down for the count and more.

Presenting numerous examples of letter forms, words, etc. closer in time to the date of the "Hand D" document than the Shaksper signatures, using  letters and other documents known to be in the hand of Henry Neville the case that it is actually his handwriting is many magnitudes of more strength than the one that is being peddled on public radio and elsewhere this past week.

Based on this paper and its numerous photographic examples, as well as other evidence it presents,  I have no hesitation to say that the assertions being trotted out by the Stratford-Shakespeare industry about the Thomas More manuscript are an open fraud.  

I don't think I'd go so far as to say that the paper makes an air-tight case that Henry Neville wrote the plays and poems in contention or even that section of Thomas More (it does make a good case that it is by whoever did write the other works and, in fact, more of the play than appears in "Hand D") but it's a better argument, made on fact and not out of conjecture and spinning charming fictitious tales, than the Stratford industry is based in .