How a surprising Shakespeare discovery was found in a letter used as scrap paper

A -year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April the day after the Bard s st birthday if you happened to have candles and an extremely large cake on hand Professor Matthew Steggle Chair in Early Modern English Literature at University of Bristol presented research that finds foreseen significance in the scraps of a letter first discovered in Incredibly the letter scraps were located by accident inside a nearly -page religious tome housed in the library of the U K s Hereford Cathedral Related Articles For Black men fashion has been a tool of self-expression and a way they ve been judged How do parents handle gift-giving after a divorce Natasha Lyonne s looking for clues as Poker Face returns TV Q A Is prime-time TV show getting too violent Fun-loving Garrett enjoys creative play The letter appears to have been addressed to Good Mrs Shakspaire concerning an apprentice named John Butts or Butte and the young man s interactions with her husband As well the letter says that the Shakespaires had lived on Trinity Lane a street that still exists in the modern day in London If this in fact turns out to be true about the Shakespeares it s a biographical nugget that has never previously been known and places them living together in London during the period when he wrote Hamlet Twelfth Night and other plays The life story of William Shakespeare as it s usually stated is that he left Stratford-upon-Avon to make his name in the London theaters It s been thought that his wife Anne Hathaway stayed behind with their children separated from him for unknown lengths of time until he returned to spend the last limited years of his life in retirement Then upon his death he left her my second best bed with the furniture which scholars still puzzle over whether it s a loving gesture as it could refer to their shared marriage bed or a final snub Amazingly the correspondence wasn t saved for its historical importance it was essentially used as scrap paper as Steggle writes in The Shakspaires Of Trinity Lane A Achievable Shakespeare Life-Record The two strips of the letter were used by the binders as guards or padding to prevent the text block from chafing against the binding they were fitting to it so the binders evidently regarded these strips as waste paper The book s publisher was Shakespeare s Stratford neighbor Richard Field who was also the playwright s first printer Why wasn t the discovery by librarian F C Morgan taken more seriously at the time Steggle explains That Morgan did not do more with this discovery is understandable He had in recent days celebrated his hundredth birthday and in fact was dead by the time this note appeared in print It was a late and startling highlight in a long career spent in English history Steggle s research was done for his forthcoming book William Shakespeare and the Early Modern World and throughout his piece he is careful not to overstate the findings and suggest areas where it might be bolstered or challenged Steggle answered questions via email about the letter and his research Q How did you find the significance of this piece of letter I m writing a Shakespeare biography and ascertained the document referenced briefly in one or two places but nobody veritably seemed to know anything about it Then when I obtained photos of the two fragments I thought you could do things with this especially with modern information hardware that previous generations of scholars didn t have access to Q If true what might it mean There s this prevailing narrative that the Shakespeares marriage was very much an arms-length affair with the wife as a distant encumbrance while he lived an exciting life in the city the kind of thing you see in Shakespeare in Love This suggests an alternative scenario in which they are living together at least a bit in London with Anne involved in William s social networks and financial affairs Q Might there be other scraps to search for Yes It shows that new discoveries are still realizable in th-century manuscript material particularly in binding waste In particular as I say in the article it makes one passionately curious about other books printed like this one by Shakespeare s associate Richard Field which might still be in their original bindings Q Is there anything else about this that you d like to say Only that this is part of a number of fresh bits of work which are starting to reassess the Shakespeare womenfolk in particular the work of Katherine Scheil on other aspects of Anne Hathaway s life For a long time it was assumed that they were all illiterate yokels and maybe that s a simplification Q Could this explain why there isn t much original Shakespeare writing or paperwork Funnily enough I d argue that authentically there s quite a decent paper trail for Shakespeare by the standards of his day There are dozens of individually perhaps rather dry documents collected on the fabulous site Shakespeare Documented tax records law cases to say nothing of the numerous documents around his professional career Those are the kinds of things that survive by and large whereas more personal papers almost invariably disappear I ve spent years looking in archives for people whose lives are only known from half a dozen grubby bits of paper and William Shakespeare is genuinely quite lavishly documented in comparison to plenty of of them