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“Had He a Hand to Write This?”: Missing “Secretary” Hands
W. Ron Hess, Alan R. Tarica
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.10.008
When Elizabethan’s were trained to read and write, the handwriting they first learned was “Secretary” (or “Secretarial”) hand, reflecting the style used by monks and scribes well back into the Middle Ages. Only in the mid-1500s did an alternative hand called “Italic” (or “Italianate”) slowly begin to be adopted as a second hand, reflecting handwriting used on the continent, and Italic was rarer than Secretary until well after 1600. Today, extant Elizabethan handwriting samples normally show each person used both hand styles, and where only one hand is extant for a given person, it is usually a Secretary hand. Thus, it’s a surprise that two noblemen, the great William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and his son-in-law Edward DeVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, are each assumed to have only Italic hand samples among their voluminous collections of handwriting. Did they not learn and never use Secretary hands, or is it that any Secretary hands in their documents are simply presumed to be written by clerks? This article begins with questioning whether the two men really were limited to Italic hands, finds a few plausible Secretary hand samples for one of them (possibly for both), reconstructs a hypothetical Italic alphabet for him, and nominates many candidate manuscripts (MSS, singular MS) for having been written or contributed to by him, some of which may be relevant to Shakespeare studies. Other subjects touched on are calligraphy, a clerk (or amanuensis), and griffe de notaire (literally a “notary’s scratch”, or identifying scribble).
Elizabethan handwriting-calligraphy; William Cecil, Lord Burghley; Edward DeVere, 17th Earl of Oxford; Shakespeare; calligraphy; clerk-scribe-amanuensis; griffe de notaire
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Tarica. A. “Did Shakespeare read from the 17th Oxford’s Personal Library?,” Pt. 1 Sh. Oxford Soc. Newsl, 42:2, Sum 2006, 1+; Pt. 2 42:3, Fall, 25-28. Also see review “Annotated Chronicle?,” Shakespeare Matters 6:2, 6 &32 and “Letter to Editor” SOS Newsl, Sum 2007, 43:2.
“The Spear-shaker and the Dragon: Oxford, Beowulf, and Hamlet,” DeVere Soc. News., Sum 2008; [see Andrew Hannas as “Ignoto” on this topic in Sh. Oxford Soc. Newsl. Spr 1990, 26:2, 3-6, which Hess neither read until after his 2008 article, nor knew was by Hannas until after his death].
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/arts/further-proof-of-shakespeares-hand-in-the-spanish-tragedy.html?_r=0 (Cites claims made by Dr. Douglas Bruster)
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