Michael Witmore and Heather Wolfe, Folger Shakespeare Library
April 21, 2014
Shakespeare’s birthday week begins with a bang: two New York booksellers, George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, announced that they have found Shakespeare’s dictionary. In their new book, Shakespeare’s Beehive, Koppelman and Wechsler present their reasons for believing that William Shakespeare is the annotator of their copy of John Baret’s Alvearie, a 1580 dictionary that scholars have linked to Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Because Koppelman and Wechsler are claiming to have discovered something new about Shakespeare, their ideas will receive significant attention in the popular press. Adam Gopnik’s recent story in the New Yorker, “The Poet’s Hand,” provides eloquent testimony to the ongoing interest in discoveries about Shakespeare, an interest that led our founders, Henry and Emily Folger, to establish the Folger Shakespeare Library here in Washington.
Even the most skeptical scholar would be thrilled to find a new piece of documentary evidence about William Shakespeare. Scholars, however, will only support the identification of Shakespeare as annotator if they feel it would be unreasonable to doubt that identification. This is a fairly high evidentiary standard, since it requires one to treat skeptically the idea that this handwriting is Shakespeare’s and to seek out counterexamples that might prove it false.
As the library of record for Shakespeare and the leading documentary source for his works, the Folger will be one of the places where Koppelman and Wechsler’s claims are evaluated by scholars. Those unfamiliar with early modern books and manuscripts will be curious about the techniques that scholars at the Folger and elsewhere hope to use to explore the identity of the Alvearie annotator. […continued]
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