Nearly a year ago the De Vere Society Newsletter published several brief first impressions of the content of the Audley End Annotations, following my April 2022 discussion of the handwriting question for the Shakespeare Authorship Trust.

The Authorship Trust lecture made no attempt to identify the annotator, but instead presented reasons why no credible handwriting expert could support the hypothesis of John Casson, William Rubinstein, and Ken Feinstein, that the annotations were in Neville’s hand.

A second Audley End visit in June 2023, with my wife Shelly Maycock, through the support of the de Vere Society and with the generous assistance of Dorna Bewley, gave us a second opportunity to record critical evidence and become better acquainted with the relevant fact patterns of the Audley End Annotations.

We found three distinctive annotators, the one in question, known as the Audley End Unknown, and two others, evidently being Sir Henry Neville and Sir Henry Savile. Of these annotators, the Audley End Unknown and Savile annotated by far the most, sometimes in the same books and sometimes in different books. The Neville hand was only found in one book, a copy of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

Of the six books containing the Audley End Unknown Hand, by far the most consequential, is the 1551 copy of Cassius Dio’s History of Rome, which is bound up with the 1548 first edition of Appian’s history of Rome. It is for this reason that Casson and Rubinstein confusedly refer to the “Dionysius section of Appian,” which is not a thing. The mistake is understandable, though, on account of the Cassius Dio volume being bound up with the Appian in a single book with a 19th century label that only references the Appian (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Binding of single volume containing Roman histories by both Appian and Cassius Dio.

It is, it transpires, not in the Appian section of this book, but in the Cassius Dio section, that the Audley End Annotator has left such a remarkable record of annotations corresponding to the characters and dramatic action of both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.

After a few months more toil an an analysis of the handwriting, first presented at the recent SOF Conference in New Orleans, has been accepted to the Journal of Forensic Document Examination, an international forensics journal, under the the deliberately technical and objective title: “The Audley End Annotations: Applying Huber and Headrick’s Elements of Handwriting Discrimination To a 16th Century Unknown Document.” Huber and Headrick’s Handwriting Identification: Facts and Fundamentals (CRC Press, 1999) is a classic textbook in the field of Forensic Document Analysis.

The 20,000 word report applies the forensic handwriting methodologies used by board certified forensic document experts who testify in court, to demonstrate two interrelated conclusions:

  1. The annotations are definitely not in the handwriting of Sir Henry Neville, as claimed by Casson and Rubinstein in their 2016 Sir Henry Neville: The Evidence and by Ken Feinstein in his blog.
  2. A substantial preponderance of evidence, reproduced in the article, supports the conclusion that the annotations are by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. While the article focuses, as appropriate to the publication, on the forensic dimension of the handwriting, it also summarizes the reasons why de Vere is a likely annotator of the volumes based on historical and biographical circumstance.

It will, of course, be interesting to see how Shakespeare Inc. responds to this new evidence as it is brought forward to a larger public view in coming months. Meanwhile, for those a little Latin, the two featured images should give a foreshadowing.

These and any other images from the images from the Audley End Archives are reproduced courtesy the generosity of the Trustees of Audley End.