Aug. 13, 2013 
 
 AUSTIN, Texas — For centuries, scholars have been searching for answers to a literary mystery: Who wrote the five additional passages in Thomas Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy”? 
 
 Mounting arguments point to William Shakespeare, but English professor Douglas Bruster has recently found evidence confirming that the 325 additional lines are indeed the work of the Bard. 
 
 According to Bruster’s textual analysis, published in the July online issue of Notes and Queries, the proof lies in Shakespeare’s trademark misspellings and the bad handwriting behind them. 
 
 “This is the clinching evidence we need to admit the additional passages into the Shakespeare canon,” says Bruster. “It’s not every day we get to identify new writing by Shakespeare, so this is an exciting moment.” 
 
 Bruster examined Shakespeare’s spelling habits in the manuscript pages of the 16th-century play “Sir Thomas More.” Using Shakespeare’s contributions as a guide, he identified 24 points of similarity between “Sir Thomas More” and “The Spanish Tragedy,” a play republished, with new material, at about the time of “Hamlet.” 
 
 The findings reveal that Shakespeare’s spelling was both old-fashioned and idiosyncratic. For example, with words like “spotless” and “darkness” Shakespeare would use a single “s.” Past-tense words like “wrapped” and “blessed” he ended with a “t” (i.e., “wrapt,” “blest”). Also telling is his habit of spelling the same word in two different ways (i.e., “alley” spelled “allie” and “allye” in the same line). 
 
 Shakespeare’s contributions to the revised version of Kyd’s play were first suspected in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the noted poet, philosopher and literary critic. Yet the cold case has remained unsolved owing to a number of awkward lines in the additions. Like a game of telephone, Shakespeare’s words got lost in translation, resulting in phrases that barely resemble the original, Bruster says. 
 
 “One line in particular literally kept me up at night wondering what Shakespeare was doing,” Bruster says. “Then I realized that the copyist or printer had misread his handwriting. It turns out that the worst line in the additional passages wasn’t what Shakespeare wrote. Once you recognize what the line originally said, the beauty of his verse rises to the surface.” 
 
 Watch Professor Douglas Bruster explain how he knew that a short section of a Thomas Kyd play, “The Spanish Tragedy,” was actually written by William Shakespeare. The scholar also reads the “new” work. 
 
 For more information, contact: Jessica Sinn, College of Liberal Arts, 512-471-2404; Douglas Bruster, Department of English, 512-471-3635, bruster@mail.utexas.edu ||||| Claiming Shakespeare authorship can be a perilous endeavor. In 1996, Donald Foster, a pioneer in computer-driven textual analysis, drew front-page headlines with his assertion that Shakespeare was the author of an obscure Elizabethan poem called “A Funeral Elegy,” only to quietly retract his argument six years later after analyses by Mr. Vickers and others linked it to a different author. 
 
 This time, editors of some prestigious scholarly editions are betting that Mr. Bruster’s cautiously methodical arguments, piled on top of previous work by Mr. Vickers and others, will make the attribution stick. 
 
 “We don’t have any absolute proof, but this is as close as you can get,” said Eric Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and an editor, with Jonathan Bate, of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the complete Shakespeare. 
 
 “I think we can now say with some authority that, yes, this is Shakespeare,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “It has his fingerprints all over it.” 
 
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 Mr. Rasmussen and Mr. Bate are including “The Spanish Tragedy” in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new edition of Shakespeare’s collaboratively authored plays, to be published in November. And Mr. Bruster plans to include the Additional Passages in his new edition of the Riverside Shakespeare (renamed the Bankside Shakespeare), coming in 2016. 
 
 If embraced by the broader world of Shakespeareans, the Additional Passages would become the first largely undisputed new addition to the canon since Shakespeare’s contributions to “Edward III” — another play that some have attributed to Kyd — began appearing in scholarly editions in the mid-1990s. 
 
 Acceptance is by no means assured. Three years ago, some scholars were skeptical when the Arden Shakespeare published “Double Falsehood,” an 18th-century play whose connection with a lost Shakespeare drama had long been debated, in its prestigious series. 
 
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 Tiffany Stern, a professor of early modern drama at Oxford University and an advisory editor for the Arden Shakespeare, praised the empirical rigor of Mr. Bruster’s paper, but said that some new attributions were driven less by solid evidence than by publishers’ desire to offer “more Shakespeare” than their rivals. 
 
 “The arguments for ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ are better than for most” putative Shakespeare collaborations, Ms. Stern said. “But I think we’re going a bit Shakespeare-attribution crazy and shoving a lot of stuff in that maybe shouldn’t be there.” 
 
 Elizabethan theater was intensely collaborative, with playwrights often punching up old plays or working with other dramatists to cobble together new ones, in the manner of Hollywood script doctors. The 1602 Additional Passages to “The Spanish Tragedy,” inserted more than a decade after Kyd wrote the original, updated the bloody revenge play with a bit of psychological realism, which had become fashionable. (It is not known whether Kyd, who died in 1594, ever met Shakespeare.) 
 
 The idea that Shakespeare may have written the Additional Passages — which include a “Hamlet”-like scene of a grief-maddened father discoursing on the death of his son — was first broached in 1833 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But that claim remained a distinctly minority position well into the 20th century, even as scholars began using sophisticated computer software to detect subtle linguistic patterns that seemed to link the passages to Shakespeare’s other work. 
 
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 Mr. Bruster said he himself was a skeptic until he read Mr. Vickers’s 2012 article, which presented voluminous circumstantial historical evidence alongside linguistic patterns unearthed by software designed to uncover student plagiarism. 
 
 “I had to rethink my entire position,” Mr. Bruster said. “His arguments based on literary history were just so strong.” 
 
 Mr. Bruster was less persuaded by the linguistic parallels, which he calls merely “suggestive.” And so he turned to perhaps the most literal source of authority: Shakespeare’s own pen. 
 
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 Scholars have long cited the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s handwriting — surviving mainly in three densely scribbled pages held in the British Library that are widely attributed to Shakespeare — to understand oddities in the earliest printed versions of his plays. (In the 1604 quarto version of “Hamlet,” for example, Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is called “Gertrad” — probably a reflection, Mr. Rasmussen said, of Shakespeare’s tendency to close up his u’s and drop his final e’s.) 
 
 In his paper, Mr. Bruster identifies 24 broad spelling patterns — including shortened past tenses (like “blest” for “blessed”) and single medial consonants (like “sorow” instead of “sorrow”) — that occur both in the Additional Passages, for which no known manuscript survives, and the Shakespeare handwriting sample in the British Library. He also cites nine textual “corruptions” (like “creuie” instead of “creuic,” modernized as “crevice”) that he believes can be explained as misreadings of Shakespeare’s handwriting. 
 
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 These irregularities, considered individually, are not necessarily unique to Shakespeare. But taken together, Mr. Bruster argues, they strongly suggest that the Additional Passages were set in type from pages written, in the most literal sense, by Shakespeare. 
 
 “What I’m getting at is the DNA of Shakespeare’s words themselves, the way he formed those words with his pen on the page,” he said. 
 
 A printer’s misreading, Mr. Bruster argues, may also explain a particularly clumsy and nongrammatical stretch in the Additional Passages. During a moving speech, the grieving father, Hieronimo, meditates on the nature of a father’s love for his son. 
 
 The 1602 quarto renders it: “What is there yet in a sonne? He must be fed,/Be thaught to goe, and speake I, or yet./Why might not a man loue a Calfe as well?” 
 
 But that baffling “I, or yet,” Mr. Bruster argues, is likely a misreading of “Ier” — an abbreviation indicating the line is spoken by Hieronimo, a name that in Shakespeare’s time was sometimes rendered as Ieronimo. 
 
 The passage, Mr. Bruster argues, should really read (with modernized spelling): “What is there yet in a son?/He must be fed, be taught to go, and speak./Yet why might not a man love a calf as well?” 
 
 Mr. Bruster once counted himself among the many scholars who have thought the passage in the quarto was simply too poorly written to be Shakespeare. “But once you realize that it’s Shakespeare’s handwriting that’s responsible for the misreading, it’s no longer a bad line,” Mr. Bruster said. “It’s actually a gorgeous passage.” 
 
 Finding some of Shakespeare’s lines embedded in another writer’s plays may not carry the frisson of announcing the discovery of a previously unknown poem entirely by Shakespeare. But Mr. Bruster’s paper reflects current scholarly interest in Shakespeare as a playwright who frequently collaborated with others — including, Mr. Vickers has controversially argued, on plays we think of as coming solely from his own pen. 
 
 “Shakespeare wasn’t a solitary genius, flying above everyone else,” Mr. Vickers said. “He was a working man of the theater. If his company needed a new play, he’d get together with someone else and get it done.”
– It's been a nearly 200-year-long debate: Did William Shakespeare add 325 lines to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy nearly a decade after Kyd's death? None other than Samuel Taylor Coleridge raised the question in 1833, and a 2012 computer analysis seemed to lend credence to the theory. Now, a University of Texas professor says the proof may be in the handwriting—and bad handwriting at that. In a paper to be published next month, Douglas Bruster compares the play's 1602 "Additional Passages" with a three-page handwriting sample believed to be the Bard's held at the British Library. What he found, per the New York Times and UT at Austin News: about two dozen similar spelling patterns (for instance, "sorow for "sorrow"; past-tense words that ended in "t", like "wrapt"; and one word spelled two ways, like "allie" and "allye" for "alley") and nine textual "corruptions" that he believes resulted from the printer misreading Shakespeare's hand. He also thinks an awkward passage—so seemingly poorly written that it has been cited as evidence the lines couldn't have been crafted by Shakespeare—is the result of another bad handwriting/printer error goof. Says Bruster, "This is the clinching evidence we need to admit the additional passages into the Shakespeare canon." The Times notes this would mark the first such addition since passages from Edward III (also attributed to Kyd) were included in scholarly editions in the mid-'90s. (Another fascinating recent study paints Shakespeare as a food hoarder.)