“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. 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. 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). 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. 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. It turns out that the worst line in the additional passages wasn’t what Shakespeare wrote.
– 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.)