Books: Eighth Signature

If a genuine scrap of Shakespeare's handwriting were found, it should interest everybody but Baconians. For years scholars have known only seven authentic specimens of his signature, three of them in his will. Last fortnight in Salt Lake City, Professor Benjamin Roland Lewis displayed a small piece of paper cut or torn from an old document, with a common contemporary spelling of the bard's name—William Shakspere—plainly written across it. For 19 months Professor Lewis pored over his find. Chemical analysis proved to his satisfaction that the ink was Elizabethan. Microscopic study put, the...