Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/232

 226 Oliphant "SIR THOMAS MORE " Some years ago I went through this play with a view to the determination of the question whether or not Shakspere was concerned in the alterations made in it. I came to the conclu- sion (I was by no means the first to do so) that the only part of the play with which our master-dramatist might possibly have been concerned was the revised insurrection scene. That fragment I would unhesitatingly have accorded to him but for the fact that assignment to him would have implied an earlier date than one seemed to be warranted in assuming for the play as a whole ; and assuredly the revision could not be earlier than the rest of the play. Since then two important facts have come to light: the body of the MS has been discovered to be in the hand- writing of Anthony Mundy; and the revision of the insurrection scene has been declared by the greatest palaeographic expert in the United Kingdom, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, to have been penned by Shakspere. The condition of the MS is such that there can be no doubt whatever that the scribe is the actual author; so that, if Sir Edward Thompson's judgment be correct, "More" will in future have to be included in any set of Shak- spere's works aiming at completeness. I may say here that though I had at first been exceedingly sceptical as to the possibility of proof on the slight data available for the purpose and though I do not set myself up to be an expert in Sir Edward's special subject, it seems to me that he has completely proved his case. Sir Edward Thompson's monograph on the subject led me to make a re-examination of the play; and I may say without further ado that the outcome of that examination was a con- firmation, on purely literary grounds verse-structure, habit of thought, use of words, and so on of the view arrived at by him by a quite different route, and at the same time a confirma- tion of my own previous instinct an instinct which I had not had the courage to follow. If that revision be indeed Shak-