Reading nonsense "news" about "Shakespeare" findings ...

MAY / JUNE 2021

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RE: "Robert Weir says he has evidence a 16th-century Latin book of poems by Horace once belonged to the Bard"

CBC Radio · Posted: May 26, 2021 5:50 PM ET | Last Updated: May 26, 2021

(https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-tuesday-edition-1.6039576/canadian-prof-says-he-s-discovered-the-1st-known-book-from-shakespeare-s-library-1.6041155)

and

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-canadian-professor-says-he-ha...

Whatever is going on here, I don't think that the text's provenance and ownership history are as supposed.

Not that it's necessarily Prof. Weir's doing--on that I neither know nor say--but, within this "find" I suspect that we have a case of make-believe and fraud.

Anne Cecil's hand wouldn't have appeared that way at any time after her marriage to Oxford. At nearly 15 years of age when she married in 1571, she'd certainly not have had so juvenile a hand as that. She, like Edward himself, would have had the best training in penmanship and, as a lady of standing, her's should have been a model of good penmanship. What we see are the scrawls of early beginners who have not even mastered holding a pencil. Nor does this writing appear to have been done by a pen-and-ink stylus.

The (alleged) appearance, by itself, on the same page of such crude examples (alleged to be) of the names "Essex", "William Shakespere" and, most of all, Robt. Greene simply don't "add up" to any kind of sense and adds to the cause for suspicion of fraud. Another attempt, whenever this was cooked up, recently or centuries ago, in a long line of made-up stuff to fool a gullible public into accepting a sensational discovery.

It may interest you to know that some of the folk at Oxfraud are also skeptical based on their own fact-based knowledge of the handwriting that has so far been claimed to have been revealed by Prof. Weir's analysis. They don't feel it is necessary to wave conspiracy theories around in attempts to discredit things that don't conform to assumed beliefs.