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 paper in the same period. Photographic enlargements permitted minute comparisons with known Shakespearian signatures. Ultraviolet photographs established the type of pen used; infra-red photographs showed no tracings beneath the ink. Shakespeare himself, said Professor Lewis, wrote that name. But where the paper came from, who owned it, how it reached Salt Lake City, what happened to the rest of the document, he could not or would not say.

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