Assuming for the moment forgery, the likeliest criminal seemed to be Payne Collier. He made in his Defence in 1860 continual appeals to the fact that Malone had seen and copied entries said to have been forged. One of these copies—the list of players (including Shakespeare) at Dulwich—was said by him to be in a printed book (Malone’s Inquiry), then in the hands of Payne Collier and now in the British Museum. It was not in Malone’s hand.
At the same time, in a critique by Payne Collier on Thomas Churchyard, annotated and corrected by himself, I found a sonnet on Sydney, which he said was inserted on a blank leaf in Thomas Churchyard’s A true Diurnal Historicall. … The curious thing was that the alterations in the sonnet were little less than a complete re-writing, impossible to any one but the author.
Were these two insertions “plants”?
Was the Malone Scrap another “plant”?
I examined Sir Frederick Madden’s correspondence at the British Museum, which contains a number of letters of Payne Collier in a hand not very dissimilar to that of the Malone Scrap. I was confronted almost immediately in 1839 by paper similar to that of the Scrap. The Malone MS. 29 in which it was found came to the Bodleian in 1838. I was courteously permitted to look at the Bodleian registers, and found that Payne Collier was there in 1842, the year in which Cunningham published the Revels Books. The prop seemed a little weakened. It was necessary to destroy or to strengthen it. Hence my letter to the Times on July 2, 1924. I hoped controversy would settle the matter. It has; but not as I imagined. I continued my investigations, expecting, I will own, to pin another forgery upon Payne Collier.
I had by this time all the nuances of the hand of the Malone Scrap at my fingers’ ends. I was looking at the letters of Sir William Musgrave, of the Audit Office, to which the Books belonged, when my attention was drawn to the marked similarity of two characteristics, the small n’s (n.) with a straight tail and the small d’s (
) curved with a curl at the top (see facsimiles). Was this the hand? A close comparison of every letter with the hand in that immense accumulation made by Musgrave, the Musgrave Obituary, showed a fairly good agreement. Letters which differed at first sight were found to be written both ways; and two or three other marked characteristics appeared in both hands—the way in which the
