New Poem ‘Found’ in San Marino : What’s in a Name? Plenty When It’s Shakespeare’s

An unpublished poem pasted in the back of a manuscript collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino is by William Shakespeare, an Oxford University poetry professor said in Britain today.

Library curator Sara Hodson said the poem could be by Shakespeare but that Huntington officials are withholding judgment on who wrote the 17th-Century manuscript until they learn of the evidence found by the British professor.

The professor, Peter Levi, came across the work while researching a book on the life of the 16th- and early 17th-Century poet and playwright, the Daily Telegraph in London reported today.

The poem will be published in a booklet next week by the British publishing house Macmillan. Levi is to give a news conference on Monday and said he will have no comment to make on his discovery until then.

“It’s possible, certainly,” said Hodson, associate curator of literary manuscripts at the Huntington. “But then again, we will want to wait and see the evidence on which the attribution is being made.”

Macmillan’s chairman, Lord Stockton, told the Daily Telegraph newspaper: “Levi has, to his satisfaction, and I think to the satisfaction of a lot of other people and certainly to us, authenticated this as poetry penned by Big Bill.

“It was not in Shakespeare’s own hand; it was written by the hand of one of his known copyists. This is one of those very romantic pieces of detective work which captures everyone’s imagination.”

A love poem found in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library in 1985 by American scholar Gary Taylor and which he attributed to Shakespeare drew bad marks from other scholars who said it could not have been written by England’s most famous bard.

The latest verse also drew skeptical comments.

Stanley Wells, professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Birmingham, said that scholars who have examined the poem had “little doubt that these verses were written not by Shakespeare but by someone else.”