Shakespeare—A New Discovery

It is a rare event when a previously unknown manuscript by a classical author is discovered. The provenance of the fragment here reproduced is unknown, its authenticity is beyond question if for no other reason than that the folio is signed on verso by Shakespeare himself, using three different inks, three styles of script and eight spellings. Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine has been extensively documented1"3 but the dramatic episode presented here was previously unrecorded and no play on the subject is known to have been performed. Probably the idea was discarded because the text has been extensively reworked into later productions. A great deal of research has gone into tracing the later echoes of this admittedly immature work and refer-