This was a Shakespeare story I wasn’t at all familiar with. ‘The Annotator’, published in 1954, was the culmination of more that a decade of research by the author Alan Keen. In 1940 Keen, an antiquarian book dealer, found a copy of Edward Halle’s The Union of the Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and York’ in unexceptional condition but with extensive margin notes in what was subsequently shown to be a sixteenth century hand. Keen came to believe for a variety of reasons that the margin notes were the work of the adolescent William Shakespeare.
If he was right we seem to see the young Shakespeare gathering vivid moments for subsequent dramatic use. The argument jumps, of course, from possibility to almost certainty but, right or wrong, it’s hard not to envy him not so much for the discovery but the subsequent decade of exploration and piecing together.
The historical detection is the interest of the read with the author building a rich construct of context for a possible version of Shakespeare’s adolescent years though the truth remains impossible to know.
The Solitary Reader 