A few posts back I wrote about ‘The Annotator’ by Alan Keen and Roger Lubbock in which the authors explored the possibility that a set of annotations found on a copy of Hall’s Chronicle might be those of a young Shakespeare. In a handsome book published by John Redington in 1949, Moray McLaren picks up the story choosing to offer a detailed examination of the annotations themselves in the context of the text of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II.’
The case will always be unproven but it is interesting to see the possible relations between Shakespeare’s texts and possible sources. McLaren discusses in the first part of the book the idea that the relationship that we have with Shakespeare is in part defined by the lack of knowledge of his life – “his own possibly deliberate reticence about himself” as McLaren speculates.
The Solitary Reader 