SAT 2022 Members' Event: Roger Stritmatter on Neville's Handwriting

Talk delivered at the online SAT members gathering 23rd April 2022
The lecture examines and tests claims by John Casson, William D. Rubinstein, and Ken Feinstein, that the annotator of a copy of Dionysius of Halicarnasus’s Roman Antiquities (1546) and Appian of Alexandria’s An Ancient History and Exquisite Chronicle (1551) now at Audley End in Essex are in the handwriting of Henry Neville. The annotations are of interest to literary historians as they follow many elements of the Antony and Cleopatra story that appear prominently in the Shakespearean play. According to Stuart Gillespie’s Athlone Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Books Appian was a significant source for both Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. The lecture follows a standard protocol for forensic linguistic examination, showing both similarities and differences between the questioned document annotations and the established samples of Neville’s handwriting and concluding that it is virtually impossible to identify Sir Henry Neville as the annotator and that, instead, other hypotheses about the genesis of the annotations and history of the books should be considered.

[@rooruffneck]

Roger, great job!

[@rstritmatter]

Thanks.

[@avlasting3507]

Well done. Any thoughts Roger on who the writer may have been?

[@rstritmatter]

It should be clarified for the record that the annotations formerly identified as appearing in Appian (first by Casson and Rubinstein in their book and then by me in this talk) are actually in a copy of Cassius Dio that is bound up with a copy of Appian (which, however contains annotations entirely or mostly by Sir Henry Savile and none, apparently by the "Audley End Unknown" annotator). This matters because although both Appian and Dio include materials relevant to *Julius Caesar,* the wording and emphases of the two accounts differ. Dio, however, also includes an account of Antony and Cleopatra that is absent in Appian, which ends c. 43 BCE around the time of assassination of Caesar Augustus.

[@floatingholmes]

I wish such rigor was standard across the board in Authorship study.