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Archaionomia Shakespeare signature

The Archaionomia Shakespeare signature is a signature discovered on the title page of William Lambarde's Archaionomia in 1939.

Signature discovered on the title page of Lambarde's Archaionomia.

In the late 1930s a putative seventh Shakespeare signature was found in the Folger Library copy of William Lambarde's Archaionomia (1568), a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws. In 1942, Giles Dawson published a report cautiously concluding that the signature was genuine, and 30 years later he concluded that there was "an overwhelming probability that the writer of all seven signatures was the same person, William Shakespeare." Nicholas Knight published a book-length study a year later with the same conclusion. Sam Schoenbaum considered that the signature was more likely to be genuine than not with "a better claim to authenticity than any other pretended Shakespeare autograph," he wrote that "it is premature ... to classify it as the poet's seventh signature," Stanley Wells notes that the authenticity of both the Montaigne and Lambarde signatures have had strong support, but the ascription has not gained wide academic attention nor any overwhelming consensus.

In 2012 University of Mississippi English professor Gregory Heyworth and his students used a 39-megapixel multispectral digital imaging system to enhance the signature as a first step to authenticating the signature.