SLEIGHT OF HAND
by Penelope Stowell

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The short answer is yes, Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The long answer is much more involved. Love's Labour's Lost may have been written during an episode of dementia--a psychotic break, if you will--and there is strong evidence that the Bard may have suffered from a mild stroke while writing Richard II, which would be consistent with his fascination with disabilities in the writing of that play. But no, Shakespeare was not Bacon. A single man wrote all of Shakespeare, excepting some short comic interludes that appear to have been penned in by one of the actors as filler material.

I know this because my dissertation, which I hope to finish this or next year, is a complete handwriting analysis of the works of Shakespeare. I spent two years in London studying original folios and have seven notebooks full of annotations that, once I've consolidated the material, will be the crux of my thesis. I have the introduction written, and chapter 3, but the rest is in the draft stages.

It's hard to find the time to complete the dissertation, because I am not independently wealthy and have to work for a living. With a bachelors in psychology and a Ph.D. pending in handwriting analysis, I would be a natural for criminal forensics. For my first job, in fact, I worked in forgery detection. Unfortunately, my area of expertise lies less in the area of handwriting falsities than in understanding why handwriting varies in the first instance. I lasted three weeks in the forgery detection job and was replaced by someone with a less curious mind.

My job at Winchester, Daggert and Moxley involves reviewing handwriting samples from present employees and prospective applicants for evidence of integrity, or more accurately put, for evidence of a deranged or even criminal latency. WD&M is the largest employment screening and securities agency on the Eastern seaboard, so the volume of work is substantial. Quite frankly, the work is boring. The kind of people who apply for jobs with IBM or Microsoft, two of our major contractors, rarely show any evidence of any sort of psychosis or moral turpitude beyond a period of pot-smoking in their youth and, sometimes, a little too much drinking today. We get our share of repressed psyches, but rarely does there seem to be anything percolating below the surface --no criminal masterminds in the making, or even, I'm sorry to say, creative but undiscovered genius. I studied Shakespeare's handwriting, and as an undergraduate, my interest in handwriting began when I studied Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. So when I say I know what genius looks like in handwriting, I know.

I also studied handwriting from Charles Manson and from the Unabomber, to compare the distinct difference between genius and psychosis, so when I saw the handwriting sample marked B40775 come across my desk, I knew the difference.

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The handwriting was strong, with large loops and firm strokes, easily mistaken for the handwriting of a strong and possibly creative character. But it was those t's, those retreating r's, and the way a few letters, in the middle of word, would suddenly grow larger than the script around it, as if a magnifying glass had rushed over that bit of text, that gave the handwriting away as that of a man on the brink.

I pushed the rest of my work aside and got out my jeweler's loop for a closer look. Stay objective, I reminded myself. Analyze, don't conclude. The jeweler's loop broke down the text into a grainy finish. I could see where the writer had traced over a character twice, where the pen--a standard ball-point--had dug deeply into the paper, and where it had simply glided over the surface.

The more I studied the writing, the more uneasy I grew. This was not creativity. This was not even Shakespeare during his Love's Labour's Lost period. This did not have the skewed lucidity of Manson's hand, or the clear schizoid markings of the Unabomber. This was the hand of an explosion waiting to happen, pent-up rage with a twisted and uncertain morality lurking beneath a glossy exterior. Whoever this man was--and it was a man, that was clear from the hand--he was extremely dangerous.

Worse than that, I felt as if I knew this hand. I couldn't place where I could have seen it, but I suspected I might have met this person. The thought terrified me.

My palms felt sweaty. I felt an urgent need to visit the rest room. Instead, I called Pamela Hindhurst, who catalogued the handwriting samples by number and kept the log of names in her own office.

"Pammy," I said.

"Yolanda, what's wrong?" said Pam. "You sound awful."

"I think I'm coming down with the flu," I said. "Look, I need you to look up one of the handwriting samples."

"You know I m not supposed to do that," said Pam.

"It's just that I think I've seen this one before," I lied. "I'm just testing myself."

I could hear Pam snapping her gum while she shuffled through some papers.

"Here it is," she said. "Oh, of course you would know him. That's Mr. Smitlop's sample. Funny, I don't know how it got into the pile today."

Waverly Smitlop? I felt something funny go ping inside. Waverly Smitlop was my supervisor, executive director of the Personnel Research Division. He was a mouse of a man, balding, with pink skin and thick glasses and a stammer. Just last week I stayed working late, with only a thin partition between me and Mr. Smitlop. Mr. Smitlop came in early and left late, and as far as any of us knew, had no life outside of WD&M.

"Yolanda? Yolanda!"

"Oh, uh, thanks, Pam. How silly of me. Of course I'd recognize his handwriting. He signs my paychecks!" I pretended to laugh.

Still, it's odd that his sample would get in with that stack.

Penelope Stowell Copyright © 2001

PENELOPE STOWELL has lived on four continents but now calls Santa Fe, NM home. By age 5 she was determined she should be a writer, but instead found herself fully occupied as an arts administrator and single parent, finally returning to writing about six years ago. Penelope, a prolific member of Milli Thornton's Santa Fe Fertile Material Writing Circle and a student of the Fear of Writing online course, aspires to mainstream publication for the children's novel she has almost completed, in her own words, "...once I overcome my Fear of Finishing."

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