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| | William Shakespeare's Catholicism |
 | | Having satisfied himself that it was genuine, though by now lacking its first page, Malone duly published it as an appendix to his 1790 edition of the Works. |
 | | The document has since vanished 'a pity', in the understatement of one of the outstanding twentieth-century Shakespeare biographers, Samuel Schoenbaum, for the advanced techniques of modern scholarship might have answered 'several intriguing questions' regarding the script, the paper, the watermark, the handwriting and, of course, John Shakespeare's signature. |
 | | Malone subsequently recanted his conviction that the document was genuine, and the hapless Jordan was accused of forgery; it took until 1923 for a diligent Jesuit scholar, burrowing around the British Museum, to come up with an uncannily similar Italian document, also dating from the sixteenth century. |
| www.englishhistory.info /Shakespeare/shakespeares-catholicism.html (1475 words) |
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