The Cowell Manuscript or the First Baconian: MS294 at the University of London

Abstract

The Library also possesses a number of manuscripts, including a Latin Bible on vellum written and rubricated in Italy in the early part of the fifteenth century; the unpublished manuscript of Sir Charles Cornwallis’s Discourse of the State of Spain, 1607, written while Ambassador in Spain; and an unpublished poem by George Herbert inserted in a copy of the original edition of Bacon’s Translation of certain [i.e. seven] Psalmes into English verse, 1625. Another interesting manuscript contains Some Reflections on the Life of William Shakespeare, in a paper read before the Ipswich Philosophic Society in 1805, by James Corton Cowell, a Quaker, who is thereby established as the first critic known to have raised doubts publicly as to Shakespeare’s authorship of the literature which passes under his name and to have attributed it to Bacon. In a second paper the author revealed, under a unanimous promise of secrecy from members of the society, his indebtedness to the Rev. James Wilmot, D.D., Rector of Barton-on-the-Heath near Stratford-upon-Avon, an alleged author of the ‘Letters of Junius’, who desired to remain anonymous lest he should incur the resentment of the inhabitants of Stratford-upon-Avon. The earliest dissenter from the Shakespeare tradition mentioned by Sir Sidney Lee is Joseph C. Hart in his Romance of Yachting , 1848. This passage is from the 1931 annual report of the University of London’s Library Committee. The paragraph is the third from the end of an anonymous three-page description of the Durning-Lawrence Library, bequeathed to the University by Edith Jane, Lady Durning-Lawrence in 1929 and received into the University Library in August 1931. Its author is uncertain: conceivably Reginald Arthur Rye as the Goldsmiths’ Librarian of the University of London at the time; possibly the Shakespearian scholar Allardyce Nicoll, then Professor of Queen Mary College at the University of London, and a member of the Library Committee. What is certain is that the discovery of the so-called Cowell manuscript, had it remained confined to the library report, would have languished, at least for a while.