Item 23 - Letter from Oliver Baker to [R. B. McKerrow?]

1 single sheet

The Stone House, Bearley, near Stratford-upon-Avon.—He recalls some of A. H. Bullen’s helpers at the Shakespeare Head, but not their names. ‘The name R. B. McKerrow has been frequently before me in print, & on my lips in the last few months, because I have borrowed a book which he wrote about an Elizabethan writer named Kydd, from the London Library.’ Has no objection to being identified as the author of the articles in the Gentleman’s Magazine [on leather drinking-vessels; cf. Modern Lan-guage Notes, liii. 207–11]. Is in bed with influenza, which will delay the completion of his book [In Shakespeare’s Warwickshire and the Unknown Years], the subject of which was originally suggested by Sir Sidney Lee. ‘If you are the author of the Kydd Biography would you mind saying if you still think that he was the author of any early version of Hamlet.’ Encloses a circular of his book on leather vessels [Black Jacks and Leather Bottells].

(*Baker appears to have consulted Boas’s edition of Kyd and McKerrow’s of Nashe and confused the two. The former contains a biography and a vindication of Kyd’s claim to be the author of the so-called Ur-Hamlet, a claim largely based on a passage in Nashe’s Preface to Menaphon, though McKerrow, in his notes to that work, expressed himself as sceptical of the attribution.)