Notes made on a 16th-century book, thought to have been an inspiration for the play, could have been the Bard’s own, says John Casson

Annotations in the margins of a 16th-century text that is believed to have been one of the sources for Hamlet could have been made by Shakespeare himself, according to an independent researcher.

John Casson was looking through the British Library’s copy of François de Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques, a 1576 French text thought to have been one of the sources for Shakespeare’s tragedy: it features the story of how a Danish prince, Amleth, avenges his father’s murder by his uncle, the latter going on to marry his mother, Geruthe.

Casson noticed that faded ink symbols had been made in the margins next to six passages – three of which dealt with the prince’s decision to pretend to be mad in order to conceal his plans for revenge. One of the annotated passages, translated from the French, reads: “It is not without cause, and just occasion, that my gestures, countenances, and words, seem all to proceed from a madman, and that I desire to have all men esteem me wholly deprived of sense or reasonable understanding.”

Casson, the author of several books on Shakespeare’s identity, said: “I saw these faint marks, and my eyes popped out of my head. I looked through page by page and found that the annotations were mainly on the Hamlet section. It’s only one section of an entire book. It’s like he read the Hamlet section, moved into the next section and then stopped. And I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ The ink is faded. It’s clearly ancient ink, which may be why these annotations weren’t noticed earlier … It is extraordinarily rare to find a source book for Shakespeare’s plays with notes on. This is virtually unique.”

Casson believes there are more than equal odds that the marks were made by Shakespeare. “Who else was interested in this text in the late 16th century? There is only one person we absolutely know was interested in it, and that’s Shakespeare. No other person has been shown to definitely have an interest in this text,” said the researcher, who has detailed his findings in the British Library’s journal.

Although the annotations are not dated, Casson believes they predate Hamlet, which was written around 1601, for two reasons. First, one of passages underlined in the book reads, when translated: “The right of succession is a better way (to choose a monarch) than that of election.”

“That would not have been an annotation underlined once James I was on the throne [from March 1603]. He had two sons. It would have been of no interest to anyone subsequently,” said Casson. Also, “there is no mention of the play. If you were annotating after the play, you would put: ‘This was Shakespeare’s Hamlet; he refers to this.’ You wouldn’t be coy.”

Casson also argues that the annotations lend further weight to his controversial theory that Sir Henry Neville, a courtier of Elizabeth I, was the author of Shakespeare’s plays. Casson has previously expounded this theory in a 2016 book, Sir Henry Neville Was Shakespeare: The Evidence, and says the annotations in the Belleforest could have been made by Neville. The courtier read and wrote in French, and books in his library at Audley End, Essex, contain annotations using Greek symbol gamma ‘γ’, which resembles the “y” symbol in the British Library’s copy of Belleforest.

Casson also argues that Neville’s life mirrors the arc of Shakespeare’s career, particularly his imprisonment in 1601 after the Essex rebellion and subsequent political downfall, a period Casson says corresponds with the majority of Shakespeare’s tragedies, written in the early 17th century.

“William from Stratford has the backing of the mass of academic authority [as the author of the plays], they’re so used to it, and challenging it is academic death or danger to your reputation,” said Casson. “But Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, people saw them sculpting and talking and wrote letters to them. There are no letters from William of Stratford. His parents were illiterate, his daughters were illiterate: how do you become the greatest writer ever when your family are illiterate? … His daughters lived into the 1660s and never said anything about their father being a writer. There’s a real sense the man doesn’t fit.”

However, Shakespeare expert Sir Brian Vickers disagreed, taking issue with the claim “that the man from Stratford simply did not have the education, cultural background and breadth of life experience necessary for him to write the plays traditionally attributed to him”.

“This is the usual snobbery, and ignorance,” said Vickers. “They are unaware that the Elizabethan grammar school was an intense crash course in reading and writing Latin verse, prose, and plays – the bigger schools often acted plays by Terence in the original … As for ‘experience of life’, there are a few blank years between his leaving Stratford and starting as an actor in the early 1590s where he might have travelled. In any case, London was full of books, he read widely, and he evidently had a receptive memory. Having acted in plays written in blank verse, lyrics and prose, he knew the conventions of drama from the inside. Above all, he had a great imagination, and didn’t need to have been to Venice to write The Merchant of Venice, or Othello. What’s most dispiriting about these anti-Stratfordians is their denial of Shakespeare’s creative imagination.”

John Mullan, a UCL English professor, agreed. “There is so much evidence for Shakespeare having been just who we have long supposed, that only those who have decided in advance that a grammar school boy from the Midlands who never went abroad and wasn’t a courtier could not have written those plays set in Italy or featuring monarchs could think otherwise.”