A professor and his students have identified a probable new Shakespeare signature in a 16th century legal text. Using a 50-megapixel multispectral digital imaging system, members of The Lazarus Project have tweaked the status of the autograph from "who knows" to "possible."

University of Mississippi English professor Gregory Heyworth and his students, Andrew Henning, Mitchell Hobbs, and Kristen Vise, spent their spring break in Washington, D.C. at the Folger Shakespeare Library imaging a faint signature in a copy of "Archaionomia," a survey of Saxon laws published during the reign of England's Queen Elizabeth I—Shakespeare's time.

The signature in the book had been identified as possibly being in Shakespeare's hand in 1942, though some suspected it to be a forgery.

Heyworth on the tech used We use a bespoke, 50 megapixel camera back produced by Megavision with a (formerly) Kodak large-format sensor in a view camera (bellows) body; a bespoke lens designed to have accurate focus across the spectrum including UV and IR (all other lenses achieve good focus only in the visual spectra but are out of focus especially in the UV); we also use a quartz lens on occasion which, unlike glass, allows UV to be transmitted through it).

The lights are also bespoke: produced by Bill Christens-Barry at Equipose Ltd, they are two LED arrays about 9x14" that produce light at wavelengths across the spectrum from UV to near infra-red (365, 450, 465, 505, 535, 570, 615, 638, 735, 780, 870 and 940 nanometers). We also employ a color filter wheel that gives us often clearer results in the UV. We use a variety of simple copy stands, as this is a traveling system, and are in the process of developing our own.

Finally, we use a prototype of a transmissive light source. The software that runs the lights and camera is produced by Megavision and is called Photoshoot. It allows, as one might expect, complete control over exposure length, shutter delays (to prevent vibrations that may affect focus), sequence, darks and flat fields (whites), providing histograms with which to calculate adjustments to aperture, exposure, and depth of field. It also provides a database for the raws. We do most of our image rendering using ENVI, a high-end multispectral imaging application used, until now, almost exclusively by geo-spatial scientists and the intelligence industry to render satellite images. At times, we also use Image-J, as well as proprietary code written by imaging scientist Keith Knox.

Like an archaeologist, Heyworth takes pains to state in no uncertain terms that it may never be possible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is by Shakespeare. However, if the spectral fingerprinting they did on this signature is consistent across other known signatures, it would come very close to definitive proof. If, however, it is consistent with known forgeries, that too would be a near-definitive judgment.

"The so-called Lambarde signature on the Archaionomia that we imaged was suspected by its first owner in the 1940s of having been by famed 18th century forger William Henry Ireland," Heyworth told Ars. "We know that Ireland used a special formulation of ink combined with acid and paper-marbling fluid for all his forgeries. Inks all refract light differently, according to their chemical composition. Multispectral imaging, then, combined with spectral analysis of particular spots, yields data indicating the unique refraction of light at various wavelengths. I call this a multispectral fingerprint, although it is not as exact."

"We are returning tomorrow to the Folger to have a look at the multispectral fingerprints of known forgeries of William Ireland and compare them to the Lambarde," he said. "In general, we are particularly interested in refining our use of multi-spectral fingerprints as a tool for authentication and provenance."

If the signature turns out to be Shakespeare's, it may shed light on the man himself.

"For one," said Andrew Henning, a student of English and mathematics on the Lazarus team, "it suggests that, at the very least, Shakespeare possessed and was actively reading legal texts. Some might even argue that it draws a strong line indicating that Shakespeare was in some way involved in the English legal system."

The Shakespeare signature imaging was only the latest undertaking for Lazarus, the permanent members of which include, in addition to Heyworth, Dr. Roger Easton of Rochester Institute of Technology, Michael Phelps of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, and CTO of Equipoise Imaging Dr. William Christen-Barry. The project's goals are to "facilitate manuscript recovery by providing researchers with access to multispectral technology, to train students and textual scholars in the use of multispectral technology and image rendering and in the scientific disciplines of the new codicology, and to collect data and metadata on damaged manuscripts as a basis for subsequent scholarship."

Previously, the project analyzed the Skipwith Revolutionary War Letters and the Wynn Faulkner Poetry Collection of William Faulkner's early poetry. The Lazarus Project was able to rebuild images of several of Faulkner's lost poems which were damaged and partly illegible. Lazarus was also instrumental in helping to restore a long 14th century Middle French poem called "Les Eschéz d'Amours" (The Chess of Love), which had been damaged in the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War.

Future plans include traveling to Tbilisi, Georgia in the summer in the hopes of reconstituting some of the earliest copies of the Christian Gospels. They also plan to go to Milan, Italy to help with the earliest manuscript of an ancient Jewish religious text called the "Book of Jubilees."