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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 14.2456  Thursday, 1 January 2004

[1]     From:   Stuart Hampton-Reeves <shampton-reeves@uclan.ac.uk>
        Date:   Wednesday, 31 Dec 2003 14:07:12 +0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?

[2]     From:   Thomas Larque <thomas.larque@lineone.net>
        Date:   Wednesday, 31 Dec 2003 15:55:24 -0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Stuart Hampton-Reeves <shampton-reeves@uclan.ac.uk>
Date:           Wednesday, 31 Dec 2003 14:07:12 +0000
Subject: 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?
Comment:        Re: SHK 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?

The story is true - sort of. I only know the rough details. A seller on
ebay claimed to have (I believe) a First Folio of Shakespeare and posted
a picture of the front page of Pericles as proof (of course Pericles
isn't in the FF). Maybe he meant the third folio. The starting bid was
£3 and the bidding did indeed get up to £5 million -- ebay pulled the
auction, presumably because they were suspicious. The seller is now
trying to auction the book from his own site, although excessive traffic
has made his page difficult to access. Here is the link anyway, for the
patient, the curious and the seriously loaded:

http://www.geocities.com/john_f_ellis/shakespeare.htm

I've not been able to access it myself

Stuart Hampton-Reeves

Postscript -- after I sent the above email, Hardy emailed me to say the
link is dead. However, the sale is still on, there is a brief mention of
it here (this link should work, but you might need to cut-and-paste it
into your browser as geocities sites do not like linking from emails):

http://www.geocities.com/john_f_ellis/books.htm

The guy is trying to raise money for some kind of internet project and
he has been posting 'rare' books on ebay for some time.

Stuart Hampton-Reeves

[Editor's Note: Stuart subsequently wrote me again with the link to the
image, saying "I've found an image of the 'manuscript' here,
http://www.geocities.com/john_f_ellis/pericles.jpg - clearly, it is
neither a manuscript or a first folio!"]

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Thomas Larque <thomas.larque@lineone.net>
Date:           Wednesday, 31 Dec 2003 15:55:24 -0000
Subject: 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?
Comment:        Re: SHK 14.2450 "Pericles manuscript"?

 >I imagine it might have been a holiday prank...i.e., someone sending
 >out a false news item and seeing how far it got. Either that or the
 >notorious New York Times fiction-journalist Jayson Blair got a new job
 >and a new pseudonym, Vijay Dutt.
 >
 >The Sun Newspaper in England apparently printed their own version of the
 >story, and it was available on their website

I see that the Scotsman (another British newspaper, published in
Scotland) also carried the £5 million Pericles story in an online
round-up of brief items (I think alongside something about Princess
Anne's dog killing the Queen's corgi), although their story now seems to
have disappeared, so maybe they have realised that it is a hoax.  Rather
amusingly they referred to it as a "Shakespeare manuscript" (now that
*really* might be worth millions of pounds).  The Scotsman site is
definitely real, so this story really did make some papers, including
British ones, or at least their official internet sites.  As far as I
can work out, the Sun site which carried the story is real too.

On a note mainly for Hardy, I see that one of my references to "the Sun"
(the name of a newspaper) in my last E-Mail got changed to "the Sunday"
before appearing on SHAKSPER.  I only point this out because it might be
a glitch in Hardy's new software rather than human error.  When it left
my Outbox it definitely read "the Sun".  I suspect an over-officious
spellchecker didn't like the capitalisation.

[Editor's Note: I am sorry about that. The problem is with a macro I run
to spell out the day in e-mail headers to the list. I normally catch
these inadvertent changes but missed this one. -Hardy]

Thomas Larque.
"Shakespeare and His Critics"       "British Shakespeare Association"
http://shakespearean.org.uk           http://britishshakespeare.ws

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