The Discovery

On the 1st of August 2010, I received an email from the Professor of English Literature at the University of Camberwell. He had been poking about in the University archives, he said, researching a minor Elizabethan playwright, and had made something of a find. While he was leafing idly through a book of superannuated criticism, a large and dirty sheaf of papers slipped out, falling to the library floor. The papers were old and dusty. The Professor picked them up and examined them. He found that they were covered with manuscript, virtually illegible, and seemingly written with a quill-pen. The writing was dense and untidy, replete with crossings-out and corrections. Strange runes and symbols crept up and down the margins. He had no idea what he had, but he sat at the library table and began to sort through the crumbling pages.

It quickly became apparent to him that proper transcription and analysis of the manuscripts were beyond his meagre skill. Knowing of my interest and expertise, he contacted me immediately and suggested I might like to take a look.

Upon receipt of the email, I can't say I was exactly intrigued. From the Professor's description I suspected that the work was of more modern provenance – a bad fake by a bored Camberwell scholar from God knows when. But the man continued to badger me, insisting that there was something of value which he needed me to see. Eventually I acquiesced. I have made something of a speciality, in my career, of puncturing the egos of the over-excited. I thought I might be able to perform a similar service on this occasion.

When I arrived at the dingy library, the Professor ushered me in and sat me down. He opened before me a bulging manilla folder, and I leant forward into the greatest discovery of my career.

The lost work of the great Elizabethan surrealist, “S.W.” is something of a standing joke among men of my profession. A letter from Jonson to the Earl of Oxford mentions S.W., praising "his heaps of words all crushed and smashed”. Webster footnotes some of his own less penetrable lyrics with the mysterious initials. Marlowe, we read, loathed him for the "divinity and filth" of his work. Bacon once beat a servant to death in fury after a long night reading the First Folio. At the subsequent trial the book was entered as evidence. The judge stated that “No gentleman can be expected to retain his faculties after drowning his mind in unreason”, and acquitted Bacon on grounds of temporary insanity. He ordered all extant copies of the poetry to be burnt, the ashes to be thrown into a hole, and covered with quicklime.

And that, we thought, for four hundred years, was that. After the judgement was handed down, the poet himself seems to have disappeared without a trace. Oh, there were many attempts to recover the writings, down the centuries. Libraries and private collections were trawled through by patient scholars, in the belief that something, somewhere, must remain. More recently there was an attempt to reconstruct the poems and plays by feeding all subsequent English literature through powerful computers. All came to naught. The work of S.W., it seemed, was lost to us permanently.

No longer. For in that hot little library I gazed on beauty the like of which no human now alive could possibly imagine. Glorious poetry, more pregnant with meaning and power than I could have foreseen. And there, in the bottom right corner of each page, in that blotched and clotted hand, were the magical initials: S.W. Could it be that my hitherto unremarkable colleague had discovered the long-lost Folio? Could it be that literature was about to be turned upside down by this complete reinvention of the art? Would all subsequent writing have to be re-evaluated in the light of this find? I believe it will. I believe it is the greatest discovery in the field of letters made in the last hundred years

I can waste no time with the popular press or the turbid meanderings of academia. The world must know of this remarkable find. That is why I turn to the internet. As I go through the papers I will present each new piece on this blog. I beg you, be careful how much you expose yourself to. After that long first night I spent going through the papers and transcribing them I felt the edges of my mind begin to fray.

The great S.W. has returned to delight the world. We have been waiting for him.