Attributing Authorship to Bodleian MS Douce 171: A Seventeenth-Century Comedy by Arthur Wilson

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the anonymous dramatic fragment at the end of Bodleian Library, MS Douce 171, recently catalogued as ‘Comedy of Stella and Alexis’, is an authorial draft written by the seventeenth-century playwright Arthur Wilson (1595–1652). It does so through a careful consideration of the manuscript’s bibliographic features, as well as through palaeographical and stylistic comparison to Wilson’s extant plays and other documents in his hand. While scholars have long recognized the play’s existence, they have overlooked the identity of its author, in large part due to a neglect of the archival context in which the manuscript appears. This article not only assigns the play to a known early-modern dramatist, but also offers an exercise in attributing authorship to a theatrical document that gives very few hints about its origins.