Leslie Hotson

As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow, LESLIE HOTSON in 1924 visited the Record Office in London, and in a matter of weeks tracked down the murderer of Christopher Marlowe and the eyewitness account of the stabbing. Five years later—this time on a Guggenheim Fellowship — he brought to light “Shelley’s Lost Letters to Harriet.”In 1931, as Professor of English at Haverford, he published “ Shakespeare versus Shallow,”his discovery of Shakespeare’s quarrel and arrest. The results of another important detective case, the dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, appeared in the Atlantic in 1949. The illuminating article which follows was printed in the Sewanee Review last summer, and we are happy to bring it to the attention of Atlantic readers.

As a Sheldon Traveling Fellow, LESLIE HOTSON in 1924 visited the Record Office in London, and in a matter of weeks tracked down the murderer of Christopher Marlowe and the eyewitness account of the stabbing. Five years later — this time on a Guggenheim Fellowship — he brought to light “Shelley’s Lost Letters to Harriet.” In 1931, as Professor of English at Haverford, he published “Shakespeare versus Shallow,“ his discovery of Shakespeare’s quarrel and arrest. Now he has completed a fourth and most important detective case, the dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The paper which follows is drawn from his new book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and Other Essays, to be published by the Oxford University Press.

"This pirate—the greatest of his generation, and one whose name was babbled with terror in most of the Romance tongues, and horribly mispronounced into the bargain—was never captured, but lived and died a pirate king"