The literary and dramatic qualities of the addition in Hand D to the manuscript of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore are outside of my brief here. I am not concerned with its artistic value per se, or with the identification of Hand D with Shakespeare or any other Elizabethan playwright. What is disturbing, I feel, is that those three pages have been from the beginning and are still beset, even at a merely textual approach, by a number of misunderstandings and misinterpretations. No doubt this is largely due to the state of the manuscript, with all the deletions, corrections, interlineations and additions in two separate hands which, following Greg’s critical edition of 1911 for the Malone Society, we are accustomed to call D and C. There have been since a number of more and more sophisticated and annotated diplomatic transcriptions of the text, beginning with Greg himself in the appendix to the collective volume Shakespeare’s Hand in the Play of ‘Sir Thomas More’ (Cambridge, 1923), reprinted in Peter Alexander’s Tudor Shakespeare (1951), Thomas Clayton (The ‘Shakespearean’ Addition to The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore, Shakespeare Studies Monographs, 1, Dubuque, Iowa, 1969), and finally G. Blakemore Evans (Riverside Shakespeare, Boston, 1974); but in spite of the fact that they provide in visual terms clear representations of the actual state of the manuscript, the necessary inclusion in them of all the alterations it originally underwent obscures to a certain extent a precise understanding of the intentions of D when he first drafted it.