How a surprising Shakespeare discovery was found in a letter used as scrap paper

A 400-year-old Shakespeare mystery has gotten a major shake-up.

In a paper published in the journal Shakespeare on April 24 — the day after the Bard’s 461st birthday, if you happened to have candles and an extremely large cake on hand — Professor Matthew Steggle, Chair in Early Modern English Literature at University of Bristol, presented research that finds potential significance in the scraps of a letter first discovered in 1978.

Incredibly, the letter scraps were found by accident...