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The article discusses the divided opinions regarding the scribal copy of dramatist William Shakespeare's "Richard II." The article adds that scholars have been undecided as to whether the compositor's copy for the First Quarto (QI) of "Richard II (1597)," consisted of a manuscript (foul or fair) in Shakespeare's hand or was a scribal transcript in the hand of another. The stage directions in QI are authorial in character, and the text is thought to derive directly from Shakespeare's foul papers or from a non-theatrical transcript of them. The relative absence of the inconsistencies, confusions, and Shakespearian spellings associated with foul-paper texts leads to the suspicion that a transcript intervened. Furthermore, the article presents a couple of other views regarding it.

The article presents information on British Library MS Harley 78 and the manuscripts of John Shirley. British Library MS Harley 78 is an assembly of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts brought together by John Stow and well known for its inclusion of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and many other authors. It further inform that folios 80-83 contain a short advisory a prose treatise and is followed by a copy of Chaucer's "Complaint Unto Pity" and the "Complaint to His Lady" rewritten in the hand of the fifteenth-century at scribe and bibliophile John Shirley.

The article reports that recent studies of the copying and transmission of some late medieval spiritual writings, and in particular of Walter Hilton's "The Scale of Perfection," have emphasized both the role played by the Carthusians and the London provenance of many of the Scale manuscripts. There seems to have been something of a Hilton industry in London. so much so that manuscripts produced there have been described as forming the "London group." M. B. Parkes believes that the hand of one Stephen Doddesham, scribe and monk of Sheen Charterhouse, is to be seen at work in British Library MS Additional 10053. He gives no folio references to the Additional manuscript, but the hand he has in mind there is in fact the same as that which copied a portion of the Scale in MS Huntington 112.