This new conceptual configuration explains why autograph manuscripts did not exist in large numbers until the second half of the 18th century. Today, they are preserved either in national libraries or archives, or in literary archives that have been assembled in Marbach in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, in Reading in the Author's Papers collection of the University Library's Special Collections , in Milan by Apice, or in France by the IMEC. Following the French example, if authors' manuscripts are not rare after 1750 (they exist for La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les liaisons dangereuses, Paul et Virginie, or Dialogues ou Rousseau juge de Jean Jacques , of which Rousseau made four autograph copies), the same cannot be said for works written earlier. Only exceptional circumstances explain the preservation of the autograph fragments of the Pensées that Pascal collected in bundles, but which were glued and reorganized on the pages of a notebook in the 18th century, making it difficult to consider them as the original manuscript of the work, or Montaigne's corrections and additions to the Essais , which have survived only because he put them on a copy of the 1588 edition, the famous "Bordeaux copy".
The only real exception to the rarity of author's manuscripts prior to the mid-eighteenth century are theater manuscripts, both in Spain and England. In Spain, there are numerous manuscripts written entirely or partly by the playwrights themselves. The National Library of Madrid holds seventeen autographs by Calderón and twenty-four by Lope de Vega. In England, the most spectacular example of a manuscript written by the playwrights themselves is The Booke of Sir Thomas More, a play probably written between 1592 and 1596 by Anthony Munday in collaboration with Chettle and Dekker, then revised by Heywood and Shakespeare, whose hand is said to be the D hand of the manuscript. If this is indeed the case, as paleographic, lexical and stylistic data suggest, the two passages Shakespeare added to the play (159 lines in Act II Scene III and the 21 lines of More's monologue that open Act III Scene I) would be his only two literary manuscripts.
Are these autograph manuscripts by early modern playwrights to be considered similar to those left by writers of the 19th and 20th centuries? Probably not, if we consider that they were often used as prompt books to organize performances, and as documents recording authorization to perform the play. Such is the case with the English manuscripts bearing the Master of Revels ' " license " and, sometimes, deletions or requests for rewriting , or with the autograph manuscript of Lope de Vega's " comedia " Carlos V en Francia (kept at the library of the University of Pennsylvania), where the " licencias " of the ecclesiastical authorities permitting its performance in various Spanish cities were recorded for more than fifteen years after the work's composition in 1604.
