The “Art of Scraping”: Knife Erasures in Seventeenth Century English Manuscript Plays

This article investigates an erasure technique present in the seventeenth century English manuscript play, The Royal Merchant. It maps out a brief history of the modern scholarly awareness of this European scribal practice, then compares examples of knife erasure in The Royal Merchant with examples in the survey I completed of over 40 seventeenth century English manuscript plays from the Folger and British Libraries.