A lot of people wonder how much of a scholar Shakespeare was, what books he read and collected, and what became of them when he died. So I have come to Blackfriar’s—to the shop of the publisher and printer Richard Field. It is 1619, three years after Shakespeare’s death, and Richard Field is now Master of the Stationers’ Company.

It is a fair-sized and tidy shopfront and Master Field is a brisk and tidy gentleman, a bit on the smallish side, with alert dark eyes and an engaging smile—the sort of chap who could make a success of anything, you imagine. He sits me down by a corner window so he can keep an eye out for customers. Behind a heavy curtain at the end of the room I can hear evidence of the printing press at work. The shop itself is light and airy, the walls lined with handsome walnut bookcases with glass doors. Small occasional tables display open copies of the most prized editions as well as stacks of pamphlets.

JB: ‘They tell me you were Will Shakespeare’s oldest and closest friend.’

RF: ‘Well, I don’t know about closest—Dick Burbage might make a claim in that direction—but oldest friend, certainly: we went to school together. My father was a tanner and Will’s old man, John, was a master glover. He dealt in skins and hides as well as wool, so they had a few business interests in common. I lived round in Bridge Street, so most mornings Will and I would meet at the Market Cross and walk to school together. I was actually two and a half years older than Will but we shared a passion for the classics.’

JB: ‘How did you get into the publishing business?’

RF: ‘I always loved books and I didn’t fancy following my old man into the tanning trade, so I made my way to London and was lucky enough to find work with a man named Thomas Vautrollier, a top publisher. When the boss died I married his widow Jacqueline and inherited the business.’

JB: ‘Did you see a lot of young Shakespeare when he first came to London?’

RF: ‘My word yes. The Vautrolliers, who were French Huguenot refugees, had some Huguenot friends called the Mountjoys who lived in Silver Street—they used to make fancy hats for the ladies at court. When Will came to London he took lodgings with them. He was struggling to make a bob or two—acting small parts, patching up old plays and collaborating on new ones. The money all had to go back to Stratford to feed the wife and kids. But the Burbages over in Shoreditch looked after him and it didn’t take him long to make his mark. He was ambitious, competitive and a hard worker, not a tearaway like a lot of the other actors and writers I met. He spent a lot of time with us and the Mountjoys, so he picked up a fair bit of French—he had a good ear for languages.’

JB: ‘When was the first time you actually worked together?’

RF: ‘Well, it must have been back in 1593. It was a particularly bad plague year and all the theatres were closed down for twelve months or more. Will spent some time in Stratford but then he went to Titchfield, the home of his patron, the young Earl of Southampton. While he was there he wrote Venus and Adonis and dedicated it to Southampton. That was a smart move. It was a fantastic success—I reprinted it nine times in Will’s lifetime and six more since he died . . . Unheard of! They reckon every student in Cambridge had a copy of Venus and Adonis under his pillow. Southampton was, of course, terribly chuffed, so Will dedicated his next poem, The Rape of Lucrece, to him too. That had eight reprints.’

JB: ‘It looks as if Shakespeare was thinking of giving up theatre and becoming a gentleman poet?’

RF: ‘He may have been tempted for a moment or two, but the theatre was where his heart was. He’d rather be with a bunch of actors than be the pet monkey to a lot of courtiers. In fact he came back from Titchfield a new man, quite recharged.’

JB: ‘What was the reason for that?’

RF: ‘There was this character called John Florio who’d been hired to teach the Earl Italian. He taught Will a bit on the side and let him use his library. He had a vast collection of Italian novellas, poems and plays and probably took Will to task over his poor knowledge of Italian geography. Anyway, Will’s Italian plays got a lot better after meeting John Florio. But it seems that not all of Will’s time was spent in the study: Florio had a very pretty wife, a clever lass from Somerset. Some people reckon she is the so-called Dark Lady of the Sonnets and that Will was bonking her while borrowing her husband’s books. Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past him.’

JB: ‘So when Shakespeare settled again in London was he a regular book buyer?’

RF: ‘Certainly not from me. I’d never call Will a tight-fisted man, but he was frugal; I guess as a jobbing actor you learn to be. And, let’s face it, books are expensive. Not many people build up a library. Anyway, Will had nowhere to keep them—always moving, sometimes to avoid the tax man, back and forth between London and Stratford . . .’

JB: ‘But surely some people must buy books; you seem to have a thriving business here . . . ?’

RF: ‘Oh yes, there are a few great collectors, thank God. Now take Ben Jonson, for instance . . . Ben feels cheated that he never got to university—he’d been apprenticed to a bricklayer. So he set out to become more erudite than the best of them and built up a personal library. He collected over two hundred books and on each one he’d write ‘Sui Ben: Jonson liber’—Ben Jonson, his book. He’d read them slowly and carefully, underlining and making notes. He was devastated when he lost the lot in a fire, but he straightaway started rebuilding it—buying new books and buying back old ones he’d sold when he was short of cash. But a library of that size is quite rare.’

JB: ‘So would you say that Jonson was a greater scholar than Shakespeare?’

RF: ‘Oh certainly—but Will never aspired to that sort of erudition. He didn’t need to. We all had our Horace and Virgil, our Plutarch and Seneca soundly beaten into us in grammar school. Any other information he needed as a playwright he could pick up on the run. Will wasn’t a bookish man; he used books but he didn’t hoard them. Once he’d got what he wanted out of a book he’d sell it or give it away. Besides, he had free access to Southampton’s library and later my Lord Pembroke’s, when he became the patron of Will’s company. He was a generous man, Pembroke: I know for a fact that he used to give Ben Jonson twenty pounds every New Year’s Day to buy books—that’s a lot of money.’

JB: ‘Did Shakespeare borrow books from you as well?’

RF: ‘He did indeed. I never begrudged him; he didn’t keep them long and always returned them in good nick.’

JB: ‘What are some of the books you loaned him?’

RF: ‘Well . . . let’s have a look on the shelves here . . . Now here’s one: Arthur Brooke’s Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet. It’s a dry-as-dust old morality tale—you know, wicked children crossing their parents’ wishes and so on . . . But it gave Will the plot for his play. Here’s an interesting one: Palace of Pleasure by William Painter. It’s got a hundred stories from the Greek, Italian and French, including twelve of Boccaccio’s Decameron yarns. Everyone says this book was ransacked to furnish the playhouses of London. They all pinched their plots from it. Will pinched the plot of All’s Well.’

JB: ‘Audiences didn’t mind that they weren’t being given original stories?’

RF: ‘On the contrary: they liked the old stories best. With at least one new play coming out every week you wouldn’t want to buy a pig in a poke!’

JB: ‘But Shakespeare did make up some new stories . . .’

RF: ‘Not that many. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s all his. So is The Tempest and Merry Wives of Windsor. The rest he picked up and adapted. On this shelf we have more Italian works—Bandello: (Twelfth Night owes a bit to him); Fiorentino (The Merchant of Venice); Cinthion’s Hundred Stories—look here: ‘There was a Moor of Venice’ . . . Ah, excuse me, there’s a customer . . .’

Master Field steps outside his front door to converse with a prosperous-looking gent in a short cloak and black velvet cap—a courtier, perhaps. As they seem quite engrossed, I take a stroll to the back of the shop and take a peek behind the heavy arras curtain that divides the shop from the publishing house. It’s a hive of industry back there.

The compositor is busy digging around for the leaden pieces of type and arranging them, letter by letter, in trays which he then sets in rows and places in frames. The pointer inks them over and an apprentice turns the heavy screws that press the inked frames down onto large sheets of paper. The printing press casts off the sheets which are collected by another apprentice and folded to make the pages. He hands them one by one to a proofreader who scans them for typos and misspellings and returns them to the compositor to make corrections before they are handed over for stitching and binding. It all looks very calm, focused and well organised.

I turn to find Master Field looking over my shoulder and observing his printing house with satisfaction. We resume our conversation:

RF: ‘Will developed a very particular pattern of movement on the days he went to perform at the Globe,’ he informs me as we sit down again. ‘He had to get there before two o’clock, so you’d catch him leaving his lodgings round about nine, after breakfast. He was staying with the Mountjoys, as I mentioned, corner of Muggle and Silver streets. He’d set off down Aldergate to St Paul’s with all its bookstalls and that’s where he’d spend the next two or three hours before walking along Cheapside, down Lombard Street, then down Gracious Street and across London Bridge to the Globe. Some days he’d catch a wherry from Puddle Dock or Dowgate . . . You’d see him standing there in St Paul’s churchyard, browsing, moving from stall to stall, picking up book after book and skimming them, the eyes moving quickly up and down the pages, the hands mechanically turning them.

‘Occasionally he’d take out his tables and make a note, but mostly he could absorb and remember whatever he needed. He had a prodigious memory; well, we all did to some extent. We’d been taught to recite whole books by rote at school, and Will was an actor who had to carry up to twenty different roles in his head at any given time. Plays were revived at short notice without much rehearsal time, so you couldn’t afford to forget any of your major parts.’

JB: ‘How many books had he when he died, and what happened to them?’

RF: ‘Hard to say—maybe thirty or forty. The rest he’d sold or given away or returned to their rightful owners . . . He hung on to his Ovid of course—that was the favourite of all his books; and he had some Plautus and Seneca in Latin. He was fond of Chaucer and had a copy of his Troilus and Criseyde as well as John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, which gave him the story of Pericles. By the by, Gower’s buried over there in Southwark Cathedral, along with Will’s brother Edmund; lovely old monument—have you seen it?’

JB: ‘Indeed I have—any more books you can remember?’

RF: ‘He held on to his old Geneva Bible but probably more for reference than out of piety. And Florio gave him a copy of his translation of Montaigne’s essays, which Will devoured. He was very attached to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander too, and Sidney’s Arcadia, where he got his Gloucester plot in King Lear.’

JB: ‘How about Hamlet? Where did he come across that one?’

RF: ‘I know he read Belleforest’s Histoire Tragiques—I’ve got a copy here. But whether he used that or an older version of the play itself is hard to say.’

JB: ‘Were there any authors who had a particularly strong influence on him, apart from Marlowe?’

RF: ‘Well of course when he was younger he was smitten with John Lyly’s Euphues—everyone was. Really fancy, clever writing, full of decorations and conceits. Everybody imitated it. Lyly was the man of the hour. But the fashion wore off; people got tired of it and Will sent it up rotten in Love’s Labour’s Lost—people tying themselves in knots with fancy language.

‘Now look at this battered old playscript—it’s Pandosto by Robert Greene. He was the one who attacked Will as an “upstart crow” when he first came to London. But Will used Pandosto as a source for his Winter’s Tale—so either he’d forgotten the insult, or didn’t give a toss, or else he may have been exacting sweet revenge—who knows?

‘And look at this—it’s a first edition in English of Don Quixote—Will was much taken with it and used a chapter of it for his play Cardenio. Did you know that he and Cervantes died the same day? How about that? The two greatest writers of their day . . . you wouldn’t read about it.

‘One unusual book he kept was this one by Sam Harsnett: A Declaration of Popish Impostures. I guess part of its fascination may have been its denunciation of Father Robert Debdale, whom Will knew from his school days. He was a Stratford man, a neighbour of the Hathaways, went to Douai to be trained for the Catholic priesthood and was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn. It lists papist superstitions and the names of demons such as Hoppedance, Flibberdigibbet, Modo and Mahu pop up in King Lear.

‘And when he died? Well, as I said, there weren’t that many books to leave . . . I kept one myself, this little one here—it’s pretty worn and well-thumbed as you can see. It’s his Ovid:

“Thou know’st that we two went to school together;

Even for that, our love of old . . .”

I don’t think he’d have minded.’