None of Shakespeare’s friends and associates left behind a description of his library. Nor is there a record of it being dispersed at the time of his death. His will refers neither to books nor manuscripts. In fact, as we’ve already heard, it gives no sign of a literary career at all, or even a literate one. Contemporary dramatists such as Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe all left behind plays in manuscript. No Shakespeare playscript, though, has ever been found. (Part of the manuscript of a play about Sir Thomas More has been attributed to Shakespeare, but the part is small and the attribution contentious.)
We do, however, know a few things about Shakespeare’s relationship with books. He wrote plays according to a method that has been labelled plagiaristic; ‘appropriative’ is a more polite term, and historically more accurate. Quantities of prior plays, poems, novels, histories and almanacs fed into his writing. The breadth of his sources is exceptional; they number in the hundreds and span diverse eras, countries and genres. By some means, Shakespeare had contact with most or all of these source texts.
During his career, a network of libraries linked bookmen to one another. Jonson, for example, used Francis Bacon’s library, and John Florio used the Earl of Southampton’s. Shakespeare probably knew John Bretchgirdle’s clergyman’s library in Stratford and printer Richard Field’s working library in London. Shakespeare referred to libraries as ‘nurser[ies] of arts’ (in The Taming of the Shrew) and characterised them as treasure troves and cure-alls. Titus Andronicus invites Marcus Andronicus and Lavinia to ‘Come, and take choice of all my Library, / And so beguile thy sorrow’. The Tempest seems to have been written late in Shakespeare’s life. Many scholars have read it as his theatrical farewell, and the sorcerer Prospero as his alter ego. Prospero tells Miranda, ‘Me, poor man, my Library was dukedom large enough’, and later confesses: ‘Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me, from my own Library, / With volumes that I prize above my dukedom.’
Shakespeare’s plays and poems reveal a close familiarity with the physicality of books and the mechanics of their production. The sonnets abound with such references:
‘Thou shoulds’t print more, nor let that copy die’ (Sonnet 11) ‘So should my papers, yellowed with their age / Be scorned’ (Sonnet 17)
‘Show me your image in some antique book’ (Sonnet 59) ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright’ (Sonnet 66) ‘The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear’ (Sonnet 77)
Book terminology also permeates the plays. In Romeo and Juliet, Lady Capulet tells Juliet about the handsome suitor, Count Paris: ‘This precious book of love, this unbound lover, / To beautify him, only lacks a cover.’ In As You Like It, Orlando exclaims: ‘O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books / And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character.’
Love’s Labour’s Lost contains book-making terms such as printing, ink, lead, letters, text, formes, numbering, pencils, superscripts, bookmen, sheets (of paper) and the coloured letters of illuminated manuscripts. In Antony and Cleopatra there are references to abstract, almanac, period and ‘nonpareil’ (a size of printer’s type). In The Merry Wives of Windsor we find second edition and madrigals; in Hamlet, index, parchment, preface, volume and writing; in As You Like It, contents, indents and the printer’s devil (a printer’s errand boy); and in Pericles, books, points, calendars and quoins (wedges for locking up type). All’s Well that Ends Well adds publisher and ‘finisher’, a tradesman in a bindery. In The Taming of the Shrew (act 4, scene 4), Shakespeare makes a racy joke about copyright:
Lucentio: And what of all this?
Biondello: I cannot tell, except they are busied about a counterfeit assurance. Take you assurance of her, ‘Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum’ [i.e. ‘With exclusive rights to print’]. To the church, take the Priest, Clerk, and some sufficient honest witnesses.
In addition to such material from the poems and plays, doubtful oral traditions have come down to us. One anecdote concerns Ben Jonson, with whom Shakespeare seems to have maintained a complex relationship of mutual affection and perpetual jousting. The anecdote sees Jonson ‘in a necessary-house’ (in other words, on the lavatory) ‘with a book in his hand reading it very attentively’. Shakespeare notices Jonson thus engaged and says he is sorry Jonson’s memory is so bad he cannot ‘sh-te without a book’.
If Shakespeare had a library, we can readily visualise its contents. Apart from working drafts, along with manuscripts and copies of his principal literary and historical sources, he probably owned reference works: writing guides, dictionaries and foreign-language instruction manuals. Examples of the latter include Claude de Sainliens’ A Treatise for Declining of Verbes (1590); Sainliens’ The French Littleton: A Most Easie, Perfect and Absolute Way to Learne the Frenche Tongue (1591); William Stepney’s The Spanish Schoole-master (1591); John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica (1593); and G. Delamonthe’s The French Alphabet, Teaching In a Very Short Tyme, by a Most Easie Way, to Pronounce French Naturally, to Reade it Perfectly, to Write it Truely, and to Speake it Accordingly (1592). All these titles were printed or published by the Stratford-born bookman Richard Field.
Shakespeare is thought to have written at least thirty-eight plays, two epic poems and 154 sonnets. As many as seventy Shakespeare quarto editions were produced during his lifetime, by a variety of publishers and printers (this includes plays that went into multiple editions), and Shakespeare probably retained copies of these. Some quarto plays identified Shakespeare as the author, some did not, and none did so before 1598. In that year, quarto editions of RichardII and RichardIII named him as author; and the quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost was issued as ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere’. The latter quarto was published at the ‘Shoppe in the Pultrie’, a street historically associated with poulterers. The 1609 quarto editions of Pericles and Troilus and Cressida stated they were written by William Shakespeare. Some of his plays, though, continued to appear anonymously after 1598. The 1599 Romeo and Juliet quarto is an example.
The same plays appeared under different titles. Much Ado About Nothing, for example, was registered and performed as Benedick and Beatrice. Twelfth Night was also known as Malvolio. (The comical part of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was separately printed in quarto, and was acted under the title Bottom the Weaver.) With the exception of Othello, from 1622, all the pre-Folio quartos were first published before Shakespeare retired to Stratford, in about 1611.
Of the many hundreds of book owners I’ve studied, the overwhelming majority left behind evidence of their ownership—bookplates, book-labels, signatures, marginal notes, manicules, inscriptions, imprecations. That is the case today and it was true, too, of book collectors in Shakespeare’s day. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors often wrote their names on title pages or other leaves of their books. John Bretchgirdle was vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. He probably baptised the infant William Shakespeare, and certainly had one of the best libraries in town. On each of his title pages, Bretchgirdle wrote ‘Jo. Bretchgyrdles Book’, along with details of where he bought the book. Edward Alleyn wrote his name twice in his books, once on the title page and once on the verso of the last leaf. Among other Shakespeare contemporaries who were also book-markers, Ann Raynor used a tidy and legible script to sign her books on the inside of the front cover, while Humphrey Dyson ink-stamped the date on his books in a manner as idiosyncratic as a signature.
Apart from writing ‘Will: Boothby’ on his title pages, Sir William Boothby had his books bound in armorial calf, goatskin and vellum. A folio volume from his library, now in a private collection, is bound in calf with raised bands that divide the spine into even compartments, each one featuring Boothby’s lion’s-paw crest stamped in gold. The sixteenth-century book collector Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, also had his books bound in personalised leather covers. Those bindings were decorated with his initials and his coat of arms—a muzzled bear chained to a ragged staff—stamped in gilt on the upper cover. Dudley’s home was Kenilworth Castle, near Stratford-upon-Avon.
Mystery and controversy surround the Shakespeare family arms and motto. In 1596 the College of Heralds granted a coat of arms to John Shakespeare. Most scholars believe the College was responding to an application from William Shakespeare in his father’s name. Unlike John, his son could afford the steep cost and possessed the steep ambition to apply for a crest. The Shakespeare application was not smooth sailing; it had to be submitted more than once. A supplementary request to combine the crest with that of the Arden family was rejected.
The application was so controversial that the Shakespeare arms were cited as a factor in the 1602 complaint by a heraldry official that coats of arms were being granted to undeserving commoners. The Shakespeares’ application does appear to have exaggerated their wealth and over-egged their connection to the better sorts of Ardens, who had lived in the district since at least 1438. The Shakespeares may also have paid a bribe in lieu of proof of their noble lineage. They could not prove, for example, that a warrior ancestor had defended Henry VII—because he almost certainly had not. Nevertheless, William Shakespeare was soon referring to himself as a ‘gentleman’.
The final ‘letters patent’ version of the Shakespeare family arms has been lost, but we do have drafts and a detailed description: ‘Gold, on a Bend, Sables, a Speare of the first Steeled Argent. And for his creast or cognizaunce a falcon, his winges displayed Argent standing on a wreath of his colours.’ Variant versions add a helmet and tassels. The spear was an unavoidable inclusion (and, in gold and silver, an aspirational one). Complementing the arms was the motto, Non sanz droict, ‘Not without right’. The claim, sometimes made, that Shakespeare used this motto on many of his documents is patently false. On nearly all the surviving documents the motto is absent. It seems to have been composed specifically for the arms application. (An alternative theory, not widely accepted, is that the motto is not a motto at all but a record of the application’s initial rejection—Non, sanz droict, ‘No, without right’, the comma making all the difference.)
Both the arms and the motto quickly drew ridicule. Pretentious characters populate Ben Jonson’s The Poetaster. Pompous Pantalabus is a writer and social climber who ‘takes up all’ and claims to be a ‘gent’man’. Crispinus, the ‘parcel-poet’ who made fun of Shakespeare’s hyphen, boasts about his own coat of arms:
Chloe: Are you a gentleman born?
Crispinus: That I am, lady; you shall see mine arms if’t please you.
Chloe: No, your legs do sufficiently show you are a gentleman born, sir: for a man born upon little legs is always a gentleman born.
Crispinus: Yet, I pray you, vouchsafe the sight of my arms, Mistress; for I bear them about me, to have ’em seen. [Showing Chloe a paper] My name is Crispinus, or Cri-spinas indeed; which is well expressed in my arms, a face crying in chief, and beneath it a bloody toe, between three thorns pungent.
(This suggests another Theory of the Hyphen: a symbol of the Elizabethan nouveau riche.)
Jonson was even more explicit in Every Man out of his Humour (1600). Sogliardo (a rustic clown) tells Sir Puntarvolo (a foolish knight) and Carlo (a jester) how proud he is of his new coat of arms (act 3, scene 1):
Sogliardo: I’ faith, I thank God. I can write myself a gentleman now; here’s my patent, it cost me thirty pounds, by this breath.
Puntarvolo: A very fair coat, well charged and full of armory.
Sogliardo: Nay, it has as much variety of colours in it, as you have seen a coat have; how like you the crest, sir?
Puntarvolo: I understand it not well, what is’t?
Sogliardo: Marry, sir, it is your boar without a head, rampant. A boar without a head, that’s very rare!
Carlo: Ay, and rampant too! troth, I commend the herald’s wit, he has deciphered him well: a swine without a head, without brain, wit, anything indeed, ramping to gentility…
Sogliardo: On a chief argent, a boar’s head proper, between two ann’lets sables.
Carlo (to Puntarvolo): ’Slud, it’s a hog’s cheek and puddings, in a pewter field, this.
Sogliardo: How like you ’hem, signior?
Puntarvolo: Let the word be, ‘Not without mustard’: Your crest is very rare, sir.
The comical conversion of ‘Not without right’ into ‘Not without mustard’ may be a reference not only to Shakespeare in general but to Shakespeare in particular, via an allusion to II Henry IV (act 2, scene 4): ‘He a good wit? Hang him, baboon! His wit’s as thick as Tewkesbury mustard; there’s no more conceit in him than is in a mallet.’
The search for Shakespeare’s library provides an intriguing perspective on his purchase of arms. Was he assembling a collection of books that he would clothe in beautiful calfskin and morocco? Was he planning to display his heraldic crest on the books’ front covers and spines? Did ‘gentle Shakespeare’, in other words, yearn for a proper gentleman’s library? Notwithstanding Jonson’s lampoon, every connoisseur of leather-bound tomes would swap a limb for an original volume displaying Shakespeare’s crest. With my wife, Fiona, I’ve searched far and wide for just such a volume.
A few of our finds are exciting and suggestive. Perhaps the most intriguing one was previously owned by the Lane family. A theological work by Agostino Tornielli, it was published in Milan in 1610, then shipped to England where, in 1615, it was bound in brown calfskin in a distinctive style. The book’s spine is divided by raised bands into eight compartments decorated with golden sprays of laurel. The cover panels feature a rectangular decoration with, in the centre, an image blocked in gilt showing the tragic story, from Ovid and used by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of Pyramus and Thisbe. (The story also influenced Romeo and Juliet.) In the image, Pyramus lies on the ground, expired, and Thisbe ends her own life by spearing herself on an upright sword. A lion flees but Cupid stays to watch the spectacle.
Apart from the handsome leather cover, the edges of the text-block are beautifully decorated with elaborate patterning: snail and lion motifs within laurel wreaths on a field of gilt ‘fleurons’, or printers’ flowers. Three other bindings in the exact same style, with the exact same gilt block, have also been documented. All four volumes date from before the year of Shakespeare’s death, except for one which was bound in that year. The latter volume, bound in black turkey, is especially notable because it is a copy of Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616), a book closely connected to Shakespeare.
The owner of the four bindings is not known, but there are a few hints. Do the fleurons signify a literary career? That would fit the depiction of Pyramus and Thisbe, which suggests a deep interest in literature (the owner chose a literary motif over a royal, ecclesiastical, political or military one) and possibly a deep interest in Shakespearean literature. In tiny letters, the cover image is signed ‘I. S.’ No one knows whether the initials are those of the block-maker, the bookbinder, the bookseller, the book’s owner, a patron or a dedicatee. No one has stepped forward to claim them. One person with those initials is ‘Iohannes Shakespeare’, William Shakespeare’s father, a man who made part of his living by dealing in leather hides, no doubt some of them for bookbinding.
Sotheby’s sold the book in 1926. Maggs Brothers of London bought it then sold it to Henry Clay Folger. It is now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, not attributed to any early owner.
Apart from this intriguing foursome, Fiona and I found many other armorial bindings from the right period. Not one of them, though, displays Shakespeare’s crest. Not one of them is conclusively traceable to his library.
Nor have we found a Shakespeare bookplate. A German innovation, the idea of using printed pictorial labels to link books to their owners dates from the mid-fifteenth century. The earliest English armorial bookplate—a woodcut plate commemorating a gift from Sir Nicholas Bacon—dates from 1574. Though slow to take off (the next two English examples date from 1585) they gradually became more popular, and by the end of the seventeenth century were de rigueur for English ladies and gentlemen. Shakespeare may well have had one made, featuring his crest and motto.
Bookplate or no bookplate, tracing the provenance of bindings is difficult. A longstanding principle of bibliography is that bindings are, strictly speaking, not part of the books they protect and adorn. Books, according to this view, begin and end with their preliminary and terminal leaves. Binding scholarship, and detailed descriptions of bindings in catalogues, are recent phenomena. Researchers looking today at early catalogues are lucky if the type of leather is briefly identified. Such identifications are usually just a single word, indicating the type of animal that provided the hide—‘calf’, ‘goatskin’, ‘vellum’ (a beautiful and hardy form of calfskin)—or the approximate geography of where the leather came from—‘morocco’, ‘turkey’, ‘russia’.
The risk of remboîtage poses another problem for the study of bindings and their provenance. Remboîtage is a type of fakery in which a desirable binding is removed from an unremarkable book and then added to one that is more valuable or exciting. Crude examples of this crime are easy to spot: the binding is too large or too tight; the wear and tear do not match up; the binding style pre-dates the book’s publication date; or there is another hint of mischief. But skilful pairings can fool even the most accomplished specialists.
The sad case of John Blacker demonstrates that, in the collection and connoisseurship of bookbindings, there are far worse crimes than remboîtage. In the 1870s and ’80s, Blacker bought a spectacular collection of beautiful Renaissance bindings from the English bookseller Bernard Quaritch. Quaritch in turn sourced the bindings from a Frenchman, Monsieur J. Caulin. Crafted by masters of the bookbinding art, the bindings had been commissioned by ‘every important French sixteenth-century collector: Grolier, Mahieu, Anne de Montmorency; French kings and their wives and mistresses, François I, Henri II and III, Catherine de Medici, Diane de Poitiers; popes and cardinals’. The texts inside were mundane and not very valuable, but the bindings lifted them into the rare-book stratosphere. They became Blacker’s most precious treasures. To guard them from light and dust, he stored them in custom-made, velvet-lined boxes and ‘coffrets’, all of which were perfumed and some of which could only be opened with golden keys.
Utterly obsessed, Blacker began to treat his collection as though it were a reliquary, or a harem. At every opportunity he sat alone in his dining room with one of the books, gloating: ‘If anyone came into the room he would throw a square of silk over the book to prevent it being seen.’ The library was thought to be worth seventy thousand pounds. That is, until Caulin was exposed as the notorious forger Louis Hagué. Disastrously, not a single one of the Caulin–Hagué bindings was genuine. Though Blacker discovered the fraud himself on a visit to Blois, his first reaction was blind denial; the bindings just had to be real. Even after Hagué came to London and confessed, Blacker refused to let go of the illusion. He died in April 1896, trapped in an obstinate, optimistic madness. In 1897 the books were bundled up and sold at Sotheby’s as ‘A Remarkable Collection of Books in Magnificent Modern Bindings, formed by an Amateur (Recently Deceased)’. The proceeds totalled a mere £1907. The silver coffrets were more valuable than the books they housed.
Partly because of the dispersal of the Blacker collection and Hagué’s own library, fake bindings now turn up surprisingly often. Though rare-book librarians are permanently on the lookout, fakes have infiltrated major collections. The Folger Shakespeare Library contains several forgeries including, on a 1555 volume by Conrad Gesner, a fake ‘Catherine de Medici’ binding by none other than Louis Hagué. Let us take care, then, when searching for Shakespeare’s bindings.
If he was indeed assembling a fine library, we know a little about what his books might have looked like. In the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century, the rise of Puritanism shifted bookbinding fashions towards simplicity and austerity; rich decoration was a radical and dangerous act. But in Shakespeare’s day the most delightful bindings were sumptuously decorated with gilt ornamentation: stars, dots, blocks, chevrons, cartouches, centrepieces, arabesques, ellipses, flowers, diamonds, rolls and scrolls. Rooms of books bound in this way look like collections of jewels.
Thinking about Shakespearean bookbindings sparks off other exciting thoughts. Robert Southey’s ‘Cottonian Library’ consisted for the most part of books bound by his daughters and their friends in floral cotton remnants. The delightful homecraft bindings make the books look soft, fresh, warm and eminently embraceable. Like Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare probably was entitled to keep his own acting wardrobe. Imagine Shakespeare’s children covering his books in fragments of the knotted and embroidered costumes he wore when playing the Ghost in Hamlet, and that his children and grandchildren wore when playing games of Scaramouches. What would such an artefact be worth? What would it tell us about Shakespeare’s life and character?
Following in Bretchgirdle’s footsteps, Reverend John Ward was Stratford’s vicar from 1662 to 1681. An anecdotal tradition, dating back at least to Ward’s day and possibly to Ward himself, speaks of a Stratford reunion between Shakespeare and Jonson late in the Bard’s life. At that time, Shakespeare was enjoying a respectable retirement. Jonson was getting older, too. As a young man, his skin had been remarkably clear and fair; by late middle age, though, a life of hard drinking had taken its toll. Jonson described himself in geographical terms as having a ‘mountain belly’ and a ‘rocky face’. John Aubrey claimed the geography was wonky; Jonson ‘had one eye lower than tother and bigger’. Thomas Dekker found other similes for Jonson’s face: it was like ‘a bruised, rotten russet apple, or a badly pock-marked brass warming pan’.
According to the reunion tradition, the two playwrights went drinking together and reprised the ‘wit-combats’ they had so energetically engaged in at London’s Mermaid Tavern during their glory days. Shakespeare was living out his retirement at New Place, the grand home he bought a decade earlier. In the century after his death, the building would be substantially rebuilt, and then entirely demolished. Surviving drawings, though, show a sizable three-storey edifice with five gables and multiple outbuildings. Plenty of room for a large private library. (Legal documents from 1635 and 1637 refer to the home having ‘a study of books’.) During Jonson’s Stratford sojourn, did he visit the library at New Place, perhaps before the old rivals went out drinking? Did they spend a few moments swapping stories, surrounded by the artefacts of Shakespeare’s literary life? Did Jonson see bindings decorated with Shakespeare’s crest? Could he hold his tongue, or did he just have to say something about wanting to be a gent’man?