If there is a Shakespeare library waiting to be found, the next step is to go looking for it. But where to look? What happened to Shakespeare’s books after his death?
Many possibilities present themselves. The books could have passed to Shakespeare’s surviving family and direct descendants. Rumours have long circulated that his Bible and other relics passed to John Hart, a chairmaker and descendant of Shakespeare’s sister Joan, who died in 1646. Or the books may have passed via his daughter Susanna and her husband Dr Hall to their daughter, Elizabeth, Shakespeare’s last surviving descendant. Elizabeth’s marriage to Sir John Bernard conferred on her a title, Lady Bernard, but no children. Her possessions may have passed to her executor, Edward Bagley, or to Sir John’s daughters from an earlier marriage. (One of Lady Bernard’s belongings has been identified: a copy of the 1599 ‘Breeches’ Bible, tenderly inscribed to her husband.)
Alternatively, Shakespeare’s books might have passed to the Arden branch of the family, or to the Sheldons of Beoley. (Ralph Sheldon’s wife, Anne Throckmorton, was sister-in-law to Edward Arden, one of the ‘better’ Ardens.) Sheldon’s sister Anne Sheldon Daston was the mother-in-law of Ralph Huband, from whom William Shakespeare purchased a lease of tithes in 1605. As author and bookseller Alan Keen has pointed out, Ralph Sheldon’s grandson, William Sheldon, owned the Burdett-Coutts copy of the 1623 First Folio; perhaps he had other Shakespeare items as well.
The books may instead have passed to John Hemmings, Shakespeare’s fellow actor and ostensibly a co-editor of the First Folio. Hemmings died in 1630. Seven of his children survived into adulthood. One, a son named William, lived until 1653. The Hemmings daughters married into the Atkins, Smith, Sheppard, Merefield and Ostler families. These marriages produced descendants who may have inherited Hemmings’ ‘accompt-books and theatrical contracts’, and perhaps part or all of Shakespeare’s library.
Or the books could have fallen into the hands of Thomas Russell, Esq., whom Shakespeare appointed, along with Francis Collins, to oversee his will. The son of a member of parliament, Russell was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. In or around 1596, he moved to Alderminster Manor, about four miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. (In 1596 he sued William Parry, a Stratford butcher, for an unpaid debt.) Shakespeare bequeathed him five pounds. Russell almost certainly had both a library and an appreciation of Shakespeare’s literary status, whatever it was. He knew people connected with Shakespeare’s theatrical career, including Anne Digges. (Leonard Digges wrote a memorial poem for the preliminary pages of the First Folio. His widowed mother Anne knew John Hemmings as well as Henry Condell, purportedly Hemmings’ First Folio co-editor.)
The Russells were well connected, including to Sir John Harington (godson of Queen Elizabeth and author of The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596)), to Tobie Matthew senior (Dean of Christ Church at Oxford and Archbishop of York) and to Tobie Matthew junior (close friend of Sir Francis Bacon and John Donne, and retainer of the Earl of Essex). Any one of these Russell connections is a possible transmission route for part or all of the library. These and other promising chains of provenance would be followed when, in the eighteenth century, the searchers first set out.
Nicholas Rowe, the first author to attempt a biography of Shakespeare, was among the earliest searchers. His brief biography is full of errors, and as a searcher, too, he did not get far. He advertised for people to come forward with Shakespearean documents. It seems few people did; in writing his book, Rowe relied heavily on anecdotal evidence, much of it apocryphal, some of it collected in Stratford-upon-Avon on Rowe’s behalf by the aged Shakespearean actor Thomas Betterton. Apart from speaking to locals, Betterton consulted the parish register at Holy Trinity Church, using methods that account for large and small inaccuracies in Rowe’s Some Account of the Life &c of Mr William Shakespear (1709).
The next we hear of a search on the ground is the story of Reverend James Wilmot. Though Wilmot’s search is said to have been extraordinarily thorough, and though it revealed a great deal, both it and a subsequent search by members of the Ireland family were not entirely satisfactory.
Born in Warwick in 1726, Reverend James Wilmot became a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, before leading an eminent life in London. He befriended parliamentarians and came to know the literary men of the day such as Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne and Thomas Warton, the poet laureate. Retiring in about 1781, he became rector at the village of Barton-on-the-Heath, sixteen miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. In his retirement he continued to pursue his literary interests. With the help of a London bookseller he augmented his library and strengthened its Elizabethan and Jacobean nucleus, especially the writings of Shakespeare and Bacon. When the bookseller asked him to emulate Rowe and write a Shakespeare biography, Wilmot went to Stratford in search of the traces he expected to see left behind by a writer of Shakespeare’s stature. He interviewed townsfolk and conducted other research in and around the town. The people of Stratford regaled him with colourful local folklore, like the story about the cakes that hailed down one Shrovetide and injured hapless pedestrians. And the one about the church tower wickedly removed by the devil. And the one about the unusually tall and ugly man who threatened to bewitch the cattle of local farmers. Why, Wilmot wondered, had Shakespeare not used these fascinating characters and stories in his plays? Most importantly for Wilmot’s search, the local people told him Shakespeare, the son not of a glover or leather-trader but an illiterate butcher, was:
at best a Country clown at the time he went to seek his fortune in London, that he could never have had any school learning, and that that fact would render it impossible that he could be received as a friend and equal by those of culture and breeding who alone could by their intercourse make up for the deficiencies of his youth.
Thoroughly, painstakingly, meticulously, the reverend searched for Shakespeare’s books and manuscripts. Interrogating bookcases, book chests, drawers, closets and cabinets, Wilmot inspected every private library and every holding of letters and documents within fifty miles of Stratford. In Warwickshire his search radius encompassed Charlecote Park, home of the Lucy family; Coughton Court, home of the Throckmortons; Ragley Hall, home of the Conways and ancestral seat of the Marquess of Hertford; Baddesley Clinton, home of the Ferrers; Packwood House, the Fetherstons; Upton House, the Childs; Farnborough Hall, the Holbechs; and Arbury Hall, the Newdegates. Not too far away in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire and Worcestershire were other august seats such as Snowshill Manor, Chastleton House, Broughton Castle and Hanbury Hall; these, too, fell within the compass of Wilmot’s search.
Most of the local gentry had roots dating back to Shakespeare’s day; their libraries were at least two centuries old. Surely they would have purchased a selection of his books upon his death, or would otherwise have come upon his manuscripts and other papers. Yet none of them seemed to have done so. None of them, in fact, seemed to know anything useful at all. Wilmot unearthed not a single volume that betrayed any evidence of having been owned by Shakespeare. He calculated that the poet must have produced over a quarter of a million manuscript pages. Yet he found not a single one.
The failure of his search led Wilmot to a tectonic conclusion. Shakespeare was not an author at all. He was an illiterate frontman for the true creator of the plays and poems, Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon was the only man with the necessary depth of intellect and breadth of learning, encompassing an intimate knowledge of France, Italy, the law, government and philosophy. Having made this earth-tilting deduction, Wilmot wrote extensive notes about it, and shared his conclusions with friends and visitors. The Baconian theory, though, was far too hot for publication. Even Wilmot’s unpublished notes were dangerous. Near the end of his life, he arranged for all the ‘bags and boxes of writing’ in his bedroom to be burned ‘on the platform before the house’. His heretical hypothesis did, however, survive the fire.
James Corton Cowell, one of the visitors to Wilmot’s home, had taken accurate notes of their conversations. ‘Wilmot does not venture so far as to say definitively that Sir Francis Bacon was the Author,’ Cowell reported, ‘but through his great knowledge of the works of that writer he is able to prepare a cap that fits him amazingly.’ Cowell had travelled to Warwickshire from Ipswich looking for details of Shakespeare’s life to include in a presentation for his local philosophic society. When finally given, the address to the society was a lightning bolt. Cowell outed himself as a Shakespeare heretic: ‘A Pervert,’ he confessed, ‘nay a renegade to the Faith I have proclaimed and avowed before you all.’ Shakespeare, he said, had destroyed his manuscripts to conceal the fact of Bacon’s authorship. The names of characters and the details of plots in Shakespeare’s plays provided ample confirmatory evidence, as did the fact that they indicated a sound knowledge of legal principles and method. Stylistic similarities in the works of Bacon and Shakespeare clinched the case. Bacon must have been Shakespeare. Having heard these revelations, the Ipswich audience was, by all accounts, scandalised.
The next major search after Wilmot’s was a curious kind of family excursion. In the late eighteenth century, Samuel Ireland lived at 8 Norfolk Street, the Strand, with one Mrs Freeman. Formerly a favourite of the Earl of Sandwich, she was now Samuel’s housekeeper, amanuensis, mistress and the mother of his children: Anna, Jane and William-Henry. A dogged collector, Samuel assembled a creditable library and a small gallery of artworks. A minor artist in his own right, he dealt in prints and paintings from time to time, and was an authority on Hogarth. He also dabbled in writing and publishing, producing illustrated books of picturesque views and topographical tours such as the intermittently racy A Picturesque Tour Through Holland, Brabant, and Part of France (1790). (The tour’s highlights include a brothel and a town whose young women trade favours for gingerbread.)
Samuel and Mrs Freeman revered Shakespeare, rearing their children on readings of his plays. In William-Henry’s teens he became an assiduous browser of bookstalls, making many Elizabethan and other finds that pleased his father. In the summer of 1793, Samuel and William-Henry visited Stratford-upon-Avon. William-Henry, though he later claimed to have been sixteen at the time, was eighteen years old. The Irelands had as their escort a tall, muscular, beetle-browed rustic named John Jordan. Formerly a wheelwright, Jordan had remodelled himself as a local antiquary and tourist guide.
At Shottery, just outside Stratford, Jordan led the Irelands to Hewlands Farm and the oak-beamed farmhouse that came to be known as Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. The moment was one of irresistible historicity, and Samuel just had to have a Shakespearean memento. Anne’s relatives owned an ancient bed; Samuel tried to buy it but seems to have failed despite multiple ardent offers. He did succeed, however, in buying another piece of furniture, which was sold to him as Shakespeare’s courting chair, and another intimate relic: a four-inch-square tasselled purse, made from supple leather and decorated with bugle beads, ‘a present from Shakespeare to his love’, Anne Hathaway.
From another Stratford family the Irelands bought a goblet fashioned from a mulberry tree that Shakespeare was said to have planted. There were limits, however, to their desire for relics; they seem to have resisted the temptation to recover bones from the charnel-house at Holy Trinity Church.
Physical relics were all well and good, but Samuel’s true prey was literary. Where were the manuscripts that would provide him with a portal to Shakespeare’s creative life and work? Interrogating all, he learned that a quantity of manuscripts had been moved from New Place to nearby Clopton House at the time of the Stratford fire of 1742. Intoxicated by the scent of rare paper, Jordan and the Irelands went to Clopton House full of expectation. There, they experienced one of the most brutal let-downs in the history of humankind.
Clopton House’s occupant, a gentleman farmer named Williams, got straight to the point. ‘By God I wish you had arrived a little sooner! Why, it isn’t a fortnight since I destroyed several baskets-full of letters and papers, in order to clear a small chamber for some young partridges which I wish to bring up alive: and as to Shakespeare, why there were many bundles with his name wrote upon them. Why it was in this very fireplace I made a roaring bonfire of them.’ A stunned and appalled Ireland cried, ‘My God! Sir, you are not aware of the loss which the world has sustained. Would to heaven I had arrived sooner!’ Farmer Williams’ elderly wife verified the baleful story and chided her husband. ‘I do remember it perfectly well! And, if you will call to mind my words, I told you not to burn the papers, as they might be of consequence.’ Shell-shocked, Ireland inspected the little chamber and found nothing but partridges.
The ornithological trauma sent Samuel’s appetite for Shakespearean documents to fever pitch. He would, he asserted, happily give half his fine library to become possessed of even a single Shakespeare signature.
Back in London, the Irelands found their son a job in the office of a conveyancer. Thus employed, and aware of his father’s appetites, William-Henry ramped up his scrutiny of bookstalls and anywhere else he could acquire old books, manuscripts, pamphlets, letters, leases, deeds, wills, contracts, rent rolls, prints, sketches; indeed, any miscellaneous old paper or parchment or vellum. He caught spectacular fish. One of his first finds after the Stratford visit was a quarto volume bound in vellum featuring the crest of Queen Elizabeth and containing a dedicatory letter. Then came an old deed—signed by Shakespeare and Michael Fraser, dated 1610—which William-Henry said he found in a chest of old papers at the home of a prosperous banker.
A delighted Samuel took the deed to several authorities, all of whom confirmed its authenticity. Father pressed son to redouble his search for documentary treasures. William-Henry came up with the goods. A promissory note from John Hemmings, followed by even bigger bounty: a letter from Shakespeare to the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, the dedicatee of two volumes of Shakespeare’s poems. In the letter, Shakespeare expressed his gratitude—a ‘Budde which Bllossommes Bllooms butte never dyes’—and apologised for not replying sooner. Remarkably, William-Henry’s sources also furnished Southampton’s reply, in which he admonished his friend for only accepting half of a proffered cash sum. Another recovered document was a firecracker: a fervent disavowal by Shakespeare of Catholicism.
Experts called at Norfolk Street to interrogate the documents and their discoverer. The documents were confirmed as genuine, their discoverer a peculiar genius. Samuel beamed: his life’s ambitions had been fulfilled, his meagre paternal investment gloriously rewarded. William-Henry, though, was just getting started. More letters followed, as did Shakespearean contracts, receipts, a pen-and-ink sketch of the playwright and a colour drawing of him as Bassanio.
Then came an incomparable prize: a manuscript catalogue of Shakespeare’s library. Extending to over thirty pages, the catalogue is a simple inventory of titles and publication dates. The last date is 1613, indicating that, if Shakespeare made the catalogue, he did so in the latter part of his Stratford retirement. The compiler wrote in an idiosyncratic, almost indecipherable script—a daunting blend of italic and secretary hands—but many titles can be made out. There are classical literary works, like Sir John Harington’s 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso (‘Orlandoo Furiosoo’), as well as contemporary ones, like Edmund Spenser’s Shepherds Calendar (‘Shepheardes Calenderre’), probably the 1579 edition (an impudent hole now obscures the date). There are plentiful Italian editions, several of them evidently by Matteo Bandello, as well as titles in Latin and Greek.
In all, the catalogue features a thousand tantalising volumes. Its discovery reverberated throughout the literary world. Leading bibliophiles were dazzled and compelled. The catalogue is intriguing because it aligns very well with how we know Shakespeare worked. He certainly used Orlando Furioso as a principal source for Much Ado About Nothing, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590) for several plays. Indeed, most of his work drew heavily on the writings of others. Even his greatest plays, Hamlet and King Lear, took major plot elements and characters from prior plays, which were called Hamlet and King Leir, the latter registered in 1594. Romeo and Juliet was based substantively on an Italian novel from 1530. Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland were a principal source for the history plays.
Whole slabs of Antony and Cleopatra were lifted from Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Plutarch’s ‘the poop whereof was of gold’ becomes in Shakespeare ‘the poop was beaten gold’; ‘the sails of purple’ becomes ‘purple the sails’; ‘the oars of silver’, ‘the oars were silver’. This is Shakespeare laundering prose into drama. In his defence, let us note again that there was no equivalent in his day of the modern concept of plagiarism. Borrowing was commonplace; part of a venerable tradition, which dated back at least as far as early mediaeval times, of incrementally improving hallowed texts. (Nevertheless, as we will see later, authors did complain.)
William-Henry, now confirmed as a magician of documentary research, went one better, producing actual books and manuscripts from Shakespeare’s library. First came books with Shakespeare’s signature and initialled annotations: Johan Carion’s Chronicles (1550); Thomas Churchyard’s The Worthiness of Wales (1587); Spenser’s Faerie Queene; and a copy of James I’s Daemonologie, containing the curtly dismissive note, ‘Impossyble, WS’. Then, even better, Shakespeare manuscripts: a less ribald version of Lear, called the Tragedye of Kynge Leare; leaves from a less raunchy version of Hamlet, called Hamblette—yes, Hamblette; and a hitherto entirely unknown play, Vortigern, An Historical Tragedy.
The Ireland documents caused a sensation. In his final year of life, diarist James Boswell visited the treasure trove at Norfolk Street and announced, ‘Well, I shall now die contented, since I have lived to witness the present day.’ He kissed the papers and thanked God for revealing them. A few pilgrims were more sceptical, but most were firmly in Boswell’s camp. The documents and the attention were a boon for the Irelands, who began to worry that a Shakespeare descendant might come forward to claim the cache that William-Henry had so miraculously assembled. Once again, providence came to the rescue. William-Henry gave forth an astonishing document that showed the Ireland and Shakespeare families were irrevocably intertwined.
In 1604, another William Henry Ireland, a hyphen-less haberdasher from London, had leased the Blackfriars gatehouse that William Shakespeare would later purchase. In 1794, the new William-Henry discovered a ‘Deed of Gift’ that his ancestor and namesake had received from Shakespeare himself. In heavily Elizabethan prose, the deed told of how the playwright, along with his ‘Masterre William Henry Ireland ande otherres’, had taken a boat up the Thames. The voyagers were ‘much toe merrye throughe Lyquorre’, to such an extent that the boat tipped over midstream. All the men could swim, all except Shakespeare. When the swimmers reached the bank, Ireland noticed Shakespeare’s absence. Informed that the Bard was ‘drownynge’, Ireland ‘pulled off hys Jerrekynne and jumpedd inn’. Finding Shakespeare ‘withe muche paynes’, Ireland dragged him nearly dead to the riverbank.
Accompanying the deed was a document bearing the Shakespeare and Ireland coats of arms. In the document, Shakespeare expressed his gratitude to Ireland for ‘hys havynge savedde mye life’. On the strength of this discovery, Garter Principal King of Arms Sir Isaac Heard suggested that the Irelands should combine their arms with Shakespeare’s. Samuel was elated, and even more so when first an invitation and then an escort arrived at Norfolk Street; he was to enjoy an audience with the Prince of Wales.
Though the meeting progressed awkwardly, the Prince made approving noises about the papers’ authenticity. A proud Samuel arranged for his son’s discoveries to be published; they appeared on Christmas Eve, 1795, in a sumptuous folio, richly adorned with facsimiles and colour illustrations. Despite its exhausting title and rich price of four guineas, subscribers snapped up Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, Including the Tragedy of King Lear, and a Small Fragment of Hamlet, from the Original Manuscripts in the Possession of Samuel Ireland. Preparations were set in train for a gala performance of Vortigern. John Philip Kemble, the greatest actor of the era, signed up (with, it is true, reservations) to play the lead role: the courtier Vortigern. The world premiere at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was initially slotted for April Fool’s Day, 1796, but was pushed back a day, ‘for fear’, in the words of Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, ‘of the enterprise seeming Foolish’.