The League of Radical Gentlemen
Yorkshireman, clergyman and minor poet, Francis Wrangham nurtured the search for Shakespeare’s library during the reign of King George III. As a student first at Magdalene College and then at Trinity Hall and Trinity College, Cambridge, Wrangham had excelled at university. He was Third Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos, and in 1787 won a medal for the best Greek and Latin epigrams; later that year his winning entry was printed handsomely as a single octavo sheet. He developed republican views (the new breed of rulers could never live up to his idealised picture of the Virgin Queen) and was thereafter denied preferment at Cambridge. Injurious gossip branded him ‘a friend to the French revolution, one who exulted in the murder of the king’.
Despite these setbacks, he embarked on a fruitful literary and ecclesiastical life, amassing a wide circle of friends, who described him as an ‘attractive personality’, an ‘affectionate father’, a ‘tall slight man of exceedingly gentle and attractive manners’, possessing a countenance ‘of classical elegance’. Wrangham was on friendly terms with Lord Spencer, Thomas Frognall Dibdin and other Roxburghers. He also knew celebrities such as Sir Walter Scott, Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth, with whom he collaborated on minor literary and republican projects. From Wrangham House at Hunmanby, North Yorkshire, he maintained an effusive correspondence with a wide circle of these and other bookmen, among them Thomas Arnold, James Montgomery, William Hone, Dawson Turner and John Gibson Lockhart, author of a Life of Scott.
In 1808 Leigh Hunt and his brother John founded the radical and much-prosecuted newspaper the Examiner, which Wrangham—an opponent of slavery and supporter of Israel—distributed enthusiastically. The paper’s most sensational trial resulted from Hunt’s disenchantment with the Prince Regent. Hunt called him a ‘corpulent libertine and violator of his word’—a blatant libel—and in February 1813 he began two years of imprisonment in Horsemonger Lane Gaol: what Ann Blainey called ‘a triumphant two years of martyrdom’.
In December 1808, Wrangham penned a prescient letter to Hunt, with whom he shared a love of Elizabethan literature. (When challenged to choose a ‘library of one’, Hunt ‘was torn between Shakespeare and Spenser’.)
I am at a loss whether to sympathise with you in the way of congratulation or of condolence, on the subject of your impending prosecution [for the Prince Regent libel]. As a proof of what to your readers needed no proving—your energy—it will undoubtedly bring you earlier to that pre-eminent celebrity which I have sanguinely anticipated for you, and by all my little efforts laboured to promote. This, by giving a wider diffusion to your opinions, out of evil may educe good…May I beg to be favoured henceforth with your Monday edition, which will leave out nothing material, I trust, of its elder brother’s contents. I shall be obliged to you likewise for the title-page, preface, &c., as I shall assuredly bind you up, whatever the law may do.
Wrangham continued to support Hunt and to make common cause in progressive politics. In his literary efforts, Wrangham rendered Petrarch into sonnets, which he submitted to the Lee Priory Press. Wordsworth asked Wrangham to destroy the manuscript of one of their collaborations: an intemperate satire imitating Juvenal. In all likelihood Wrangham kept it. The most enduring picture of him is of a ‘conscientious clerical dignitary with a consuming passion for rare books and eccentric bibliographic detail’. The archdeacon’s friend and neighbour Sydney Smith was fully alert to the intensity of Wrangham’s bibliomania. He counselled Mrs Wrangham: ‘If there be a single room which you wish to preserve from being completely surrounded by books, let me advise you not to suffer a single shelf to be placed in it; for they will creep round you like an erysipelas till they have covered the whole.’
Leigh Hunt’s biographers portrayed him as an ‘immortal boy’, a gentle soul who retained child-like traits well into adulthood. For many years Wrangham, too, kept up ‘the elegant tastes of youth and college’. Dibdin portrayed him in his library ‘stretching himself at length in the Elizabethan chair, in the midst of his Plantins and Elzevirs’, watching the last glimmer of the day tipping the Cheviot hilltops. He maintained strong connections with other private collectors, and in 1822 would himself be elected to Roxburghe membership.
For his Roxburghe Member Book he chose a little volume called The Garden Plot, An Allegorical Poem, Inscribed to Queen Elizabeth. It was written by the sixteenth-century poet and dramatist Henry Goldingham. Though unpublished in Shakespeare’s lifetime (or indeed before the Roxburghe edition), it had circulated in manuscript in the 1580s and Shakespeare probably knew of it. Wrangham had it printed in nostalgic ‘black letter’ type. The reception was not universally positive. In Dibdin’s Reminiscences of a Literary Life (1836), the critical reverend called the archdeacon’s choice ‘unworthy’; the content was suitable neither for a clergyman nor a Queen. Wrangham replied with infinite patience, pointing out errors in Dibdin’s recollections.
In returning my most heartfelt thanks for the very kind manner in which you have characterized me in many parts of your highly interesting volumes, for the suggestion of literary employments so highly flattering to me, and for the friendly honesty of your censure of my poor Garden-Plot, I ought I know to attach a formal disclaimer of all fitness, &c., but it would at once be too formal and too hypocritical for the habits of our intercourse. I will therefore only meo more note two or three slight errata in your extracts relative to me which I hope you will soon be called to set right in a second edition.
Wrangham’s regard for books—especially ones that were privately printed or had uncommon features like coloured paper, private imprints and special bindings—was equally infinite. He used his network of friends and bookmen to assemble a library that he hoped would be ‘extensive rather than expensive’. In the library’s extent, his success was absolute. He owned tens of thousands of books, booklets and manuscripts, neatly organised into folio, quarto, octavo and duodecimo sections. Books from around the world, encompassing an astonishing range of subjects: angling, gardening, magic, history, travel, classics, science, mythology, art, archaeology, poetry, drama.
Dibdin ribbed Wrangham for his eclecticism: ‘The Archdeacon yet continues to woo his muse in his miscellaneous and wide-spreading library. He is yet as rapturous as ever over the charms of Bibliomania.’ Many of the books were merely ‘reading copies’ in tired condition. Wrangham confessed to preferring ‘tattered and dusty’ old books over new titles. His library did, however, contain a good deal of treasure. Wynkyn de Worde’s edition of Synonima by Johannes de Garlandia, 1518 (an edition unknown to Dibdin). A 1603 printing of James I’s Daemonologie (the edition Dibdin dubbed ‘the author’s opus maximum’) and a 1619 printing of his A Meditation upon the Lord’s Prayer. A Second Folio Shakespeare. And many other rare volumes from the period.
Ever the fisherman, Wrangham dropped hints in his correspondence with publishers about them sending him complimentary copies and offprints, even better if on apricot or stone-coloured paper. In his letters to booksellers he offered to swap his duplicates for books in their stock. For titles he could not obtain this way, he politely sought discounts—a mutually beneficial way to move slow-selling items, he argued—and he informed the merchants of the cheapest means of dispatch. Mrs Wrangham showed admirable tolerance for the books, some of them improper, that took over her house. She accommodated them as best she could and, from time to time, tried to limit her husband’s expenditure. As a clerical father of six children, perhaps he should not indulge in ‘the luxury of large paper copies’ when ordinary editions would do. He mostly followed her advice, but sometimes the special copies were irresistible and had to be paid for somehow. ‘I must make up this prodigality by economy in some other quarter,’ he remarked after an especially juicy purchase.
In one of the many curious twists in the story of Shakespeare’s library, the creators of the Cowell–Wilmot forgeries seem to have selected Wilmot, and to have built his imaginary identity, in part with an eye to Wrangham’s real one. The transformation of Wrangham into Wilmot is simple. Turn Yorkshire into Warwickshire, conveniently congruent with the Bard’s home town. Swap Trinity College, Cambridge, for Trinity College, Oxford. Replace Wordsworth, Scott and Hunt with their predecessors Warton, Sterne and Johnson. Sprinkle in a hint of Dibdin. Otherwise leave everything else unchanged, and the archdeacon becomes the reverend. This sleight of hand could have been perpetrated by the nineteenth-century fantasist Olivia Serres, or by a more recent Baconian activist.
(A serial fraudster, Serres wrote a bogus 1813 biography of Wilmot, which she dedicated to the Marquess of Blandford and in which she falsely gave Wilmot authorship of the ‘Junius’ letters. Serres claimed at different times to be Wilmot’s granddaughter, Wilmot’s niece, George III’s niece and George III’s daughter.)
In 1812, soon after the Roxburghe Sale and at the height of the Examiner trouble, a youth of twenty called at Wrangham House. John Fry arrived carrying an introduction from his fellow Bristolian Sir Francis Freeling, First Baronet, fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and founding member of the Roxburghe Club.
Freeling had worked his way up through the postal service to become England’s postal supremo: Secretary of His Majesty’s General Post Office. Along the way he collected a large library that was even stronger than Wrangham’s in Shakespeareana and Elizabetheana, and even more eclectic. Apart from a witchcraft collection and a complete set of the Roxburghe Club issues, it contained very naughty books like The Scourge of Venus, or the Wanton Lady (1613, the only known copy); possibly the only surviving copy of Loyal Garland (1686); and several Caxtons, including The Morale Prouerbs Cristyne of Pyse (1478), which Dibdin classified ‘among the Scarcest Pieces of Caxton’s Press’. Bibliomania was a strong theme. Apart from Dibdin’s Reminiscences, the library contained nineteen other Dibdin titles, as well as books Freeling had bought with enthusiasm at the Roxburghe Sale.
At Fry’s first meeting with Wrangham, the young bookseller spoke of his strong appreciation for ‘ancient’ books, especially those from the reign of Elizabeth. He deplored editors like Pope who claimed to have ‘improved’ and ‘modernised’ Shakespeare but had in fact, in the words of the British Critic, ‘purged and castrated him, and tattooed and beplaistered him, and cauterised and phlebotomised him’. Displaying an impressive knowledge of Elizabethan drama and early printed books, Fry outlined his plans to study and promote the foundation texts of English literature, and to help preserve their integrity. And he announced that he was on a quest. He was looking for Shakespeare’s library.
In an advertisement at the end of the Inquiry, Malone’s publishers had appealed for information about Shakespeare’s papers, of whose existence Malone was certain.
Though Mr Malone has already obtained several very curious and original Materials for the Life of Shakspeare, he will be extremely obliged by any further Communications on that Subject. He has always thought that much Information might be procured, illustrative of the History of this extraordinary Man, if Persons possessed of ancient Papers would take the trouble to examine them, or permit others to peruse them.
In particular, Malone was sure that Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Lady Bernard, had left behind ‘Coffers and Cabinets, in which undoubtedly were several of her Grandfather’s Papers’. John Fry was one of several aspiring young bibliographers to take up Malone’s challenge.
Fry shared Wrangham’s politics and was a fellow supporter of the Examiner. Both men were radicals in another sense, too. In the nineteenth century, to admire the original Shakespeare, with all his wildness and bawdiness, was a daring act. Influenced in part by Ker’s collection and the Roxburghe Sale, Fry’s taste had taken an early and ardent turn towards Elizabethanism. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, ‘it can require but little examination to decide that the latter half of the sixteenth century was the period of England’s greatness. The heart swells with rapture at the idea that one female reign contained the greatest Poets, Heroes, Statesmen, Philosophers and Warriors that any nation ever produced in the same portion of time.’ Among the great poets, three stood tallest. Shakespeare, Spenser and the slightly later Milton were ‘Fancy’s sweetest children’, a triumvirate of literary genii, and Shakespeare ranked uppermost among them. (Virginia Woolf rated Milton highest.) In Wrangham’s drawing room, Fry praised ‘the magic muse of the divine Shakspere’, and confided his goal of rescuing—from obscurity, neglect and ‘shelves of dust’—important documents that would extend understanding of the Elizabethan drama.
William-Henry Ireland had uncovered, in fraudulent form, exactly the kind of Shakespearean association copies that Fry now yearned to find in genuine form. Ireland and Wilmot had used fantasy to search for phantoms; Fry would conduct a real search. Almost a generation younger than the forger, Fry had been an impressionable teenager in the golden era of British bibliomania. By the age of sixteen or so he was already dealing in books and busily cultivating an antiquarian sensibility. At the age of eighteen Fry subscribed to Dibdin’s exhilarating Typographical Antiquities, and began publishing fragments and extracts from exceptionally rare books and manuscripts housed in the greatest libraries of Elizabetheana.
Fry’s first three books appeared in 1810. One of the debut volumes was A Selection from the Poetical Works of Thomas Carew, with a Life of the Author, and Notes, by John Fry (price four shillings, boards, in crown octavo). Another was The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots: And Other Ancient Poems, Now First Published from MSS of the XVIth Century (the poem in question was possibly an inspiration for Hamlet). Longmans received these two Fry titles with enthusiasm and published them to feed the Elizabethan poetry craze. Carew’s verse was mostly amatory in nature; Fry called it ‘mellifluous’, the same word Heywood and Meres had used to describe Shakespeare.
Fry was interested in tracing Carew’s use of ideas and vocabulary from Milton, Spenser and especially from Shakespeare. The Nymph’s lines in Carew’s ‘A Pastorall Dialogue’, ‘The yellow planets and the grey / Dawn shall attend thee on thy way’, reminded Fry of Romeo and Juliet (act 3, scene 5): ‘Yon light is not day-light, I know it well; It is some meteor / To light thee on thy way to Mantua.’
Carew’s ‘Boldness in Love’:
Mark hoe the bashfull morne in vaine
Courts the amorous Marigold
With sighing blasts and weeping raine;
Yet she refuses to unfold:
But when the planet of the day
Approacheth with his powerfull ray,
Then she spreads, then she receives
His warmer beames into her virgin leaves.
echoed Winter’s Tale (act 4, scene 3): ‘The marigold that goes to bed wi’ the Sun, / And with him rises weeping.’ Fry noted other parallels, too, including the use of the Saxon word hind or hinde, meaning servant, both in Carew and in The Merry Wives of Windsor. These observations reveal Fry cultivating an especially sharp eye for the detection of poetical recycling.
Fry’s Carew collection was well received by the British Critic: ‘This is a chaste, elegant, and classical Publication. We have always encouraged Works of this description, and should be glad if the Editor would extend his critical labours to the Works of many of Carew’s contemporaries.’ But a man by the name of Griffiths, writing in the Monthly Review (1810), thought he had overdone the identification of sources and parallels. Griffiths’ review abounded with patronising criticisms of the teenager’s editorial method.
In the first place, we would suggest to him that the use of the same epithet by two authors is no certain mark of imitation; and that, were it so, the multiplication of parallel passages might be carried on ad infinitum: nay, there would indeed, in that case, be nothing new after Homer…Because Carew calls the wind ‘whispering,’ we need not be told that Milton in various passages does the same; nor need we be referred to Mister Todd’s notes on that author, as our editor quaintly refers us. The ‘dimpled stream’ is an expression, like the foregoing, to be found throughout the whole range of English poetry…The image is natural, and would obviously strike any beholder.
The reviewer concluded by pointing out minor date errors and encouraging the editor to make further extracts from the works of Carew’s contemporaries, while making sure that he ‘excluded all intimations of parallel passages that do not contain manifest indications of plagiarism. The present editor would do well to read Bishop Hurd’s Treatise on this subject, before he published again.’ Other reviewers were even harsher, and one was especially damning of another Fry publication that appeared in 1810, Metrical Trifles in Youth. Four years later, Fry wrote with disarming openness about how he had been subjected to ‘malevolent aspersion’ and ‘spiteful malignity’ after producing his debut books, ‘in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, when scarcely eighteen years old, independent of controul and without a friendly adviser to check an aspiring mind…That he now regrets this premature appearance it is unnecessary to add’.
Fry’s feelings about The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots (and its critical reception) were more uniformly positive, though the story is a harrowing one. Mary acceded to the Scottish throne as an infant. Once she attained her majority, her life became a series of disasters: a brief marriage to the Dauphin of France; marriage to her cousin, Henry Stuart, who was murdered just two years later; marriage to the man suspected of the murder; and long periods of confinement, mostly at the behest of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, ending with Mary’s execution on the flimsiest of pretexts. These and later books show Fry’s desire to preserve and revive early texts. They also show him developing a practical brand of scientific bibliography for which Malone’s demolition of the Ireland forgeries provided the methodological benchmark.
Francis Wrangham shared Fry’s ambition to revive Elizabethan authors. He also shared Fry’s view that Malone’s rival eighteenth-century editors had diminished Shakespeare. In the catalogue of his library, Wrangham cited the Gentleman’s Magazine on the amounts received by Pope (£217 12s), Theobald (£652 10s) and Johnson (£475) for editions of Shakespeare. ‘Thus,’ Wrangham quoted, ‘has the Poet enriched those, who have impoverished him.’
Unoffended by Fry’s reference to ‘shelves of dust’, the archdeacon gave his erudite visitor immediate and unfettered access to the sprawling library at Wrangham House. A long friendship began, in which there was much swapping of books and anecdotes and clues. Impressed by Wrangham’s ‘enlarged and cultured mind’, Fry used his connections with Thomas Fry & Co., a bookshop in Bristol’s High Street, to help the archdeacon expand his library, and even to improve it by restoring missing pages to the most time-worn volumes. Freeling had introduced Fry to the leading literary lights of Bristol. Wrangham now did the same in London, introducing Fry to the lords, scholars and collectors such as Francis Douce and John Morgan Rice who would consume his stock like hotcakes, admit him into their marvellous libraries, subscribe with gusto to his publications, and make common cause with him in his quest.
Wrangham wrote to Lord Spencer describing his refreshing new acquaintance as ‘a very enlightened and intelligent young bookseller’ and buzzing over his bibliographical faculties. In an era that lacked bibliographical professionals, men such as Freeling, Wrangham and Fry stepped forward to join a noble enterprise. Reckless editors were attacking the textual integrity of Shakespeare. Thieves and forgers were pillaging libraries. In response, the noble amateurs created a network that operated as a league of bibliographical superheroes. In answer to Malone’s call to arms, and using weapons he had wrought, the bookmen pledged to preserve the reputations and genuine texts of Elizabethan and Jacobean authors. Fry described the enterprise as an endeavour to protect and promote ‘the poetical treasures of the Elizabethan era…all the sublimity, the magnificence, the heroism, the imagery, and the vivid charms of the age’. He would finish what Malone had started.
In pursuit of Shakespeare, Fry searched institutional collections like the Bodleian, but he also scoured the libraries of clergymen and scholars, and the patrician collections of the minor and major aristocracy. These private libraries were ideal places in which to look: a direct chain of provenance connected them to Shakespeare’s world. Some early institutional libraries spurned ‘low’ drama and had replaced early editions with ‘better’ new ones, just as the Bodleian had done with its First Folio. Compared to university libraries, private libraries were more likely to hold literature that people actually liked and read, including politically unpopular and morally naughty books. (Wrangham owned works that were banned in Shakespeare’s day, such as ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ (1584).)
Private libraries were the natural environment for the rarest private editions, either printed or in manuscript, that circulated in and since Elizabethan times. Small editions and unpublished manuscripts could pass under the radars of censors and other authorities. Often not registered with the Stationers’ Company (an early form of copyright protection and print regulation), these editions were the preserve of antiquarians and connoisseurs; their mode of distribution was ideal for the works of those poets and dramatists who were seen as too radical, too heterodox or too sexy. Those rare texts are the source of much that is known about the literature and book culture of Shakespeare’s world.
Many of the manuscripts were written in the notoriously difficult ‘secretary hand’, a scribbly gothic script that is striking for its inconsistency and incongruity—features appreciated by Elizabethans who, as the palaeographer Leon Kellner observed, liked to shake things up. ‘Uniformity was shunned, variety commended as a grace of style. In spelling, in declension and conjugation, in the structure of sentences, in word-formation we notice a deliberate preference for variation.’ To aid his search, Fry mastered the secretary hand.
He also adopted a bibliographical method that today seems very modern. He was interested in the completeness of the books he examined; he noted any defects such as missing leaves and plates. Scrupulous in acknowledging his own sources, he called conjecture conjecture, and was meticulous in noticing and correcting his own errors. Following a lead that Dibdin had half started, Fry and his Malonite network advanced the study of provenance. They traced books back through chains of multiple prior owners, as revealed by bookplates, inscriptions and signatures, and they published their findings in books and catalogues.
Freeling’s copy of Anthony Munday’s True Historie of the Three Years Fasting of a Maiden of Confolens (1604) was, for example, ‘Bindley’s Copy’ (James Bindley was an eighteenth-century English official, book collector and antiquarian). Freeling’s copy of Munday’s Palmerin of England (1596) was ‘Col. Stanley’s Copy, in russia’. Many of the books in Wrangham’s, Freeling’s and Rice’s libraries had come, via the hands of Ker and Masterman-Sykes, from eighteenth-century collections such as those of Johnson, Steevens and Ames, and could be traced even further back to seventeenth-century owners such as Sir William Boothby and Frances Wolfreston.
To zero in on Shakespeare, Fry studied annotated eighteenth-century editions of the plays, as well as bibliographies and reference works from that century, like Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry (1774–81). He also studied, from earlier centuries, the silences, sources and contemporary references. He noticed, for example, how the section on English poets in Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1627), as mentioned in chapter 2, referred to Heywood, Sidney, Dyer, Spenser, Daniel and de Vere, but not to Shakespeare. And he noticed how thoroughly the early English poets had made use of Latin and French sources.
Equipped with his bibliographical and palaeographical toolkit, Fry followed a trail from shelf to shelf, book to book and page to page in his friends’ libraries. As Malone and Rowe had done, he appealed to owners of ‘ancient papers’ to make them available for scholarly examination. What he found would turn the search for Shakespeare’s library upside down.