Two hundred years ago, and two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, John Fry and his associates conducted a thorough search for traces of Shakespeare’s library. Fry documented his findings in letters, catalogues, unpublished manuscripts and three new publications: Pieces of Ancient Poetry from Unpublished Manuscripts and Scarce Books (1814); an edition of George Whetstone’s Metrical Life of George Gascoigne (1815); and the wide-ranging Bibliographical Memoranda (1816). In their style of publication, all three targeted the Georgian appetite for special rarities, and all harked back to the private editions that had circulated in Shakespeare’s day. Of Pieces, a total of 102 copies were printed, including six ‘specials’ on blue paper; of the Metrical Life, a hundred copies; and of Bibliographical Memoranda, again a hundred copies, one of which was ‘accidentally destroyed’. The Metrical Life was produced from Edmond Malone’s own copy of the notoriously rare 1577 original.
The leading collectors of the day—men such as Francis Douce, Mark Masterman-Sykes and the two Francises, Wrangham and Freeling—snapped up Fry’s publications. When he came to acknowledge the men whose libraries he had used, Fry gave special thanks to Wrangham for ‘friendly favours’, and to Freeling for ‘unreserved liberality’.
One of Fry’s subscribers was infamous trickster William-Henry Ireland, who bought one of the special ‘large paper’ copies of The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots (1810) using proceeds from the sale of his bogus curiosities, or money he had borrowed from one of his few remaining friends. (In an 1811 letter to Richard Garnett, Joseph Ritchie wrote of Ireland: ‘He is a man of very engaging manners and extremely communicative, but talks rather too much of what books he has published and what he intends to publish.’) In the year in which Pieces appeared, Ireland moved to France where he worked in the Bibliothèque Nationale, no doubt perpetrating further mischief.
Freeling’s library contained a remarkable curiosity: for Spenser’s Faerie Queene (first edition, 1590–96) the catalogue citation reads, ‘From Ireland’s Shakspeare Library, with numerous Manuscript Notes pretended to be Shakspeare’s, forged by Ireland, in green morocco’. According to Freeling, at the height of public belief in the Ireland hoax, the two Spenser volumes ‘attracted more notice, curiosity and veneration from the believers in the Shakspeare Forgery, than any of the Printed Books in the pretended Shakspeare Library. Spenser illustrated with Notes by Shakspeare was hailed as an inestimable Treasure. Ireland, in his Confessions, says that a Gentleman offered Sixty Pounds for the copy.’
In his search for Shakespeare’s library, John Fry made many contributions to our understanding of the sources Shakespeare used for his plays and poems. He pointed out two early sources for Troilus and Cressida: ‘Troylus and Cresseyde’ in John Skelton’s Philip Sparowe (1568); and a manuscript, on vellum, of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Creseide. Fry also pinpointed two Merchant of Venice sources: Alexander Silvayn’s Orator (1596), which includes the ‘Story of a Jew, who would have a pound of a Christian’s flesh for his debt’; and John Gower’s epic Confessio Amantis (1483), which Caxton printed and which includes the casket-choosing plot device.
Among the other source books he studied were Anthony Munday’s rare play, Two Italian Gentlemen (1584, a source for Two Gentlemen of Verona); Barnaby Riche’s 1581 Fruites of Long Experience and 1594 Farewell to Military Profession (the latter a source for Twelfth Night); John Eliot’s Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), which influenced The Rape of Lucrece; William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), ‘the earliest collection of Romances in the era of Elizabeth’ and the book that ‘supplied Shakspeare with the fables of many of his Dramas’; and Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte (1573), the inspiration for the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy.
Another important source in Freeling’s library was Saviolo’s Practice of the Use of the Rapier and Dagger; and the Honor of Honorable Quarrels, ‘very rare, in russia, gilt leaves’, 1595. Stabbing was the principal cause of death in Shakespeare’s plays. Freeling’s library catalogue identifies Saviolo as a source both for Shakespeare and for Jonson: ‘This work throws considerable light on the affected manners of “our gallants” in the days of Elizabeth, and elucidates several passages in Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. It is strikingly alluded to in As You Like It, the Alchemist, and Every Man in His Humour.’
Freeling also owned one of the most important Shakespeare source books of all: Holinshed’s Chronicles in two folio editions: the 1577 first edition, and the expurgated 1587 ‘best edition’. The latter was a primary reference source for Macbeth as well as Cymbeline, the history plays and parts of King Lear.
Freeling introduced Fry to another essential resource for Shakespeare research: a ‘matchless’ collection of Robert Greene’s works. Greene has been labelled England’s first professional author. A less sympathetic appellation would be the sixteenth century’s greatest hack. Versifier, farceur, romantic novelist, social historian, crime reporter and adapter of foreign works, Greene wrote prolifically—poetry, plays and prose; fiction and non-fiction; and blends of fact and fiction—on a great variety of subjects. Many of his books found wide audiences. His popular Defence of Cony-catching sold for three pence and kicked off a series of irresistibly colourful underworld accounts: A Notable Discovery of Coosnage, Now Daily Practised by Sundry Lewd Persons called Cony-catchers and Cross-biters (1591); The Second Part of Cony-catching (1591); Thirde and Last Parte of Cony-catching (1592); A Disputation Between a Hee Cony-Catcher and a Shee Cony-Catcher (1592); and the pseudonymous Defence of Cony-catching ‘by Cuthbert Cony-catcher’ (1592). (‘Coosnage’ or cozenage is trickery, such as in cards and dice; ‘cony-catchers’ are con-artists; ‘cross-biters’ are swindlers.)
Greene’s personal appearance and habits were notorious. ‘Who in London hath not heard’, asked writer Gabriel Harvey, of Greene’s ‘dissolute and licentious living; his fonde disguisinge of a Master of Arte with ruffianly haire, unseemely apparrell, and more unseemely Company?’ According to Freeling’s catalogue:
[Greene’s] dissipated habits made him fairly acquainted… with the Profligates of every grade. He has accordingly depicted in glowing terms, and with poignant raillery the Humours of the Times; and laid open the Practices of Cheats, Sharpers, Courtezans, &c. with a raciness and animation scarcely to be found in any other writer of the Period. His Descriptions are living Pictures, Painted with the hand of a Master; he possessed great fertility of imagination, vividness of fancy, a strong perception of the ludicrous and real pathos. The Poetical Pieces scattered through his Prose Works, as well as his Dramas, evince the high station he might have attained as a Poet, had he sacrificed more at the shrine of Apollo, than at those of Bacchus and Venus.
Freeling’s Greenes included a dubious pamphlet of dubious origin that is also one of the most important Shakespearean documents. Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte (1592) is exceedingly rare: Freeling’s was one of only two known copies. The pamphlet contains what is probably the first citation of Shakespeare as a playwright: a cryptic, hyphenated reference to ‘Shake-scene’, the ‘upstart Crow’.
Edmond Malone was the first to properly identify the reference as an attack on Shakespeare (aged twenty-eight at the time), whom Greene accused of stealing other authors’ works and passing them off as his own. Fry, too, saw Groats-worth as an attack, and focused on the text that Greene most probably thought Shakespeare had filched: Greene’s 1588 pastoral romance, Pandosto, the basis for The Winter’s Tale. (Greene may also have been put out by Shakespeare and Marlowe revising Greene and George Peele’s original versions of the three parts of Henry VI.) Freeling’s catalogue calls Groats-worth ‘a very interesting tract, as Greene gives in it an exposition of his own follies and dissipation…and makes an attack upon Shakespeare, who he says, “is in his owne conceyt the onely Shake-scene in a countrey”’.
Fry studied Greene volumes that Shakespeare probably used as sources, and may have owned. Other exceptional sixteenth-century rarities in that category include Chaucer’s Workes (1561); Thomas Cutwode’s Caltha Poetarum, or The Bumble-Bee (1599); William Percy’s Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia (1594); Edward Hake’s Newes out of Powles Churchyarde (1579); Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse (1587); Bartholomew Chappell’s Garden of Prudence (1595), thought to be the only extant copy; and Richard Crompton’s very rare Mansion of Magnanimitie (1599), dedicated to the ‘Earle of Essex, Earle Marshall of England’.
In the spectacular Shakespearean library of Reverend John Morgan Rice, Fry found other extreme rarities, including Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of Love (1581), dedicated to Edward de Vere. In the eighteenth century, George Steevens had pronounced Watson a ‘much more elegant Sonnetteer than Shakespeare’. According to Rice’s catalogue, Watson’s Sonnets ‘should form part of a Shakespeare Library’.
Shakespeare appears to have been among the number of his readers, having in the following passage of Venus and Adonis, ‘Leading him Prisoner in a red-rose chain,’ borrowed an idea from his 83rd Sonnet, ‘The Muses not long since intrapping Love In chains of Roses’.
Rice also owned John Florio’s Second Frutes, with 6000 Italian Proverbs (1591); George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie (1589, annotated by Steevens); and the 1603 compilation of work by poets expressing their ‘Sorrowes, Joy, or Lamentation for Queen Elizabeth and Triumph for the prosperous succession of King James’. Another of Rice’s prizes was a very rare book that had passed through the libraries of Steevens and the Duke of Roxburghe: Arthur Hall’s Ten Books of Homers Iliades (1581), thought to be ‘the first appearance of a part of the Iliad in English Dress’. Robert Harding Evans called the translation ‘frequently very singular and whimsical’. An example is the anachronistic line: ‘Sound friend (quoth Nestor) what you say, as true is as the Byble’. Rice also possessed what was thought to be the only remaining copy of Munday’s Banquet of Daintie Conceits (1588), ‘unknown to Warton, Ritson, Ames, and Herbert’.
Fry studied dispersed libraries such as Ker’s, Steevens’ and Malone’s. He retraced the searches made by Rowe, the Irelands, and celebrated eighteenth-century antiquary and bookman William Oldys. Oldys wrote a variety of books, among them a life of Sir Walter Raleigh and (with John Taylor) a book on curing blindness. Dibdin opined in Bibliomania that Oldys’ The British Librarian was ‘a work of no common occurrence, or mean value. It is rigidly correct, if not very learned.’ With Samuel Johnson, Oldys had worked for the bookseller-publisher Thomas Osborne, famous for producing The Harleian Miscellany (1744–46) and for being knocked down by Johnson with a folio. ‘Sir,’ Johnson told Boswell, ‘he was impertinent to me, and I beat him.’ Oldys built an important collection of early books and manuscripts. His famous copy of Gerard Langbaine’s Dramatick Poets contained extensive annotations of much Shakespearean interest.
One of several antiquarians who ‘helped’ Shakespeare’s descendants with their relics, Oldys seems to have been better than most. The Folger includes a copy of Poems on Several Occasions inscribed by a sixth-generation descendant of Joan Shakespeare.
Father
Thomas Hart
With manye items of my
Noble Ancestors Joan Shakespeare
Had it not been for the great
Spirit of Kindness of Mr William
Oldys I should not of had the
joy of having in my safe keeping
our great Poets Bible, in the little
Chest with the keys
Throughout Oldys’ life he was frequently in financial trouble; in 1761 he died deep in debt. His friend and creditor John Taylor paid for the funeral ‘and obtained possession of [Oldys’] books and valuable manuscripts’. The bookseller Thomas Davies sold the books and a portion of the manuscripts.
Bibliographical Memoranda is the principal source for details of the dispersal of Oldys’ library. Taylor’s son told Fry that the dispersal led to trouble:
Mr Oldys had engaged to furnish a bookseller in the Strand, whose name was Walker, with ten years of the life of Shakespeare unknown to the biographers and commentators, but he died, and ‘made no sign’ of the projected work. The bookseller made a demand of twenty guineas on my father, alleging that he had advanced that sum to Mr Oldys, who had promised to provide the matter in question.
The sale of Oldys’ books would disappoint Taylor as well as Walker. Fry was shocked by the ‘trifling prices’ achieved by important sixteenth- and seventeenth-century items that were ‘esteemed amongst the scarcest in the language’. The prices were vastly below those achieved in the heady days of the bibliomania. At the Roxburghe Sale, Linschoten’s Voyages to the East Indies (1596) had sold for £10 15s. Davies’ price for the same copy was 12s 6d. Davies sold Oldys’ 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems for a shilling. A large quantity of early quarto plays were knocked down as a job lot.
Like a police line-up, the main characters in Shakespeare’s world—and future authorship controversies—appear in John Fry’s publications: monarchs, aristocrats, literary giants, contemporaries, editors, printer-publishers, forgers. In Pieces and Bibliographical Memoranda, Fry quoted Sir Francis Bacon—‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested’—then précised Bacon’s thoughts on nobility, scholarship, discourse, beauty, brotherly love and the greatness of kingdoms. He explored Sir Walter Raleigh’s incarceration and its impact on his poetry. And he reproduced (from Howell’s Familiar Letters, sixth edition, 1688) early anecdotes about Ben Jonson’s method and egotism, such as this one.
I was invited yesternight, to a solemn supper, by B[en] I[onson]…there was good Company, excellent chear, choice Wines, and jovial welcome ; one thing intervened, which almost spoiled the relish of the rest, that B[en] began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extreamly of himself, and by villifying others to magnifie his own Muse. T[homas] C[arew] buz’d me in the ear, that though B[en] had barrell’d up a great deal of knowledge ; yet, it seems, he had not read the Ethiques, which among other precepts of morality forbid self commendation, declaring it to be an illfavour’d solecism in good manners.
Wrangham owned a large collection of Dibdin’s works, including his unpublished ‘Specimen of an English De Bure’ (1810), ‘only 50 copies’; Dibdin’s The Library-Companion; and, purchased from John Fry, Dibdin’s Bibliomania. For Fry, Dibdin began as an inspiration and ended as an antithesis. Bibliographical Memoranda criticises Dibdin’s sloppy methods and recurring incompetence. Unlike Dibdin, Fry focused on English works, and was not dazzled by the bibliomania cult. Unlike Dibdin, he sought the humble, day-to-day books and manuscripts and pamphlets. That is where Shakespeare was to be found.
The work of Fry and his fellow Malonites was immediately influential. Among editors and bibliophiles, the network helped popularise the search for Shakespeare’s library, directly influencing attempts by Nathan Drake and, later, William Hazlitt and John Payne Collier, to reconstruct ‘Bibliotheca Shakespeareana’. By analysing the plays and poems to identify the romances, novels, poems and histories that Shakespeare was thought to have used, Drake helped answer, ‘Of what extent was the library of Shakespeare?’ Published in Shakespeare and His Times (1817), Drake’s Shakespeare library included the original source manuscript for Fry’s The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots—and scores of other source books such as Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545), Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560), Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie and Florio’s First Fruits (1578).
William-Henry Ireland’s bogus library catalogue was a crude but not altogether alien preview of Drake’s Shakespeare library, and the two editions that followed it: Shakespeare’s Library, by Collier (1840–43), and Hazlitt’s second edition with the same title (1875). In essence, these three latter compilers ‘catalogued’ Shakespeare’s library using the same methods Ireland had employed to assemble the handlist that impressed his father and conned literary London.
Wrangham bought copy number 86 of Pieces. He also bought Fry’s The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots and had it bound into a composite volume alongside Dibdin’s Bibliomania and John Davors’ Secrets of Angling. He became one of Fry’s best supporters and friends; a father figure who chided him over his lifestyle and his frequent bouts of illness. ‘If at three or four and twenty the health begins to feel the effect of nightly lucubration, it is indeed the first of duties by consulting it to guard against the unavailing remorse of a disoccupied and exhausted old age.’ There was no question, though, of the bookseller suffering into old age. In 1822, at the age of thirty and just over a decade after his ‘premature’ edition of Carew, John Fry died. Wrangham grieved the loss of a young man who possessed a ‘rare union of talent and industry’ that should have borne ‘rich and lasting fruits’.
A self-made bookman, Fry had learned by finding and handling important books, and by cultivating friendships with the foremost collectors and litterateurs of the era. Copies of his books held in libraries today feature warm inscriptions to his friends and supporters. The Legend of Mary, Queen of Scots in the New York Public Library is warmly inscribed by Fry to the editor of the Examiner.
More grounded than Dibdin, more honest than the Irelands, more sane than Steevens, and faithful to the methods modelled by Malone, Fry performed a preservative function that is invaluable for modern scholars. Looking back over the history of Shakespeare studies, it is remarkable how many Shakespearean documents have been found and analysed, only to be lost again. Infamous examples include the papers Malone used to prove Shakespeare lived in Southwark, near the Bear Garden, in 1596, and maintained multiple London residences until 1608. Thomas Greene, the Stratford town clerk, referred to two letters he had written to ‘Shakspeare’ about the enclosure of fields at Stratford; these, too, are now lost. Perhaps the most intriguing piece of missing evidence is John Shakespeare’s ‘Spiritual testament’.
Just six small leaves stitched together, the document appeared to be a Catholic ‘will’ bearing the name of John Shakspear—along with the name of his patron saint, ‘Saint Winefride’. Poet and antiquarian John Jordan claimed the bricklayer Joseph Moseley found the will in April 1757 between the rafters and the roof tiles when retiling a Henley Street house owned by descendants of Shakespeare’s sister Joan. Passing through the hands of intermediaries, the document reached Malone around 1789. Jordan had been implicated in more than one forgery, and the spiritual will was greeted with scepticism. After much deliberation, Malone published the testament as genuine in his 1790 edition of Shakespeare’s works, but then had second thoughts, concluding in 1796 that it ‘could not have been the composition of any one of our poet’s family’. The will’s authenticity is still the subject of debate, and the debate is likely to continue: no one since Malone has seen the document.
In his friends’ libraries, Fry studied and recorded poems, prose works and documents whose original versions have since been lost. Today, he is the sole source for notable verse fragments and details of early book collections. Without Fry and his league of bibliophiles, much more would have perished.
Wrangham lived for two more decades, long enough to complete the epic catalogue of his library. When Dibdin visited in 1838, the archdeacon’s figure was ‘inclined at a gentle angle’, his step was ‘hesitating’, but he was still engrossed in his library, and in planning its fate. Wrangham gifted a collection of ten thousand pamphlets, including many not in the British Museum Library, to Trinity College, Cambridge. Bound in a thousand volumes at the time of their delivery, they are still there today. Sotheby’s auctioned most of his other books in 1843 at a sale lasting twenty days. Wrangham’s treasured books nourished libraries around the world.
Francis Freeling did so well at the General Post Office that the King made him a baronet. Late in his life, he spent as much time as possible in his library. ‘Many were the hours of weariness and suffering in his latter days which were thus happily soothed.’ After Freeling’s death in 1836, the Roxburghe auctioneer Robert Harding Evans sold, at an auction extending over nine days, ‘the Curious, Choice and Valuable Library of the late Sir Francis Freeling, Bart. F.S.A.’ Dibdin dedicated to Freeling his 1836 memoir, Reminiscences of a Literary Life.
Fry’s discoveries about Shakespeare’s sources and Greene’s ‘Shake-scene’ attack would be crucial evidence in the authorship debate. In this and other respects, Fry accomplished much in his shortened life. He became one of the world’s most diligent searchers for Shakespeare’s library; unlike Drake and Hazlitt, who traced textual sources, Fry sought actual books. His legacy supplied new pictures of Shakespeare. The book-loving scholar-librarian. The anti-censorship activist. The radical gentleman.
If Fry had lived longer, there is little doubt he would have outshone Dibdin, and bibliography would have made greater progress. Fundamentally, though, in the search for Shakespeare’s library, Fry and his network failed. The significance of some of their discoveries is not yet fully understood, but they never found a verifiable Shakespeare manuscript or association copy. Measured against the standards set by Malone, the network never found a single book or document that has been directly, authoritatively linked to Shakespeare’s library.
Now one of several nineteenth-century searchers whom history has largely forgotten, John Fry nevertheless leaves us at a telling point in our quest. He had free access to the major libraries of his era. And he found none of Shakespeare’s books. This conclusion has led many people to question whether there were any such books to be found in the first place.