Today’s book will make its appearance in the forthcoming Spring 2023 Focus on Women sale by Swann Galleries, who have generously allowed it to be previewed here.
Printed in Oxford, The Tragoedy of Rollo is attributed to John Fletcher, although its true authorship has been the subject of scholarly debate. It first appeared in print in 1639 as The Bloody Brother, its text was from a different quarto. John E. Curran, Jr. attributes the play to Fletcher, Philip Massinger, “and probably some others,” while the English Short Title Catalogue suggests that it was probably written by Fletcher and Ben Jonson, then revised by Massinger. Similarly, R. Garnett argued in 1905 that Act IV, Scene II was penned by Jonson. Although the play was included in the Second Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher (1679), Fletcher’s frequent collaborator did not participate in its writing. Others have proposed that George Chapman was one of its writers, or that Fletcher merely revised the play.
Whatever the truth, we can be sure that the playbook’s owners were more focused on plot than author. The titular character is based on the real-life Rollo, a Viking and the first ruler of Normandy. Rollo’s descendants were known as the Normans, who of course famously conquered England in 1066. Fletcher (and / or whoever else wrote the play) gives Rollo a fictional brother, Otto, with whom he wrestles for control of the kingdom. After a brief reconciliation between the two gives way to suspicion and tension, Rollo murders Otto in front of their mother and has several of Otto’s supporters killed. Rollo is ultimately killed by Hamond, captain of his guard, after ordering the execution of Hamond’s brother Allan, and his kinsman Lord Aubrey ascends to the dukedom.
The recto of the first blank leaf is signed “Grace Jefferson’s Book 1696” along the upper edge. Beneath it, later owner Thomas Pennington has tried four different versions of his signature, the first dated 1710. The book later belonged to the Legh family of Norbury Booths Hall, whose armorial bookplate on the front pastedown is dated 1826. The book may have entered the family’s library during Peter Legh’s lifetime, as he lived until 1857. It was owned most recently by collector Kenneth Rapaport.
Like so many women who inscribed books, Grace Jefferson is unidentified, but demonstrates seventeenth-century women’s interest in drama.
Source: Book to be offered for sale by Swann Auction Galleries in Spring 2023. Images used with permission.
Title page from the 1651 edition at the Huntington LibraryFrontispiece from the 1651 edition at the Huntington Library
Appearing in eight editions (plus additional issues) between 1621 and 1676, seven of them in folio, Robert Burton’s expansive and erudite Anatomy of Melancholy was a seventeenth-century publishing phenomenon. A copy of the 1651 edition of Burton’s Anatomy, held by the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island (shelfmark PR 2223.A1 1651), is the first to appear on the EMFBO site.[1] Furthermore, the evidence here of early modern female book ownership is but one of this book’s several interesting features—including the only known manuscript copy of Katherine Philips’ song “Pompey’s Ghost” in a seventeenth-century printed book or made by a seventeenth-century woman.
The Redwood copy is in a modern binding and lacks the frontispiece and title-page, but it retains two original flyleaves and the half-title that precedes the now missing frontispiece.[2] The earliest provenance appears on the recto of the second of the two flyleaves, where Pleasant Rawlins has enthusiastically inscribed her full name four times: “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book”; “Pleasant Rawlins / Her Book Aprill the 1 day 16**” [second line of inscription obliterated and date trimmed]; “Pleasant Rawlins her book / Aprill ye 1 day 1672” [entire inscription obliterated]; and, at the bottom of the page, “Pleasant Rawlins her book.”
Second flyleaf recto (top)Second flyleaf recto (middle)
She subsequently re-inscribed her name in an accomplished calligraphic hand on the recto of the first flyleaf, the inscription oriented vertically on the page: “Mrs Pleasant Biker / her booke / Aprill Idus Mensis pridie [the day before the Ides of April, i.e. April 12] Anno Domine 1676.”
First flyleaf recto
The obliterations of the two dated “Rawlins” entries look likely to be by Rawlins herself, possibly prompted by her addition of the re-dated inscription under her married name. The same hand has obliterated two instances of the name “John” on the “Rawlins” inscription page, in the same ink and probably at the same time as the other obliterations. On the top left of the “Biker” page, also oriented vertically, is another inscription, probably not by Rawlins/Biker but still early and possibly missing some text due to paper repairs. Difficult to decipher, it reads like a quotation but remains untraced: “[?Jan*** pa**] / I shall Endeavour for the future / To have \no/ constant indareance between us / by Letter.”
Pleasant Rawlins and Mrs Pleasant Biker are the same person: Pleasant Rawlins, daughter of William and Katherine Rawlins, was baptised in the parish of St Botolph Without Aldgate in London on February 1, 1652. She married Samuel Biker (d.1685) at some point between April 1672 (the date of her “Rawlins” inscription) and 1674, the year her daughter Pleasant Biker (d.1696) was baptised, also in St Botolph Without Aldgate, on August 30. Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker died in early 1685, the same year as her husband, and was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on January 12 of that year, at the age of thirty-two.[3]
Pleasant Rawlins was a young woman of twenty when she first inscribed her copy of Burton’s Anatomy. The Latin in her 1676 inscription as well as her practised use of Italic and calligraphic hands, not to mention her ownership of a work like Burton’s Anatomy, suggests a certain level of education. In addition, the thirty-line poem she has copied in the book, beginning on the “Rawlins” inscription page (in the same hand and ink as her signature at the bottom of the page) and continuing onto the facing verso of the preceding flyleaf, suggests a fashionably current literary sensibility. Beginning “From lasting and unclouded Day,” the poem is an extract, often known as “Pompey’s Ghost,” from Katherine Philips’s play Pompey, her translation of Pierre Corneille’s tragedy La mort de Pompeé. “Pompey’s Ghost” is one of the newly written songs Philips innovatively added to the translated play.
From lasting and unclouded Day, From joys refin’d above allay And from a Spring without decay. I come by Cynthia’s borrow’d bems To visit my Cornelia’s Drems, And give them yet sublimer Thems.
Second flyleaf recto
[first flyleaf verso, oriented vertically]
Behold the Man thou love’dst before Pure streams have wash’d away his Gore And Pompey now shall bleed no more. By Death my Glory I resume, For ’twould have been a harsher doom T’ outlive the Liberty of Rome. By me her doubtfull fortune try’d Falling, bequeaths my Fame this Pride I for it lived and with it Dy’d. Nor shall my Vengeance bee withstood Nor unattempted, with a Flood off Roman and Egitptian blood. Cesar himselfe it shall pursue his days shall troubled bee & few And hee shall dye by treason too. hee by severity Divine shallbee an offring att my shrine As I was his hee must bee mine Thy stormy life Ile regrett noe more For Fate shall waft the soone ashore [And to thy Pompey the restore] There none a Guilty Crowne shall weare nor Cesar bee Dictator there nor shall Cornelia shed one teare
First flyleaf verso
Rawlins has omitted from Philips’ original the penultimate three-line stanza, probably for reasons of space: working around some pen trials already on the page, she changed hands halfway through the first line of the sixth stanza from her elegant italic to a more cramped secretary, squeezing stanzas six and seven onto the lower half of the left side, then squeezing stanzas eight and nine onto the lower half of the right side (in stanza nine, the final line has been trimmed in rebinding and the final words of the first two lines are covered by a paper repair), then adding the final stanza in an empty space above, breaking up lines to make it fit. The omitted stanza reads, in Philips’ original, “Where past the fears of sad removes / We’l entertain our spotless Loves, / In beauteous, and Immortal Groves.” Rawlins has bracketed stanzas eight and nine, adding an unfortunately illegible (and possibly trimmed) word in the margin (?*eib*).
Pleasant (Rawlins) Biker and her husband Samuel both died in 1685, in London: Samuel was buried in St Botolph Without Aldgate on February 21, about six weeks after his wife. At some point that same year, the next owner of this copy of Burton’s Anatomy bought it in a location a world away: an inscription across the top of the book’s half-title reads, “Benjamin Newberry Ejus Liber Bought att / Port Royall In Jamaica 1685.” This is probably Benjamin Newberry (c.1653-1711), of Newport, Rhode Island.
Half-title
The Newberrys were a prominent merchant family in Newport and would likely have had trade dealings in Jamaica; the Newport connection could also explain the current presence of the book in the Redwood Library & Athenaeum. The same page features one additional later signature, the (untraced) “Robert Morton / 1828.” If this copy of Burton remained in the possession of the Rawlins/Biker family until the deaths of Pleasant and then Samuel in early 1685, it soon made its way into the hands of somebody with an entrepreneurial sense of the potential transatlantic market for used books. While other copies of Burton’s Anatomy are documented in America in the seventeenth century, including at least one owned by a woman,[8] this book may represent the earliest text by Katherine Philips to make its way across the Atlantic.
Source: Redwood Library & Athenaeum, call number PR 2223.A1 1651. Photos reproduced with permission.
[1] I would like to thank Michelle Farias, Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at the Redwood Library and Athenaeum, for drawing this book to my attention during a visit there in January 2022, and Victoria Burke and Elizabeth Hageman for their comments on early versions of this note.
[2] Because the title-page is missing, the holding library has catalogued the copy on the basis of its colophon, dated 1651 (sig. 4A4r). The same colophon appears in the 1652 re-issue, which differs only in its re-dated title-page: the copy may therefore represent the 1652 re-issue (Wing B6182) rather than the 1651 edition (Wing B6181).
[3] The genealogical data presented here all derives from records found in ancestrylibrary.com. This Pleasant Rawlins is not to be confused with her niece, also Pleasant Rawlins (b.1684), who was the teenaged victim of a notorious 1702 case of heiress abduction and forced marriage regarded as a source for Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa: see Beth Swan, “Clarissa Harlowe, Pleasant Rawlins, and Eighteenth-Century Discourses of Law,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 1 (2001), 71-93.
[4] Long ‘s’ and initial ‘ff’ regularized, abbreviations silently expanded, and a false start on one stanza omitted.
[5] Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 182.
[6] Salzman, 187-90; Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700 (CELM), PsK 575-77; John Cunningham, “Songs Lost and Found: Katherine Philips’s ‘Pompey’s Ghost’,” Music and Letters, advance article 20 May 2022.
[7] The Folger Union First Line Index of English Verse lists five manuscript copies; CELM adds two, one now lost (PsK 578-80); Cunningham, incorporating ongoing research by Nathan Tinker, adds seven more, all copied in the USA in the eighteenth century (20-23). For a study of manuscript copying of other work by Philips by early modern women, see Victoria E. Burke, “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips,” Women’s Writing 24.3 (2017), 280-97.
[8] Charles Heventhal Jr., “Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ in Early America,” PBSA 63.3 (1969), 157-75. Heventhal notes that a copy of the 1632 edition is described in the 1870 catalogue of the Thomas Prince library as signed “Sarah Standish” (159-60). Prince bequeathed his library to Boston’s Old South Church in 1758, and this could be any one of several Sarah Standishes who lived in the New England settlements between the mid-seventeenth century and the date of Prince’s death. The Prince library is currently held by the Boston Public Library, but this copy of Burton’s Anatomy seems no longer to be present in the collection.
While most of our posts involve single books or evidence of book ownership in the form of marginalia and signatures, another key area of provenance research is in the form of inventories and book lists. The fascinating database and journal series Private Libraries of Renaissance England have showcased a number of key women for whom the content of larger libraries are known. These lists, whether they are based on inventories or wills, help us determine not only what women read, but also, as Edith Snook notes, how they wanted to present themselves. Indeed, in her essay on the private library of Elizabeth Isham, Snook calls the booklist a form of life writing or “ego document,” a source that can tell us something about women’s senses of identity, particularly for noble women whose profile was of necessity at least to some degree public.
In his chapter in the collection Women’s Bookscapes, Joseph Black predicted that “Unpublished early modern booklists will … continue to turn up” (219). A few months ago, I was delighted to receive a message from Tim Couzens, who offered to share with us and our readers two lists of books that he has found in the papers of Lady Dorothy Long housed at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. Though he will be editing and publishing these lists more fully soon, we get here an advance look at the contents. The lists were evidently drawn up to facilitate their placement in the household, as they are books to be put on “the high shelf,” some of them grouped among the “little books to be put on the high shelf.” Whether the “high shelf” indicates that they needed to be placed out of reach or were stored where they were not readily accessible is unclear.
Lady Dorothy Long, née Leche (c. 1620-1710) was married in around 1640 to Sir James Long, second Baronet (1617-1692), a politician. The couple lived in their estate at Draycot, Wiltshire. Sir James had fought on the side of the royalists in the Civil Wars, but nonetheless, according to biographer John Aubrey, befriended Oliver Cromwell through his interests in hawking, a lifelong passion. Aubrey lists James Long under “amici” (friends) in his Brief Lives.
In their edition of Elizabeth Isham’s autobiographical writings, Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow mention Lady Long (“Dolly”)’s correspondence with Isham’s brother and contrast her style with that of the more sober Isham: “[Long’s] letters employ the banter of a royalist coterie, complete with nicknames and a (mocking) reference to their ‘Academy’, in a style reminiscent of the more familiar and accomplished works of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips. Lady Long does display an interest in literature, particularly the salacious Ovid, but she mocks the Countess of Dysart’s serious study of Donne.” Long donated to the Ashmolean, and their Book of Benefactors describes her in much different terms, as “the pride and joy of her family and her sex … [She] showed a deep interest in primitive religions and antiquities. Her piety and great good will to this University led her to give a carved ivory crosier [head] which had belonged to Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, to this museum to be placed with the other treasures.”
Given these contrasting descriptions, it is fascinating to think, with Snook, of the two lists of books that belonged to Long as a form of life writing to counter the narratives of royalist eccentricity and piety.
Here is Tim Couzen’s transcription, along with his preliminary identifications of the books in brackets:
Little books to put ith highe Shelf. [15 July 1704, from content]
Narrative oth Fire at London [An Historical narrative of the Great and Terrible Fire of London, Sept 2nd1666. Gideon Harvey. This may be an original of the book published more generally by W. Nicoll in 1769.]
Epitome of Husbandry [The Epitome of the Art of Husbandry: comprising all necessary directions for the Improvement of it. Etc, by J.B. Gent (Joseph Blagrave), 1675.]
Flatmans Poems [Dr. Thomas Flatman (1635–1688) Fellow of the Royal Society, Poet and miniature painter. Probably Poems and Songs (1674).]
Counr Manners Legacy tos Son. [Counsellor Manners, His Last legacy to His Son: etc. Probably the first edition, published in 1673, by Josiah Dare.]
Dr Gouge Domestick dutys [Of Domesticall Duties, eight treatises etc. by William Gouge, 1622.]
Pasquin risen from ye Dead [London, 1674.]
Nat: Culverwel on ye Light of Nature [Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–1651), An elegant and learned discourse of the Light of Nature, 1652.]
The History of Joseph &c: [Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews. Probably the 1700 edition.]
Theopanila Broms Poems [William Sales’s Theophania (London, 1655) and Alexander Brome’s Poems.]
G [Gaius] Velleius Paterculus [Roman Historian (c 19BC – c AD31). There are several early editions.]
Evagoros. [Evagoros. [Two possible identifications: Paul Salzman has suggested this is Evagoras, a Romance by L.L. Gent (London, 1677). A second possibility is the Greek oration by Isocrates on the King of Salamis (Unknown edition). Given the mixture of romances, for Dorothy Long’s own use, and text books from her grandson, James, it is not possible to be certain, but the former seems much more likely.]
Bookes to put into ye High Shelfe ye 15o July 1704.
The Countise Montgomerys Urania [romance by Mary Wroth (1587–1653), dedicated to Countess of Montgomery; the book was first published in 1621.]
Orlando Furiosa: Abraham Cowleys workes [Two separate books. The first is Orlando Furioso, an Italian epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto (1516–1532), presumably in an early, but un-named translation. Abraham Cowley (1618–1667), was an English poet, with 14 printings of his works published between 1668 and 1721.]
Mrs Phillipes’s Verses. orinda. [Katherine Philips (1631/32–1664), known as “The Matchless Orinda,” was an Anglo-Welsh royalist poet, translator, and woman of letters. After her death, in 1667, an authorized edition of her poetry was printed entitled Poems by the Most Deservedly admired Mrs Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, which included her translations of Pompee and Horace.]
Scarrons Comicall Romance [Paul Scarron (1610–1660) was a French dramatist and novelist. The Roman Comique was reworked by a number of English authors.]
The Lusiad. or Portingales His: a Poem [The Lusiads is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luis vaz de Camoes (c1524/5–1580) and first published in 1572. The date and author of the early translation is not stated.]
The warres of Justinian [The history of the warres of the Emperour Justinian in eight books: etc. Written in Greek by Procopius etc. Englished by Sir Henry Holcroft (1586–1650). Published in 1653.]
Micrographia. By Rob: Hooke [Likely to be a first edition (1665) directly from the author. The book is listed in the 1846 Draycot House contents catalogue.]
The Civell warrs of Spain [Joseph Black has identified this as Prudencio de Sandoval, The Civil Wars of Spain (published in multiple editions from 1652 to 1662) This book is also listed in the 1795 Draycot House Inventory.]
Phillipe De Comines. [An early translation from French of the Memoirs of Philippe de Commines. The usual publication date for Volume 2 is 1712.]
Cornelius Tacitus Tacitus Arriana. [The Annales of Cornelius Tacitus: The description of Germanie. Translated by Richard Greenway and Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622). Published London, 1640; Ariana is a romance by Jean Desmarets, Sieur de Saint Sorlin, originally translated in 1636.]
Of Goverment of obeydiense by Jo: Hall. [Of Government and obedience as the stand directed and determined in Scripture and reason, four books by John Hall of Richmond. London, 1654.]
Cass[andra?] Sanders on Memory &c. [The title is obscured by the fold; the first book is Cassandra the fam’d romance: the whole work: in five parts / written originally in French: now elegantly rendred into English by a person of quality. Cassandra is a translation of a romance novel by Gaultier de Coste La Calprenède, translated in 1652. Possible second work is unidentified.]
Pasquil risen from ye Dead to put higher [see above.]
Standly’s 7: wise Men &c. [Thomas Stanley (1625–1678) was an English Author and translator. The History of Philosophy, 3 volumes published in 1655, 1656, and 1660, includes the seven wise men (sages) of Greece.]
A larg print of Cardinall Richeleis House [Probably the Chateau de Richelieu, south of Chinon, Touraine, rather than the Palais Royal in Paris.]
Nero Ceazar. & ye warr of Jugurth &c: [Two separate books. The first title is possibly Nero Caesar, or Monarchy Depraved. An Historical Work, by Edmund Bolton (published 1627). The second is an early English translation of Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus). The Warre of Jugurth is by Thomas Heywood, 1608.]
The collection of books is, as Tim Couzens notes in his email to me, largely associated with her schooling of her grandsons, Sir Giles and Sir James Long (later 5th Baronet), before they went on to tutors and governors and to Oxford. But many women’s collections included works of history and politics, whether or not they used them to educate their children.
Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs Katherine Philips, Folger Shakespeare Library, P2035.
Readers of this blog will be particularly interested to see both Mary Wroth’s Urania and Katherine Philips’s Poems in the listing, and, compared with other such inventories, there are surprisingly few devotional books. Though Margaret Cavendish is missing, the presence of Philips certainly shows, much like the romance texts, an affiliation with royalist culture. Links between different books are evident: Thomas Flatman, author of a book of poems listed here, had written a dedicatory poem for Philip’s collection, and as it happens, another copy of Philips’s poems we have featured on this site (housed by the Folger Shakespeare library) was owned by Hannah Flatman, Thomas Flatman’s wife.
Generally, Long’s inventories reveal her political affiliations, her investment in learning (or teaching the boys in her family), and a wide range of interests in romance, history, philosophy, and poetry, with only minor concerns with household management and domestic advice so commonly found in women’s inventories and little in books of devotion that normally dominate such libraries. Perhaps those books were placed on the lower shelves.
We want to thank Tim for providing us with transcriptions and pictures of the two lists of books owned by Lady Dorothy Long and Sara Morrison and Anabel Loyd for permission to reproduce both the transcription and images.
Source: Wiltshire and Swindon History Center 2943B/1/35. Draft letters and notes by Lady Dorothy Long [No description] (1686-1704). 35 documents.
Further Reading
Joseph L. Black, “Women’s Libraries in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England Project.” Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 214–229.
Elizabeth Clarke and Erica Longfellow, “Introduction to the Online Edition.” Elizabeth Isham’s Autobiographical Writings. Center for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, 2015. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/researchcurrent/isham/texts/.
Tim Couzens, Hand of Fate: The History of the Longs, Wellesleys and the Draycot Estate in Wiltshire. ELSP, 2001.
PLRE.Folger: Private Libraries in Renaissance England. Ed. Joseph L. Black et al. Folger Shakespeare Library. https://plre.folger.edu/
Private Libraries in Renaissance England vols. 8-9 (2014–16).
Edith Snook, “Elizabeth Isham’s ‘own Bookes’: Property, Propriety, and the Self as Library.” Women.’’ Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation. Edited by Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Saur. University of Michigan Press, 2018. 77–93.
Title page of the Fourth Folio of Mr. William Shakespear’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1685), up for auction at Christie’s as part of the Theodore B. Baum sale in September 2021.
But this rough magic I here abjure, and when I have required Some heavenly music, which even now I do, To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.
Shakespeare, The Tempest (5.1.59-66)
You are what you read—at least, that’s how I have always understood the feeling of dissolving into a book. Books absorb us into their pages: we feel our edges blur and disappear. The world goes away, until reality breaks the charm and we resurface and reappear among the living.
Except when we don’t. Sometimes, those who are forgotten by history live on only in the books they left behind, fathoms beneath our memory of the past. That is exactly what happened to Charlotte Rowe (1718-1739), daughter of Nicholas Rowe, England’s fourth Poet Laureate and the first editor of Shakespeare’s works. Charlotte Rowe was swallowed by a book. In fact, she disappeared into the Fourth Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1685).
Rowe’s signature on recto of the frontispiece leaf. The shadow of the intaglio portrait of Shakespeare on the verso is visible to the keen eye.
Charlotte is concealed by Shakespeare both historically and literally. If there’s a place one would least expect to find her name inscribed, it’s in Poets’ Corner, the most iconic pilgrimage site for lovers of English literature—yet there she is. Anyone who explores Westminster Abbey in London will soon find themselves in an alcove in the south transept crammed with tombs and memorials to some of the greatest English writers. In this part of the cathedral, there’s hardly an inch of space that isn’t carved with famous names. A visitor can’t take so much as a step without trodding on Charles Dickens or coming nose to nose with Geoffrey Chaucer. Even after the inscriptions had carpeted the stone floor and climbed up the marble walls, names began appearing in the stained-glass windows too. Poet’ Corner is one of the most magical places a passionate reader can find herself. The stone itself is alive, and one of its most electrifying features is an elaborate monument to Shakespeare.
The monument to Shakespeare in Poets’ Corner. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Drawn in by the sheer prominence of Shakespeare’s statue, most visitors don’t notice what sits just a few feet away. Next door is the tomb of Nicholas Rowe, which includes a memorial to his daughter, Charlotte.
The most prominent figures in the Rowe monument are a bust of Rowe and a symbolic statue of a mourning woman holding an open book. A carving of Charlotte in profile in a round frame hovers diffidently in the background. Even though it sits directly within view, it would easily escape the casual observer’s notice.
This only surviving portrait of Charlotte reflects the apparent position of many women. They hover in the background, metaphorically and spatially. Where their names survive, they play second fiddle to men’s names and achievements. And, too often, we can barely get a clear enough view of them to put a face to the name. The tiny glimpse we get of Charlotte raises more questions than answers.
Charlotte was born in 1718, the same year her father died. She never knew him personally, yet she owned a copy of Shakespeare’s Fourth Folio. Nicholas Rowe based his 1709 edition of Shakespeare primarily on the Fourth Folio which, at the time, was the most recently published version of the plays. It was also highly inaccurate, containing substantially different texts to those published in Shakespeare’s time and the First Folio (1623). Modern editors, who regard Shakespeare’s language as almost sacred, aim to recover it as accurately as possible. Today, the Fourth Folio’s differences are damning.
But that’s not how many of Rowe’s contemporaries would have seen it. From the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, writers and editors often took a liberty that would horrify Bardolaters today: they rewrote Shakespeare. Unthinkable though it seems to us, it wasn’t uncommon for Shakespeareans to take it upon themselves to ‘improve’ the plays. Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate before Rowe, was put off by the unbearably tragic ending of King Lear—so he simply rewrote the play to give it a happy ending. In fact, it was Tate’s version, in which Lear and his beloved daughter Cordelia survive, and not Shakespeare’s original which ends in both characters’ deaths, that was performed on the English stage from 1681 until the mid-nineteenth century. For more than a hundred years, Shakespeare’s King Lear wasn’t Shakespeare’s King Lear!
In some ways, Rowe was ahead of his time. He pioneered many editorial features of Shakespeare’s plays that we take for granted: he divided the plays into five acts each, added stage directions, and included a Dramatis Personae, or list of characters, at the beginning of each play. He also claimed that he had compared “several Editions” to reproduce as nearly as possible “the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts.” In reality, his edition shows that he simply followed the Fourth Folio, and even included several plays incorrectly attributed to Shakespeare. But, in a time of Tates who freely abridged Shakespeare’s works, it was the thought that counted. Rowe was the first to express a desire to recover the author’s own versions—and Shakespeare’s original words have been pearls which editors have sought ever since.
That the daughter whom Rowe never met owned a copy of the Fourth Folio raises some unanswerable questions. Was this inscribed book her father’s copy, perhaps inherited after his death? Did Charlotte long to know more about the father she would never meet? And how might such a desire have driven her interest in Shakespeare? How would she have read a play like King Lear, in which death thwarts a reunion between a father and daughter? And is there a copy of Rowe’s 1709 six-volume edition with his daughter’s signature still waiting to be found—or have these volumes been drowned in the tides of time if they ever existed at all?
On these questions, Charlotte’s copy of the Fourth Folio is as silent as the grave. The book contains no further substantial annotations beyond her signature. Charlotte herself died at the age of twenty-one, giving birth to a daughter, Charlotte Fane (1739-1762), who would die, in her turn, at the age of twenty-three. The bare skeleton of these facts survives to tantalize us with truths we many never conjure from the pages of books. Charlotte’s Fourth Folio whispers,
Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
The Tempest (1.2.474–479)
So Shakespeare seemed to Rowe—so Rowe might have seemed to Charlotte. So Charlotte appears to us.
The best historical writing makes the past and its inhabitants come alive. But what are we to do with those individuals who have undergone a sea change into something strange and elusive? Many women’s histories exist but remain undiscovered—but even more have been reduced to flickers and flashes, as indistinct as water is in water. In the face of large-scale social inequity and subsequent historical neglect, women have disappeared into the books they owned and read. As a result, rare books are some of the most evocative places we can look for and attempt to discover them. When we do so, whether as historians or curious readers, we seek the pearls of great price that humankind has unwisely thrown away: the books and people time’s tempests have submerged.
Many heartfelt thanks go to Rhiannon Knol for showing me this book and, as ever, to the members of the Books and Manuscripts Division at Christie’s, for their warm and wonderful support.
Source: Book offered for sale by Christie’s, September 14, 2021. All images reproduced with permission.
This set of Ben Jonson’s Workes includes a first volume printed in 1616 and a second volume printed in 1640. The first volume shows an interesting instance of use of an older manuscript as endpaper.
Pen trials appear on the flyleaf of the volume and a bookplate has been pasted onto the endpaper. The bookplate belonged to John Stackhouse, possibly the botanist, whose bookplate is in a collection in the British Museum.
For our purposes the second volume is even more interesting. The title page, which shows the book was printed for Richard Meighen, has several inscriptions on it that show women’s interest in displaying their ownership.
A “William Owen Esq” has signed the book twice, once around the word “Viz.” and his name appears again twice times before the list of plays, as if appropriating each title as his. At the very top of the page, a relative has written “Madm Elizabeth Owen her book.” The same name appears between the lines immediately below, and perhaps she is also the person who has copied the date, 1640, and the word “Printed” at the bottom of the page. The positioning of the “her book” phrase at the very top seems designed to override all other claims to ownership below.
Still, the name Elizabeth appears three more times on the page, twice crossed out, as is made visible by RetroReveal.
Although it is difficult to read the last name or other words that have been crossed out and we cannot tell whether these are by the same woman, it is clear that the female owner or owners of the volume wanted to mark their ownership on the title page. Title pages can, as in this instance, become spaces for competing marks and pen trials, as we have seen before on this blog.
Source: book offered for sale by Whitmore Rare Books, July 2021. Images reproduced with permission.
Liam Sims (Rare Books Specialist, Cambridge University Library)
Fig. 1. Title page with inscription by Nathaniel Dalton.
Earlier this year I spent some time examining the Shakespeare folios at Cambridge University Library, on behalf of the Shakespeare Census, edited by Adam Hooks and Zachary Lesser. The First Folio of 1623 has long been the recipient of attention, from collectors and academics alike. But the later folios (1632, 1663/4 and 1685) have not – until now – been as well studied.
Until the end of the nineteenth century Cambridge University Library had only the fourth folio of 1685, which arrived in the Library in 1715 with the vast library (30,000 volumes) of John Moore, Bishop of Ely. The collection had been purchased by King George I for the huge sum of £6450 and presented to Cambridge. But in 1894 copies of all four folios arrived on our shelves. In this group the second folio of 1632 (shelfmark SSS.10.7) is particularly interesting when it comes to provenance, chiefly for the inscription of a woman – Anne Browne – made in the late seventeenth century. This appears on the blank recto of the “To the Reader” leaf along with half a dozen other inscriptions, some dated and others not. These include “Samuel Sampson 1673,” and undated “Charles Sampson” and “William Watts his book 1693.” Who Anne Browne actually was is hard to say. She may have to remain simply as one of a number of untraceable names associated with this copy.
Fig. 2. Anne Browne’s inscription (upper right) on recto of ‘To the reader’ leaf.
One of its early owners (whether Anne or not is impossible for me to say) read the text extremely closely and made amendments to it (I hesitate to use the word corrections as I’m not sure they are). For example, in The Winter’s Tale (p. 281) the printed text “I appointed him to murther you,” by Camillo, is amended to “I am appointed by him to murther you.” The four folios give slightly different renderings of this passage: the first “I am appointed him to murther you” and the third and fourth “I appointed him to murder you.” Another example occurs in Henry IV, Part 1, when on p. 70 the phrase “Supposition, all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes” is amended to begin with the word “Suspicion.” One final example comes in the form of a description of action on the stage in Henry VI, Part 3 (p. 151): next to the line “I marry Sir, now lookes he like a King” is added in the margin “She put’s on his Head a paper-crown.” It would be hard to imagine anyone sitting though a performance of Shakespeare with a folio on their lap, but perhaps such an addition was made mid-performance. I am no scholar of Shakespeare reception and leave it to others to mull this over.
Fig. 3. Annotation to margin of Henry VI, Part 3 (p. 151).
Later, the book was in Oxford: a Nathaniel Dalton, who matriculated at Queen’s College Oxford in 1772, has boldly inscribed the title page (see fig. 1 above). It may have been Dalton who commissioned the volume’s current binding of full scarlet morocco, gilt, by John Mackenzie of Westminster (executed between 1817 and 1850). It was acquired in this binding by Samuel Sandars (1837–94), a Cambridge student in the 1850s and friend of Cambridge University Librarians Henry Bradshaw and Francis Jenkinson. It came to the Library in 1894, upon his death, as part of his collection of about 1500 volumes of early English books and fine bindings. A rich assemblage, it continues to give up secrets about its contents and will do so long into the future.
Source: Cambridge University Library, shelf mark SSS.10.7. Images reproduced by permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
In early January 2021, rare-book librarian Jane Siegel discovered a previously untraced play owned by early woman reader Frances Wolfreston (1607–1677), Lewis Sharpe’s The Noble Stranger, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Sharpe’s play was printed only once in 1640 and the ESTC records a little over two dozen surviving copies. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama indicates that the play was first performed in 1639 by Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, who put on many of the plays that Frances Wolfreston owned in print: Richard Brome’s The Antipodes, Shackerley Marmion’s The Antiquary, Thomas Nabbes’ Covent Garden, Thomas Heywood’s The English Traveller, and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice, among others.
Little scholarship has been done on this relatively minor and obscure play and its even obscurer author, whom Matteo A. Pangallo calls a “nonaristocratic playwriting playgoer” (23). The Noble Stranger seems to have been Sharpe’s only printed play. The dramatis personae includes the King of Naples, the princess, and Honorio, the eponymous stranger.
In contrast to many of her playbooks, this is one that Wolfreston did not annotate. However, she did sign it in a favored location on the caption title page and in her customary way: “frances wolfreston her bouk.”
The book was first sold in 1856 as lot 361 of the now famous single-day Sotheby’s auction of the Wolferstan* family library. The lot contained two other minor plays, Henry Shirley’s The Martyr’d Souldier (1638), now at the Huntington, and an English translation of an Italian work by Guidubaldo Bonarelli, Filli di Sciro, or, Phillis of Scyros (1655), untraced. In contrast to the Shakespeare plays appearing a few lots before them, which sold for between £1 (two damaged copies of Richard the Third and Richard the Second) and £13 13s (the complete copy of Richard the Second now at the Harry Ransom Center), these three lesser known plays were purchased by bookseller Joseph Lilly for just a single shilling.
Siegel notes that Wolfreston’s copy of The Noble Stranger entered Columbia University’s collections as an anonymous gift some forty years after the Sotheby’s sale in October 1895. She goes on to say:
In the Report of the Librarian [George H. Baker] for the Academic Year ending June 30, 1895, on page 192, “There have been added to the library, through Prof. Geo. E. Woodberry [professor of Comparative Literature], from a sum of money put at his disposal by a gentleman, 1169 volumes. These books bear a bookplate with the words “Ex dono Amici Litterarum.” They are largely works in English drama, and in criticism and literary history.” [T]he accession register listings of other parts of this gift on the pages around The Noble Stranger include a number of other 17th century plays acquired at the same time.
At least one other signed book from Frances Wolfreston’s library now resides at Columbia University, Robert Mead’s play The Combat of Love and Friendship (1653), which Wolfreston deemed “a uery prity one, all of loue 3 copells of louers.”
*Wolferstan is the spelling adopted by Wolfreston’s eldest son Francis and used to this day by her descendants.
Source: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, B823 Sh25. Images taken by Jane Siegel and reproduced with permission.
Further Reading
Matteo A. Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
I collect eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions, an outgrowth of my scholarship in this area, which in turn originated from my work as editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. I recently acquired a 1747 reprint of the 1743-44 Oxford Shakespeare, a relationship that the former’s title page explicitly proclaims, albeit without the sumptuous typefaces and magnificent illustrations by Francis Hayman and Hubert Gravelot in the latter. Sir Thomas Hanmer’s name appears nowhere in the six volumes of the original or the nine of the reissue, but scholarly consensus decreed that he composed the preface preceding Alexander Pope’s and the Rowe biography of the playwright in the first tome. A second, corrected Hanmer edition appeared in 1745, and a third in 1770-71.
In my group of nine, each except the first includes the handwritten name of its two probable owners, El[i]z[abeth] Philips and Maria Goodford Jun[io]r, the first in quill pen, the second likely in nineteenth-century steel fountain ink. In each signature, Philips commemorates her date of possession as 1756. Goodford simply identifies as herself. In every instance, someone has crossed out Elizabeth’s name. There are no other annotations in the set: no significant passages marked out, no underlining, no starred lines or words.
Who were these women? The most recent seller of the set spells Elizabeth’s surname as Philips, but in some of her signatures, she seems to have spelled it Phelips, which would be an unusual, but not unheard of, variation. Philips, Phelps, and Phelips might have similar origins. Though Junior and Senior are traditionally male appendages, so to speak, some women named after their mothers adopted them in the nineteenth century, which might account for Maria’s form of self-identification. An intriguing ancestry.com search revealed that an Elizabeth Philips in the late eighteenth century had a sister named Maria, who in turn married a Goodford. However, the dates do not match up well enough to make a sibling relationship probable.
That the otherwise unknown Philips and Goodford owned this pocket-sized reprint set of the Hanmer Shakespeare accords perfectly with what scholarship has uncovered over the last fifty years about English women’s readership in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Many notable studies, such as those by Fiona Richie, have tended to concentrate on recognizable figures such as the Enlightenment actresses, critics, and playgoers who left the Shakespeare-imbued traces of themselves that a scholar would be delighted to unearth, analyze, and bring to light in print. [1] Yet a rise in the literacy rate from 25% to 40% among European women between 1714 and 1750 allows for the possibility that those who were not Elizabeth Pepys, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Montagu, or Sarah Siddons read the plays and poetry, as well. [2]
As most students of mid-eighteenth-century Shakespeare editions know, negotiating the relationships and rivalries between Pope, William Warburton, Lewis Theobald and Sir Thomas can be formidable. Accounting for their squabbles to an audience unfamiliar with them can only be more so, and inadvisable here as a result. However, the publishing history of the 1747 Hanmer reprint is less complex, and significant for my present task.
The “Tonson cartel” considered itself the owner of the Shakespeare copyright throughout the century and guarded what it believed to be its proprietary interest in publishing the works. Warburton had been preparing his edition of the plays and signed over his rights to Jacob Tonson III in January of that year, a deal brokered in part by the publishers of his theological works, John and Paul Knapton, sub-proprietors of the family business that Jacob had inherited. The expensive nine-guinea Oxford edition was not under the firm’s purview but would prove to outsell Warburton’s less pricey eighteen-shilling publication. [3] Hence John Osborn, a London publisher, saw his opportunity, defied the status quo, and issued the more affordable nine-volume reprint delineated here that belonged to Philips and Goodford, variously described as duodecimo or octodecimo, but in any case, a small size. Predictably, the monopolists “threatened, prosecuted, and tried every other artifice, to intimidate him from printing Shakespear.” However, “Mr. Osborne having calmly answered, That, if they talked any more to him in that Style, he would print a Dozen of Books which they had such pretended Rights.” As a result, “They immediately, and justly took the Alarm, and were glad to take the half of the Impression off his Hands, at the Price he was pleased to put upon it, besides allowing him, as it is said, an annual Pension, which he enjoys to this Day, to buy him off from reprinting upon them.” [4] In other words, the Knaptons bought out Osborne’s copies and reissued them under their own names along with the Tonsons, thus re-cementing the monopoly, which could now boast of an inexpensive version for sale of the Hanmer production that had so eluded them.
Traditional textual editors, unlike most book historians today, have not often concerned themselves with material labeled “paratextual”—introductions, annotations, typefaces—though such divisions have become less distinct. As Georg Stanitzek drolly observed, these things “mean that no text ever has a truly paratext-free moment.” [5] Sociological theories of book production usefully attempt to account for other factors involved, e.g., the influence of stationers, printers, publishers, or how fluid these categories were three centuries ago; market forces; and, of course, the person identified as the editor and what he actually did. These are things worth considering, since they probably influenced the creation of the material text in ways we have yet to discover. Why did an editor make a choice to emend, or not? What did he think he was doing? If there was a theory behind what he did, did he always follow it?
Did contemporary readers care about such things? This economic competition in Shakespeare publishing doubtless favored the consumer. It shows there was a market for an affordable edition of the playwright who was becoming the National Poet some two decades before the Garrick Jubilee of 1769, such as the Osborne reprint of Hanmer’s edition. The books were small, designed for one hand if necessary, yet clearly printed in legible type, unencumbered with engravings and explanatory notes of warring commentators. Margins were large enough to allow for annotations, passages that could be marked out to be recalled or memorized. The 1747 set was one that women such as Philips and, later, Goodford could buy, keep, inscribe with their names, resell, and enjoy.
[1] See Richie’s Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2014).
[2] Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women—Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800-1867 (Oxford, 2007).
[3] A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, eds., The Cambridge History of English Literature, v. 5, The Drama to 1642, pt. 1 (Cambridge, 1910), 303.
[4] Respectively, Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, Humbly Submitted to the Consideration of the Public (London: Printed for Alexander Donaldson, 1764), 20; and Considerations on the Nature and Origin of Literary Property (Edinburgh: Printed by Alexander Donaldson, 1767), 13-14.
[5] Georg Stanitzek. “Texts and Paratexts in Media,” Critical Inquiry 32 (1995): 30; 27-42.
Source: books privately owned. Photos by M. L. Stapleton, reproduced with permission.
Giles Dawson, “Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare,” Studies in Bibliography 2 (1949-50): 35-48.
Donald W. Nichol, “Warburton (Not!) on Copyright: Clearing up the Misattribution of An Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Literary Property (1762),” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 12 (1996): 171-82.
We have seen several examples of female book ownership of plays lately, but this is a particularly interesting one, of the 1632 Folio of Shakespeare’s complete works. The wonderfully useful Shakespeare Census has located 53 copies of pre-1800 Shakespeare works owned by a woman and currently housed in libraries all over the world. But occasionally an example ends up for sale and thereafter possibly in private ownership.
This copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio has a lovely binding and multiple ownership inscriptions.
A closer look at the title page, which I enhanced with Adobe Lightroom, reveals at least one female owner, Joanna White, who appears to be the person who has not only written her name, but also copied the title of the play that begins next to the page, The Winter’s Tale. The other name, Richard Carrington, seems to be written in a different hand than the one that wrote and practiced the title of the play. If it is Joanna, she might be marking a particular fondness for Shakespeare’s late romance.
Potential other female scribblings can be seen on the page, with some upside down (something we see frequently in early modern books). It is possible that one reads “mery” or Mary, a name we also see below Joanna White’s signature in the image above.
The bookseller has a blog and short video on their website, allowing us to see the book in more detail (including another page of pen trials with male names). This copy of the Folio was on the market earlier this year.
Source: book for sale on 26 February 2020 by Peter Harrington. Images reproduced with permission.
As we have seen on this blog, women owned all kinds of books in the early modern period, including plays. Although we cannot date this particular signature with any degree of certainty, Mary Feltham wrote it in a copy (presumably hers) of a collection of plays by the popular playwright Richard Brome, published in 1653. Rather than putting her signature on the title page, she put it above the Letter “to the Readers” by the person who put the collection together, the royalist poet Alexander Brome (who was not related to the playwright). Thus, she marks herself as one of the readers to whom the letter is addressed.
Sixe Court Comedies is only the third example on this website (so far!) of a woman owning a copy of early modern plays. Yet, as Kitamura Sae discusses, early modern women purchased playbooks, gave and received them as gifts and, in some cases, were involved in printing them. Clearly, we have more work to do to find these women and their playbooks!
Sixe Court Comedies is a collection of plays by English playwright John Lyly: Endymion, Campaspe, Sapho and Phao, Gallathea, Midas, and Mother Bombie. It was printed by William Stansby for Edward Blount, who, along with William and Isaac Jaggard, also printed Shakespeare’s First Folio.
This copy of Sixe Court Comedies has three indications of potential ownership. Thomas Baynard inscribed his name on the title page and the first page of Act 1, Scene 1 of Endymion. The title page also contains a faint “W,” perhaps belonging to the William Sainbourne whose name can be found at the end of the volume.
On the verso side of the final page, he wrote “M Willam Sainbourne his book.” Lower on the page, “Mr. William” appears again, presumably the same person. This final page also includes the name of a Mrs Mary Meller, who experimented with the style of her signature. She wrote her name out in full twice, and twice abbreviated it as Mrs M M. The stylistic variations of each of these signatures suggest she may have been practicing a new signature and perhaps, for that matter, a new name.
Source:
John Lyly, Sixe Court Comedies (1632). STC 17088 copy 2. title page recto, B1r, and 2D12v. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Photographed by Emily Fine.
Further Reading
Kitamura Sae, “A Shakespeare of One’s Own: Female Users of Playbooks from the Seventeenth to the Mid-Eighteenth century.” Palgrave Communications 3, 17021 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.21
We have only showcased a few books on this website so far that were both owned and written by a woman, and as we have seen in the case of Hannah Woolley, attribution can be problematic. Here is another instance of problematic attribution: a play that has been attributed to Aphra Behn. The Counterfeit Bridegroom, published in 1677, is an adaptation of No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (1613) by Thomas Middleton. However, the play was published anonymously and Behn’s authorship has been questioned, and we cannot know if this particular female reader even knew this was perhaps a play by Behn. A woman named Millisent Smith wrote her name twice on a page, once at the very top and once upside down next to the text. The handwriting looks as if it may be that of a young person. The positioning of the writing next to the prologue and the double presence of her name suggests she may have been practicing her signature, a way of claiming ownership that disregards the actual content of the book. It is difficult to date the handwriting, which may well be later than the seventeenth century.
Early Modern Female Book Ownership 