University of California • Berkeley From the Library of Helen and Alexander Meikle john ,V rW.0.,^0^ — ^ I e o ^. ^'* A»/»# ^TSr f^^mrP'^j>*jr^jJl "" l£ti Mr. WILLIAM 5HAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, & TRAGEDIES. J UNI^E FIRST FOLIO BT H. C. FOLGER, JR. WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEORGE DUPONT PRATT ON Wednesday, August 11, 1596, Hamnet, only son of William Shakespeare, was buried at Strat- ford. The little lad's father, hurrying from London, was the saddest mourner at the funeral. For the wise Shake- speare, though he wrote for us all a book of life, showed signal indifference about himself. He found his father harassed by creditors, and his wife a borrower to meet her needs. Indeed, one sum remained unpaid five years later, the lender telling his executors to collect from Shakespeare and give it to the poor. Thus death rudely checked the bard's supreme ambition — to found a line of gentlefolk. While he could " by his right happy and copious industry," as the dramatist Webster puts it, pay the family debts, buy a property, and make for himself a reputation, only the boy Hamnet could pass the name of Shake- speare down to posterity — and Hamnet was gone. E'or William Shakespeare had already approached the Heralds about a coat of arms, applying in his father's name, as was the practice ; and a rough draft by Dethick, Garter King, dated October 20 of this sad year, 1596, can still be seen at the College. Curi- ously enough, it is in the hand of Vin- cent, who appears later in our narrative. How its sonorous phrases must have delighted the poet's ear ! As many gentelmen by theyre auncyent names of families, kyndrede, and descentes, have and enjoye certeyne enseignes and cotes of arms, So it is verie expedient in all ages that some men for their valeant factes, magnanimitie, vertu, dignitie, and desertes, may use and beare such tokens of honour and worthinesse whereby theyre name and good fame may be the better knowen and divulged, and theyre children and posteritie in all virtu (to the service of theyre Prynce and Contrie) encouraged. Perhaps comments on the financial instability of the father, John Shake- speare, perhaps objections to the son's calling — hardly respected, however re- munerative — checked the College ; but most probably the death of his heir left the poet, clearly the mover in the suit, less eager for the honor. The grant of arms was not confirmed. Three years later the application takes a new form. Shakespeare is fast becoming a man of means, with many •friends, one of whom, the Earl of Essex, is chief of the Heralds' College, and another, the scholarly Camden, Claren- ceux. It is easy now to get his grant, but our poet is more ambitious, and begs permission to quarter the Arden arms with those of Shakespeare. Again the College hesitates, suggesting the device of Ardens more distant and less known 687 688 THE OUTLOOK than those of Warwickshire. Happily, the poet relieved their embarrassment by accepting the Shakespeare arms alone. Gould, on a bend sables a speare of the first, steeled argent; and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his winges displayed argent, standing on a wrethe of his coullers, supporting a speare gould, steeled as afore- said, sett upon a helmett with mantelles and tasselles as hath been accustomed. Above runs the motto, " Non sanz droict," which all the world most will- ingly now grants. This is the beginning of our curious history. The " Exemplification of Arms " to Shakespeare in 1599 was executed by "William Dethick, Garter Principall King at Arms of England, and William Camden, alias Clarentieulx." Two men could not be more unlike. Dethick was arrogant, grasping, unscrupulous ; Cam- den, surnamed " the learned " by Stow, a man of talent and scholarship. But Camden, two years before, had been ad- vanced by Queen Bess to second place in the College, a step keenly resented by his colleagues. They clung to the old regime, by which the offices were given in succession to Heralds and Pursuivants as of right. So Camden was charged with lack of experience — which could not be denied — and with igno- rance, though it was his knowledge and industry that were feared. Most bitter were the attacks of the York Herald, Raphe Brooke, the black sheep of the College of Heraldry, who had vehemently demanded for himself the office given to Camden unsolicited. There is a touch of humor in our finding Brooke a member of the College at all. That body was established solely to pre- serve family succession and to reward the services of faithful subjects by hon- oring their descendants. Brooke, a man without a past, had forced his way into the sacred precincts. His very name and lineage were assumed. He was born Raffe Brokesmouth, but changed his name to Raphe Brooke, and fabricated a line back to the days of Richard IH. By trade a " painter-stainer," his ready hand at tricking coats of arms made him a welcome among the Heralds, who were none too clever or industrious. One might think the vigorous language of the time accounted for the keen criticisms by his associates, did we not read in contemporaneous history that he broke open the office and stole the books and muniments of the College, and that he was later found guilty of other felonies, and branded in the hand at Newgate. Those were rugged times of .refined bar- barity. In order to disgrace a colleague and superior, Segar the Garter King, he arranged, by a hired emissary, for the confirmation of arms to one going hur- riedly, it was said, to Spain. Brooke, with the boldest effrontery, used the royal device of Arragon ; and Segar, falling into the trap, made the grant for only twenty -two shillings, the real appli- cant being Brandon, the public execu- tioner. Brooke himself carried the tale to the King, quite oblivious to his own ignominy in his eagerness to involve another. But our concern is with his assaults on Camden. He objected to the heraldic shield given to the Shakespeares, claim- ing that it encroached on that borne by the family of Manley. This the shrewd Dethick and the scholarly Camden readily answered, showing at least two other coats of similar design and differentiating the four from one another. But Brooke was not to be silenced. Knowing neither Latin nor French, and ignorant of all history, his instinct of self-preservation led him to attack the learned Camden, whose " Britannia," a book held in highest esteem, had been enriched, in its issue of 1 594, with many genealogies. Brooke claimed that this curtailed the emolu- ments of the Heralds' office, and assailed Camden, in 1596, with " A Discoverie of Certain Errours published in print in the much commended Britannia, 1594. Very preiudiciall to the descentes and successions of the auncient Nobilitie of this Realme. By Yorke Herault." And then, in 1619, he brings out a pretentious, rather than accurate. Peerage of his own, with a title as ambitious as it is ample : A Catalogue and Succession of the Kings, Princes, Dukes, Marquesses, Earles, and Viscounts of this Realme of England, since the Norman Conquest, to this present yeare, 1619. Together, with their Armes, Wives, and Children : the times of their deaths and burials, with many their memorable Actions. Collected by Raphe Brooke Esquire, Yorke Herauld : Discovering and Reforming many tule-i-agl or iiui vi.nxent first folio 690 THE OUTLOOK 23 November Errours committed, by men of other Pro- fessions, and lately published in Print ; to the great wronging of the Nobility, and preiudice of his Maiesties officers of Armes, who are onely appointed and sworne to deale faithfidly in these causes. The publisher was William Jaggard, afterwards made famous as printer of the Shakespeare First Folio. Camden's friends had little difficulty in turning the tables on the intemperate critic, Camden himself being too gentle to be party to any controversy — so gentle, indeed, that he declined knighthood, unwilling to wear spurs and carry a sword. Most active among his supporters was the Windsor Herald, Augustine Vincent, who of right came to the defense, as Camden long before had befriended him when but a Pursuivant. One of the criticisms of the older man was that he had em- ployed as deputies inferior officers to make visitations in his stead, the young Vincent having been so honored, besides being favored often in other ways by the kindly Clarencieux. Brooke was driven by these disclosures to issue, in 1622, a second edition of his " A Catalogue and Succession," although, as Jaggard de- clared, " there lay yet of the former im- pression, almost two hundred of five, rotting by the walles." In this issue he charges the errors, now corrected, upon his " rascally printer," Jaggard, by whom " divers faults and many mistakings were committed." In the meantime Vincent, now Herald of Windsor, had prepared an elaborate defense of his former patron and con- stant friend. As Brooke had called his attack " A Discoverie of Errours in the Britannia 1594," Vincent entitled his rejoinder " A Discoverie of Errours in the Catalogue of Nobility, Published by Raphe Brooke, Yorke Herald, 1619." He found an eager printer in Jaggard, glad of the opportunity to add some five pages of the choicest Billingsgate in his own defense. We do not often, even in the frank days of King James, find in print so intemperate phrases as " falsifi- cations, suborning of incestuous matches, bastard issues, and changing children in the cradle, and such scumms of his ranke eloquence." Your owne intollerable arrogance and pride of conceite, your vilifying and con- tempt of others, as if you had stoode on the toppe of Powles, and saw all men under you no bigger \>:i2iV\.Jacke-da'wes; your familiar vaine of detracting from the best and Worthi- . est men ; your tongue gliding over no man's name, but that it left a slime behind it Brooke was at last silenced. The justi- fication of Camden was complete, includ- ing the granting of Shakespeare's arms ; and the aspersions on Jaggard's skill as a printer were, to his keen delight, refuted. This was in 1622. In 1623 Jaggard and his associates finished their ambitious task and issued the Shake- speare First Folio — " the greatest of all events in English literary history." In the flush of triumph over a common foe, Jaggard the printer presented to Herald Vincent, the vindicator of his reputation as a typographus, an early copy — per- haps the first — of his new work, binding it in rich full calf, and stamping on its cover the Herald's arms — " a bear, hold- ing in his left paw a banner, and in his right a squire's helmet, surmounted with acrestofabear'shead, standing on a scroll with the motto * Vincenti Augusta ' "— (Laurels for a conqueror). Doubtless Jaggard would have penned a stirring presentation inscription, after the man- ner of the times, had he not, through blindness, lost the power of writing. But Vincent supplied the lack by him- self proudly inscribing in a bold hand at the top of the title-page, " Ex dono Willi Jaggard, Typographi a° 1623." Friend- ships, like enmities, were strong in those days. Thus came into existence the subject of our sketch. It is quite incidental that the book, as the librarians of the British Museum state, is "absolutely uncut," being the largest of known copies and unique in that respect; or that, as the same authority puts it, " the Portrait on the title-page is a very brilliant impres- sion, pointing to its being one of the earliest struck off." These facts, not to mention the further one that it still remains in the original binding, would distinguish it from all its fellows — a nota- ble company — and put it in a class by itself. Important as they are, these extraordinary marks become trifling in the presence of this history of the book's genesis, with the stamp of its identity made by the friends whose mutual triumph it records. Nor is it of moment to trace its :wabnderiiigs since the master printer handed it to the worthy Herald, even if such history could be told. This much is known. The book was discovered by a mem- ber of the London firm of Henry So- theran & Co., Booksellers to the King. Mr. Railton had been sent, in the spring of 1891, to Sudbrooke Holme, in Lincoln," to weed out the worthless items and prepare a catalogue of the others in the library of Coningsby C. Sibthorp, of Carwick Hall. To use his own words, *' Having finished work in the library, I was taken to the coach-house, in which was a large case of books. On the top of the case, outside, were stacked a great number of folios, covered with dust. These were passed to me by an assistant who lived on the estate. On throwing down a volume which was tied tightly around with cord, he remarked. That is no good, sir, it is only old poetry.' I unloosened the string, opened the book, and, at a glance, saw what a treasure was found I" Mr. Railton noted only that it was an uncut copy of the Fir^t Folio, and in the original binding. It was left for the Shakespearean scholar, Sidney Lee, and the Librarians of the British Museum, eight years later, to discover the ^nore important features. Dr. Lee was quick to notice the presentation inscription on the title-page. The Principal Librarian, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, and his assistants, Mr. Warner, of the Manuscript Department, and Mr. Pollard, of the Printed Books, identified the device stamped on the cover as the arms of the Herald Vincent, and the note on the title- page as in Vincent's autograph. We are carried at once back nearly three hun- dred years to the splendors and struggles of the reign of Elizabeth and James, when poets sang a glorious note, full-throated, when felonies were punished by brand- ing the hand that stole, and ears were shorn to discourage eavesdropping where royalty conferred. Such is the curious history of the Vin- cent First Folio — the most precious book in the world. BSSS