None of William Shakespeare's friends and associates left behind a description of his library. Nor is there a record of it being dispersed at the time of his death. His will refers neither to books nor manuscripts. In fact, it gives no sign of a literary career at all, or even a literate one. Contemporary dramatists such as Francis Beaumont, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, and Ben Jonson all left behind plays in manuscript. No Shakespeare playscript, though, has ever been found. (Part of the manuscript of a play about Sir Thomas More has been attributed to Shakespeare, but the part is small and the attribution contentious.)
We do, however, know a few things about Shakespeare's relationship with books. He wrote plays according to a method that has been labeled plagiaristic; “appropriative” is a more polite term, and historically more accurate. Quantities of prior plays, poems, novels, histories, and almanacs fed into his writing. The breadth of his sources is exceptional; they number in the hundreds and span diverse eras, countries, and genres. By some means, Shakespeare had contact with most or all of these source texts.
During his career, a network of libraries linked bookmen to one another. Jonson, for example, used Francis Bacon's library, and John Florio used the Earl of Southampton's. Shakespeare probably knew John Bretchgirdle's clergyman's library in Stratford and printer Richard Field's working library in London. Shakespeare referred to libraries as “nurser[ies] of arts” (in The Taming of the Shrew) and characterized them as treasure troves and cure-alls. Titus Andronicus invites Marcus Andronicus and Lavinia to “Come, and take choice of all my Library, / And so beguile thy sorrow.” The Tempest seems to have been written late in Shakespeare's life. Many scholars have read it as his theatrical farewell, and the sorcerer Prospero as his alter ego. Prospero tells Miranda, “Me, poor man, my Library was dukedom large enough,” and later confesses: “Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me, from my own Library, / With volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”
Doubtful oral traditions have come down to us as well. One anecdote concerns Ben Jonson, with whom Shakespeare seems to have maintained a complex relationship of mutual affection and perpetual jousting. The anecdote sees Jonson “in a necessary-house” (in other words, on the lavatory) “with a book in his hand reading it very attentively.” Shakespeare notices Jonson thus engaged and says he is sorry Jonson's memory is so bad he cannot “sh-te without a book.”
If Shakespeare had a library, we can readily visualize its contents. Apart from working drafts, along with manuscripts and copies of his principal literary and historical sources, he probably owned reference works: writing guides, dictionaries, and foreign-language instruction manuals. Examples of the latter include Claude de Sainliens' A Treatise for Declining of Verbes (1590); Sainliens' The French Littleton: A Most Easie, Perfect and Absolute Way to Learne the Frenche Tongue (1591); William Stepney's The Spanish Schoole-master (1591); John Eliot's Ortho-epia Gallica (1593); and G. Delamonthe's The French Alphabet, Teaching in a Very Short Tyme, by a Most Easie Way, to Pronounce French Naturally, to Reade It Perfectly, to Write It Truely, and to Speake It Accordingly (1592). All these titles were printed or published by the Stratford-born bookman Richard Field.
Of the many hundreds of book owners I've studied, the overwhelming majority left behind evidence of their ownership—bookplates, book labels, signatures, marginal notes, manicules, inscriptions, imprecations. That is the case today and it was true, too, of book collectors in Shakespeare's day. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors often wrote their names on title pages or other leaves of their books. John Bretchgirdle was vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. He probably baptized the infant William Shakespeare, and certainly had one of the best libraries in town. On each of his title pages, Bretchgirdle wrote “Jo. Bretchgyrdles Book,” along with details of where he bought the book. Edward Alleyn wrote his name twice in his books, once on the title page and once on the verso of the last leaf. Among other Shakespeare contemporaries who were also book-markers, Ann Raynor used a tidy and legible script to sign her books on the inside of the front cover, while Humphrey Dyson ink-stamped the date on his books in a manner as idiosyncratic as a signature.
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