by AARON T. PRATT
Any Shakespeare collector would want a copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, which is arguably the most comprehensive history of England, Ireland, and Scotland written during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.
Carl H. Pforzheimer bought a copy of the first edition (1577) for his library of early English books, which has been at the Ransom Center since 1986. A reasonable choice. It is, after all, the first edition, and it includes more than 200 distinct woodcuts. There’s even one of Macbeth and Banquo with the Three Witches. The Holinshed that Shakespeare worked from, however, was not the first but the second edition (1587). It served as a source for Macbeth as well as King Lear, Cymbeline, and the English history plays. This follow-up may lack the woodcuts of the earlier edition, but the content has been significantly revised and expanded. Usually bound as two volumes with more than 2,750 large-format pages between them, it is a truly formidable book. I should know. As a PhD student, I went page-by-page through several copies of both it and the first edition for a book chapter I wrote with a mentor, David Scott Kastan. It was painstaking, retina-detaching work.
At the end of February, I found myself in front of yet another copy of the 1587 Holinshed, this time in the well-appointed special collections reading room at the Phoenix Public Library. I was there as part of a small group of book historians invited by faculty at nearby Arizona State University to examine some of the roughly 2,300 books, manuscripts, and other objects that the businessman Alfred Knight had donated upon his death in 1958. The contents are wide ranging—cuneiform tablets to modern first editions in fine dust jackets—but Shakespeare is at the core. Alongside numerous later editions and scholarship on the poet-playwright, the collection contains a couple of seventeenth-century quartos, copies of the Second (1632) and Fourth (1685) Folios, and fragments of the First (1623) and Third (1663–4). Not bad.
When I initially leafed through Knight’s copy of the Chronicles, the first thing I noticed was a series of blueish-ink annotations in a modern hand. They’re nearly impossible to miss and, once you see them, hard to move beyond. I read a few and then turned to peruse other books. Feeling restless the next day, though, I decided to revisit the volumes and happened upon a page with a marginal annotation in a rather different script: “see stow otherwise.” (John Stow was a contemporary of Holinshed who wrote his own histories of England.) This note stopped me in my tracks. Even from such a tiny sample, I was pretty sure I recognized the hand. Specific letters—four instances of “e,” an “st” ligature—and the writing’s overall character pointed, against all odds, to one of the most famous English poets. Research with two colleagues quickly confirmed that these and other notes and brackets throughout the book were written by none other than John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. Scholars have long known that Milton read Holinshed, but who would have thought to look for his copy of the book at a public library in the American Southwest?
Aaron T. Pratt is the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts at the Ransom Center.
