In 2017, an expert on BBC One’s Antiques Roadshow was excited by a minuscule 17th-century notebook that bore the name of Shakespeare, but the writing was so tiny it was difficult to read.
Since then, it has been transcribed and studied by leading scholars and its anonymous author has emerged as what is thought to have been the playwright’s first obsessive fan.
The manuscript is so small that it fits into the palm of a hand. Yet its author had crammed 12,500 words into its 48 pages, drawing on hundreds of quotations from Shakespeare’s 36 plays in the first folio, which was published in 1623.
It will be publicly displayed for the first time as part of an exhibition at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Dr Paul Edmondson, a leading scholar and one of the show’s creators, said the notebook’s true significance could now be appreciated. “It is one of the most fascinating Shakespearean artefacts that I’ve come across,” he said.
Describing it as the “first proper reader’s response” to the first folio, Edmondson joked that its anonymous author was “the first Shakespeare geek”.
“We’re able to see things that he really liked about Shakespeare and what he wanted to remember or to use maybe in conversation and to sound clever,” he said. “The plays just flow on from each other seamlessly. For example, you’re reading Measure for Measure and suddenly you’re reading The Comedy of Errors.”
The notebook was transcribed by Prof Tiffany Stern, another leading scholar, who is based at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
She dated the handwriting to between the 1630s and 1650s, and discovered that it was all the more intriguing because the most famous quotes were ignored, revealing lines that were perhaps of greater interest to the first generation of Shakespeare’s readers. “Our own history of what we value in Shakespeare has changed over time,” she said.
For example, Stern said the notebook’s author overlooked Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be”, preferring a description of kneeling: “‘And crooke the pregnant Hindges of the knee,’ which he rendered ‘Crooke ye pregnant hindges of ye knee’.”
She added: “He likes metaphors and is fascinated by pregnancy, so this really works for him. The image is of a knee getting more and more pregnant – bulging – as one goes down on it.”
In Richard III, “now is the winter of our discontent” is ignored, as is “a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse”. The notebook’s author preferred the queen’s curse: “My tongue should to thy eares not name my Boyes / Till that my Nayles were anchor’d in thine eyes.”
Stern noted that he simplified it to what may be more useful as a general threat: “My nailes Ile Anchor in thine eys.”
She said: “What’s fascinating is the insight this gives into a reader of Shakespeare. He’s clearly a man because at the back of the book are lecture notes on Aristotle in Latin, and women couldn’t go to university and didn’t tend to be taught Latin. You get a sense of his character. He’s got an ear for words that go together nicely. He likes jokes and references to thunder. It’s a great labour of love.”
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is the independent charity that cares for five historic sites in playwright’s Warwickshire home town, including New Place, the family home from 1597 until his death there in 1616.
The exhibition, titled A Great Variety of Readers – 400 Years of Shakespeare’s First Folio, will be held at the property. It is the first event in a year of celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the first folio’s publication. Without it, 18 of his plays – including Macbeth, The Tempest and Twelfth Night – would have been lost to time.Stern said the tiny notebook, which emerged from a private collection, would be shown alongside the first folio. “Its author took the biggest book you probably can and made the tiniest book out of it,” she said.
