The Lost Plays of Ralph Sheldon (1623–1684)

Abstract

This article traces the fate of an important group of early English plays in fifty-six volumes, collected by the Warwickshire antiquary Ralph Sheldon (1623-1684) and sold at a Christie’s country house sale at his home nearly a hundred years later. The sale itself in 1781 was an early example of the booksellers ‘ring’ and involved some of the major collectors of early English drama, notably David Garrick, Edmond Malone, and the Earl of Charlemont. The earlier portion of the Sheldon plays, recorded by Anthony Wood in a manuscript list, may have survived as part of the Malone bequest to the Bodleian Library. The Restoration Plays remained largely intact, in some thirty volumes, until the ill-fated sale of Lord Charlemont’s library by his descendants at Sotheby’s in 1865, discussed by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman in The Library, VII, 23 (March 2022).

Further notes to ‘The Charlemont Library, the Sotheby Warehouse Fire of 1865, and the Vexed Provenance of British Library, MS Egerton 1994’ by Arthur and Janet Ing Freeman, The Library, VII, 23 (March 2022).

THE SALE OF THE LIBRARY OF RALPH SHELDON, the Catholic antiquary (1623–1684), on the premises, at Weston, Long Compton, Warwickshire, by Christie’s on 7 September 1781, took place nearly a hundred years after the owner’s death. The one lot in the sale that caused considerable interest at the time was the subject of some speculation half a century later, and continues to fascinate scholars today: lot 422, a ‘large collection of scarce old plays, by various Authors, bound in 56 vol.’ The book-collector Richard Heber (1773–1833), whose copy of the rare Sheldon sale catalogue was annotated by him towards the end of his life,¹ gives the first and definitive version of a legend which has grown up about this sale:

But the great prize of the collection, was the series of old English plays, in 56 vols 4to in [lot] 422 which was first bought by King for 5.5.0.—then by Dennis for 18.1.0 and lastly by Henderson for 31.10.0—who transferred to Malone if not the whole at least all he had not already, or wished to possess. From the testimony of Isaac Reed & my friend Malone himself I have ascertained these vols to have abounded in the rarest pieces, in the finest condition. In fact, to an intelligent & ardent collector they were almost invaluable.

Heber also states that ‘Messrs Isaac Reed & Henderson, the Actor, made the pilgrimage on foot, not only to be present at the sale, but to pay their devotions at the shrine of Shakspeare at the neighbouring town of Stratford upon Avon’. A further note by Heber, on page 17 of the catalogue, adds a few details: ‘NB 422. Sold at the Booksellers’ “knock-out” or second sale for £18.1.0. at Warwick. John Dennis of Middle Row, Holborn, was the buyer who disposed of them Oct 10. To Mr. Henderson for £31.10.’ He goes on to repeat the story of Henderson and Reed’s epic walk to Warwickshire. Philip Bliss, in his edition of Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses (1848), repeats Heber’s story almost verbatim and writes:

The Library, 7th series, vol. 25, no. 2 (June 2024)

© The Author 2024; all rights reserved

It may be added that many of the rarest old plays have since found their way into the Bodleian. Henderson allowed Malone to select, such as were wanting in his collection at the time of the sale at Weston. Consequently the University library now contains one of the most curious, if not the very best, dramatic library in the kingdom.²

The pious legend of Reed the distinguished Shakespearian editor and Henderson, the ‘Bath Roscius’, an idol of the stage, both well able to afford a carriage, making a Compostela-like pilgrimage from London over fifty miles to Weston and then some twenty miles on to Stratford is hard to believe, but the story of the booksellers’ ‘settlement’ has the ring of truth.³ What were the fifty-six volumes of ‘scarce old plays’, where did they come from and what happened to them?

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Ralph Sheldon employed the services of one of the ablest bibliographers at Oxford, Anthony Wood, to catalogue his library, and Wood has left a detailed list of the early portion of the Sheldon play collection. The Bodleian Library’s MS Wood D. 18 is described as a ‘Catalogue of such playes that were in the hand of Mr. [John] Horne sometime fellow of Oriel Coll. They came after his death into the hand of Mr. John Houghton of Brasnose; then into Mr. Hernes of St. Ald[ate’]s parish; then into the hands of Ralph Sheldon of Weston, Esq.’ The first two owners of the old plays are easily identifiable; John Horne was born about 1599, undergraduate and fellow of Oriel College, vicar of Headington in 1636, expelled by the visitors of Oriel in 1648; John Houghton, born about 1608, undergraduate and fellow of Brasenose College, died in 1673.⁴ Mr Herne of S. Aldate’s [also given as

Hernes of St. Abbs parish, i.e. St Ebbs], the last owner of the early plays before Sheldon, may possibly be identified as James Herne, son of the town clerk of Abendon [i.e. Abingdon] who, according to Wood (diary, June 1685) ‘died in the house in St. Aldate’s parish on M, the first day of June 1685, aged 60 or thereabouts, having been much troubled with the gout for severall years before’. Wood adds, less charitably, ‘the said James Herne being a sot and beast, his said wife left him and lived about 18 yeares in London by her needle, without any maintenance from her husband’. Anthony Wood’s catalogue of the Sheldon plays is undated but was almost certainly made in the late summer of 1675, after Houghton’s death in 1673 and shortly after Herne found himself a grass-widow with a gout-inducing taste for liquor. The exact succession of these early owners will probably never be known, nor the reason for their interest in old plays. By the time Sheldon acquired this collection it numbered 233 plays in twenty-six volumes. The earliest play is dated 1593, the latest 1643; exactly half a century of English drama. It seems likely that the collection was originally put together by John Horne, possibly with additions by Houghton and Herne.

Sheldon’s old plays reveal a close affinity with those of another Warwickshire library, the Newdigate family collection at Arbury Hall. The absence of individual plays by Beaumont, Fletcher, Shirley,⁵ and Marston is easily accounted for by the presence of their collected works, as also, memorably, by a First Folio Shakespeare, purchased by Sheldon’s father. Sheldon owned twice as many plays by Chapman (12) and Heywood (15) as Newdigate but a more modest number of Davenant’s plays (6 to the Arbury Library’s 14) and very similar numbers of plays by Nabbes, Massinger, and Middleton. The scarcer and earlier plays, mostly bound together in a single volume (pressmark OO 13) included Kyd’s Cornelia (1594), Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (part 1, 1605), Edward the second (1622) and Jew of Malta (the 1633 edition as at Arbury Hall), as well as three rare plays by George Peele, Edward the first (1601), King David and fair Bathsabe (1599), and The battell of Alcazar (1594). For Shakespeare (and apocryphal works) Sheldon owned Pericles (1630), The Puritan (1607), and Thomas Lord Cromwell (1613), none of which were present in the First Folio. Other plays by Dekker (8), Ford (6), Glapthorne (6), Brome (3), Webster (3), Goffe (3), Rowley (3), and many single plays by other authors fleshed out the collection. These twenty-six volumes bear pressmarks in the series OO and PP (marking later additions to the Sheldon library) and were bound in groups of between eight

and twelve plays, enough to make a manageable quarto volume. They are usually organized into single author groups, or, if insufficient, as volumes of comedies, tragedies, etc. We can assume that they were all rebound in Sheldon’s personal livery but probably following the original owners’ groupings. There still remained thirty volumes of Sheldon plays to be accounted for.

It seems likely that these thirty volumes, allowing for additions to the original collection of old plays of works published after 1643, comprised mainly Restoration drama. A comparable collection is that of Edward and Clary Coke, parents of the Earl of Leicester, who also owned thirty volumes of plays (now part of the Holkham collection at the Bodleian) with their joint armorial bookplate, dated 1701. Both husband and wife had plays dedicated to them,⁶ and out of 290 plays, printed between 1663 and 1700, nearly ten per cent were duplicates, indicating some measure of individual purchasing within the family. Sheldon’s correspondence with Anthony Wood gives meagre evidence of his own play-collecting after the Restoration. When in London he lodged ‘at Mrs Floyd’s in Drury-Lane over against great Queene-streete’,⁷ convenient for theatre-going, and he may have inherited plays from his niece, Mary, Lady Tuke, widow of Sir Samuel Tuke (died 1674), author of the popular play from the Spanish, The Adventures of Five Hours (1663), a Catholic convert by 1659 and an early member of the Royal Society. John Evelyn contributed a dedicatory poem to the 1664 second edition of Tuke’s play, ‘Upon my Worthy Kinsman Colonel Tuke, His Incomparable Play’.

Another Catholic convert and playwright with whom Sheldon had some acquaintance was William Joyner (1622–1706), author of The Roman Empress (1671). Joyner had been in the service of Queen Henrietta Maria, but after the 1678 Popish Plot, a watershed for so many ‘laical papists’, he retired to a life of quiet devotion at Horspath, Oxfordshire. Joyner was also a friend of Anthony Wood, and in response to a query from Wood, Sheldon replied on 3 March 1683/4: ‘As to Mr Ioyner’s Roman Empresse I am sure it is not any translation for hee himself told me that it was taken out of history and mix’t with divers products of his owne braine: you know it is bound in a volume with other playes but if you have a mind to see it I can easily send it.’⁸ It also appears that Sheldon owned a volume of plays by Wycherley (probably pressmark PP 42, one of the last volumes in the run of Sheldon plays),⁹ but no other contemporary evidence of his Restoration drama

holdings is forthcoming. To discover more about these remaining thirty volumes of plays one must turn to the sale of the Earl of Charlemont’s library in 1865; but to make the connection between the Weston sale of 1781 and the reappearance of the Sheldon plays some eighty-four years later, the crucial figure of Edmond Malone must be invoked.

The best introduction to Malone as a book-collector is James M. Osborn’s Edmond Malone: Scholar-Collector, read before the Bibliographical Society on 19 March 1963. Osborn, himself a distinguished scholar-collector, commemorated by the Osborn collection of literary manuscripts at Yale, places Malone firmly in that noble tradition. Malone was born in Dublin in 1741, educated at Trinity College, Dublin then a student at the Inner Temple, London, from 1762–67, and then called to the Irish Bar. Ten years later, after a timely inheritance of some £800 a year, Malone established himself in London as a literary scholar and took on the mantle of the great Shakespearean editor and collector George Steevens, receiving, as an unusually munificent gift, Steevens’s own collection of nearly a thousand early plays.¹⁰ By 1777 Malone had made the acquaintance of James Caulfield, earl of Charlemont (1728–1799), a member of Dr Johnson’s circle, an early traveller to Greece, patron of the architect Sir William Chambers, and enthusiastic collector of old plays. Their correspondence gives a fascinating picture of eighteenth-century book-collecting and what Malone himself called ‘Shakespearomania’.¹¹

Some quotations from the Malone–Charlemont correspondence will give a flavour of their mutual obsession with old plays, Malone having taken over the role of ‘bearleader’, in Grand Tour terms, of Charlemont’s growing collection. In the years leading up to the Weston sale of 1781 one can see Malone at work, building Charlemont’s collection for him in Ireland by attending all the major London book auctions and, at the same time, improving and refining his own collection. The commercial side of these transactions evidently played a fairly minor role as Malone was independently wealthy. On 5 April 1779 he wrote:

At all the different sales of books here this winter, I have purchased whatever old plays I could light on for you—and have already procured near 120 of rare old quartos. I mean to bind them up in volumes immediately and send them over to you by the first opportunity. They will make 18 or 20 volumes. Among them are one half of Shirley’s, Massinger almost complete, and half of Beaumont and Fletcher’s

quartos … there is hardly an old play of any rarity now to be got under four or five shillings—and some they even ask half-a-guinea for … I wish to know from you whether you chuse to have the plays bound without any selection—or to place the three principal authors that I have mentioned, by themselves. I have in my own collection in general followed this latter method.¹²

David Garrick, the great actor-collector, had died in January of that year, removing the single most important collector of early drama and enabling Malone to sweep up much of the material coming on to the market. On 20 April Malone writes, ‘I am glad you approve of my intended plan for your old plays. I had before I received your letter got Massinger complete, all to two plays. I shall therefore bind them up, although you have six of them in King Charles’s volume, as you may wish to keep these distinct.’¹³ On 5 July Malone adds:

I bound up the plays of Fletcher, Shirley, and Massinger separately; the latter is complete excepting one play (the “Old Law”), which I could not procure, but there is some blank paper inserted, and the play, whenever you get it, may be tacked into the volume … All the remaining plays are bound up in thirteen volumes. You have, I think, 161 quarto plays at about 2s.6d. apiece one with another, but many of them cost five or six shillings. I have bought for myself this last winter some at so high a rate as half-a-guinea, and one at two guineas’.¹⁴

By 18 June 1781, Malone reports that his run of good luck at the sales had expired at the auction of Topham Beauclerk’s books (9th April for 49 days until 6th June), with new competition from collectors fresh to the market:

Mr. Garrick having made a collection of old plays, every [theatre] manager now thinks it necessary to do the same. Mr [Thomas] Harris of Covent Garden, has now commenced collector … in consequence of this, I picked up very few plays there, either for you or myself … I shall be able to make up about five more volumes of old plays for you, besides an additional volume of Shirley.¹⁵

He adds that having made a mistake in omitting two plays from the volume to complete Beaumont & Fletcher, Charlemont should get his binder to rebind them, but with the interesting caveat, rarely heeded by contemporary collectors, ‘you must remember to charge the binder not to cut them, otherwise they will be spoiled’.¹⁶ The stage is thus set for the sale at Weston and the booksellers’ ‘settlement’ at Warwick in September 1781.

The facts of the first dispersal of the Sheldon plays are not in dispute. Isaac Reed and John Henderson apparently viewed or attended the sale but did not bid. Lot 422 was bought at the sale by the London bookseller King (on 8 September, the second day of the book portion) for five guineas (teste Christie’s marked file copy of the sale catalogue). At the ‘knockout’ in Warwick, presumably on 8 or 9 September as many of the booksellers had come from London, the lot passed to another London dealer, John Dennis, for £18.1.0. Dennis sold the lot on 10 October to Henderson for thirty guineas (£31.10.0), a sixfold mark-up on the original sale price, of which Henderson must have been well aware if he had attended the sale.¹⁷ Henderson was already possessed of a fine collection and Malone later wrote to Charlemont on 18 February 1786, ‘poor Henderson’s books are to be sold next Monday and the five following days. He was very rich in old plays, his collection being, I believe, the greatest in England except Garrick’s and my own’.¹⁸ For some reason Henderson passed on most of the Sheldon plays immediately to Malone, who wrote, triumphantly, to Charlemont only two days later, on 12 October 1781:

I am sure you will pardon me, when I tell you that I have made a most noble purchase for you, no less than thirty volumes of large quarto plays (of which you had none before in your collection) and about fifty small ones, in addition to your former store. I was under a necessity of buying near fourscore plays of which you are already possessed, in order to get the others; but these I shall be able to dispose of either to some collector, or at the worst to some bookseller. When what I shall sell them for is subtracted from the first cost of the whole, I think your plays, I mean this parcel, will stand you at about seventeen pounds, which for near 170 plays is, I think, not dear, at least considering how exorbitant the prices are that are now frequently asked for these rarities.¹⁹

To recapitulate: Malone purchased for Charlemont all thirty volumes of Sheldon’s ‘new plays’ (Restoration plays being almost invariably large quarto rather than small quarto in format) and fifty of the ‘old plays’. Henderson, or more likely Malone himself, retained some 183 old plays, of which Charlemont already had eighty. Malone continues, after some summary of their previous accounting:

I am glad it so happened that my bookbinder could not put the former parcel that I had bought last winter into their regimentals, as I shall now be able to arrange them better, and hope to send you, in a month or six weeks, about twelve or fourteen volumes of small quartos, and the larger ones that I mentioned. These latter are tolerably uniform and in pretty good binding, and therefore I think it will

be unnecessary to take them to pieces. I was very happy to find in this collection almost all the plays of Shirley that I wanted to complete your set; all I think except three. I beg you will let me know how many volumes of that author I sent you (I think three), that I may number the rest properly. I request also you will cut a piece exactly of the size of one of the covers of your volumes of plays (measuring it at the outside); and also cut another slip of paper of the length and breadth of the back, marking with a pen where the bands are to be placed; that I may get the rest bound, so as to match exactly. I think you had thirteen volumes of the old plays (exclusive of particular author’s works.) The ‘Puritan’, which I know you were particularly desirous to have, is in the collection that I have bought. I will send it over loose, that it may be added to your spurious Shakespeare. The ‘London Prodigal’, concerning which I find you gave me a memorandum long ago, I have never been able to meet with. I forgot to tell you that all the plays in this new purchase are the most beautiful copies I ever saw, and have not I believe been opened since they were bound a hundred years ago. You have I think three or four loose plays; I wish you would send them to me under a cover, in order to be bound with the rest.

By 1790 Malone’s ‘Shakespearomania’ was turning into the Revd T. F. Dibdin’s ‘Bibliomania’. He wrote to Charlemont on 15 April: ‘People are growing mad about books. The dukes of Roxburgh and Grafton have come into the field, and have raised the market shamefully. The former gave thirty-five guineas the other day for an indifferent copy of the first folio of Shakespeare, for which I think I paid for you but six guineas, and I was obliged to give seven guineas this winter for a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ 1599.’²⁰ Malone died in 1812, leaving most of his rare plays, amongst which must have been many of Sheldon’s older plays, sadly no longer identifiable, to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Charlemont died in 1799, and his library was sent to Sotheby’s by his descendants in 1865, catalogued as the [anonymous] ‘Library of a nobleman of great literary and artistic taste, comprising … several of the early quartos of Shakspeare’s dramatic pieces, a most remarkable and extensive collection of old plays’, scheduled for sale on ‘Monday, 10th of July, 1865 and seven following days’. The catalogue was printed but not distributed, because on the morning of 29 June a disastrous fire at 13 Wellington Street, Sotheby’s sale-room, immolated most of the library of George Offor, 40,000 volumes collected by two generations of the family of J. J. Techener, the Parisian bookseller, and damaged much of the Charlemont Library. Many of Charlemont’s best books had fortunately been out on inspection to J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps at Old Brompton and were saved; others were charred or waterstained.²¹ The Quaritch file copy of the original Charlemont sale

catalogue for 10 July has a contemporary note on the titlepage ‘(only 12 copies printed)’, referring to Large Paper copies; but all the ordinary paper copies seem to have been destroyed in the fire.²² There were to have been 2,477 lots in the sale, including lot 1,680, described as ‘Plays (Old). Collection of 156 Plays by Dryden, Lee, Otway, Ravenscroft, D’Urfey, Crowne, Behn, Settle, and other Dramatists of the time, in 26 vol. Mostly in fine condition, including some very scarce pieces, old calf, from the library of Ralph Sheldon, with arms stamped on the sides’. This was what remained of Charlemont’s purchase of the thirty volumes of Restoration plays from Malone in 1781. In the hastily cobbled together sale of the major surviving books, which did take place on 11 August, Sotheby’s offered only 278 lots, of which ‘Old Plays’ occupied lots 87 to 123, but not the Sheldon plays. However, on 27 September Sotheby’s offered a ‘catalogue of the remaining portion of highly important and valuable Books and Manuscripts of a Nobleman, of great literary and artistic taste; comprising, besides the selection of works of great rarity, to be offered separately, the entire salvages of this and various other libraries, each in a distinct lot, well worthy of speculation’. Advice, in smaller print, on the first page, announces ‘Note—as many of the volumes have been stained with water in the late calamitous Fire at 13, Wellington Street, this Library will be sold not subject to collation’. Lot 28 announces the last appearance of the Sheldon Restoration plays: ‘Plays (Old). Collection of nearly 150 Plays, by Dryden, Lee, Otway, Ravenscroft, D’Urfey, Crowne, Behn, Settle, and other Dramatists of the Time, 26 vol. from the library of Ralph Sheldon, with arms stamped on the sides’. Although the number of volumes remained constant, a recount came up with six less plays, unless it was a typographical error. Malone’s letter to Charlemont after the Weston sale referred to 170 plays, which would account for the missing four volumes and some twenty plays. The lot was bought by Lacy for £5, hardly much of an advance on the sale in 1781, although the fire and water damage remained unspecified and, as the catalogue announced, these were books ‘well worthy of speculation’.

Thomas Hailes Lacy (1809–1873), the purchaser of lot 28, was something of a speculator himself. After a career as actor and theatre manager he became a theatrical publisher and bookseller in 1849 at no. 17 Wellington Street, the Strand, a few doors away from Sotheby’s. He published acting editions of plays on a large scale and had a business selling old plays as well.²³ At his death in 1873, Sotheby’s held two sales, one of his stock on 6 February 1873 and two following days, and the other of his ‘Private Library’ on 24 November 1873 and five following days. The stock sale, which included a great many rebound seventeenth-century plays, had as lot 800 ‘Plays, various, mostly original editions, bound in 24 vol. some very scarce, v.y.’ sold to ‘Arthur’ for one guinea. This may possibly be the last sighting of the Sheldon Restoration plays—a somewhat ignominious end.

Footnotes