A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  These also were the years when William Shakespeare dominated the London stage with his greatest plays. Many studies have been undertaken to identify the literary and historical sources of Shakespeare’s works, but precisely where the playwright may have read the books he consulted remains unanswered. That England’s greatest writer might have derived some inspiration from Cotton’s books is pure speculation, but certainly possible. The link could have been Ben Jonson, who was friendly with both men, or Lord Hunsdon, Cotton’s landlord and patron, and from 1597 to 1603, director of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the theatrical company that included Shakespeare as actor, shareholder, and principal dramatist, and which became known as the King’s Men in 1603 with the death of Queen Elizabeth and the coronation of James I.

  There is also a coincidence linking Shakespeare to Dr. John Dee, the eccentric book collector, alchemist, geographer, mathematician, and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who was rumored to have buried books and papers in a field that was later excavated by Robert Cotton. Known also as a sorcerer, Dee was acquitted in 1555 on charges of scheming to kill Queen Mary I with magic. In later years he was concerned with the search for a Northwest Passage to the Far East, and he dabbled in necromancy, claiming at one point to have found a potent elixir in the ruins of Glastonbury.

  When Shakespeare was bidding adieu to the London stage around 1611, he conceived as the leading character in his farewell production a powerful magician who at the play’s end buries the twin totems of his authority, his wand and his books, several fathoms deep in the ground. (One contemporary event known to have influenced The Tempest was the sensational story of Sir Thomas Gates, a traveler to North America whose shipwreck and survival on Bermuda had occasioned the publication of several pamphlets in 1609 and 1610, and undoubtedly prompted Shakespeare to give his farewell play an island setting.)

  Although Geoffrey Bullough made no connection between Prospero and John Dee in his eight-volume work, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (1960), in another context he professed “no doubt” that Shakespeare had read a certain French poem, “Traison,” that he used in Richard II, and speculated that the playwright actually may have read it in Dee’s home. Bullough pointed out that a copy of “Traison” now in Lambeth Palace bears the ownership signature of John Dee: “It is pleasant to fancy Shakespeare going to consult the manuscript at the Mortlake home of the famous mathematician and spiritualist,” he wrote. It is just as pleasant to fancy this prince of poets poking among the shelves of Robert Cotton’s library and hearing stories from his friends about the strange sorcerer who buried his books in the ground. A more direct connection was made by Frances Yates in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. “Dee is shadowed through Prospero in this most daring play which presents a good conjuror at a time when conjuring was a dreaded accusation.” Elsewhere, Yates suggests that Dr. Dee, the philosopher to Queen Elizabeth, was “defended” by Shakespeare in the creation of Prospero, “the good and learned conjuror, who had managed to transport his valuable library to the island.”

  Cotton’s residence, located in the heart of Westminster on a site now occupied by the House of Lords, was famous as an informal athenaeum, a Jacobean form of literary salon. Cotton’s library was recognized as the most important source of factual information in the realm, an archive that was valued by his friends and feared by his enemies. In his journal Cotton recorded books “lent to his Majesty at Whitehall.” Other items were lent to the master of the revels, the chancellor of the exchequer, the lord treasurer, and many other noblemen and parliamentary figures. When Sir Robert fell out of favor with the coterie that assumed power after the death of King James I, a singularly vindictive form of punishment was devised just for him.

  In November 1629, Cotton was falsely charged with having circulated a seditious paper titled “The Danger wherein this Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedy.” Because the “pestilential tractate” purportedly was found among Cotton’s books, King Charles I ordered the library to be sealed. Some historians feel the charges were fabricated as a pretext to deprive the king’s enemies of access to information contained in Cotton’s book collection. Cotton was arrested, questioned, and released pending prosecution in the Star Chamber. The birth of Prince Charles on May 29, 1630, occasioned an amnesty, and charges against him were dropped. But once the library was closed, it remained so, and the keys were kept by royal subordinates.

  At first Cotton was allowed occasional access to his books, but only under close supervision of the king’s council. Soon, he was denied use of his library entirely. He fell into a deep depression and his repeated pleas to regain custody were ignored. Sir Simonds d’Ewes, a fellow collector and close friend, later wrote that Cotton was “outworn in a few months with anguish and grief,” and described his once “ruddy and well coloured” face to be “in a green-blackish paleness, near to the resemblance and hue of a dead visage.” Early in 1631, when the end was near, Sir Robert Cotton sent a dire message: “Tell the Lord Privy Seal, and the rest of the Council, that their so long detaining my books from me has been the cause of this mortal malady.” Finally Charles I dispatched the Earl of Dorset with a decree to rescind the order, but word of the decree arrived at Cotton’s home on March 6, 1631, half an hour after the great collector’s death.

  In 1809, the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin wrote that the “loss of such a character—the deprivation of such a patron—made the whole society of book collectors tremble and turn pale. Men began to look sharply into their libraries, and to cast a distrustful eye upon those who came to consult and to copy: for the spirit of Cotton, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, was seen to walk, before cock-crow, along the galleries and balconies of great collections, and to bid the owners of them ‘remember and beware’!”

  The Cottonian Library remained the property of Sir Robert’s family, passing through several generations to his great-grandson Sir John Cotton, who turned it over to the nation in 1700. But more than half a century would pass before the books found a proper home. In the meantime, they moved around from place to place, arriving finally at Ashburnham House in Westminster, where on October 23, 1731, a fire broke out and caused extensive damage, though efforts to save the material were heroic. In some instances, entire presses with the books still in them were hastily removed. Others were broken open, and books “were thrown out of the windows” to safety. Of 958 manuscript volumes in the collection, 114 were reported by a special investigating commission to be “lost, burnt, or entirely spoiled,” while another ninety-eight were “damaged so as to be defective.” Extensive repairs were undertaken over the next century, and many manuscripts thought lost were partially restored.

  Most catastrophic by far was the damage done to a volume known as the Cotton Genesis, a series of illuminations depicting scenes from the first book of the Bible believed executed in Alexandria between the fifth and sixth centuries. The 250 miniatures were among the few examples of classical book painting still in existence. According to one speculative account, the book had first come to England in the sixteenth century with two refugee Greek bishops from Philippi who presented the codex as a gift to King Henry VIII. The manuscript then is said to have passed to Queen Elizabeth I; she, in turn, presented it to her tutor, Sir John Fontescue, who apparently discerned its proper place in the library of Robert Cotton. In a selfless gesture of generosity, Cotton once allowed a French scholar to take the treasures to Paris for four years of study. Today, only a few charred fragments remain, a reminder of just how fragile these objects are.

  There was, by contrast, the miraculous survival of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Originally encased in a binding of gold, gilded silver, and precious stones, the illuminated manuscript was produced in the seventh century by Benedictine scribes on a “holy island” two miles off the coast of Northumbria. When in the ninth century a band of Danish invaders forced the monks to flee, they took the gospels with them. As they attempted a sea crossing to Ireland, a pounding storm washed the bulky book o
ver the side. During low tide the following day, it was found ashore, intact and undamaged. Years later the volume returned to Lindisfarne, where it was recorded in a 1367 inventory. Though shorn of its gold and jewels during the Tudor sack of the monasteries, the text at least was saved and made its way into the library of Sir Robert Cotton, a gift to him from the clerk of the House of Commons. His heirs passed it on to the British Museum, where today it is showcased as a priceless heirloom of English culture.

  If there was an unforeseen lesson to be learned from Robert Cotton’s experience, it was that book collecting could be dangerous, an awareness not lost on a London bookseller who ran a shop at the sign of the Rose and Crown in St. Paul’s Churchyard by day and amassed a vast assortment of fiery pamphlets and fugitive tracts by night. Unlike Cotton, who was pleased to let the world know about his collection, George Thomason took special measures to conceal the existence of what soon would become an extraordinary archive of historic material.

  Starting sometime in 1640 Thomason began saving every book, pamphlet, and broadside he could find pertaining to the dispute between the Royalists and Puritans that was about to erupt in civil war. Though firmly committed to King Charles, Thomason collected on both sides of the controversy. Even after the monarchy was dissolved and the king was executed, even after Oliver Cromwell was installed as head of the commonwealth, the bookseller doggedly continued on his mission, stopping only after the monarchy had been restored in 1661 and Charles II was securely on the throne.

  The scope of Thomason’s accomplishment is best expressed in numbers. During twenty-two years of tireless collecting he filled 2,008 volumes with 22,255 separate items. Though the collection is outstanding for its comprehensive view of the period, an occasional gem sparkles on its own. One such example is the collector’s copy of Areopagitica, the impassioned 1644 speech against censorship in which John Milton described books as “the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life.” Thomason’s copy bears the handwritten inscription “ex dono authoris”—“a gift from the author.”

  Aside from George Thomason, nobody saved much that was printed between 1640 and 1660, even though the output of quarto pieces exceeded anything known in England up to that time. (A quarto, approximately nine by twelve inches, was made from sheets of paper folded twice to make four pages.) Much of this can be attributed to the proliferation of fugitive printing ships during the upheaval, and the movement of Royalist influence away from London to Oxford. In an 1897 essay for the periodical Bibliographica, Falconer Madan of the British Library specified the conditions that were necessary for such an archival enterprise to succeed. “In fact, the only hope of dealing satisfactorily with the whole disturbed period of twenty years lay in the appearance of some person who should see the importance of the task, should arrange a uniform system in London of catching each little treatise as it was hawked about the streets or sold over (or under) the counter, should be successful in interesting his Royalist friends in the pursuit of the pamphlets of the king’s side, should be able to keep his collection safe, and, above all, should be sagacious enough to take a note of the date on which each piece came into his net.”

  Little is known about Thomason, not even the year of his birth, though sometime between 1600 and 1602 is likely, since he had to be at least twenty-four years old in 1626 when he was admitted to the Stationers’ Company as a printer or publisher. While the bookseller did issue a number of catalogues, there is nothing to indicate how successful he may have been in the trade. Not long after Thomason’s death, his estate prepared two informational documents in the hope that the government would be persuaded to buy his civil war tracts. In the process of describing the collection, the narratives shed some light on the scheme he formulated to build it.

  The first document, printed about 1680 as a broadside, begins by pointing out how “very much Money” had been spent, how “great Pains” were taken, and how “many Hazards” were run to make “an exact Collection of all the Pamphlets,” which totaled “near Thirty Thousand of several sorts, and by all Parties.” Every item had been precisely marked, numbered, and preserved in two thousand bound volumes. “The Method that has been observed, is Time, and such punctual Care was taken, that the very Day is written upon most of them, when they came out.” The collection also included “near one Hundred” pieces of manuscript “which no man durst then venture to publish without endangering his Ruine.”

  Because Thomason maintained close professional ties with publishers, he could arrange for the continuous flow of printed material to his shop without arousing suspicion. Not only was he the first systematic collector of what today is called ephemera, he implemented an astonishing code of bibliographic technique generations before any such principles were generally established. Of singular significance was the uniqueness of the delicate tracts he preserved, a distinction that was recognized just fourteen years after his death by his estate: “They may be of very great Use to any Gentleman concerned in Publick Affairs, both for this Present, and After-Ages, there being not the like in the World, neither is it possible to make such a Collection.”

  The anonymous author of this broadside also told how the collection “was so privately carried on” by Thomason “that it was never known” that “there was such a Design in hand.” Once, to “prevent the Discovery” of the tracts while “the Army was Northwards,” he “pack’d them up in several Trunks,” and “sent them to a trusty Friend in Surry, who safely preserv’d them.” And “when the Army was Westward, and fearing their Return,” the pamphlets “were sent to London again; but the Collector durst not keep them, but sent them into Essex, and so according as they lay near Danger, still, by timely removing them, at a great Charge, secur’d them” once again, all the while “perfecting the Work” by continually adding to it. Another time “there was a Bargain pretended to be made with the University of Oxford, and a Receipt of a Thousand Pounds given and acknowledg’d to be” a partial payment for the collection. The thinking was that “if the Usurper”—the Parliamentarians who had ousted the Royalists—discovered the material, university officials would have “greater Power to struggle for them than a private Man.”

  Though the second account relates the same basic history as the first, it includes some additional insights as to just how driven Thomason was. Fearful of being discovered, he once “took great pains both day and night” to bury the tracts in the ground. Unhappy with that solution, he then considered shipping them to Holland “for their more safe preservation,” but the dangers of a high-seas transit caused further anxiety. Finally he hid his treasures inside hollow wooden tables stored in a warehouse and covered with canvas dropcloths.

  Close to a century would elapse between George Thomason’s death and his collection’s finding a permanent home. The 2,008 volumes were kept for several years at Oxford University (thus escaping destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666), then were moved around from custodian to custodian. Finally, in 1761, Thomas Hollis V—the same Thomas Hollis who came to the aid of Harvard College after a catastrophic fire destroyed its library in 1764—persuaded the secretary of state, Lord Bute, to buy the material for £300. The collection entered the British Museum Library in the name of George III, and was known for some time as the king’s pamphlets. For 150 years or so, it more appropriately has been referred to as the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts.

  No contemporary portrait exists of George Thomason, and according to a brief obituary published in April 1666 that noticed his passing, he died “a poore man.” Yet two hundred years after this humble bookseller embarked on his daily ritual of preserving the printed matter of his day, Thomas Carlyle, who wrote a biography of Oliver Cromwell, would say that Thomason had assembled “the most valuable set of documents connected with English history: greatly preferable to all the sheepskins in the Tower and other places, for informing the English what the English were in former times.” In his 1897 essay on the tracts, Falcon
er Madan was less impassioned than Carlyle, but just as impressed by the obscure collector’s matchless deed: “His achievement is unparalleled in its kind, and it does not speak well for bibliography in England that his name is so little known.”

  When the incomparable journal maintained for nine and a half years by Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) during the reign of King Charles II was “discovered” in the nineteenth century, the prevailing assumption was that the diarist wrote his entries out in code because he did not want anybody to read his private thoughts. Eventually it was shown that Pepys used a form of forgotten shorthand called tachygraphy, yet the vexing question remained: Why? Did this indomitable perfectionist take steps to ensure that his candid insights into Restoration life would be read by future generations, or did he wish them to remain concealed?

  Because diaries were not published in the seventeenth century, it is unlikely that Pepys envisioned a printed book emerging from the million and a quarter words he wrote between January 1, 1660, and May 31, 1669. But Pepys did insist that his journal be part of the great private library he took ingenious steps to preserve intact, leaving little doubt that the six volumes were pieces of the bequest he emphatically stated was “for the benefit of posterity.”

  Three centuries after it was formed, the library endures as a time capsule from another era. With seven exceptions, every book that the former secretary of the admiralty chose to include is present, and every one is shelved not only in the precise order he indicated, but in the same glazed book “presses” that had been built to his specifications by British navy shipwrights. Since 1724 the library has been housed behind a graceful courtyard at Magdalene College in Cambridge on the northeastern bank of the River Cam. There is nothing else quite like it—and presumably this was part of the collector’s plan as well.