Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley

In Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley, Jason Scott-Warren provides a lively account of the first person known to have purchased a printed book by Shakespeare, the popular narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593). He argues convincingly that even a fleeting encounter with a book in a shop window constitutes a mode of paratextual engagement that challenges “the tidy distinction between reading and book use” (viii). The list of about five hundred titles Stonley amassed in his extraordinary book collection, which was inventoried with his other London townhouse belongings when this Exchequer clerk for Elizabeth I was incarcerated for embezzlement in 1597, shows how “books work to link people, places, and things” (ix). Because Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is not among Stonley's “two dozen books known to have survived today,” we lack marginalia that might have indicated whether or not he read the poem closely (14). It is tempting to speculate that an Exchequer clerk at court would have wanted to read a best-selling poem in which Shakespeare might have used Venus doting on the youth Adonis to satirize the courting games of the aging Queen Elizabeth I.Like Shakespeare's poem Venus and Adonis, Scott-Warren's book is a delight. He touches on the exploded book, which resulted from the Elizabethan habit of reading actively with scissors or knives in hand in order to reconstitute a text as if it were letters in an anagram. He also unearths “a dirty French novel” written and published by a sixteenth-century woman and found in Stonley's bedchamber (143). Providing an exquisitely detailed and engaging portrait of an early modern individual and his library, Scott-Warren reveals how Stonley's books served as vital agents in the material, interpersonal, and environmental networks that imprinted this bibliophile's identity.In Chapter 1, “Shopping for Shakespeare,” and Chapter 2, “Accounting for the Self,” Scott-Warren relates Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis to a web of material objects such as buttons, fashionable leggings, and boxes that Stonley purchased and recorded in his orderly account book. Trivialized by early modern consumers as “trifles,” such stuff nonetheless demonstrates that the identity of an individual is a composite of clothing and other goods for sale on the marketplace. Because expensive attachments to sixteenth-century men's clothing such as buttons, ribbons, and lace necessitated servants for dressing, these things contributed vitally to elaborate social and economic networks driven by “the performance of hierarchy” (29). Early modern people not only wore little devotional books incorporated into their clothing but also purchased books with adornments made from fine cloth such as velvet that coordinated with their outfits. “The fact that books were usually sold unbound” led to “pick-and-mix” anthologies of works that attached not only Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis with Spenser's Amoretti but also the “literary with the nonliterary” (36–37). Like clothing, books included detachable parts like maps that could be stuck to the wall of a house, many of which were decorated with proverbs engraved above doors and on windows. “Commonplacing,” which was “one of the dominant modes of reading in the period,” involved generating “a series of lists,” a feature that aligns reading with a tally of purchases in a leger (42–43). Financial account books, like Stonley's, apply order to things in the world and serve as a figurative storage box of property that secures memories and identities. In keeping with a collection of ethical proverbs or commonplaces, Stonley's lists of daily expenditures that were based on preexisting notes and copied neatly by hand in a journal granted him the appearance of “moral and temporal regulation” (71).In Chapter 3, “On Aldersgate Street,” and Chapter 4, “People of the Book,” Scott-Warren discusses how the inventory of property in Stonley's townhouse offers a material expression of the owner, his status, and his network of connections to family members, the book trade, and a diverse religious community. By providing a room-by-room survey of Stonley's townhouse and its miscellaneous contents of “fading … fabric” and “yellowing … paper,” which mirror the aging householder, Scott-Warren illustrates that “who you are is inseparable from what you own” (76). Similarly, a blazon is “a poetic inventory that turns people into lists of physical attributes” (76). As illustrated by a box of “printes for pastery” found in Stonley's kitchen, even his foodstuff included the impression of letters, poetry, and moral proverbs (92). “Objectifying titles” for books in Stonley's collection such as A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation, The Palace of Pleasure, and the Shepherd's Calendar indicate that early modern people “imagined books as places and things” (111–12). Stonley's surviving volumes include book covers with his family's coat of arms, signatures of those witnessing his purchase of particular books, and printers' inscriptions “with a conspicuously showy knot” (127) that speak to Stonley's elite “book-trade connections” (125). The Catholic and Protestant books he owned point to his multifaceted religious identity for which “his books must have served as a kind of material memory” (136) and to “the polymorphousness of early modern print, which regularly played across religious divisions” (142). The only book annotations we can attribute to Stonley are “Aesopian,” which is not surprising considering that he owned two Latin copies of Aesop's Fables, a prominent text in the English schoolroom where students learned to attend to the ethical, moral significance of imaginary works (137–38).Scott-Warren explores the foreign interests and familial connections Stonley forged through his books in Chapter 5, “Paper Travels,” and Chapter 6, “A Booke in Commendation of the Ladye Branche.” His possession of a banned copy of Giles Fletcher's Of the Russe Common Wealth and the erotic best seller Oeuvres by “Hélisenne de Crenne (the pen name of Marquerite Briet)” (17) illustrates “that we need to redraw our maps of literary culture to take account of the porosity of national borders in the period,” which for Stonley includes England, France, and Russia (161). Scott-Warren turns to arboreal metaphors to depict how Stonley's younger relative Robert Nicholson sought to graft himself onto international “networks of family history and family property” through his annotations and ostentatious heraldry in many of Stonley's books (17).In Chapter 7, “Meet the Chillesters,” and the final Chapter 8, “Reading in the Fleet,” Scott-Warren follows “a fantastically seamy paper trail” linking Stonley to literary pirates, counterfeiters, and a government informer responsible for his imprisonment in the Fleet with a large community of elite debtors (17). Stonley's journal entries from 1597–98 reveal that “high-status inmates might live in prison in a certain degree of luxury, importing servants, books, and furniture and venturing out at will” (228). Prison walls at the Fleet were “far more porous than they would subsequently become” and granted debtors access to legal and financial advice and the opportunity to continue to conduct business (228). One of Stonley's fellow inmates was Gerard de Malynes, a merchant and “author of numerous treatises on currency and exchange” (233). Inside and outside of prison, Stonley used the Bible as a source of “scriptural or moral excerpts” for his daily journal entries and appears to have been “an archetypal Protestant reader” (236). In prison Stonley records his purchase of a commentary on Solomon's Proverbs and Deloney's Jack of Newberie. The latter includes a chapter about Randoll Pert, who was imprisoned for debt as a draper, the occupation of Stonley's relatives, the Branches. Stonley's journal of expenditures while incarcerated for his debt to the Queen provides “an index to a life that was becoming unstruck” (246).In Scott-Warren's engrossing and imaginative Shakespeare's First Reader: The Paper Trails of Richard Stonley, he sleuths through a vast inventory of household objects and journals with unrivalled, archival expertise and originality to reveal how Stonley's emotional and financial life was constituted by his treasured, relic-like books. Drawing upon Bruno Latour's actor-network theory in Reassembling the Social and Rita Felski's application of it to literary criticism in The Limits of Critique, Scott-Warren interprets Stonley's diverse collection of household items as signs of the attachments of books to “chains of objects” and “interpersonal relationships” (15). Stonley's copy of Venus and Adonis is attached to a complex network of powerful people, places, and things in his affectively rich archive of books. This fascinating study will appeal widely to those interested in reception history; early modern practices of reading, using, and purchasing books; biography; life-writing in prison; and reception studies of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.