‘THE LIBRARY OF GEORGE TOLLET, SHAKESPEAREAN 227 ‘THE LIBRARY OF GEORGE TOLLET, NEGLECTED SHAKESPEAREAN by AgTHUR SHERRO once ToLter (1725-1799) was admitted to Eton College in 1742, the register of admissions making a tentative identification of him as the son of George Tollet, commissioner of the navy by his wife Elizabeth Oakes, of the Isle of Man. From Eton he, like so many of his schoolmates, went on to King’s College, Cambridge, matriculating 2s a Fellow Commoner in 1744- He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn on 2 July 1745 and was called co the bar in 1751. At some time after the last date he retired to Betley Hall, Staford- shire, which had been purchased by his father, and there he seems to have settled down to the life of a bachelor country gentleman. William Cole, Tollet’s contemporary at Cambridge, described him in his Athena Canta- brigienses as “a shy, reserved man, of no genteel appearance and behaviour. Gole went on to remark He was much acquainted with the late Mr. Ewin, father of Dr. Ewin, whose sister told me. 1780, that the acquaintance began when the went to Stratfordle Bow school where Mr. Tolle: aime (a Title, crooked woman, but a sharp wit and a0- thor of some poems in print) took notice of her. Mr. Toliet has many notes in Mr. Steevends edition of Shakespeare; in the first volume of which he has an ingenious dissertation on the figures of some pantomimes in his house at Betley. in Stafford- shire, a print of which morrisdancers is at the head of it, and sent to me by Mr. Steevens in September, 1780; who was also a Fellow Commoner of the same college, Dut came thither the year after I left it, viz, in 1753, as he told me at Dr. Lort’s chambers in Trinity College. Mr. Tollet died’ Oct. #2, 3779.” (Lit. llustr. VIL. 584) As some possible indication of Tollet’s character one should know that the DNB describes Thomas Ewin, father of the usurious Dr. Ewin, as “formerly 22 grocer and latterly a brewer in partnership with one Sparks of St, Sepul- chre’s, Cambridge.” Perhaps it is a measure of Tollet’s almost anonymous existence that the editors of Alumni Cantabrigienses were not sure he was “the Shakespearean aiitic.” Tollet would almost surely have been forgotten except for two things: his aunt Elizabeth was a poet and a friend of Newton's and “he con- tributed some notes [I am quoting the DNB] to Johnson and Stevens's edi- tion of Shakespeare.” Actually, the modest “some” of the DNB account amounts to over four hundred notes in the 1778 edition added to the fifteen contributed to the 1773 edition, making Tollet the greatest single contribu- tor to the commentary on Shakespeare, always excepting the editors of the various editions in the eighteenth century. His notes are on all the plays of238 STUDIES IN BIBLIOGRAPHY the accepted canon except Julius Gasar, Titus Andronicus (which many thought uncanonical), and Romeo and Juliet (hardly bachelor fare). There are three new notes and an addition to an earlier note posthumously printed in Malone's Supplement (1780). “Shortly before his death,” the DNB con- ues, “he complained that many of his valuable suggestions were appro- priated by the editors in the second issue [1778] of their work without ac knowledgment.” Since he is given credit by name for over 400 notes in the 1778 Shakespeare, one of them, ten pages long, describing the figures of mortisdancers on a painted glass window at Betley and reproducing them in a folded insert titled “Morris Dancers. From an Ancient Window in the House of George Tollet Esq. at Betley in Staffordshire,” this statement may be discounted almost entirely. ‘What I wish to do is succumb to the temptation of a conjectural recon- struction of Tollet’s library by reference to his notes on Shakespeare. Since in most of his notes Tollet gives date of edition and page number, and some- times book size, for his citations or quotations, one must conclude either that he had the very books or that he had copied down the information else- where. Given his solitary bent, the former explanation is infinitely more plausible. Since he led the retired life of a country gentleman, he almost surely had little access to libraries other than his own. Although Betley was 2 market town and Tollet might have picked up bargains from itinerant booksellers, he must have accumulated the greatest part of his collection in the Cambridge and London years. From the corpus of over 400 notes one ‘could very reatonably characterize Toilet not only a8 a hookish man, for he definitely was that, but also as 2 man who knew something about @ good many subjects. His knowledge of aw might be taken for granted, and so, too, possibly, his aequaintance with many aspects of country life—husbandry, botany, hunting, natural history, and local history. One would expect him to be familiar with the Bible, and he was. He evidently knew something about heraldry, and was much interested in antiquities. He was fairly well- read in poctry, largely English poctry of the latesixteenth and early-seven- teenth centuries Since primary interest focuses upon Tollet as a commentator on Shake- speare, itis almost mandatory to begin reconstructing his library by listing editions of Shakespeare and works on Shakespeare mentioned by him, Next in order would be dramatic literature, especially that contemporary with Shakespeare's plays. He had evidently steeped himself in Shakespeare's plays, for there are more than thirty cross-references to various of the plays in his notes. Of editions he had the First Folio, a quarto edition of The Mery Wives of Windsor, and probably Rowe's or Pope's Shakespeare, since he quotes from the Sonnets and from Lucrece, and there were five editions of the poems available to him in Rowe or Pope up to 1728. The next edition of the poems was in 1771. I do not believe he had a copy of Theobald’s edi- tion, for in at least two notes (IL. 420.5 and 504.2)! Tollet offers, presumably 1. The 1778 edition here and in what follows unless otherwise Indicated.‘THE LIBRARY OF GEORGE TOLLET, SHAKESPEAREAN 289 as original, information already in Theobald, The number of times he quotes ‘or cites Johnson makes it quite clear that he had one of the two 176s editions or the third edition of 1768, the three editions being virtually the same. He had Richard Warner's Letter to David Garrick with its plan of a glossary (1768), Zachary Grey's Critical, Historical, and Explanatory Notes on Shake- speare (2 vols., 1754), Benjamin Heath's Revisal of Shakespeare's Text (1765), and Francis Peck's New Memoirs of Milton (1740) with its notes on Shake- speare.? He had Ben Jonson's Works in Peter Whalley’s edition, but not very much else in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic literature, although references to The Two Noble Kinsmien and to The Tamer Tam'd might be taken to mean that he had an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. He had Philip Massinger’s The Picture, George Chapman's Widow's Tears, and Frances Quarles's Virgin Widow. He had, knew, or had seen George Far- quhar’s The Beaux Strategem. Not a very impressive body of dramatic literature, Shakespeare's great contemporary in poetry is represented by eight quo- tations or references; these include The Shepherd's Calendar and Colin Glout’s Come Home Again, as well, of course, as The Fairy Queen. Tollet quotes or cites Chaucer fairly often, in one note giving a reference to Urry's don. Tusice he quotes Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, and he knew the poetry of Hoccleve, Fairfax’s Tasso, Daniel, Drayton (both the Polyolbion and Ideas), and Milton. He quotes only from Lycidas, but he had an edition of the prose works of 1738. He also owned a copy of George Pettie’s Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure. What modern poets he possessed or favored it is dificult to say, as he quotes only Hudibras, in Zachary Grey's edition, and Pope-the second Epilogue to the Satires and the translation of the Miad. Prose writers in Tollet’s library roughly contemporary with Shakespeare were Bacon, Sidney (the Arcadia), Ascham (in the edition nominally by Bennet but actually by Samuel Johnson), and Sir William Cornwallis’s Essays, 1601. Of continental writers he quotes Montaigne, a writer one would expect him to know, and Henri Estienne’s (or Etienne’s) semi-satirical work Apologie pour Hérodote, 1566, a work he might very easily not be expected to know. Both are quoted in English translation, the latter from an edition of 1607. Classical literature, other than certain works such as Pliny and ‘Tacitus which fall into special categories, is confined to Ovid, both in a Latin edition and in George Sandys's translation of the Metamorphoses, and a reference to and a quotation from Plutarch, presumably in North’s trans- lation. Except, then, for James Howell's Epistolae Ho—Eliance and Chester- field's Letters, all the other books in Tollet's library can be pretty well classi- fied under about nine general headings, always leaving a final category for miscellaneous, usually single, pieces. ‘A prospective editor of Shakespeare obviously needed dictionaries and glossaries, and more than just those in English, Whether Tollet had them, or, once dedicated to explicating Shakespeare, he bought them directly or ‘2 For these lst, se, rexpectively, VIE. 998.7; V. 542.5; I. 465.53 and V. 405,