George Tollet (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 as a Fellow Commoner in
1744. He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn on 2 July 1745 and was called to
the bar in 1751. At some time after the last date he retired to Betley Hall,
Staffordshire, 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
Athenœ Cantabrigienses as "a shy, reserved man, of no
genteel appearance and behaviour." Cole 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 she went to
Stratford-le-Bow school, where Mr. Tollet's aunt (a little, crooked woman,
but a sharp wit, and author of some poems in print) took notice of her. Mr.
Tollet has many notes in Mr. Steevens's 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 Staffordshire, a print of
which morris-dancers 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, but 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. 22, 1779."
(Lit. Illustr. VIII. 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 a grocer and latterly a brewer in partnership with one Sparks
of St. Sepulchre'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 critic." 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 contributed some notes [I am quoting the
DNB] to Johnson and Steevens's edition 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 contributor 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
the accepted canon except
Julius Cœsar,
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 continues, "he complained that many of his valuable
suggestions were appropriated by the editors in the second issue [1778] of
their work without acknowledgment." 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 morris-dancers 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
reconstruction 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
sometimes 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 elsewhere. 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 a 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 reasonably characterize Tollet not only as
a bookish man, for he definitely was that, but also as a man who knew
something about a good many subjects. His knowledge
of law might be taken for granted, and so, too, possibly, his acquaintance
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 wellread in poetry, largely
English poetry of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries.
Since primary interest focuses upon Tollet as a commentator on
Shakespeare, it is 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 Merry 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
edition, for in at least two notes (II. 420.5 and 504.2)[1] Tollet offers, presumably
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 1765
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 Shakespeare (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
Shakespeare.
[2] 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 Kinsmen 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
Farquhar's
The Beaux Stratagem. Not a very impressive body of
dramatic
literature.
Shakespeare's great contemporary in poetry is represented by eight
quotations or references; these include The Shepherd's
Calendar
and Colin Clout'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 edition. Twice 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 difficult
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 Iliad. 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
Étienne'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
translation. Except, then, for James Howell's Epistolae
Ho—Elianae and Chesterfield's
Letters, all
the other books in Tollet's library can be pretty well classified 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
ordered from his London bookseller, he had a fair collection. In
alphabetical order, he quotes or cites from Robert Ainsworth's
Thesaurus linguae Latinœ Compendiarus (1736), Nathan
Bailey's
Dictionarium Britanicum (1730, the most commonly
used English dictionary before Dr. Johnson's, an edition of which Tollet
also had), Abel Boyer's
Dictionnaire François-Anglais
(1699), Randle Cotgrave's
Dictionarie of the French and English
tongues (1611), John Cowell's
The Interpreter, containing the
general signification of such obscure words and terms as are used either in
the common or statute laws of this kingdom (1607, expeditiously
referred to as Cowell's
Law Dictionary), the
Dictionarium
rusticum, urbanicum, and botanicum, or a dictionary of husbandry,
gardening, trade, commerce, and all sorts of country affairs (1704,
attributed to Nathan Bailey), Junius's
Etymologicum
Anglicanum (either in the 1677 edition or that edited by
Edward Lye in 1743), John Minsheu's
Guide into tongues
(1617), William Somners's
Dictionarium
Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (1659), Stephen Skinner's
Etymologicon Lingua Anglicanae (1667), and Sir Henry
Spelman's
Glossarium archaiologicum (1664). He also had
a
copy of George Hickes's
Grammatica anglo-saxonica
(1711).
Tollet was well read in history, especially English history. Before
cataloguing the works on English history in his library, it may be well to
dispatch the others. He cites Herodotus in one note and quotes Sir Henry
Savile's The ende of Nero and beginning of Galla, fower bookes of
the histories of Tacitus. The life of Agricola (1591)
in
another. John Steevens's General History of Spain (1699),
translated from Juan de Mariana, had a place on his bookshelves, as did
John Bulteel's translation of François Eudes de Mézeray's
history of
France, Englished as A General Chronological History of
France (3 vols., 1683). Close by Mézeray would be
The
Memoirs of Philippe de Comines (seigneur
d'Argenton)
translated by D. Godefroy (1674). English chronicles and histories in his
possession were Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England,
Scotland,
and Ireland (1577), which he quotes or cites twenty-nine times; John
Stow's Summarie of
Englyshe chronicles (1565), his Annales of England
(1592), as well as his Survay of London (1598). He had John
Speed's History of Great Britain (1611), Thomas Langley's
translation of Polydore Vergil (1546), John Rous's (or Ross's),
Historia Regum Angliae (a fifteenth-century work edited by
Thomas Hearne in 1716), Joshua Barnes's History of . . . Edward
III (1688), Fuller's History of the Worthies of
England
(1661), Robert Sheringham's De Anglorum gentis origine
disceptatio (1670), Sir Richard Cox's Hibernia Anglicana; or
the history of Ireland from the conquest there of by the English to this
present time (1689-90), and Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes's,
Annals of Scotland (1776). Thomas Hearne's Liber
Niger
Scaccarii, Wilhelmique etiam Worcestrii Annales Rerum
Anglicanum
(2 vols., 1728) would have been in close proximity to Francis Peck's
Desiderata Curiosa (2 vols., 1732-5), a collection of tracts,
letters, memoirs and other documents dealing with English history from
1558 to 1660. At some time or other when he was in London he must have
visited the British Museum to consult Sir Symonds D'Ewes's "Journals of
all the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth," Harleian MSS.
481-484, for he quotes
from them in a note in 1778 and they were not published until after 1780.
Tollet's close familiarity with English history is exemplified in one note on
3 Henry VI where the Duke of York enters to his sons
Edward
and Richard and to the Marquess of Montague and addresses them as "sons
and brother." Steevens proposed to read "cousin" for "brother," after the
quarto, and pointed out that the expression "brother of the war" occurs in
King Lear. Johnson inclined to "sons and brothers," i.e., as
he
put it, "my
sons, and
brothers to each other."
But
Tollet defended the old reading:
This is right. In the two succeeding pages York calls Montague
brother. This may be in respect to their being brothers
of
the war, as Mr. Steevens observes, or of the same council as in
K. Henry VIII who says to Cranmer, "You are a
brother of us." Mountague [sic] was brother to Warwick;
Warwick's daughter was married to a son of York: Therefore York and
Montague were brothers. But as this alliance did not take place during the
life of York, I embrace Mr. Steevens's interpretation rather than suppose
that Shakespeare made a mistake about the time of the marriage (VI.
442.2).
Another part of Tollet's collection was devoted to local histories,
travel, and antiquities. Robert Plot's Natural History of
Staffordshire (1686) was cited or quoted four times in Tollet's notes;
in two others he remarks on Staffordshire customs and dialect, explaining
in the first how the Staffordshire poor go from parish to parish on
All-Saints-Day "a souling, as they call it, i.e. begging and
puling (or singing small . . .) for soul-cakes"
and
quoting Staffordshire dialect to exemplify the meaning of "sag" as "to sink
down by its own weight, or by an overload" (I. 142.6 and IV. 592.7).
Tollet also had Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677),
Sir William Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated
(1656), Charles Smith's Antient and present state of the county and
city of Waterford in the edition of 1774, and John Wallis's
Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland (2 vols.,
1769). To these one must
add Martin Martin's Description of the Western Islands of
Scotland (1703), Richard Carew's History of Cornwall
(1602, referred to in three notes), and John Norden's Speculi
Britanniae pars; a topographicall and chorographicall
description
of Cornwall (1610). Tollet used Carew's Survey to
adduce parallels to "corporals of the field" in Love's Labour's
Lost (1773, II. 382.4) and "potch" in Coriolanus (VII.
368.2) and to explain "to cry hold" in Macbeth (IV. 608.7).
Norden's History of Cornwall, as Tollet refers to it, affords
him
a quotation in explication of the "third borough" in the Introduction to
The Taming of the Shrew: "A third borough
seems
originally to have signified him who had the principal government within
his own tything, or trithing. Norden's
Hist. of
Cornwall, decides for the former word tithing. See p.
29,
30. 'The shirife has his bayliwickes; the hundreds
have constables, tythings have therdbarows, in some places
hed-burows, in some borrowshed, and in the west partes, a tythngman'"
(III. 397.8).
Five times in a long note in 1778 on the Morris dancers in 1
Henry IV and twice elsewhere in the same edition Tollet quotes or
cites Olaus Magnus's well-known work, the Historia de Gentibus
Septentrionalius (1555),
translated as
A Compendious History of the Goths, Swedes, and
Vandals, and other Northern Nations in 1658. He had Magellan's
Voyages, Columbus's
Voyages, and George
Sandys's
Travels, as that work came to be titled from 1658
on.
What I have rather loosely described as antiquities was represented by such
works as John Weever's
Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631)
and John Leland's
De rebus Britannicis collectanea, originally
published in 1552, but edited by Thomas Hearne in six volumes in 1715,
with a new edition, also in six volumes, in 1770. Tollet, who cites or
quotes the
Collectanea seven times in his notes, was
sufficiently
fond of the book as to have both modern editions. He also had Leland's
Itinerary, edited by Thomas Hearne in nine volumes
(1710-12,
1744, and 1770). Still another work of Thomas Hearne's in Tollet's library
was
A Letter containing an account of some antiquities between
Windsor and Oxford published in
the
Monthly Miscellany, Nov. 1708-Jan. 1709, and reprinted
in 1725. In a note in the 1773 Appendix Tollet explained the "shealed
peascods" in
King Lear but gave no authority for his
explanation; in 1778 he added in evidence page numbers to
two
editions of William Camden's
Remains of a greater work concerning
Britain (1657 and 1674). Camden's
Britannia (1586)
was
invoked once in the notes. Tollet also owned a copy of a book which was
the subject of correspondence between such scholars as Bishop Percy and
Thomas Warton; this was Robert Laneham's
Letter, whose
long
full title has to do with some entertainment offered Queen Elizabeth at
Kenilworth Castle in 1575 during her summer's progress. Three other
works round out the antiquities: Richard Verstegan's
Restitution of
decay'd Intelligence: in Antiquities (1605); Bernard de
Mountfaucon's
Antiquity explained and represented in sculpture, thus the title
in the English translation
by D. Humphreys (five volumes with a supplement of another five volumes,
1721-5); and Johan Gregor Keysler's
Antiquitates Selectae
Septentrionales et Celticae (1720), Englished as
Northern and
Celtic Antiquities and a companion volume to Olaus Magnus's work
mentioned shortly above.
The number of works of husbandry Tollet possessed invites conjecture
as to the extent to which he may have put them to practical use himself. He
had as nucleus for this part of his library several works of that remarkable
literary Jack-of-all-trades Gervase Markham, one of the earliest and most
prolific of English professional writers and compilers. These were
Markham's Farewell to Husbandry (1620), The
English
Husbandman (1635), A Discourse of Horsemanship
(1593, 1595), Country Contentments (1615), The
Pleasures of Princes . . . containing a Discourse on the Art of Fishing with
an Angle (1614), and The Whole Art of Husbandry
(1634), this last being a revised and enlarged edition of Barnaby Googe's
English translation (1577) of Conrad Heresbach's Rei Rusticae libri
quator (Cologne, 1570). Tollet quoted Markham's edition of the
Maison Rustique (1616), a translation of an earlier work by
Charles Estienne, in one note and a
work he calls simply Husbandry and dates as 1631 in two
others. This is almost surely Markham's Cheap and Good
Husbandry, first published in 1614, in its reprinting in A
Way
to Get
Health (1631), a compilation of some of his earlier
pieces.
[3] Markham's volumes were
buttressed by Thomas Tusser's
Five hundred points of
husbandry (1557), either John Fitzherbert's
New Tract or
treatise . . . for all husband men (1523) or his
Book of
Husbandry (1534), Samuel Harlib's
Legacy: or an
enlargement
of the Discourse of Husbandry (1651), Leonard Mascall's
The
first (second, third) book of cattle (1587), and either Walter Blithe's
The English Improver, or a New Survey of Husbandry (1649)
or the same author's
The English Improver Improved, or the Survey
of Husbandry Surveyed (1652). Tollet brought to Steevens's
attention
Thomas Powell's
Human Industry, or a History of Most Manual
Arts (1661) and thus enabled the latter to correct an error he had
made in the 1773 edition. At another juncture he was able to explain Duke
Orsino's exclamation upon seeing Viola-Cesario and her brother
Sebastian together, "a natural perspective, that is, and is not!," by reference
to that same work (V. 173.1). Because they are allied to this group of
works, Aristotle's
De generatione animalium, Bacon's
Natural History, Henry Lyte's
New herbal, or history
of
plants (1578, invoked four times), and Philemon Holland's
translation
of Pliny (1601), quoted or cited eleven times, making it one of Tollet's
favorite reference books, should be given adjacent shelf space.
There are four notes dealing with falconry, hunting, and dogs.
Hamlet's reference to "French falconers" in his welcome to the players
prompted Tollet to call Steevens's attention to "Sir Tho. Browne's
Tracts, p. 116" for the information that "the French
seem
to have been the first and noblest falconers in the western part of Europe"
and that the French king sent his own falconers over "to shew that sport to
King James the first" (1778, X. 261.8). Twice Tollet turned to
Turberville's Book of Hunting, once to cite him on bear
hunting
(1778, III. 96.2) and once to quote the 1575 edition in explication of
Gads-hill's reference to "great oneyers; such as can hold in; such as will
strike sooner than speak, and speak sooner than drink." The note reads:
"Turbervile's Book on Hunting, 1575, p. 37, mentions
huntsmen on horseback to make young hounds 'hold in and
close' to the old ones: so Gads-hill may mean, that he is joined with such
companions as will
hold in, or keep and stick close to one another, and such as
are
men of deeds, and not of words; and yet they love to talk and speak their
mind freely better than to drink" (V. 298.5). When Prince Hal, in the same
play, says of the presumptively dead Falstaff, "Death hath not struck so fat
a deer today," Tollet quoted Turberville's Terms of the Ages of all
Beasts of Venery and Chase in defence of "fat" as opposed to the
quartos' "fair" (V. 420.1). Tollet's knowledge of hunting is further
exemplified in a note on Rosencrantz's use of the verb "to cote," for he
quoted the "laws of coursing" to the effect that "a cote is
when
a greyhound goes endways by the side of his fellows, and gives the hare a
turn" (X. 252.8). And in the following note, on "Brach Merriman" in
The Taming of the Shrew, quoted in full, we learn of two
more
books in Tollet's library:
It feems from the commentary of Ulitius upon Gratius,
from Caius de Canibus Britannicis, from
bracco, in
Spelman's Gloſſary, and from Markham's
Country
Contentments, that brache originally meant a bitch.
Ulitius, p. 163, obferves, that bitches have a ſuperior
fagacity of noſe, "fœminis [canibus] ſagacitatis plurimum
ineſſe, uſus docuit;" and hence, perhaps, any hound with eminent
quickneſs of ſcent, whether dog or bitch, was called
brache,
for the term brache is fometimes applied to males. Our
anceſtors hunted much with the large ſouthern hounds, and had in
every pack a couple of dogs peculiarly good and cunning to find game, or
recover the ſcent, as Markham informs us. To this
cuſtom
Shakeſpeare ſeems here to allude, by naming two
braches,
which, in my opinion, are beagles; and this diſcriminates
brache from the lym, a blood-hound mentioned
together
with it, in the tragedy of King Lear. In the following
quotation
offered by Mr. Steevens on another occaſion, the brache
hunts truely by the ſcent, behind the doe, while the hounds are on every
ſide:
"For as the dogs purſue the ſilly doe,
"The brache behind, the hounds on every ſide;
"So trac'd they me among the mountains wide."
Phaer's Legend of Owen Glendower (pp. 400-01)
Caius is Dr. John Caius; Ulitius upon Gratius is Jan Van Vliet's
Autores rei venaticœ antiqui.
Cum commentariis
Jani
Vlitii (1653), the section on Grattius "Faliscus's" poem
Cynegetica on hunting, especially with dogs.
Tollet, it will be recalled, was called to the bar in 1751. Hence, he
would be expected to know some law. One of his dictionaries, already
mentioned, was John Cowell's The Interpreter, loosely
referred
to as Cowell's Law Dictionary. There are nine references that
I would term legal references, exclusive of those which refer to Cowell, in
Tollet's notes. Most of these are to statutes. Thus, Pistol's "faitors" in
2 Henry IV is, according to Tollet, a word "used in the
statute
7 Rich. II. c.5, for evil doers, or rather for idle livers" (V.
500.7). Similar references to a specific statute occur in one other note and
a general reference to "several old statutes" in still another. He knew that
there was "a penalty of ten shillings in one of king Alfred's ecclesiastical
laws, if one opprobriously shave a common man like a
fool," thus explaining somebody's being nicked with scissors
"like a fool" in The Comedy of Errors, an allusion whose
"force" Steevens was "unable to explain" (II. 237.5). He agreed with
Johnson that "extend," as used in Antony and Cleopatra
("extended Asia"), was a term for "to seize," but he went further and said
it was "a law term used for to seize lands and tenements," quoted
"Savile's Translation of Tacitus" in support, and concluded
by
quoting a parallel usage in As You Like It as evidence that
Shakespeare "knew the legal signification of the term" (VIII. 133.5). Iago's
reference to the magnifico's having "a voice potential / As double as the
duke's" elicited a long note by Johnson, a lawyer manqué, who
wrote,
in part, that "in our courts, the chief justice and one of the inferior judges
prevail over the other two, because the chief justice has a
double voice." Tollet wrote, "I believe here is a mistake. The
chief justice and one of the inferior judges do not prevail over
the other two. The lord mayor in the court of alderman has a double voice"
(X.
442.9). Tollet was declared correct by one who could be considered the
final authority, for in
Malone's
Supplement (1780) Sir William Blackstone declared
that "the chief justice has no double voice. If the court is equally divided,
nothing is done" (I. 364). Sir John Hawkins would naturally know much
more law than Johnson, but when he cited "a statute of the 21st of James
I to reform prophane cursing and swearing" Tollet reminded him that he
"should have referred to the statute of the 3d of James I. c. 21 which lays
a penalty for the profane use of the name of God, etc. in stage-plays,
enterludes, May-games, etc." (X. 606.2). Tollet, surely because of the
Morris dancers and the May pole depicted in his stained glass window, had
made himself quite an expert on the subject of May games and in his
dissertation on those figures on his window he could therefore refer to "an
ordinance of the Rump Parliament in April 1644" which caused all
May-poles to be taken down and removed by the proper authorities (V.
431). Finally, insofar as his knowledge of legal matters is
concerned, and here it was tied in with his knowledge of English history,
when the Duke of Buckingham in
Henry VIII refers to
himself
as "poor Edward Bohun" after his trial, he was again able to correct
Steevens who stated that "the duke of Buckingham's name was Stafford,
Shakespeare was led into the mistake by Holinshed." Tollet's note reads,
in part: "This is not an expression thrown out at random, or by mistake, but
one strongly marked with historical propriety. The name of the duke of
Buckingham most generally known, was
Stafford; but the
Hist. of Remarkable Trials, 8vo. 1715, p. 170, says: 'it
seems
he affected that surname [of
Bohun] before that of
Stafford, he being descended from the
Bohuns,
earls
of Hereford" (VII. 221.7). The work quoted is
The History of
Remarkable Trials.
Faithfully extracted from records and
other
authentick authorities as well MS as printed. Shakespeare is thus
acquitted of having made a
mistake, whether he was aware of it or not.
The Queen in Cymbeline describes England as
"Neptune's
park, ribbed and paled / With rocks unscaleable," Sir Thomas Hanmer's
emendation of "oaks unscaleable." Tollet supported the emendation with an
apposite quotation "from Chapter 109 of Bariffe's Military
Discipline, 1639, seemingly from Tooke's Legend of
Britomart" (IX. 239.2), thus betraying another of his areas of
interest. The full titles of the books are Military Discipline, or the
Young Artillery Man (1638), by William Bariffe, and The
Legend of Brita-mart: otherwise Britaines Mars; or A paraphrase upon our
provisionall martiall discipline, by George Tooke (1635). Why
Tollet
had these works and four or five more that deal with military matters will
probably always remain a mystery, but he may simply have inherited them
as part of his father's library, the elder Tollet having been a Commissioner
of the Navy. In any event, he also had W. G.'s quarto translation of a work
by Count Ernst
von Mansfield titled, in the English version, Count Mansfield's
Directions of War (1624), a book he cited in his dissertation on the
Morris dancers (V. 431n.). Lewis Theobald had explained an heraldic
allusion in Love's Labour's Lost by recourse to Gerard
Leigh's
Accidence of Armourie (1597); Tollet, probably ignorant of
Theobald's note, had recourse to the same work, quoting the pertinent
words and giving a page reference (II. 504.2), having
earlier in the same play quoted Leigh's
Accidence for the
spelling of "several" (II. 407.3). Bellay's
Instructions for the
War, so Englished by Paul Ive in 1589, was quoted in explication
of
Lady Macbeth's "To cry,
hold,
hold," and
from
Thomas Birch's edition of Sir Walter Raleigh's
Works (2
vols.,
1751) Tollet remembered two references to "corporals of the field."
[4] Akin to these works more than to
any
other definable category of books in his library is John Selden's
The
Duello, or Single Combat (1610).
Tollet quotes or cites the Bible five times in the 1778
Shakespeare, three of the five being from St. Matthew and
one
from Acts, in "the old version of the New Testament." In the fifth note, on
the "shard-borne beetle" in Macbeth, part of a long defence
of
the interpretation "the shard-born [sic] beetle
is born
in dung," in which Aristotle, Pliny, Drayton, Jonson, A petite Palace
of Pettie his Pleasure, Bacon's Natural History, and
Much Ado About Nothing are all quoted or cited, Tollet also
cited "his [Shakespeare's] Bible, or the old translation of the
Bible" as authority for the spelling "borne" to mean "brought forth" (IV.
532.5). The only other religious works he had occasion to refer to were
Juan Luis Vives's De instructione feminœ christianœ
(1523), translated by Richard Hyde as The Instruction of a Christian
Woman (1540), of which he had an edition of 1592, and Thomas
Adams's Spiritual
Navigator (1615). Constance's reference to the devil's appearing "in
likeness of a new untrimmed bride" in King John brought an
emendation from Theobald, an absurd explanation from Warburton, a
distortion of Johnson's risible muscles, four parallels for the meaning
"undrest" from Steevens, and a quotation from Vives's work from Tollet
in support of the meaning "not finely dressed or attired" or indicating "a
deshabille or a frugal vesture" (V. 61.4). Tollet also remembered
encountering "Hirens" in Adams's Spiritual Navigator and
offered this bit of knowledge to Steevens in evidence that "Hirens" were,
in Adams's words, "in plain English, harlots" (V. 500.8).
Everybody in the eighteenth century with any pretensions to learning
seems to have had some knowledge of heraldry. Tollet was no exception.
The king in Love's Labour's Lost speaks of "beauty's crest"
which "becomes the heavens well." Warburton, as usual, saw the need to
emend, being dissatisfied with "crest"; Johnson attempted explication;
Tollet stated that "crest" meant "the very top, the
height of beauty" and adduced a convincing parallel from
King John. He further remarked that "in heraldry, a crest is
a
device placed above a coat of arms" (II. 458.2). The use of the word
"cognizance" in 1 Henry VI gave Tollet opportunity to call
upon his knowledge of heraldry again, as he explained that "the
cognisance is seated upon the most eminent part of the
helmet;
and by a designed blunder in Ben Jonson's works, 1750, Vol. I, p. 160 and
Vol. VII, p. 356 is called a cullisen, which Mr. Whalley's
Dictionaries or the heralds he consulted,
could not explain" (VI. 219.7). Whalley's note on the word in its
appearance in Every Man Out of His Humour reads, "No
dictionary I can find will help us to the meaning of
this word, nor does the context lead us to discover it." Tollet's library
contained John Selden's
Titles of Honour for the raised points of
Coronets (1614); John Walker's
The History of the Order of
the
Garter (1715), a continuation of Elias Ashmole
The
Institution,
Laws and Ceremonies of the Order of the Garter (1672); and John
Anstis's
Observations Introductory to an Historical Essay upon the
Knighthood of the Bath (1725). All three works were referred to in
Tollet's long note on the Morris dancers.
The miscellaneous works in Tollet's library are a curiously mixed lot.
Had he not written the long note on the Morris dancers, we would not have
known that he had a number of the works already discussed, the last three
above, for example. Nor would we have known that he had Richard
Haydocke's 1598 translation of an Italian work by G. P. Lomazzo,
Tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge or a work
entitled Sports or lawful Recreations upon Sunday after
Evening-prayers, and upon Holy-days, published by king James in
1618, with its reference to "May-games, Morris dances, and the setting up
of May-poles." Even more curious is a quotation from "the appendix to
Bulwer's Artificial Changeling, for the book in question is
John
Bulwer's
Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed: Or, the
Artificial Changeling; hiſtorically prefented, in the mad and cruel
Gallantry, foolifh Bravery, ridiculous Beauty, filthy Finenefs, and
loathſome Lovelineſs of moſt Nations, faſhioning
and
altering their Bodies from the Mould intended by
Nature;
with Figures of thoſe Transfigurations.
To
which artificial and affected Deformations are added, all the native
and national Monſtroſities that have appeared to
disfigure the Human Fabrick. With a Vindication
of
the regular Beauty and Honeſty of Nature. And an
Appendix of the Pedigree of the English Gallant.
Scripſit, F. B. Cognomento Chiroſophus, M. D. Quarto,
London 1653. Pages 559, beſides the Introduction, Table
of
Contents, &c. (p. 364)
Nothing but a full title could do justice to the contents of the book.
[5]
One of the passages in Shakespeare's plays that had exercised the
critics was Hubert's description in King John of the tailor
"standing on slippers (which his nimble hast / Had falsely thrust upon
contrary Feet." Johnson asserted that "either shoe will equally admit either
foot"; Farmer mustered three passages to show that Johnson was almost
surely wrong; Steevens, never one to be outdone, added three more to
Farmer's parallels; Tollet quoted Martin's Description of the Western
Islands of Scotland and "the Philosophical Transactions
abridged, vol. III. p. 432 and VII. p. 23, where are exhibited shoes
and sandals shaped to the feet, spreading more to the outside than the
inside" (V. 95.4). In another note he cited Dr. Lister's demonstration in the
Philosophical Transactions "that what were vulgarly thought
animated horse-hairs, are real insects," a handy recollection for the
explication of Antony's reference to "the courser's hair" having life, and
further evidence of Tollet's interest in scientific matters (VII. 138.6). A
reference to
"Pitt's
Atlas, in Sweden, p. 20" (VII. 14.7) reveals that
Tollet
owned Moses Pitt's four-volume folio
English Atlas
(1680-83),
which William Lowndes in his
Bibliographer's Manual
described as "formerly in great estimation, and still a curious book of
reference."
Finally, his library boasted copies of Henry Peacham's
Compleat Gentleman (1622), Reginald Scot's
Discovery
of Witchcraft (1584), Sir Thomas Wotton's Elements of
Architecture (1624) and Reliquiœ Wottonianae
(1639).
Rarer than any of these, and they were not especially rare at that time, was
a work by José Teixeira entitled The Spanish Pilgrim, or an
admirable discovery of a Romish Catholike in its English version by
W. P. (1625). Richard Farmer had cited the title of a pamphlet, a
"Treatise Parœnitical, wherein is shewed the right way to resist
the
Castilian king" in a note on the Host's calling Dr. Caius a "Castilian
king" in the Merry Wives of Windsor; Tollet seconded
Farmer's belief that the term was "a popular slur upon the Spaniards, who
were held in great contempt by the business of the Armada,"
by
extracting corroborating evidence "from an old pamphlet, called The
Spanish Pilgrime, which I have
reason to suppose is the same discourse with the Treatise
Parœnetical, mentioned by Dr. Farmer" (I. 289.8). He was right,
they were the same pamphlet.
There are approximately 135 titles of books, plays, and pamphlets in
Tollet's notes. Since he had the collected works of Jonson, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, probably Beaumont and Fletcher, Bacon, Raleigh, Milton's
prose, Pope's Iliad, and certain other works in multi-volumes,
the actual number of volumes represented in the approximately 135 titles
is quite a good deal greater. Whatever that number, however, it should
surely be regarded as only part of his entire library, a library he put to
effective use.
