Richard Stonley has all but vanished from history, but to his
contemporaries he would have been an enviable figure. A clerk of the
Exchequer for more than four decades under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I,
he rose from obscure origins to a life of opulence; his job, a secure
bureaucratic post with a guaranteed income, was the kind of which many
men dreamed. Vast sums of money passed through his hands, some of which
he used to engage in moneylending and land speculation. He also bought
books, lots of them, amassing one of the largest libraries in early
modern London.
In 1597, all of this was brought to a halt when Stonley, aged around
seventy-seven, was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison, convicted of
embezzling the spectacular sum of £13,000 from the Exchequer. His
property was sold off, and an inventory was made of his house on
Aldersgate Street. This provides our most detailed guide to his lost
library. By chance, we also have three handwritten volumes of accounts,
in which he earlier itemized his spending on food, clothing, travel, and
books. It is here that we learn that on June 12, 1593, he bought the
Venus & Adhonay per Shakspere--the earliest known record of a purchase
of Shakespeare's first publication.
In Shakespeare's First Reader, Jason Scott-Warren sets Stonley's
journals and inventories of goods alongside a wealth of archival
evidence to put his life and library back together again. He shows how
Stonley's books were integral to the material worlds he inhabited and
the social networks he formed with communities of merchants, printers,
recusants, and spies. Through a combination of book history and
biography, Shakespeare's First Reader provides a compelling
bio-bibliography--the story of how one early modern gentleman lived in
and through his library.
