SHAKESPEARE, William. [Second Folio] Mr. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES COMEDIES, HISTORIES, and TRAGEDIES. Published according to the true Originall Copies. The second Impression. LONDON, Printed by Tho. Cotes, for Richard Hawkins, and are to be sold at his shop in Chancery Land, neere Serjeants Inne. 1632.

2o. *1-4 & A1 from another, shorter copy, “To The Reader” leaf in facsimile, title-page tipped-in. Early full brown calf, spine gilt, rebacked at an early date with original spine laid down; housed in modern cloth folder and brown morocco-backed slipcase. Previous owners’ marks of Penelope Tyrwhitt (early eighteenth century), Professor Thomas Case of Beam Hall, Oxford (late nineteenth/early twentieth century), and Paul Peralta-Ramos (twentieth century, Japanese monogram in red ink on FFEP). Multiple taped-in copies on front pastedown and FFEP of newspaper accounts related to sales of Shakespeare Second Folios in the early twentieth century (likely by Case). STC 22274c; Greg III 1113; Pforzheimer 906.

The earliest provenance clue in this copy of the Second Folio is the signature of one Penelope Tyrwhitt. The most likely match for this person in the historical record is Penelope Tyrwhitt, nee de la Fountaine (1633-1709), the daughter of Sir Erasmus de la Fontaine, the owner of Kirby Bellars, in Leicestershire, and Mary Noel, daughter of the Viscount Campden. As Penelope was born only a year after this copy was published, she clearly acquired it later in her (and its) life.

Penelope married Philip Tyrwhitt (1633-1688), the son of Sir Philip Tyrwhitt (1598-1667). While other books definitively belonging to Penelope have yet to be found, Penelope’s father-in-law owned enough books to have his own library stamp, a racially challenging image of a “savage man” holding a club, based on the family’s crest.[1] Multiple books with the inscription “P. Tyrwhitt” have been sold at auction over the years; given the shared first initial, more work needs to be done to establish whether any of the signatures might match Penelope’s.[2]

The seat of the Tyrwhitt baronets was Stainfield Hall, in Lincolnshire, which was built in the sixteenth century on the site of a Benedictine nunnery after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The location of the family seat is deeply ironic, given that, at least by Penelope’s time, this branch of the Tyrwhitt family was firmly crypto-Catholic, verging on complete recusancy. Penelope seemingly discovered this, to her dismay, only after her marriage. One family history claims that Sir Philip “appears to have used unworthy methods to change the faith of his lady, a zealous Protestant.” In distress and under siege, Penelope turned to Gilbert Burnet, a well-known Protestant theologian who would later become the Bishop of Salisbury, for help. Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, famed for his theological brilliance, his polemical writing, and his extreme good looks, met with Philip Tyrwhitt to debate doctrine in 1676. At his house, they found a group including “seven or eight Ladies” as well as at least five Catholic men who were all married to Protestant women. A debate ensued, an account of which Burnet and Stillingfleet soon published as A relation of a conference held about religion at London, the third of April, 1676 by Edw. Stillingfleet ... and Gilbert Burnet, with some gentlemen of the Church of Rome.

Ultimately, Penelope outlived her evangelizing husband. When she died in 1709, her will did not mention books (although she did leave money to aid “Christian Captives from Barbarous Countryes”), but she left most of her personal estate to her daughter Juliana and her husband Sir Edward Southcote. If the Second Folio was, as the signature indicates, a personal item of Penelope’s rather than part of the estate’s library, it may have left Stainfield Hall at that time.

The next provenance inscription, “T. Case | Beam Hall | Oxford,” takes us forward almost two centuries. Professor Thomas Case (1844-1925) was an Oxford academic, philosopher, and first-class cricketer. He joined Corpus Christi College, which owned Beam Hall, in 1876, and became its president in 1904. I suspect he moved into Beam Hall and purchased the Folio around that time, which would align with the taped-in notices about sales of Second Folio copies, which date around 1902-4.

This copy next appears in auction records in 1953, at a sale by Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York, where it sold for $475. The sale consisted of the stock of the Brick Row Book Shop (NYC) and the collection of H.A. Astlett (Montclair, NJ). This may have been the sale at which it was acquired by Paul Peralta-Ramos, whose distinctive stamp, a Japanese character in red ink, can be found next to the newspaper clippings on the FFEP. Peralta-Ramos was the son of Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers.

This copy was obtained by the Rasmussen-Hines Collection at the Sothebys sale of Peralta-Ramos’s collection in 2004.

_______________________

Burnet, Gilbert, A Relation of a Conference Held about Religion at London, the Third of April, 1676 by Edw.

Stillingfleet ... and Gilbert Burnet, with Some Gentlemen of the Church of Rome. (London: Printed and

are to be sold by Moses Pitt, at the Angel against the little North-door of S. Paul’s Church,

1676) <http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A30411.0001.001>

Tyrwhitt, Robert Philip, Notices and Remains of the Family of Tyrwhitt (London: Privately Printed, 1858)

[1] The crest is described by a Tyrwhitt family history as having the shield supported by “two wilde men of Inde, of colour blewishe, without any clubbes in their handes.” See the binding stamp here. In the area around Stainfield Hall, the crest is linked to a legend of “the Wild Man of Stainfield,” but the crest seems to predate those tales, casting doubt on any historical connection between the crest’s origin and the legends. It seems more likely that the crest imagery inspired the stories, rather than the other way around.

[2] These include: Nova legenda Angliae (Capgrave, 1516), sold by Sotheby’s, 2000; Vita et processus Sancti Thome Cantuariensis martyris super libertate ecclesiasticae (Becket, 1495), sold by Lyon and Turnbull, 2006; Mores hominum (Juvenal, 1660), sold by Bonhams, 2012 [with early marginalia, including a burlesque poem]; A generall historie of the Netherlands (Grimeston, 1609), sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet in 1980, PBA Galleries in 2012; The Citie of God (St. Augustine, 1610), sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet in 1980; The Commentaries. .. all the Combats, Rencounters, Skirmishes, Battels, Siges, Assaults, Scalado's [etc.]... (Montluc, 1674), sold by Sotheby Parke Bernet in 1980 [this book almost certainly belonged to Penelope’s husband, as her father-in-law died in 1667]; Argenis (1636), sold by Sotheby’s in 1924; Relation of a journey begun an. Dom.1610 (1632), held at the National Art Library; Orlando Furioso (Harington, 1591), held at the Folger; Opera Mathematica (Tacquet, 1669), held at Stanford; Purchas his pilgrimange… (Purchas, 1619), in Rulon-Miller Winter 2017 catalogue.