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Equity, ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and William Lambarde

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2007

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Summary

Giles E. Dawson and Joseph Q. Adams, while working on Shakespeare’s autograph uncovered in 1938 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in a copy of William Lambarde’s Archaionomia (1568), expressed their continued puzzlement at why this book was ever in Shakespeare’s possession or under what specific circumstances the dramatist would have encountered William Lambarde. Dawson felt the book was a peculiar one for Shakespeare to have: ‘ . . . the only one [possibility] remaining, is that William Shakespeare wrote his signature on this title page, perhaps because he owned the book — a strange volume indeed for his library’. Adams accounted for the strangeness by indicating the likelihood that some other writing on the page, stating that the book should not be lost, was Lambarde’s; thus evidencing that this was a presentation copy from the author to Shakespeare. Adams then opined,

That the two men of letters in the small world of literary London knew each other is hardly to be doubted, and that Shakespeare was interested, as was Ben Jonson, in Anglo-Saxon law seems highly likely. We must be content, however, with the likelihood that here at least we have a volume that was once actually in the possession of the poet.

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Shakespeare Survey , pp. 93 - 104
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1974

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