The Shakespeare Collection in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge

Summary

It is not easy to be precise about the beginnings of the Shakespeare collection in Trinity College, Cambridge, because of the absence of early and detailed records concerning the books in the Library. But one of the earliest and much the most notable component in that collection was the gift in 1779 of his books by Edward Capell, the Shakespearian editor. This contained, among other items, the four folios and fifty-one quarto plays, besides four quarto editions of the separate poems, and the octavo Passionate Pilgrim, 1599 and Venus and Adonis, 1620. Perhaps before the advent of the Capell books the College may have possessed two of its four Fourth Folios, and perhaps also the collected editions of Rowe, Pope and Theobald. Then in 1863 came second copies of the First, Second and Third Folios, part of the library of William Grylls, scholar of the College. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Library was enriched by W. Aldis Wright, one of the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare and later Vice-Master of the College. He gave several eighteenth-century editions, besides other books which will be mentioned later. But it seems that donors were never lacking to provide the Library with editions of Shakespeare. From the early 1700’s and excluding the Capell collection there are sixty-one editions in English up to 1900, besides one in French and two in German.