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 GBP13,000 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.
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