Eliz 188, title page
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The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
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Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
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Eliz 188, signature E4 recto
Terms of use
The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
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Eliz 188, signature E4 verso
Terms of use
The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
View online bibliographic record
Eliz 188, signature F4 verso
Terms of use
The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
View online bibliographic record
Eliz 188, signature I2 verso
Terms of use
The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
View online bibliographic record
Terms of use
The Elizabethan Club has graciously contributed images from their collections to Shakespeare Documented, and retains sole ownership of said images. Visitors may download, link to and cite the images within Shakespeare Documented in personal research, and for publication. Any further use, including, but not limited to, unauthorized downloading or distribution of the images is strictly prohibited. Visitors must contact the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to request additional use, at: Beinecke.library@yale.edu.
Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true relation of the whole history, aduentures, and fortunes of the said prince: as also, the no lesse strange, and worthy accidents, in the birth and life, of his daughter Mariana. As it hath been dieuers and sundry times acted by his maiesties seruants, at the Globe on the Banck-side. By William Shakespeare.
Date: Imprinted at London for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold at the signe of the Sunne in Pater-noster Row, &c. 1609.
Repository: Elizbeth Club, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Call number and opening: Eliz 188, title page & sigs. E4r-v, F4v, I2v
View online bibliographic record
Alan H. Nelson, "Scipio Squire’s emendations to the first edition of Pericles," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/602.
Elizabethan Club, Eliz 188. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/602.
Scipio Squire (alias Le Squyer alias Squyre) (1579-1659), who owned the edition of Pericles shown here, was a minor legal officer who rose to become deputy chamberlain and then chamberlain of the Exchequer, or royal treasury. Responsible for keeping and searching numerous documents now housed at The National Archives, Kew, Squire followed his industrious predecessor, Arthur Agarde, in compiling abstracts and calendars – what we now call lists and indexes – of documents under his control.
Squire’s copy of Pericles, now in the collection of the Elizabethan Club at Yale, is of interest first of all because it contains the owner’s signature and a date on its title-page: “Scipio Squyre. 5. Maij 160<9>”. It was therefore purchased about a year following its entry in the Stationers Register on May 20, 1608. At the time, or perhaps shortly after, Squire read the play, making five emendations (or corrections) to the text in his own hand:
E4: warmth > warm
E4v: unsistered > unsissered; will > wild
F4v: peasure > pleasure
I2v: mum > Nunn
Scipio Squire may be the first known individual to emend a printed edition of any Shakespeare poem or play. His corrections range in their applications, and while modern editors do not always address these problems the same way, they often do emend these same lines (Nelson 64).
In his private life Squire compiled a library of some 200 manuscripts and 500 printed books, recording the latter in 1632 under various headings, including “Poesy.” Many of his books survive today, some easily identified by superb personalized bindings stamped “S S,” or “Scipio” on the front cover and “Squyer” on the back. Among books listed under “Poesy” in Squire’s 1632 list are William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Venus and Adonis. Among surviving books from Squire’s library are, in order of publication, Gerard Legh, Accidence of Armorie (1591); The True Tragedie of Richarde Duke of Yorke (1600); Edward Sharpham, The Fleire (1607); and an undated edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, circa 1625 (STC 22278), now in the library of the University of Pennsylvania.
(Information in this essay is summarized from “Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles,” full citation below, which also supplies exact information on surviving books from Squire’s library. Peter Stallybrass of the University of Pennsylvania kindly added the undated edition of Hamlet to known Shakespeare items from the same library.)
Written by Alan H. Nelson
Sources
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. "Le Squyer, Scipio (1579–1659)," by Nigel Ramsay, accessed May 24, 2016, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37668.
F. Taylor, "The books and manuscripts of Scipio le Squyer, deputy chamberlain of the exchequer, 1620–1659," Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 25 (1941), 137–64.
Alan H. Nelson, "Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles: from the earliest years to 1616," in Owners, Annotators and the Signs of Reading, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (London: British Library, 2005), 49-73.
Last updated January 25, 2020
