There I cowch when Owles doe crie

A noble consortium of libraries has put up online just about every scrap of paper relating to William Shakespeare from his time and a few years afterward—a treasure house!

At random, here is the first lute setting for "T was a louer and his lasse."



Gabriel Harvey's elegant, obsessive marginalia: what to read next? Richard III. Hamlet.



Here Shakespeare's young neighbor Leonard Digges (whose father was the first English Copernican, "but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances") scrawls on a flyleaf.  You'll like these sonnets, he says:   Lope de Vega is accounted in Spain "as in Englande wee sholde of or: Will Shakespeare."





Ben Jonson, having walked to Scotland, falls into a tun of canary and holds forth:  Drummond of Hawthornden scribbles down what must have been the best damned one-man panel ever:


That Don[n]e, for not keeping of accent, deserved
hanging.

That next himself only Fletcher and Chapman could
make a Mask.

That Shakspear wanted Arte.







Dip in or dive!

Nine