The Library of Edward Dale: Revisiting 'The Earliest Recorded Shakespeare in America'

What books would an English Royalist gentleman bring with him if he were emigrating to Virginia in the 1650s? “A List of Mr Edward Dales Books,” copied onto a blank leaf in the Folger copy of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, and Aulus Persius Flaccus Translated (1673) (call number 269-410f), gives us a good idea. Thirty-four titles are listed, including a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632).

Major Edward Dale (1620-1695) was a Royalist who emigrated to Virginia in the 1650s after the execution of Charles I. He was among the earliest settlers in Lancaster County, Virginia, where he owned a substantial plantation, held several key county administrative offices, and served as burgess in four sittings of the Virginia General Assembly. 

As Georgianna Ziegler noted in a 2016 Collation post, Edward Dale’s Second Folio remains the earliest known recorded copy of Shakespeare in America (we are not aware of its current location, if it has survived), giving this otherwise unassuming one-page inventory a resonant role in Shakespeare’s American story. 

Edward Dale’s Shakespeare speaks to us across time not only through its presence in seventeenth-century Virginia but also through the books that kept it company in Dale’s house alongside the Rappahannock. While comparatively small by the standards of the later seventeenth century, Dale’s 34-volume library nevertheless addresses a full range of the social, cultural, and political roles he played as a colonial gentleman of property. 

Early modern booklists often reflect the order in which books were shelved or stored, and the list of Dale’s books opens, appropriately enough, with the foundational text for colonial life: the first collected edition of the Lawes of Virginia (1662). Dale would have consulted this volume for much of the business that came before him in his roles of county clerk, high sheriff, and justice of the peace. This 1662 edition of the Virginia Lawes was published too early in the year to include the period’s most far-reachingly significant statute, the December 1662 act that established the legal foundation of hereditary slavery in the colony. But Dale held positions throughout the 1660s and 1670s in which he enforced the laws governing the practice of hereditary enslavement, and he was himself an enslaver. In 1674 he conveyed an enslaved boy named Dick to his daughter and son-in-law, and in 1687, two additional young men, James and Robin, to them (see Joseph Miller, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter (1912)). His ownership of a 600-acre home plantation along with other substantial properties and his tobacco investments makes it highly probable that he owned additional enslaved people as well.

Five additional books round out Dale’s working coverage of legal matters and advertised the leading administrative roles he played in the colony: two books on oaths (key mechanisms of social and political order), The Complete Justice (a guide for Justices of the Peace), The Office of a Compleat Attorney, and a standard treatise of maritime law and commerce.

[note: None of the books illustrated below belonged to Edward Dale; they are Folger copies of titles that also appear in his book list. They are not reproduced to scale.]

Substantial works of history, literature, and religion follow his copies of legal works, and collectively these four categories comprise about three-quarters of the entire collection. Many of Dale’s theological books signal his royalist religio-political credentials. He owned a Bible and a Book of Common Prayer, both printed in the 1630s, and his folio copies of the collected sermons of John Donne (1640) and Jeremy Taylor (1673) likewise announce his affiliation with the pre-civil war church—as well as his taste for elevated prose. Three popular works of practical divinity or devotion join Donne and Taylor: Richard Baxter’s Saints Everlasting Rest (1653), Richard Allestree’s Whole Duty of Man (1660), and the Certaine Select Prayers (1585) of pseudo-Augustine. In a period fraught with ecclesiological debate, Dale owned no works of religious controversy or even works of theology per se: his library reflects a conception of the church as established and above controversy—moderate, conformist, practical, and ceremonial.

Dale’s reading of history is similarly focused on practical matters, including chronological reference and broadly based accounts of the dangers of political division. Sir Walter Raleigh’s monumental History of the World (1677) traces the rise and fall of empires, and the Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus (1609) addresses the relations between empire and periphery; other folios treat the civil wars in France and in the Low Countries. For English history, Dale owned only Sir Richard Baker’s chronicle account of English kings (1684), Sir Robert Cotton’s antiquarian essays on the powers of parliament (1679), and the historical collection Cabala, sive Scrinia Sacra, Mysteries of State and Government (1663). The only historically “topical” work here is a 1649 Eikōn basilikē, a memorialization of Charles I that served a devotional as much as historical role in royalist libraries. Dale seeks in his reading of history not to refight the civil wars but to turn time back and start afresh, guided by reading that warns against conflict and that anchors monarchy firmly in chronology.

An intriguing group of literary works accompany Dale’s 1632 Shakespeare, the only work of drama represented in the collection. Other literary folios include Spenser’s Works (1679) and Tasso’s Godfrey of Boulogne: or the Recoverie of Jerusalem (1624), epic poems of Christian nationalism and empire; Dale, of course, would not have purchased anything by the regicide-supporting Milton. Spenser’s 1679 Works furthermore included his View of the Present State of Ireland, a text potentially of interest to a colonial plantation owner. Dale’s taste in poetry otherwise ran to satire: Juvenal and Persius (the work in which the booklist is inscribed) for the classical take on the world’s follies, and Rump Songs (1662) for anti-puritan merriment. Thomas Browne’s literary-philosophical memoir Religio Medici (1659) aligns with the sermons of Donne and Taylor to exemplify Dale’s taste for the elevated style. Finally, Cicero’s Orations (unclear if an English translation or Latin original) may have provided Dale with a rhetorical model for his own public speaking.

A handful of practical books round out the library: an English dictionary; a guidebook to military tactics and training; a comprehensive work of physic and another on anatomy and surgery; and Francis Bacon’s work of natural history, the Sylva Sylvarum (1669). The Sylva included Bacon’s New Atlantis, his scientific-utopian fable that a colonial gentleman might have regarded as an intriguing model of a prosperous society free from political or religious controversy established and governed in lands beyond Europe.

Viewed as a collection, the most surprising aspect of the library of Edward Dale is how unsurprisingly familiar it feels. Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Taylor, Raleigh, Bacon, Browne, and Tasso, some contemporary history, some choice classics, and some of the period’s more authoritative or popular works of law, devotion, and medicine: these will strike many as books we might very well purchase ourselves were we to travel back in time and have the opportunity to compile a similarly sized and focused library. 

The vast majority of early modern libraries, however, remind us consistently that their canon was not our canon: a collection like this, consisting almost entirely of now-familiar names, titles, and genres, is highly unusual. Perhaps Edward Dale simply had a taste for writing that aligns presciently with modern standards, a set of preferences of style, mode, and approach that makes his library stand out from those of most contemporaries. Perhaps too his library was shaped by a desire to create in Virginia a collection of what he considered the best works in every genre he considered important or useful, a collection anchored in writing that reflected the world before the disorders of the civil wars. 

Whatever Dale’s motives for acquiring these books, his collection has a performative quality. Fully half the library comprises folios, a higher percentage than usual. As a group, these books convey not only canonicity but also an impressive solidity: it has the feel of a collection designed both to impress and to make a statement. Dale’s library speaks materially to a desire for a stability detached from a recent history of political and religious change, for a return to a golden age as the foundation for a new one. To Edward Dale, Shakespeare’s Second Folio contributed to that vision. 

The list will soon be included in the Folger’s Private Libraries in Renaissance England (PLRE) database. Thank you to Collation co-editors Morgan Ellison and Heather Wolfe for discussing the list and finding images of many of the title pages of books that appeared in it.