Manuscripts

The three manuscripts of 15th-century allegorical dramas known as the Macro Plays are the earliest morality plays in English to survive in their entirety. Named for their 18th-century owner, the Suffolk antiquarian Cox Macro, these handwritten pages are undoubtedly some of the greatest treasures of The Folger Shakespeare Library. Without these unique plays—given the titles Wisdom, Mankind, and The Castle of Perseverance by the 19th-century scholars who first transcribed and published them—we would know virtually nothing about pre-Reformation forms of this drama. Featured above is the last page of The Castle of Perseverance. It contains the earliest known stage diagram for an English play and is thus an invaluable record of early performance history. The diagram depicts a stage in the round with a castle at its center surrounded by five scaffolds designated as the locations for the allegorical characters representing God, the World, Flesh, Covetousness, and the Devil. You can explore the full manuscript of the Macro plays in our digital image collection. 

The Folger holds the buyer and seller copies of the Final Concord for Shakespeare’s purchase of New Place, his home in Stratford-upon-Avon, from William Underhill. Upon purchasing property, the vendor and purchaser would enter into an agreement through the Court of Common Pleas. This agreement resulted in a three-part indenture, copied three times and divided so that Shakespeare and Underhill would each receive a copy, with a third retained by the courts. Shakespeare had to undergo this process twice, in 1597 and then in 1602, as William Underhill was murdered by his eldest son soon after the 1597 final concord. His youngest son and heir, Hercules Underhill, could have legally challenged Shakespeare’s claim due to the closeness of these events, and so the process was repeated. The vendor and purchaser’s copies shown here both belonged to Shakespeare, as Hercules Underhill apparently never received his. The court copy, or foot of fine, is held by the National Archives in the United Kingdom.

This is one of 13 letters by the 17th-century poet John Donne held at the Folger, a collection that makes up about a third of his surviving letters. Eight of them, including this one, illuminate a crisis in Donne's life triggered by his secret marriage in late 1601 to Anne More, daughter of Sir George More of Loseley Park. By marrying Anne without her father's permission, Donne offended against both civil and canon laws. He soon found himself jobless, in prison, and barred from communication with his bride. Donne responded with an outpouring of eloquent, pleading letters to Sir George More and to Sir Thomas Egerton, his former employer (and his wife's uncle). In this one to More, Donne writes movingly of Anne, "whose good ys dearer to me by much than my lyfe." The poet's appeals were eventually heeded, and on April 27, 1602, the court of the archbishop of Canterbury confirmed the marriage. Despite some financial difficulties brought on by the scandal, the marriage was a happy one. After his wife's death in childbed in 1617, the great poet vowed never to marry again.

This “Partridge and Cooper’s Patent Improved Metallic Book” contains 172 pages of quotations in the hand of George Eliot, compiled in preparation for her novel Middlemarch. One of two Eliot notebooks at the Folger, it includes extracts from the works of dozens of poets, dramatists, historians, literary critics, philosophers, and mythologists, in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish. The collected material represents her attempt to identify the “history of man,” as she calls it in the first sentence of the novel. The leaf featured here, headed “Fine declamation,” includes quotations from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, and extracts from Charles Knight’s editorial comments in his second edition of the Works of William Shakespeare (1842-1844). In nearby pages she also quotes from Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, and Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as Tennyson, Horace, Swinburne, and Byron.