Everything about Ralph Crane totally explained
Ralph Crane (
fl. 1615 –
1630) was a professional
scrivener or
scribe in early seventeenth-century London. His close connection with some of the
First Folio texts of the plays of
William Shakespeare has led to his being called "Shakespeare's first editor."
What little is known of Crane's life comes from his own writings. In
1621 he published a small collection of his own poems titled
The Works of Mercy, Both Corporeal and Spiritual, which he dedicated to
John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater. In the prefatory "Proem" to that volume, Crane indicated that he was a native Londoner, and the son of a successful member of the
Merchant Taylors Company. He spent seven years as the law clerk to Sir Anthony Ashley, secretary of the
Privy Council; Crane later became a scribe working mainly for attorneys.
Thomas Lodge dedicated his
Scylla's Metamorphosis to a Ralph Crane in
1589; this may have been the poet/scrivener. Crane turned to writing verse late in life, when he was oppressed by ill health and poverty.
Crane was working for the
King's Men by
1618; he produced multiple transcripts of the company's plays over the next decade and more. The modern scholarly consensus holds that Crane transcripts constituted the copy from which at least five plays were set into type for the First Folio. Those five (in their Folio order) are:
E. A. J. Honigmann, in his edition of
Othello, suggested that
Othello should be added as a sixth play to that list; and a few other Folio texts (from
Henry IV, Part 2 to
Timon of Athens) have been proposed by individual scholars, though without winning wide acceptance. As a result, Crane's scribal peculiarities concerning stage directions, speech prefixes, punctuation and other specifics have received intense attention from generations of scholars, critics, and editors of Shakespeare.
Crane's work for the King's Men wasn't restricted to Shakespeare. (Or even to plays: he copied out the last will and testament of
Richard Burbage.) The most notable of his other transcripts for the company may well be his MS. of
The Witch, the
Thomas Middleton play that has a significant relationship with
Macbeth. Crane transcripts provided copy for several plays in the
first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of
1647, including
The False One, The Knight of Malta, The Prophetess, and
The Spanish Curate. The
1623 quarto of
John Webster's
The Duchess of Malfi was "almost certainly" set into type from a Crane transcript.
None of Crane's Shakespearean MSS. have survived; but Crane scripts of several other works are extant, in addition to the one for
The Witch noted above. Two of the six extant MSS. of Middleton's
A Game at Chess are from Crane's hand. (Crane consistently changed all of Middleton's uses of "has" to "hath" in those transcripts, illustrating the complexities involved in using discriminators like "has/hath" and "does/doth" in authorship studies.) The play
Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, never printed in its own era, survived to modern times in a single Crane manuscript.
Crane regularly produced what were called presentation manuscripts, copies of favored works for particular clients. On Nov. 27, 1625 he sent his transcript of
John Fletcher's play
The Humorous Lieutenant to Sir
Kenelm Digby. The extant manuscript of
Ben Jonson's 1618
masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, known as the Chatsworth MS., was a Crane presentation manuscript for
Sir Dudley Carleton.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Ralph Crane'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://ralph_crane.totallyexplained.com">Ralph Crane Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
