A Companion to Henslowe's Diary

NOT SURPRISINGLY the editing of Henslowe's diary has always taken precedence over its explication. Commentaries have been rudimentary or have lagged well behind the publication of the original material. Edmond Malone, the first to make scholarly use of the manuscript, apologized that it was not in his power ‘to arrange those very curious materials in their proper places’, but did not wish that ‘the publicke should be deprived of the information and entertainment’ they would afford (1790:1, Part 2, 289). Malone's extracts printed in his edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (1790) were the only selections from the diary and papers available to most scholars until J. Payne Collier's edition of the diary, published in 1845. Collier's commentary was devoted almost entirely to an explanation of the document's relevance to the study of Shakespeare. Furthermore, it was coloured by his attitude to its author whom he described as ‘an ignorant man, even for the time in which he lived, and for the station he occupied’. Collier's assessment seems to have been based entirely on the fact that Henslowe ‘wrote a bad hand, adopted any orthography that suited his notion of the sound of the words … and kept his book, as respects dates in particular, in the most disorderly, negligent, and confused manner’ (1845: xv). Collier himself made no attempt to improve the order of the work, however, and added materially to its confusion by introducing a number of forged entries.