2023/11/01 by Lucy Munro · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Classical Antiquity Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/sq/quad037
openalex publication_date 2023/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
I begin this essay, which is concerned with the relationship between theater history and the history of the book, with a record that illuminates an actor’s ownership of books. When Elizabeth Condell, widow of the actor Henry Condell, died in 1635, an inventory of her goods and chattels was drawn up by her executor, Thomas Seaman. Three years later, a list of items supposedly “possessed, pawned & sold” by Condell’s daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Herbert Finch, was transcribed to accompany Seaman’s answer to a bill of complaint entered in the Court of Chancery by John Diodati and his wife Isabel, daughter of Henry Condell’s former colleague John Underwood.1 The goods in the “little chamber” of the Condell house at Fulham include items such as a bedstead, curtains, a green rug, blankets, “ten pictures,” “one paire of iron Creepers with brasses,” “three lowestooles,” and, alongside them, “one booke called the Turkish history,” “one booke called Jeffery Chaucers works,” and “one booke called Decameron.” A further set of goods in an unspecified location features “one booke called the ffayry Queene,” “one booke called Dubartas his works,” and “one sermon book called doctor Andrewes his workes.”2 With the exception of XCVI Sermons by the Right Honourable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester, which was first published in 1629, all of these books could have been purchased before the death of Henry Condell in 1627. All were available in folio editions, and this is probably why they are singled out in the inventory, with other cheaper and less saleable books likely going unmentioned.3