Henry VIII,the ReignHolinshed Publishing |
Raphael Holinshed
 St Giles Church, Packwood, Warwickshire
In 1548, London printer and bookseller Reyner (or Reginald) Wolfe planned to produce a universal history and cosmography of the world. After Wolfe died in 1573, his assistant, Raphael Holinshed, assumed responsibility for the undertaking. Holinshed employed additional writers and reduced the scope of the work to chronicles of the British Isles as opposed to the whole world.
This finished work became known as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) – or simply as Holinshed. The Chronicles were first published in 1577 in a two-volume folio edition illustrated with numerous woodcuts. After Holinshed’s death in 1580, Abraham Fleming published the significantly expanded and revised second edition of 1587 in a larger folio format, this time without illustrations. The 1587 edition was a principal source for Shakespeare’s history plays, for the plot of Macbeth and for scenes in King Lear and Cymbeline. Raphael Holinshed came from Cheshire. Born in or around 1525, he was the son of Ralph Holinshed of Copshurst (one of the hamlets making up the village of Sutton Downes , north-east of Macclesfield) and may have been a scholar at Macclesfield Grammar School. Coincidently, schoolmaster John Brownsword taught at both Stratford-upon-Avon and Macclesfield Grammar Schools. There have been claims by some historians that Holinshed studied at Cambridge and took holy orders. Be that as it may, the sources cited in the Chronicles suggest that Holinshed became a learned man and acquired a wide knowledge of historical British and overseas texts, both printed and in manuscript form. In March 1559, he can be found giving evidence in a Chancery lawsuit, in which he related that he had become an employee of Robert Burdett of Bramcote, Warwickshire, in 1547. Upon Robert’s death on 11 January 1550, he passed into the service of his son, Thomas Burdett, continuing his work of steward (a manorial estate manager). In the service of the Burdetts, Holinshed can be seen proving his legal knowledge and presiding over the court of his employer’s manor of Packwood in Warwickshire, a few miles north of Stratford-upon-Avon. He is recorded as acting as steward of Packwood in 1562, 1563 and 1567, and it seems that he continued as Thomas Burdett’s steward until 1574, the year following Reyner Wolfe’s death, when a certain John Newport succeeded him. In her will of 1574, Reyner Wolfe’s widow, Joan, had bequeathed to Holinshed ‘all suche benefit, profitt and commodetie as was promised unto him by my saide late husbande Reginald Wolffe for or concerning the translating and prynting of a certaine Crownacle whiche my saide husbande before his decease did prepare and intende to have printed’. It is imagined that Shakespeare divided his time between London and Stratford-upon-Avon, and it seems likely that, albeit a decade or so earlier, Holinshed also traversed the Chiltern Hills, on his journeys between writing in Warwickshire and printing and publishing in the capital. Holinshed’s place of burial is unrecorded. He may well have died in London, though if he died at Bramcote he was probably interred at Polesworth parish church. His name, however, is perhaps synonymous with Packwood, and maybe it was there he was laid to rest. One thing, however, is certain: if there had been no Holinshed, there would have been no Shakespeare – at least, not as we know the works. |
Holinshed Publishing
