Manuscript marginalia: Gabriel Harvey refers to Hamlet and Richard III

The scholar and writer Gabriel Harvey was known and mocked in his lifetime for making copious notes in the margins of printed books. An inventor of words, friend of Edmund Spenser, and rival of Thomas Nashe, he constantly sought to improve himself through note-taking and repetitive reading. One of the writers he turned to for inspiration was Shakespeare.  

Harvey fills every available margin of these two bound-together Italian books of aphorisms with notes in English, Latin, and Italian. Turning the book 90 degrees, Harvey notes in the margins of the two pages of this opening that a good “discourser at the Table” needs to absorb a wide range of writing, including English works such as Robert Greene’s Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592) and A notable discovery of coosnage, now daily practised by sundry lewd persons, called connie-catchers (1591), George Gascoigne’s Steel-glass (1576), and Shakespeare’s two plays, “The Tragedie of Hamlet: Richard 3.” Richard III was first published in 1597; Hamlet in 1603. Other English works he refers to include Francis Bacon's Essays (1597), Henry Butt's Dyets dry dinner (1599), John Eliot's Ortho-epia Gallica. Eliots fruits for the French (1593)--the Huntington has Gabriel Harvey's copy of this work annotated by him--John Heywood's proverbs and epigrams, and a "fresh supply" of Mensa Philosophica, possibly the English translation first published in 1576: The schoolemaster, or teacher of table philosophie. 

Harvey lists as well a number of works in Latin, French, and Italian as well, including Seneca's Tragedies, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Aeneid, Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, the Satires of Persius, Juvenal, Horace, and works by Ausonius, Poliziano, Martial, Plutarch, Aeschines, Demosthenes, Julian (The Caesars, Mispogon), Diogenes Laertius. He also refers to the Mimes of Publilius Syrius, Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione (1574), and Ludovico Domenichi's Facetie, the first part of the volume in which he makes his notes.