The only surviving letter to Shakespeare: Letter from Richard Quiney asking for Shakespeare's assistance in securing a loan of £30

This is the only known surviving letter written to Shakespeare, but he may never have received it. (No known letters survive written by him.) It is addressed “To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann Mr. Wm Shackespere,” dated “ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane the 25 October 1598” and signed “Ryc. Quyney.” 

In October 1598 Richard Quiney, a mercer from Stratford-upon-Avon, who served his town as an alderman and bailiff (similar to a modern-day mayor), travelled to London on civic business. The Quiney and Shakespeare families were long associated. Richard’s grandfather, his namesake, was acquainted with Shakespeare’s grandfather Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield. His father, Adrian Quiney, was a colleague of Shakespeare’s father John in Stratford’s Corporation. More than a decade later, on February 10, 1616, Quiney’s third son Thomas married Shakespeare’s younger daughter Judith. Their first child, born nine months later in November 1616, was baptized Shakespeare Quiney.

Quiney’s letter requests Shakespeare’s assistance in raising £30 (the equivalent of several thousand dollars) to pay “all the debettes I owe in London.” This request indicates that Shakespeare was seen either as a potential moneylender, or, more likely, as a Stratford man sufficiently creditworthy in London to secure Quiney a loan. This latter interpretation is supported by Quiney’s wording, implying that Shakespeare was to obtain the money from a third party on his behalf: “I wyll holde my tyme [i.e. pay back on the due date] & content yowr ffrende.” Quiney offers, to stand surety for this loan together with either Richard Mytton or Thomas Bushell, two other Stratford men.

Quiney explains that he had approached Shakespeare because a third man, Peter Rosswell, “is nott come to London as yeate.” Rosswell was an associate of Edward Grevill, who, from other correspondence, is known to have been indebted to the Quineys. Therefore the underlying issue in this, and other surviving letters, may have been the frequently referenced interlocking network of debts between the parties, and their other friends and associates. 

Although Quiney had explained that he needed the £30 to settle his own debts, he had almost certainly made the approach on behalf of his friend, Abraham Sturley. Sturley had written to Quiney on October 16, bemoaning the fact that a bond for the repayment of £100 would become due on November 22, and that he was also in dire need of £25 to meet pressing creditors which he therefore hoped “might bi ur good labour & leisure be procured” (ER 1/97, f. 134). This would explain the wording of Sturley’s response to Quiney on November 4, after hearing the news of the negotiations, “that our countryman Mr Wm Shak: would procure us monej.”

Quiney’s letter to Shakespeare holds a certain mystery. After Quiney, died in May 1602 while still in office, the letter became part of a substantial cache of letters in the Stratford Corporation’s archives. Most of these letters were written to Quiney, but among them was this letter to Shakespeare. Its survival in Quiney's own archive suggests that Quiney never sent his letter to Shakespeare, perhaps because the two Stratford men instead met in London. Shakespeare, it seems, did help out in some way. In addition to Sturley’s letter establishing that an approach had been made, two other letters, from Adrian Quiney and Daniel Baker, imply that negotiations with Shakespeare were in hand.

The letter was discovered in the fall of 1793, when the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone visited Stratford-upon-Avon, working his way through over three thousand papers in the Corporative archives. The letter was finally printed in 1821, almost thirty years after its discovery, and nine years after Malone’s death, when James Boswell, Jr. edited Malone’s posthumous Life of William Shakespeare. Early in the nineteenth century, the Stratford antiquary R.B. Wheler removed the letter, and other records, from the Corporation muniments to facilitate his own research. After Wheler's death, his sister gave his entire collection to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, thereby reuniting these “borrowed” items with the early Corporation archives which were similarly placed in the Trust’s care at that time. 

When Malone examined the letter, he described it to his friend Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, as measuring “about three inches long by two broad.” An analysis of the visible folds in the letter, which measures roughly 5⅓ inches x 6⅓ inches (or more precisely, 136 x 168 mm) when opened, suggests that when Malone viewed it, the letter was still closed as a packet to be sent, and would in fact have measured roughly 2⅞ inches by 2 inches. Traces of Quiney's seal are still visible, indicating that the letter had been sealed for sending, and then opened at a later date.