• DOI:10.1353/SHQ.2015.0026
• Corpus ID: 194022730

William Dugdale on Shakespeare and His Monument

@article{Reedy2015WilliamDO,
  title={William Dugdale on Shakespeare and His Monument},
  author={Tom Reedy},
  journal={Shakespeare Quarterly},
  year={2015},
  volume={66},
  pages={188 - 196}
}

• Tom Reedy
• Published 1 July 2015
• History
• Shakespeare Quarterly

THE INFLUENCE OF ENGLISH SCHOLAR AND HERALD SIR WILLIAM DUGDALE (1605–86) on the development of historiography is undisputed. Acknowledged as one of England’s foremost antiquaries, he set high standards for the study of medieval and local history sources, helping to establish both as academic subjects. His indefatigable industry, as evinced in such work as his three-volume Monasticon Anglicanum (1655, 1661, 1673) in collaboration with Roger Dodsworth, preserved many valuable pre-Reformation records that otherwise would have been lost. His History of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658) is a unique window into the church as it existed before the 1666 Great Fire, and his Baronage of England (1675–76) remains a foundational text for study of the English peerage.1 While not as far-reaching or comprehensive, Sir William’s contributions to Shakespeare scholarship during the course of his Warwickshire research are not insignificant. He was an early reporter of attribution to Shakespeare of the Stanley tomb epitaphs in St. Bartholomew’s Church in Tong, Shropshire.2 His Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), recognized as a model county history, includes transcriptions not only from Shakespeare’s monument and gravestone in the Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford-upon-Avon but also from those of Shakespeare’s family buried in the church. (Rev. William Harness used Dugdale’s transcriptions in 1844 to restore the gravestone epitaph of Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna Hall, more than a century after it had been effaced to make room for another inscription.3) More famously, Dugdale was