The central question posed by this promising gathering of ten essays is, “can we learn anything new about Shakespeare?” In her introduction, Crummé says that each contribution announces a biographical discovery and explains how they occurred: “they demonstrate how specialist knowledge of entire collections can inform interpretation of early modern records” (1). The contributors themselves include expert archivists, historians, and Shakespeare scholars.

The first of Alan H. Nelson's two essays is an extended critique of Chris Laoutaris's Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe (2014), about a successful 1596 petition against the Lord Chamberlain's Men starting an indoor theater at the Blackfriars. “Elizabeth Russell Dowager [Countess]” is top of the list of signatories. While Nelson disagrees with Laoutaris's revisionist history, he seems also to have misunderstood it. In exploring the peculiarities of the petition, Laoutaris shows that Russell's name is first, not because she was a dowager countess (in fact she lost her legal case to call herself one), but because she led the petition herself, through the strength of her own personality. Nelson reads the petition only for social status (29), which was not in fact there in the way he assumes. Nelson's second essay discusses several Shakespearean-related indentures, one of which, relating to Shakespeare's purchase of the Blackfriars Gatehouse, Nelson himself has newly identified (114).

Heather Wolfe's long contribution on Shakespeare's coat of arms contains useful background information about how one was obtained, as well as some expert close readings of the manuscripts involved. But I could have done with more clarity about what her findings actually tell us, and why they matter to Shakespearean biography. The coat of arms was awarded to John Shakespeare, not his son, and surely has little to do with William's own reputation by 1596. Lena Cowen Orlin's chapter on the letters of Richard Quiney is dedicated to the late Head of Reader Services at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Elizabeth “Betsy” Walsh. Orlin answers valuable questions about how Quiney's papers were kept and arranged by their original owner, then reordered, recorded, and used by subsequent generations of collectors and scholars. She includes an invaluable listing of the Quiney papers, which are surely ripe for a full critical edition.

Adrian Ailes sets out what Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit calls “the circumlocution office” behind King James I's letters patent: an elaborate, slow, and expensive administrative process, but one that Shakespeare and his fellows were willing to pay for in order to become the King's Men. Lucy Munro looks to the forged theatrical records of John Payne Collier in order to historicize and disrupt biographical desires in the wider documentary contexts. W. R. Streitberger looks closely at the factors behind documenting theatrical performances in the courts of Elizabeth I and James I. Robert Bearman considers Shakespeare's investment in a lease on the Stratford-upon-Avon tithes from 1605 and how he safeguarded his interests through the agreement he entered into with William Replingham. Bearman's article needs now to be read in the wider context of the theatrical economies of Shakespeare's contemporaries, the better to contextualize his own estimation of Shakespeare's social status. Katy Mair reports on the fascinating work carried out by the National Archive on Shakespeare's will, the results of which show “an unusual level of insight into the process of drafting a will” (196), and therefore Shakespeare's changing intentions.

The collection ends with Eric M. Johnson's description of the Folger's admirable “Shakespeare Documented” project. While Johnson may be right about the democratization of documents through such online resources, I found myself seeking even more work on the paper originals. It is regrettable that Crummé dismisses S. Schoenbaum's masterly illustrated William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life as “unwieldy.” She should take more than a leaf out of Schoenbaum's groundbreaking book. Nearly all of her own forty-six images are illegible and inappropriately tiny. This makes them at best symbolic, and, given her focus on manuscripts and their wider contexts, it would have been helpful for her to tell her readers the actual size of the documents under consideration.