GIFTED BY DADIE RYLANDS TO RALPH RICHARDSON & BY MARGARET DRABBLE AND MICHAEL HOLROYD: The Ages of Man: Shakespeare’s Image of Man and Nature

A much gifted book, presented in the first instance by its editor George ‘Dadie’ Rylands to the preeminent Shakespearean actor Ralph Richardson whose bookplate appears on the front pastedown and who has annotated chunks of the text and the endpapers, apparently for performance at an event celebrating Shakespeare’s 375th birthday. (In 1939 Richardson was playing Falstaff in Henry IV Part I and Caliban in The Four Feathers.) After Richardson’s death in 2006 the book came into the possession of the novelist Margaret Drabble and her biographer second husband, Michael Holroyd. Having (seemingly) removed Dadie Rylands’ inscription to Richardson from the front flyleaf which has been excised, Holroyd has explained the complicated provenance of the book and Drabble then inscribed this ‘battered tribute’ to her first husband also a Shakespearean actor, ‘Clive Swift for his 70th birthday’, with Holroyd adding his signature and the date: ‘9th February 2006’.

The book is bound in worn buckram; lacks the front flyleaf and has two pages of Richardson’s notes to the final opening. There are further handwritten notes by Richardson through the text: 350, Henry VI Pt III, ‘O God! methinks it were a happy life’ - annotated for performance; 662 (As you like it) and 663 ‘Time’s glory is to calm contending kings...’ (Rape of Lucrece); inserted is an annotated bookmark for ‘An epitaph 472’ written on the verso of an exhibition invitation by Richardson and referring to a speech by Kent from King Lear: ‘That such a slave as this should wear a sword’.