According to Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol 6, p 212, n 1, these two entries are 'From a MS. copy of the Office Book which Halliwell-Phillipps cut up and pasted into his Scrap-book labelled Hope, p. 46, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The words in brackets were written in by him to replace words destroyed in cutting up the manuscript.'
For an abstract of this record and details of its transcription in other printed sources, see the related EMLoT event.
Grimes may have been Arthur Grimes (aka Anthony Grymes), a provincial player; see further Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, vol 2, p 452.
Record title: Sir Henry Herbert's Office Book
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library
Shelfmark: W.b.158
Repository location: Washington, DC
Each master of the Revels kept an office book to record his (or his deputy's) business, entering details of licenses issued for plays and other entertainments, as well as further theatrical information. The office books of Edmund Tilney (1535/6–1610), master of the Revels, 1578-20 August 1610, and his nephew Sir George Buck (bap. 1560, d. 1622), master of the Revels, 1610–March 1622, have now largely disappeared but they were made use of by Sir Henry Herbert (bap. 1594, d. 1673), master of the Revels, 1623-73, who purchased the office from Buck's successor, Sir John Astley (c 1569–1640), master of the Revels, 1622–July 1623.
Herbert continued the office book up to 1642 but following his death, his records were kept at his family estate at Ribbesford, near Bewdley, Worcestershire. Edmond Malone published many records from the office book in his edition of The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (1790), and more extracts were included by George Chalmers in An Apology for the Believers in the Shakespeare-Papers (1797) and A Supplemental Apology (1799). In 1818 Rebecca Warner published her Epistolary Curiosities, which included a few entries from the office book, but subsequently all trace of the office book was lost. However, as N.W. Bawcutt has noted, 'in 1880 J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps announced that he possessed a "partial transcript" of the office-book, although he never published his transcript or showed it to anyone else. Eventually it became clear that the manuscript had been written by the antiquarian Craven Ord (1756–1832) and that Halliwell-Phillipps did not preserve it as a whole but cut out extracts from it and gummed the strips of paper into notebooks that are now in the Folger Shakespeare Library'; see 'Craven Ord Transcripts,' p 84. As a result, the entries below are quoted from one of Halliwell-Phillipps' scrapbooks rather than the original office book.
See further N.W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama. The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford, 1996), 134-200, and 'Craven Ord Transcripts of Sir Henry Herbert's Office-Book in the Folger Shakespeare Library,' English Literary Renaissance 14.1 (1984), 83–94.
The Halliwell-Phillips' Scrapbook could not be checked during the recent closure of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Upon reopening the transcription from that source will be verified.
19th-c.; English; paper; ix + 84; 315mm x 185mm; stamped pagination, pages divided on both sides into double columns, many pages trimmed after writing; bound in half-calf with matching marbled boards, series and volume title stamped in gold on spine.