Ralph Crane was a professional scrivener or scribe in early seventeenth-century London. His close connection with some of the First Folio texts of the plays of William Shakespeare has led to his being called "Shakespeare's first editor."
Life
What little is known of Crane's life comes from his own writings. In 1621 he published a small collection of his own poems titled The Works of Mercy, Both Corporeal and Spiritual, which he dedicated to John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater. In the prefatory "Proem" to that volume, Crane indicated that he was a native Londoner, and the son of a successful member of the Merchant Taylors Company. He spent seven years as the law clerk to Sir Anthony Ashley, secretary of the Privy Council; Crane later became a scribe working mainly for attorneys. Thomas Lodge dedicated his Scylla's Metamorphosis to a Ralph Crane in 1589; this may have been the poet/scrivener. Crane turned to writing verse late in life, when he was oppressed by ill health and poverty.
Shakespeare
Crane was working for the King's Men by 1618; he produced multiple transcripts of the company's plays over the next decade and more. The modern scholarly consensus holds that Crane transcripts constituted the copy from which at least five plays were set into type for the First Folio. Those five are:
E. A. J. Honigmann, in his edition of Othello, suggested that Othello should be added as a sixth play to that list; and a few other Folio texts have been proposed by individual scholars, though without winning wide acceptance. As a result, Crane's scribal peculiarities concerning stage directions, speech prefixes, punctuation and other specifics have received intense attention from generations of scholars, critics, and editors of Shakespeare.
Others
Crane's work for the King's Men was not restricted to Shakespeare. The most notable of his other transcripts for the company may well be his manuscript of The Witch, the Thomas Middleton play that has a significant relationship with Macbeth. Crane transcripts provided copy for several plays in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, including The False One, The Knight of Malta, The Prophetess, and The Spanish Curate. The 1623quarto of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi was "almost certainly" set into type from a Crane transcript. None of Crane's Shakespearean manuscripts have survived; but Crane scripts of several other works are extant, in addition to the one for The Witch noted above. Two of the six extant manuscripts of Middleton's A Game at Chess are from Crane's hand. The play Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, never printed in its own era, survived to modern times in a single Crane manuscript. Crane regularly produced what were called presentation manuscripts, copies of favored works for particular clients. On November 27, 1625 he sent his transcript of John Fletcher's play The Humorous Lieutenant to Sir Kenelm Digby. The extant manuscript of Ben Jonson's 1618 masquePleasure Reconciled to Virtue, known as the Chatsworth manuscript, was a Crane presentation manuscript for Sir Dudley Carleton.
