Ralph Crane

Ralph Crane (fl. 1615 – 1630) 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."

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.

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 (in their Folio order) 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 (from Henry IV, Part 2 to Timon of Athens) 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.

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