Office-book
The surviving transcripts of Herbert's "office-book" are among the most important documentary records of English Renaissance drama. Herbert recorded all of his activities as Master of the Revels, in particular his licensing of plays for performance and his organization of court performances. His detailed records provide modern scholars with dates for many plays of the period, as well as dates of performances at court, and evidence for the existence of lost plays. The office-book itself has been lost since 1818, but its information partially survives in incomplete eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transcripts.
When Herbert died in 1673, his papers, including the office-book, were stored at his home, the manor-house of Ribbesford, Worcestershire. In 1738, Herbert's grandson, Henry Herbert, 2nd Baron Herbert of Chirbury died childless and the archive was bequeathed to another relative, Francis Walker, and was gradually dispersed over time. However, the office-book and other documents related to it were overlooked, remaining at Ribbesford in an old wooden chest where they were partially damaged by water leakage. In 1787, Ribbesford House was sold to Francis Ingram who discovered the chest and its contents.
In the next few decades, Ingram and his descendants permitted scholars to study the revels documents. The most important was Edmond Malone, who found the office-book to be partially moldered, but still readable. He published selections from it in his edition of Shakespeare (1790). Malone claimed to have made a full transcript of the office-book, but he only published a fraction of it, and his transcript has never been found. At some point, the scholar Craven Ord studied the office-book and transcribed a large number of entries from it but did not publish them. In the 1790s, George Chalmers published some extracts not published by Malone in 1799; however, although he did not acknowledge it, these may have been supplied to Chalmers by Ord. At some point before 1818, Thomas Ingram temporarily loaned the office-book to Reverend Richard Warner and his sister Rebecca Warner, and they published some extracts from it.
When Craven Ord died, his transcripts of the office-book were auctioned and ultimately ended up in the hands of Jacob Henry Burn, who was compiling notes toward a history of the Office of the Revels. Burn copied, or sometimes cut out and pasted, some of Ord's records into his own notebook, which is now in the Beinecke Library. After his death, the Ord transcript was bought by J.O. Halliwell-Phillips, who also did not publish anything from it. The Ord transcript appeared to be lost until 1937, when R.C. Bald discovered fragments of it pasted into Halliwell-Phillips' notebooks, stored at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It was revealed that Halliwell-Philips had gone through the Ord transcript and cut out interesting items, apparently discarding the rest. In 1996, N.W. Bawcutt discovered a few more of Hallilwell-Phillips' cuttings in a notebook at Edinburgh University Library.
After 1818, the original office-book appears to have been lost. It was in the possession of Reverend Edward Winnington-Ingram, but it is not known what he did with it and it is no longer in the family's papers. Halliwell-Phillips asserted that it was in the library of the Earl of Powis, but the Earl denied this; the Powis papers are now owned by the Public Record Office and the National Library of Wales and the office-book is not among them. N.W. Bawcutt, who published in 1996 a complete collection of all of the surviving Revels records, believes that the lost information might still be rediscovered some day: the office-book, Malone's transcript, the remains of Ord's transcript, and Chalmers' notebooks are all unaccounted for and might still come to light.
