Eggar Collection

The Collection 

Subject: English literature 

The printed books in the Eggar Collection are an adjunct to manuscript notes and cuttings gathered for a book that the pianist, composer and musical scholar Katharine Eggar (1874-1961) intended to write supporting the Oxford theory, which attributed the works of Shakespeare to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604). The book remained unwritten, although Eggar did publish two pamphlets, Shakespeare in his True Colours (1951) and The Unified Shadow (1954). 

A working collection, the books comprise 253 volumes (1806-1960), almost all in English. About 60 are from the nineteenth century, the rest from the twentieth. They include works about the Earl of Oxford and his putative authorship of Shakespeare’s output, works by and about Shakespeare and the plays, late editions of Shakespearean sources, books about the Elizabethan period, and biographies of Elizabethans. While the texts to an extent duplicate holdings in the Durning-Lawrence Library and the Francis Bacon Society Library, several of Eggar’s books are individualised by her annotations, or by manuscript notes or press cuttings laid in. 

Eggar bequeathed the collection to the University of London in 1962.