ABSTRACT
Ralph Crane transcribed some twenty-two to twenty-five plays by the Jacobean theatre's most prominent playwrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Massinger, Fletcher and Webster. Yet, although the Shakespeare First Folio has provided and will continue to be the focus and raison d'etre of Crane studies, other areas of his potential influence require closer examination and promise significant advances of our understanding of his operations on texts. Apart from its proximity to Crane's work on the Folio, the Seaman's Dictionary shows the scribe in the process of copying continuously revised copy. The life of a man is the record of what he has done. Crane was a scribe so his life for the most part is a simple recital of the texts that he worked on. However, his literary activities were concentrated in the last dozen or so years of his life when he was beset by the pains of penury and age.
