'Antiques Roadshow' expert starts trembling after guest brings a unique 400-year-old notebook

“Antiques Roadshow” largely provides a platform to people turning up with family heirlooms and collectibles, but once in a while, experts are surprised to spot something that has rare historical significance. One such item was a notebook that was brought to the show and could shed light on the work of the legendary William Shakespeare. It was a small notebook that belonged to a guest who said that it belonged to his ancestor, the 18th-century antiquarian named John Loveday of Caversham. The guest found it among his mother’s belongings.

Antique expert Matthew Haley was beyond happy to see such an item on the show. "There is so much research that can be done on this item," he said, as per Express. "It's amazing, it's almost completely illegible, but you can pick out the odd word, and you can pick out phrases that appear in Shakespeare." The notebook was tiny, and the writing even tinier, so whoever wrote in it must have wielded impressive skills with a quill.

Haley was certain that it belonged to someone who lived during the 17th century from the writing. There was no doubt that this person used to read Shakespeare’s work. Inside the copy were several notes from the Bard’s many legendary plays like Twelfth Knight and Much Ado About Nothing, to name a couple. “It's absolutely extraordinary. My hands are trembling now, just looking at it,” he said. Big things sometimes come in small packages, and this was the perfect example of that. Shakespeare is considered by many to be one of the greatest playwrights of all time. Any document, no matter how small or illegible, holds massive value in the world of literature. Therefore, it was no surprise when Haley said that the tiny notebook could fetch more than 30,000 pounds at an auction. Today, its value is probably a lot more.

Professor Tiffany Stern of the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, was given the notebook to read and make sense of what’s written in it. While it did not contain any unpublished work of Shakespeare, there was still a lot to be excited about. Stern said that the notebook was a record of someone who had read the playwright’s folio, which was his collected works published in the year 1623. She also called the writer of the diary a geek.

“This person had read that collected works and had taken quotations out of every single bit of it. All the preliminary matter and all the 36 plays in folio order. So this was an obsessive fan, an absolute geek. And maybe the earliest one we know of. This book will be from about the 1630s, I think,” she said.

While the name of the original owner of the notebook is not known, Stern drew attention to the clues that could give us an insight into who they were. The seal at the back of the notebook was of the Waterhouse family. The professor even pointed out that the writer was obsessed with pregnancy and eyebrows.