ESPERIDES, OR THE MUSES’ GARDEN is a seventeenth-century manu- script commonplace book. The recent history of the manuscript begins with Gunnar Sorelius’s 1973 discovery of James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps’s cut-up notebook version in the Shakespeare Centre Library at Stratford-upon-Avon (‘Notes upon the Works of Shakespeare’, 128 volumes, arranged by play) and the additional fragments at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (MSS V.a.75, V.a.79, V.a.80). 1 This fragmented version of Hesperides, distributed on both sides of the Atlantic, was intact before Halliwell-Phillipps’s scissor work in the nineteenth cen- tury. 2 In 1980 Peter Beal identified Folger MS V.b.93 as the same work and discovered the Stationers’ Register entry for the book along with Humphrey Moseley’s advertisement, which specify the author/compiler as a certain John Evans, whose identity remains uncertain. 3 More recently Beal has drawn attention to how little work has been undertaken on these interesting manuscripts since their discovery, encouraging further investigation. 4 Folger MS V.b.93 (referred to as V.b.93 hereafter) is a book of 900 folio pages measuring 7 1 ⁄ 2 x 11 3 ⁄ 4 inches. Pages 1–4, 379–80, 667–68, 715–20, and 785–88 are not extant. The pagination ends at 892, and the five-page index at the end is unpaginated. There are pencil notations and symbols through- out, with additional numbers at the foot of many columns, sometimes indicating the number of entries, sometimes not. Of the 128 volumes of The Library, 7th series, vol. 10, no. 4 (December 2009) Hesperides, or the Muses’ Garden and its Manuscript History by HAO TIANHU H Supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Fund of the Ministry of Education, People’s Republic of China. Authorisation: 08JC 752001. 1 Gunnar Sorelius, ‘An Unknown Shakespearian Commonplace Book’, The Library, v, 28 (1973), 294–308. I am grateful to Dr Peter Beal, Dr Oliver Pickering, and Professor Thomas Rendall for their suggestions. 2 The other fragments of this version might be located in Halliwell-Phillipps’s non-Shakespearean scrapbooks at Folger, though I have not yet been able to examine them. 3 Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. i: 1450–1625, comp. by Peter Beal, 2 pts (London, 1980), pt 2, p. 450. 4 Peter Beal, ‘The Folger Manuscript Collection: A Personal View’, in ‘The Pen’s Excellencie’, ed. by Heather Wolfe (Washington DC, 2002), pp. 16–19.