In 1621 he published a small collection of his own poems titled The Works of Mercy, Both Corporeal and Spiritual, which he dedicated to John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater.
[2] The current ODNB states there is no record of a Ralph Crane among attendees of the Merchant Taylors School, a benefit for Freemen's sons.
As a result, Crane's scribal peculiarities concerning stage directions, speech prefixes, punctuation and other specifics have received intense attention from generations of scholars, critics, and editors of Shakespeare.
Crane transcripts provided copy for several plays in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, including The False One, The Knight of Malta, The Prophetess, and The Spanish Curate.
The play Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, never printed in its own era, survived to modern times in a single Crane manuscript.