University of Virginia Library

CONCLUSIONS AND APPLICATIONS

I have presented evidence showing that John Norton printed The Triumph
of Peace in four impressions, with hiatuses within the second and third of these.
Varying amounts of text—but always much less than half of the book—were
distributed and reset before each of the later impressions, at least partly to sup-
ply other jobs running concurrently. The preliminaries, including the title page,
also went through four impressions, but in different quantities from the text
quires, so that the first two states of the title may each occur with two possible
impressions of the text. Other, smaller disparities in print runs among the text
quires produced occasional copies containing quires from adjacent impressions,
further complicating the problems of identification. However, in general the four
printings of the text come together in a few consistent combinations with little
intermixing. The state of quire C is the clearest indicator of which impression a
copy belongs to, but fully characterizing exemplars of the first three printings still
requires the specification of many variables. About half of the copies of the third
and fourth impressions contain type-material from Norton's partner Nicholas
Okes and are presumed to have been printed by him.

The difficulties that earlier bibliographers had with ToP arose largely from
their point of view. Like astronomers of the Ptolemaic paradigm, they put the
most familiar element—the title page, in this case—at the center and saw the
rest of the system behaving with a bewildering complexity. Moving the main part
of the book—the text—to the center and relegating the title page to its own odd
but explainable orbit eliminates much of the need to invoke mysterious causes.
Even so, the book offers seemingly unlimited surprises—even unto the fifty-fifth
copy—and mysteries whose unravelling I will now leave, as did Greg, to those

with more "leisure and opportunity". Those happy investigators might be able
to explain the unique variant in St. Catharine's (Cambridge) Z59; the garbling
of states in some phases of quires B and C; the weird quire interactions in the
Phase IIIb copies; the rationale of enlisting a second printer for help on quire D;
and the identity and dynamics of the competing jobs in Norton's shop. Mechani-
cal collation (a luxury that I did not allow myself) might uncover tiny differences
in the pairs of "identical" reprints that I have hypothesized above.

The complexities of ToP may tempt us to put it in a class by itself, 65 but it
contains lessons that might point the way to a fresh approach to certain diffi-
cult cases. For example, both Greg and STC treat Philip Massinger's The Picture
(1630) as one edition with a confusing array of variants. 66 A brief comparison of
copies, with attention to the skeletons, reveals a similar situation to that of ToP:
there were at least two impressions, though in this case the copies contain sheets
drawn indiscriminately from both. Perhaps not coincidentally, the printer was
again John Norton, and one immediately recognizes the characteristic slovenli-
ness that he inflicted on his lower-end work. Looking at The Picture in this light
may ease the work of the next editor, but it also at least doubles our estimate of
the play's sales during the author's lifetime. I cannot believe that The Triumph
of Peace and The Picture form the tip of a particularly large iceberg, but they
do underline the need to pay close attention to skeletons, especially when the
headlines contain nothing more than page numbers. We are still exploring the
range of ingenious—if not devious—shifts that early modern printers could use
to make their lives easier.