DURING SOME PERIODS IN THE EIGHTEENTH century it is
difficult to
decide just what constituted a piracy. The established, prosperous
members of the Trade, who owned the most valuable literary
properties, such as Shakespeare and Milton, were loudly insisting
that the copyright statute of 1709 had had no adverse effect upon
their perpetual rights in these properties. This view was strongly
contested by the small fry among publishers, who took the position
that the Act had put an end to perpetual copyright and hence that
these old authors lay in the public domain. Now and again one of
the little men ventured to publish Shakespeare or Milton, was hotly
denounced by the 'proprietor' as a pirate, and as hotly denied the
charge. But this controversy arose only after 1731, for the Act of
1709 was perfectly explicit in continuing the copyrights of old
books in the hands of their then possessors for the term of
twenty-one years from 25 April 1710. Any play of Shakespeare's
published during
this period by any stationer other than the Tonson firm or the
Wellington firm—the lawful proprietors of all of Shakespeare's
plays—was undeniably a piracy.
Three such piracies—the only ones known to me—form
the
subject of the present paper. But before we embark on the account
of these three little spurious Shakespeares it will
simplify matters to have before us a description of three other
Shakespeares—irreproachable publications of the lawful owners of
the copyrights, the Wellingtons:
[1]
- (1) HAMLET, | Prince of Denmark; | A |
TRAGEDY, | As
it is now Acted by his | Majesty's Servants. | [rule] |
Written by | William Shakespear. | [rule] |
LONDON;
| Printed by J. Darby, for A. Bettes-|worth in
Pater-noster-Row, and F. Clay | without
Temple-Bar.
M.DCC.XXIII. | (Price One Shilling.)
12mo. A-I6.
- (2) OTHELLO, | THE | MOOR of
VENICE; | A |
TRAGEDY, | As it hath been divers times Acted at | the
Globe, and at the Black-Friers: | And now at
the
Theater-Royal, by | His Majesty's Servants. |
[rule]
| Written by W. Shakespear. | [rule] |
[ornament:
a pair of quadripartite type blocks] | [rule] |
LONDON: | Printed by John Darby in
Bartholomew-Close,
for | Mary Poulson, and fold by A. Bettes-|worth in
Pater-noster-Row, R. Caldwell | in
Newgate-street,
and F. Clay without Temple | Bar.
M.DCC.XXIV.
Price
1 s
12mo. A-H6.
- (3) MACBETH; | A | TRAGEDY, | As it is now
Acted by
His Ma-|jesty's Servants. | [rule] | Written by | William
Shakespear. | [rule] | [ornament: rabbit with crossed
sprays, triangular, 37 mm. x
24 mm.] | [rule] | LONDON,
| Printed
for J.
Tonson; and also for J. Darby, | A. Bettesworth, and F. Clay, in
Trust | for Richard, James, and Bethel Wel-|lington. M.DCC.XXIX.
12mo. A-G6.
Ford's bibliography[2] contains
three entries corresponding to these. It ought to contain six, for
there exist two editions of the 1723 Hamlet, two of the 1724
Othello, and two of the 1729 Macbeth to which
the
foregoing descriptions would in each case apply equally well. That
Ford failed to recognize these duplicate editions is not to his
discredit, for the duplication is so close that even when the pairs
are seen together it is not easy at once to distinguish them. More
conspicuous differences than those which they present have been
overlooked in books of greater importance than these three
insignificant duodecimos. Not until very recently was it recognized
that the 1709 Rowe edition of Shakespeare and the 1765 Johnson
edition were each two editions, actually, instead of one. And these
pairs differ even as to collation. But their title-pages, their
format, their illustrations—the points ordinarily observed by
booksellers and
collectors—differ only in such trifling details as no one but a
prying bibliographer is likely to observe—or value.[3] This practice of making reprints
duplicate their first editions might reasonably be taken to explain
the reprints which we are now considering. A close examination of
these, however, reveals certain features which clearly show such an
explanation to be untenable and which suggest instead unlawful
publication and an intent to deceive. It will make the detailed
description of these features easier if we confine ourselves first
to one of the plays—the 1724 Othello. In this
description
I use the letters
A and
B to designate the two
editions (in what I believe to be their correct order).
Title-page. Comparison of the A and
B
titles in the accompanying reproduction reveals small typographical
variations sufficiently apparent without further comment. But it
also reveals a degree of correspondence too great to be the result
of accident or of the natural desire of the compositor of a reprint
to save time and trouble by following his copy as exactly as
possible. The dimensions of the A and B
type-pages,
for example, differ by scarcely a hair's breadth.[4] The
similarity of the pair of ornaments
on A and B, each composed of four common
stock
pieces, is not remarkable; the close correspondence of their
relative positions is more so.
Headband, A2
r. Again, it is not
remarkable that the
printer of B should have had in his shop, or have been able
to obtain, the type sorts of which he found the A headband
composed. These were standard ornaments, doubtless obtainable by
any printer. The significant points are, on the one hand, that the
two headbands are not exactly identical and, on the other, that
they are so near alike that the differences can be detected only
upon close examination. To make the rows of very small pieces which
compose the outer border and separate the larger interior elements
fill the required spaces, it was necessary to insert here and there
thin types. In the top row are an exclamation point and a question
mark; in the righthand side an exclamation point; in the lefthand
side an 'i'. Exactly the same types appear in B as in
A and in precisely the same positions—an effect which
required careful calculation and counting.
Factotum initial, A2
r. The factotum
of B
is not
identical with that of A but is sufficiently like it—and
this is the important point—to be regarded as unmistakably an
imitation. The A factotum having been a woodblock, the
B printer did not have,
and could not go out and buy, a duplicate, as he could the
component parts of the headband. His alternatives were instead to
use another factotum of similar size and character, or to have an
imitation of
A specially made for the occasion. The first of
these alternative courses would not, it seems, answer his purpose,
and we may assume that he chose the second. It is chiefly upon this
factotum (supported by the tailpiece on H6
v) that my
determination of the order in which the two editions were printed
rests. It is obvious that the
A factotum is old and worn,
while
B appears fresh and clean.
Tailpiece, p. 96 (H6
v).
Much of what I
have
said about the factotums applies to these tailpieces. B is
of cruder workmanship than A, with heavy outlines and
inferior draughtsmanship, but is clean and unworn.
Signatures. One of the easiest quick tests by which to
determine whether two given copies of a book (of the 18th century
or earlier) are printed from the same setting of type or whether
they belong instead to two different editions is to compare
signatures. Since compositors did not bother to center their
signatures exactly in the lower margins, a signature in one edition
will ordinarily occupy a different position in relation to the
letters of the line just above it from that of the corresponding
signature in another edition. The variation between the position of
the 'A2' in A and B (see the reproduction) is
so
slight as to appear not to be the result of chance. A comparison of
the other signatures of the two editions makes it clear that chance
is not here the controlling factor—that, even in such a trifling
and unobtrusive detail, the B compositor was consciously
imitating his copy, A. Of twenty-three signatures in the
volume the B
compositor placed eighteen of them more accurately than he did the
'A2'.
Press figures. In many 18th-century books we find in
an
occasional lower margin a figure, asterisk, or the like—never
more than one to a forme. These are believed to indicate the press
or the pressman on which or by which the forme was
printed. It seems probable that they were inserted by the pressman;
they could not have been inserted until the formes were made up.
And so there would normally be—and there normally is—no
agreement whatever between the press figures of a first edition and
those of a reprint of it. In the
Othello there is such
agreement. One press figure appears in
A—a '2' on
C6
v.
And
B agrees with this, even down to the position of the
figure on the page. This can only be intentional imitation.
So much for the 1724 Othello. The 1723
Hamlet and
the 1729 Macbeth exhibit the same kinds of similarities in
the two editions of each. Title-pages are copied with approximately
the same degree of fidelity. Factotums and tailpieces of the two
A editions are worn like those of Othello, while
those of the B editions are new looking, heavy, rather crude
in workmanship, and have the appearance of imitations executed by
the same hand as those of Othello. Hamlet has at the head of
its text a composite headband somewhat like that of Othello,
the B edition showing the same care in the placing of the
thin types needed to fill up that we found there. The
Macbeth headpiece is, instead, a foliated woodblock
ornament, B imitating A just as in the
factotums and
tailpieces. In its signatures Hamlet is almost as remarkable
in the correspondence of B to A as
Othello.
Of a total of twenty-five signatures, eighteen agree more or less
exactly in their relative positions. Likewise the Hamlet B
press figures exactly duplicate the four in A—three
stars
and a '1'. In the 1729 Macbeth no press figures occur in
either edition, and the B compositor failed to follow
A in the placing of his signatures.
From this mass of evidence it will be quite clear that in the
printing of the three B editions neither trouble or expense
was spared to produce careful type-facsimiles. There could have
been no reason for this if the B editions were ordinary
reprints (like those of 1709 and 1765) produced by John Darby, who
is named in all the imprints. Had Darby been responsible for these
reprints, supposing that he had had any motive for producing
exact facsimiles, he could have made them better and with less
trouble by using the same factotums and tailpieces instead of only
moderately good imitations. He retained these old factotums and
tailpieces in his shop and used them later in other plays. Quite
obviously, then, the three reprints are the work of a pirate. And
from the great lengths to which he went to make his spurious
products look exactly like the genuine it seems probable that he
had reason to fear detection.
Were the evidence of piracy less conclusive than it is, one
would be tempted to allow some weight to what appears at first
sight to be a piece of contrary evidence, namely an advertisement
appended to the 1729 Macbeth. In the 1723
Hamlet
also, the original printer, following a common custom, filled what
would otherwise have been a blank and wasted page at the end of the
play by there placing an advertisement of 'Books printed for M.
Poulson.' This our pirate, carrying out with complete fidelity the
facsimile nature of his reprint, reproduces in its proper place
(I6v), thus very honestly advertising the wares of his rival.
In
the Macbeth, Darby had a blank leaf at the end (G6), which
he utilized by printing on the recto a list of 'Books printed for
J. Tonson in the Strand' and on the verso one of 'Books sold by J.
Darby in Bartholomew-Close, A. Bettes-worth in Pater-noster-Row,
and F. Clay without Temple-bar, in trust for Richard, James, and
Bethel
Wellington.' Again, the pirate follows suit, reproducing the
advertisements with close attention to details of typography,
spelling, and punctuation. But there is a difference, and it is
this that creates the difficulty. When we find, upon collating the
Darby-Wellington list, that the reprint omits two titles, we need
not attach much importance to the omission; it could, despite this
printer's usual care, be a mere accident. But when, proceeding down
the list, we find in the spurious reprint two titles not included
in the genuine original, this is harder to explain. What we have
seen of the pirate's work has not led us to expect from him any
degree of carelessness that could have produced such a result. The
only
explanation which I have been able to evolve eliminates any
carelessness on the pirate's part without, I hope, too great a
strain upon our credulity. The two extra titles which appear in the
reprint, '
Collier's Dictionary abridg'd, 2 Vol.' and
'
Hartman's Family Physician,' were for many years among
the
Wellington stock. They appear, for example, together with most of
the other titles in the
Macbeth list, in a list of books
printed for the three Wellingtons and sold by Darby, Bettes-worth,
Clay, and R. Caldwell which is appended to a 1728 edition of Lee's
Mithridates and in another Wellington-Bettes-worth-Clay list
appended to a 1734 edition of
Mithridates. Is it not
reasonable to assume, then, that Darby omitted the Collier and
Hartman titles from the
Macbeth list by mistake, that he
remedied this by a belated press correction, that copies were sold
in both states, that the pirate had before him a copy with the list
in the second state, and that the two copies known to me both belong, by
an unhappy chance, to the first?
Three questions about these elaborately executed piracies remain
to be considered: Who was the pirate? When did he produce his
spurious reprints? How did he intend to dispose of them? While I
can supply no confident answer to any of these questions, I can at
least throw some light on all of them and suggest some plausible
answers.
William Feales, who is first heard of in 1729, very soon
established himself as a large dealer in plays. His name appears in
the imprint of many plays between 1731 and 1736, never, so far as
I have observed, as sole publisher, always in conjunction with such
well-established capitalists as Bernard Lintott, the Wellingtons,
or the Tonsons, particularly the last. From the first he appears to
have been primarily a wholesale dealer in plays, especially
remainders. Two receipts preserved in the British Museum[5] show him buying in October 1731 from
Benjamin Motte 1950 copies of Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice
for
£13.11.0, and in July 1733 from Lintott 606 copies of Cibber's
Love's Last Shift, the price not stated. Sir Courtly
Nice was a
fairly new play, published at some time in 1731, but the price of
1 2/3 pence per copy suggests a remainder stock. Though Feales sold
plays separately, he also collected them into bound sets for which
he supplied general title-pages. The first of these he called
The English Theatre. This began as an eight-volume set,
dated 1731, but additional 'Parts' of six or eight volumes extended
the set by 1733 to twenty-six volumes containing 104 plays, which
he advertised at £4.7.6 bound (which comes to 10d. per play). I
do not know of any complete set of these; the Folger Library has a
nearly complete set the only missing volume of which is supplied in
another broken set.
The plays, which have their own titles, are chiefly old
remainders, their dates going back as far as 1719 and their
imprints representing many publishers. As a stock of old remainders
became exhausted, Feales obtained other reprints to fill their
places; in all probability he undertook for this purpose the
publication of new reprints in conjunction with those publishers
who controlled the copyrights. Thus in a volume with a general
title-page dated 1731 we may find plays dated 1733. And in the two
Folger sets, though they are alike in general titles and contents,
a given play may be of two different editions, one 1728, the other
1733. With Feales's later ventures, The British Theatre, in
ten volumes, and 'The Beautiful Editions of the Plays with Red
Titles and Handsome Frontispieces'—the latter consisting of the
old plays issued separately with new (cancel) titles—I am not now
concerned.
Feales's method of play publishing bears upon our three pirated
plays. For all three of them appear in the first volume of The
English Theatre, 1731—the three counterfeit reprints, in the
order indicated by their imprint dates, complete with titles and
advertisements—together with a 1729 edition of Tate's King
Lear. The two Folger copies of this volume are identical in
every important respect.
Now I cannot say how Feales acquired the three reprints. He was
not himself a printer, and when he required the services of a
printer he usually employed Darby himself, who is in this
case, as always so far as I know, above suspicion. Yet it is not
impossible—or even unlikely—that Feales was the culprit.
Nothing is known about him before 1731, except for the single
imprint of 1729 mentioned before. He was not in any case a
well-established member of the trade and may well, before he became
respectable as the associate of the most substantial stationers of
London, have been a shady character not above a barefaced piracy.
He may have employed some equally shady printer to do the job for
him and, experiencing difficulty in getting the pirated plays off
his hands, may have kept them until the assembling of
The
English Theatre occurred to him. Or he may have acquired a
large stock of miscellaneous plays with such a collection in view
and, unable to obtain editions of the most popular plays of
Shakespeare which he desired for his first volume, may have had
them secretly printed for the purpose. On the other hand, it must
be regarded as equally possible that
Feales, a wholesale dealer in all sorts of plays, bought these
three piracies from their real perpetrator, either quite innocently
or with some degree of guilt. Perhaps, even, the real pirate was
caught, and his stock confiscated, as the Act of 1709 provided, and
then acquired by Feales. There seems little to choose between these
alternative suggestions.
Whichever origin we choose, it seems to me very probable that
the three plays were produced not earlier than 1729, and I see no
good reason for assigning a date earlier than 1731. The dates on
the title-pages of the reprints may of course be ignored. And the
similarity of technique in all three, together with the uniformity
in execution of the woodblock ornaments, supplies some ground for
assuming that the three piracies were carried out by one printer
and at one time.
When all is said, it must be admitted that we have here but few
facts. All that can be said with complete confidence is that the
three reprints are piracies, and that William Feales is the only
man whom we can connect with them in any way.
5124 mm.] | [rule] | LONDON, | Printed for J. Tonson; and also for J. Darby, | A. Bettesworth, and F. Clay, in Trust | for Richard, James, and Bethel Wel-|lington. M.DCC.XXIX. 12mo. A-G6.
