University of Virginia Library

The Mary Poulson of the imprints was the widow of Richard Wellington (d. 1715), who had owned some half dozen Shakespeare copyrights. A. Bettesworth and F. Clay appear to have been trustees of the Wellington estate on behalf of his three minor sons, Richard, James, and Bethel. On the Wellingtons' part in the Shakespeare copyrights see my "The Copyright of Shakespeare's Works", Studies in Honor of A. H. R. Fairchild (University of Missouri Studies, 1946), pp. 28-9.

H. L. Ford, Shakespeare 1700-1740 (Oxford, 1935), Nos. 47, 167, and 217.

No satisfactory explanation has ever been suggested to account for this 18th-century practice of disguising the fact that a reprint, when it follows close on the heels of the first edition, was a reprint. Why not openly denominate the reprint "Second Edition" and thus advertise the popularity of the work?

In contrast to this the type-page height of the general title to the second of the 1765 Johnson editions, printed in the same shop as the first and intended to imitate it closely, is more than 9 mm. taller.

Addit. MS. 28275, ff. 271, 287.