Shakespearian Dated Watermarks
Allan H. Stevenson
ON a perfect morning in July, when I might have been bowling
on the greens at Arroyo Seco, I made a minor Shakespearian
discovery. In the Huntington Library reading room I was
reëxamining the Jaggard-Pavier quartos of 1619. As
all the world knows, Sir Walter Greg brilliantly proved,
in 1908, that these quartos, variously dated 1600, 1608,
and 1619, had all been printed in the latter year; and the
most persuasive part of his evidence lay in the complex
mixture of watermarks distributed through them.[1] Yet history records that
conservative-minded gentlemen like Sir Sidney Lee and
Alfred H. Huth were not readily persuaded.[2]
On this day forty-two years after,[3] I was searching
the Huntington set of 1619 quartos for evidence of twin
watermarks, and finding what I sought: most of the marks
pictured by Greg were turning out to be pairs themselves
or members of pairs.[4] I had also found several
new marks to add to his list of twenty-seven. Thus, while
leafing through the Church copy of Sir
John Oldcastle (dated "1600"), I was not much
surprised to note a new pot in sheet F. It was not a
prepossessing fellow, for it looked more like a pot of
1600 than of 1619, having a simple form, apparently little
superstructure, and a malformed base. But in a narrow band
across the throat was an inscription. I could make out
something like a 6, a sort of lopsided u, and what might
be a tall, thinnish X. Puzzled, I moved on, hoping for
another view of this new thing. But I had none.
Half an hour later—such is the timing of
coincidence—I stopped similarly in my sidelong
perusal of the Church copy of Henry
V (dated "1608")—again at sheet F. Here
was another pot not in Greg's gallery. This
one looked more like a Norman pot of
about 1620. It had a candle-like top above a number of
lobes, a fleur-de-lis on its chest, the initials PD on its
bowl, and below them certainly—a date. The figures 1
and 6 were clear enough. Then came a space where only a 1
could go, and of which only a stub remained. And beyond
that a figure that might be a 7 or 9, the top being
slightly obscured by type. The base was also obscured, but
that hardly mattered. The inscription on the bowl
apparently had once read PD/1617 or 1619. This pot
appeared in no other sheet of
Henry
V. Only at F1.4, with the date on F4.
Breathless, I reopened the Oldcastle,
at sheet F. The inscription on the pot throat might also
be a date. Indeed, it looked much like one. 1608. The 1
was a heavy mark just inside the left line of the neck.
The 6 was a 6, with a curved top. The u-like form was the
lower part of an o. The X was an 8 with the ends squared
by the lines of the band. As the paper was thickish and
the imprint of the wire-design none too sharp, I regarded
it doubtfully; yet there seemed to be no other way to read
what was on the band. It was no attempt at ornament; and
from the reverse side it made no sense. The top of this
pot (with the date) was in F4, and the base and part of
the bowl in F1. And on the bowl parts of two letters were
visible, deep in the quarto crack. They might be MO or
MJ—or BM or LM reversed.[5] But they merely
added to the mystery of this curious pot.
Briquet when summoned brought forward several analogies of
dated pots, but none with a dated band high on the throat.[6] Churchill, on the other hand,
offered in his first pot one remarkably similar to the PD
pot.[7] Here were the same candle-like shoot
above clustered lobes, a similar fleur-de-lis throat, a
similar PD on the bowl, and below it 16, apparently a year
date with both final digits
missing. Whether this is the same
pot with the 7 or 9 lost, or its twin, or a mark from a
related set of moulds I do not know: such are the vagaries
of tracings; and Churchill does not show the position of
the chains. His note merely indicates that he found it in
a sheet (of manuscript?) which he dates 1618.[8] This fact may be one reason for
preferring the reading 1617 on the Henry
V pot, though at first I preferred 1619. The
sketches I made show a figure with an open top and a
curved back. Let us call it a 7.
If it seems strange to the reader that one or two figures
should drop out of a watermark, he should note that they
must have been formed of tiny
pieces of
wire and sewed at either end to the band wires across the
belly of the pot. The constant wear on moulds in use and
the brushing at the end of the day tended to distort the
wireforms and even to break off bits of wire. In this
instance it looks very much as if the 1 had come unsewn at
the top and subsequently broken off near the base; and the
final digit may have been distorted into ambiguity. Just
two weeks later, in examining the plates in Raleigh's
History of the World (Jaggard,
1621), crown folio, I noted a pair of shields, quarterly a
fess R
GD and three lions (style of
Heawood 576), with the year
1610 in
the base point of one shield and
16:0 in its twin. In this instance too
the second figure 1 has dropped
out, leaving sewing-marks to show where it had
been.
[9] No longer could I doubt
that the gods provide coincidences by way of empiric
proof.
Both dated Shakespeare pots are situated mainly between
chains. The 1608 pot fits within a chain-space of 23-24
mm. Its style is that of Heawood 3548-54. Its crest has
five points with a trefoil on the center one and single or
double circlets on the others. The neckband is 6 mm. high
and the date 9 mm. wide. There is not enough of the bowl
to measure; but the misshapen
base
measures 6[18]0 reading up. The handle is in normal
position, at the left.
The 1617 pot is centered at top 9.5:9.5 between 19 mm. chains.
The leafed shoot above (if that's what it is) is unlike
that in Greg 17 or Heawood 3545, in that it has sprouts
above and leaves farther down. The five lobes that show
resemble those in Greg 6 or Heawood 3565. The handle is to
the right, outside the chain. The bowl with the precious
date measures 1[18:1] up. The base is hard to make out.
The accompanying illustrations of these two pots are mere
rough sketches.[10]
Friends at the Huntington who viewed these pots generally
conceded the 1617 date: there could be no doubt of it,
except for the ambiguity of the 7 or 9. When shown the
1608 pot Dr. James McManaway shook his head slightly in
puzzlement; while others said it looked more like a date
than anything else. Obviously a further example of this
tantalizing pot had to be found, if possible. And the PD
pot was not yet complete, for its neck was lost in the
quarto fold.
None of the set of nine Pavier quartos at the Huntington
yielded further instances of these pots; and the Library
had disposed of its so-called duplicate of Henry V. So I turned to the
Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles. Its copies of Oldcastle and Henry V had only the pots and shields
illustrated by Greg. A month later in Austin I examined
the Oldcastle of 1619 in the Wren
Collection: it had no dated pots. In September in New York
I saw the Lenox, Morgan, and Rosenbach copies of Oldcastle and the Morgan copy of
Henry V; and later in
Chicago the Newberry Henry V; but
still I found no pots with dates.[11] Recently Dr.
Giles Dawson has kindly checked the Folger Shakespeare
Library copies—an undertaking, for the Folger has
seven copies of each! Yet his patience has produced no
pots of 1608 or 1617, no jugs that resemble my
sketches.
Thus the conviction grows that these are "intrusive"
watermarks. The 1608 mark appears just once in seventeen
copies examined by Greg, Dawson, and myself; and the
PD/1617 mark once in fifteen. According to the
Pollard-Greg theory the 1619 quartos were printed on a
job-lot of miscellaneous papers supplied by a London paper
merchant.[12] I have suggested that
such mixtures may have resulted normally from the
manufacture of paper by a cluster of papermills in
Normandy (or elsewhere) and its periodic collection by a
paper factor.[13] Yet neither hypothesis,
nor both taken together (which may be the better view),
quite explains these rare dated
pots.
They imply the inclusion of an odd quire or so in the
paper laid out for an edition-sheet. Either the paper
merchant has thrown in the remnant of a ream, or Jaggard
has swept out his stockroom. In laying out paper for the
press, the outside or "cording" quires were commonly put
aside and replaced by good inside quires from other
reams—or by quires culled from cording quires.
[14] Further, extra quires were needed
for filling out short quires, for proofs, and for
replacement of "naughty" sheets. And sometimes for copies
allowed in part-payment of the printer's work.
Occasionally, no doubt, the warehouse keeper recovered a
quire or two from some odd corner or pile of
waste—and thus filled out the count for the
press.
If the 1608 date can be accepted, it looks as if we have an
instance of such an odd quire turning up in Jaggard's
stockroom (or his paper merchant's) ten years after it was
sold out of France. This interval is in accord with
delayed uses noted by Briquet.[15] If the other
date is 1617, there has been a proper interval after
manufacture; and it may be that Jaggard had used some
reams of this paper in recent books. If the date is 1619,
the year of issue, the small amount used is less likely to
have come from a broken ream; but it might indicate a
mixture of paper from more than one vat in the
papermill—though then we should find other PD marks
among the Jaggard-Pavier quartos. A 1619 date would have
interesting implications for the time of printing.[16] A slow search among pot folios and
quartos of 1608-10 and 1617-20, particularly among
Jaggard's books, may ultimately answer the questions posed
by these dated Shakesperian watermarks.
The papermaker PD may be represented by some of the Pot PD
watermarks in Briquet's great work and Edward Heawood's
recently published collection of Watermarks,[17] but his identity
is unknown. He might belong to the Debon or the Durand
family of papermakers, or some other.
The significance of this small Shakespearian discovery is not
what it
would have been forty or so
years ago. At that time the ways of the New Bibliography
proved difficult for men of the old school; and the
arguments of A. W. Pollard and W. W. Greg from printers'
and papermakers' ornaments, though they look good now,
provoked an amiable controversy of two years'
duration—which was smothered in 1910 by William J.
Neidig's evidence from photographic measurement of title
pages.
[18] If the New Bibliography
had discovered in the Capell or Huth copies (say) what I
have now happened on in the Church copies of
Oldcastle and
Henry V, it would have been saved some of the
joys of creative bibliography, though it might have
convinced with one thwack schoolmasters in the upper
forms. For anyone at all can see that a
Sir John Oldcastle dated 1600 on its title
page but apparently containing a 1608 watermark may not
have been printed in 1600; and that a
Henry V dated 1608 but certainly watermarked
1617 (or 1619) was definitely not published before the
latter year. Indeed, so elementary a demonstration may be
useful even today, for some boys have not yet been
promoted to the upper forms.
On the other hand, inasmuch as a paper war was waged and in
effect won forty years ago, I, on a marvelous July day in
1950, might well have gone bowling on the smooth Arroyo
Seco greens. The shade of Shakespeare might have been
better pleased, for bowls was his favorite game.[19]
Notes
