University of Virginia Library

I.

THE EARLIEST PUBLICATION OF THE POPULAR heroic dramatist, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, is his prose romance Parthenissa. Despite its literary barrenness, almost every historian of seventeenth-century English literature has felt obliged to mention the work because it stands as the only serious lengthy imitation in English of the French heroico-historical romances written by Gomberville, La Calprenède, and Scudéry. Some of the bibliographical problems which this English romance presents have, on the other hand, caught the attention of a few scholars, but no one has made a really intensive study of the various editions and issues of the romance as a problem in itself.

The order of publication of certain basic editions of Parthenissa is above dispute, and since it is generally agreed upon by William Carew Hazlitt,[1] Arundell Esdaile,[2] and Donald G.

Wing,[3] the three bibliographers of the romance, its presentation at this point will serve to assist the reader in following later explanations. At the end of this paper I shall present a more complete list incorporating several additional items cited in the course of the discussion.

• (1) Parthenissa (Part I, Books 1-6).[4] Printed for Richard Lownes, London, 1654. Collation: 4°, A-2L4 2M2. A1: title-page, v. blank.
• (2) Parthenissa In Four Parts. Printed for Henry Herringman, London, 1655. The First Part Collation: 4°, A4(±A1; A3+A2+B2) B-3G4 [3H]1. A1: title-page, v. blank. The Second Part Collation: 4°, i1 A-3M4 3N1. i1: title-page, v. blank. The Third Part Collation: 4°, i1 *2 A-3G4 3H2. i1: title-page, v. blank. The Fourth Part Collation: 4°, i1 A-3E4. i1: title-page, v. blank.
• (3) Parthenissa The Fifth Part. Printed by T. R. and E. M. for Henry Herringman, London, 1656. Collation: 4°, [A]1 B-2Q4 2R1. [A]1: title-page, v. blank.

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• (4) Parthenissa The Sixth Part. Printed for Henry Herringman, London, 1669. Collation: 4°, A-2Q4. A1: title-page, v. blank.
• (5) Parthenissa The Six Volumes Compleat. Printed by T. N. for Henry Herringman, London, 1676. Collation: 2°, A2 B-3E4 3F2, 3Q-5K4 (5K4 blank(?), lacking in observed copies). A1: title-page, v. blank.

The edition of Parthenissa which Esdaile prefixed to the above list and which he and all literary historians after him have considered to be the first,[5] he records thus:

To this description Esdaile appended the note: "There is a transcript of the Waterford Title-pages by H. Bradshaw in U[niversity] L[ibrary] C[ambridge]." Hence Esdaile, who otherwise gave a location for each book he listed, had not seen a copy of the romance with Waterford imprints, but in making his entry, he believed at the time, as he has written me, that a copy with these title-pages must have existed somewhere.[7]

The "transcript" to which he referred is set down in Bradshaw's handwriting on four separate leaves inserted after each of the four title-pages of copies of the four parts of Herringman's Parthenissa (London, 1655), which Bradshaw once owned and later gave to University Library Cambridge along with his extensive collection of Irish books.[8]

In these notes Bradshaw makes no mention of the owner or the library location of the Waterford set, the titles of which he is presumably transcribing in his library manuscript insertions. Yet such facts as these he might perhaps be expected to include in a detailed description of a rare example of provincial Irish printing not in his private collection or in that of University Library Cambridge. In fact, Bradshaw never says that he is making notes from a particular set of volumes. On the verso of each of the four inserted leaves he simply summarizes the contents, including story-headings and pagination, of each of the four volumes, which except for the title-pages are identical with those in the Herringman, London, 1655 set. On the recto of each leaf, however, he seems to be describing a series of title-pages, all recorded with the same careful regard for detail as this first one:

To assume, as Esdaile did, that Bradshaw's notes constitute transcripts of actual printed title-pages, a fact presumably indicated by the lineation and the sketches of ornaments in the manuscript insertions, obliges the bibliographer to face at least one inconsistency in the practice of either Boyle or de Pienne. Boyle notes in his preface, inserted in the first gathering of Parthenissa, The First Part, Herringman, 1655, and written after 'the finishing of the Fourth Tome,' or Herringman's 'The Fourth Part,' that while he had originally planned to write Parthenissa in six tomes he has so far completed only four and that if he undertakes the last two it will be in penance for having done the first four. In fact, it was not until 1669, some fifteen years later, that Boyle completed the sixth 'tome' and

had it printed and published through Herringman in London. Yet Bradshaw's notes carry 'In six Tomes' in the description of all four Waterford title-pages presumably printed in 1654-55.

A much more plausible alternative interpretation of the Bradshaw notes, which can be supported by abundant evidence and which accounts for the apparent inconsistency just presented, is that Bradshaw shrewdly recognizing the sheets of the romance Parthenissa in quarto with Herringman, London, 1655, prefixed title-pages to be actually the presswork of an Irish provincial printer, undertook to construct a set of hypothetical title-pages which would describe as accurately as he could determine them the facts of the printing of the romance. This explanation of the objectives of Bradshaw's investigation certainly squares with the "natural-history" method which he first applied with great success to his historical classification of volumes lacking dates and printers' names in University Library Cambridge.[9]

Strong evidence supporting the "construction" explanation exists in the form of personal testimonies from G. W. Prothero, Bradshaw's biographer; Francis Jenkinson, his bibliographical protégé and successor as librarian of U.L.C.; and Sir Norman Moore, one of his friends. Prothero writes:

Jenkinson, after examining Esdaile's newly published List (1912), wrote the following in a private letter to the compiler: Sir Shane Leslie, in a comparatively recent essay on Bradshaw, substantiates the opinions of Prothero and Jenkinson with information given him by one of Bradshaw's friends.

Clearly these accounts are at odds on how Bradshaw proved his case, but all agree on the central point that he was attempting to establish the actual printer, place of publication, and date of Parthenissa from available bibliographical information, not that he was recording information derived from the titles of any copies which he had seen.

There now remains, in substantiation of the personal testimony, the necessity for demonstrating how Bradshaw probably went about constructing his hypothetical title-pages. He had available to him in his own collection the entire six parts of the romance in quarto issued by Herringman, London, 1655-69, the Herringman 1676 folio, and the two issues of Cook's Monarchy No Creature of God's Making, printed and sold in Waterford by de Pienne (1651) and reissued in London by Brewster

in 1652.[14] His biographer states that the Parthenissa problem was one of the last on which he had been working before his death in 1886; therefore in all probability the new light on the Parthenissa problem which gave impetus to his research at that late date was the entry "Parthenissa 4° 1654" in the second volume of the British Museum Catalogue published in 1884. The only scrap of evidence of Bradshaw's work on the romance, other than the title-page notes, is the description of that B. M. copy of the R. Lownes 1654 London edition—the one preceding Herringman's—preserved in his notebooks.[15] It is improbable that he was aided by manuscript copies of either the Stationers' Register (1913-14) or The Letters of Dorothy Osborne (1888), both published after his death.

Of the facts included in the Bradshaw title-page notes for the first tome[16] quoted earlier, the title of the romance, the dedication, and the part and book numbers could have been readily derived from the Herringman 1655 title-pages. 'Parthenissa A Romance' follows the Herringman title-page verbatim. In place of Herringman's 'In Four Parts', Bradshaw has substituted 'In six Tomes', a phrase suggested by the words 'The Last Part | The Sixth Tome' on the title-page of the Herringman 1669 quarto edition of The Sixth Part. The words 'Composed by the Right Honble | The Lord Broghill' follow the Lownes title-page phrasing exactly, even to capitalization, punctuation, lineation, and abbreviation except that Lownes prints 'Honoble' and Bradshaw writes 'Honble'. Having previously referred to the six major divisions of the romance as 'tomes,' Bradshaw is only consistent in substituting 'The First Tome' in place of Herringman's 'The First Part,' while the

phrase 'containing the first four Books of The First Part,' which appears on neither the Lownes nor the Herringman title-pages, is certainly Bradshaw's attempt to define precisely the contents of each 'tome' in the face of the confusing dual system of numbering the divisions of the romance found in the Herringman publication. The words 'Dedicated to the Lady Northumberland' appear on both the Lownes and Herringman title-pages. The imprint which Bradshaw composed follows, except for two deletions,[17] the phrasing employed by de Pienne in his imprint of Cook's Monarchy No Creature of God's Making.

Bradshaw's identification of de Pienne as the printer and Waterford as the place of printing resulted almost certainly from his intimate knowledge of the history and press work of early Irish printers, which enabled him to identify from memory the characteristics of de Pienne's type, border designs, and craftsmanship in the Herringman quartos. If Bradshaw had had any doubts about the accuracy of his identification, even a casual comparison of his copy of the Herringman Parthenissa quartos with his copies of Cook's Monarchy printed by de Pienne in 1651 would have revealed to him that the fonts, border designs, and decorative capitals were identical. Further, de Pienne's faulty workmanship in permitting the 'beards' of the letters to print[18] on the top and bottom lines of most of the pages of Parthenissa is also evident on almost every page of Cook's book. De Pienne's printing career centered on the towns of Cork and Waterford; the two extant books printed with his name on the title-page in the 1650's bear Waterford imprints.[19]

Bradshaw's settling on the dates 1654-55 for the printing of the romance is incorrect, as I shall demonstrate later in this paper. Sir Shane Leslie's statement that Bradshaw "proved from

the types that it [Part One] was printed . . . in the year 1654' is obviously inaccurate since de Pienne used the same types in 1651. Equally questionable is Prothero's statement that 'Bradshaw ingeniously proved [a part of Parthenissa] to have been printed in 1654 at Waterford where the author was at that time staying.' An author's residence in a particular town during a certain year is hardly proof for establishing the printing date of a book, especially when the Boyle family seat, Lismore Castle, was located only a short distance from Waterford. The fact is that by June, 1654, Boyle had left Ireland for London.[20] If Bradshaw had proved to his satisfaction that Boyle was residing in Waterford during the first half of that year, he did so on the basis of evidence unknown to Boyle's careful modern biographer, Professor W. S. Clark, II, who had access to all extant family papers. In all probability Bradshaw settled on the dates 1654-55 by reasoning that de Pienne working alone or at most with one assistant must have set up and printed off approximately half of the text of the lengthy romance sometime in 1654 if he was able to have completed and shipped to London the sheets of all four volumes in time for Herringman to publish them with his own titles in 1655. Or he might have conjectured, or perhaps even determined by collation, that the Lownes 1654 Parthenissa, Part I, Books 1-6, was set from the de Pienne text and hence that the bulk of the first two tomes must have been printed off by 1654.

The only detail of Bradshaw's title-page notes now unaccounted for is his ornament sketches. All four ornaments are drawn in the meagerest detail and do not appear to be careful efforts to copy particular title-page ornaments. They most nearly resemble large asterisks; the two on the title-pages of the tomes which Bradshaw believed were printed in 1654 are identical and are very slightly differentiated from the two identical ones on the title-pages of the tomes dated 1655. De

Pienne did not use an ornament on the title-page of either his Cork Eikon Basilike or his Waterford Monarchy, nor did Herringman's printer use an ornament on his London 1655 title-pages. Lownes, however, did use one on his 1654 title-page, and since it has been pointed out that Bradshaw depended on the Lownes title-page for the lines of his hypothetically constructed title-pages stating the authorship, even to the point of reproducing capitalization, lineation, punctuation, and abbreviation, one can only suppose that in drawing up his notes in title-page form he satisfied a decorative whim[21] by inserting an ornament as Lownes had done, making the ornaments for the title-pages of Tomes One and Two, dated 1654, identical and those for the title-pages of Tomes Three and Four, dated 1655, likewise identical.

The evidence presented so far, therefore, establishes two points: (1) Mr. Esdaile was mistaken in interpreting Bradshaw's title-page reconstructions as recordings of the titles of an actual edition printed in 1654-55, and (2) Bradshaw's significant contribution to Parthenissa bibliography was his identifying de Pienne as the printer of the quarto sheets offered for sale in London by Herringman in 1655.