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Notes
Bibliographical Collections and Notes on Early English Literature, 1474-1700, 3rd ser., III (1887), 22-23. Hazlitt fails to record the R. Lownes 1654 quarto edition, of which apparently he was unaware.
A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed Before 1740 (London, 1912), p. 167. Dr. Thomas P. Haviland, 'The Roman de Longue Haleine on English Soil' (Philadelphia, 1931), p. 182, gives a Parthenissa bibliography based on Mr. Esdaile's. Dr. Haviland's statement, however, that item '12635. pp. 26' in the British Museum is an 'edition' which 'Esdaile has apparently overlooked' is inaccurate. That set is Parts I-V of the Herringman 1655-56 publication in quarto which Mr. Esdaile records with a Bodleian location. Mr. Esdaile's not citing a B. M. location may be explained on the grounds that the set was acquired after publication of his List.
Since Boyle has greatly confused literary historians and bibliographers by employing simultaneously two systems for numbering the multiple divisions of his romance, it is necessary at the outset to explain his dual practice. According to one system outlined by Boyle in his preface, the romance was thought of as falling into six general divisions or "tomes," each consisting of four subdivisions called "books." Herringman, Boyle's London bookseller, followed the author's plan and published the romance in six quarto sections of four "books" each, but used the word "part" instead of "tome" on the title-page of each of the six sections. Hence Herringman's "The First Part" is the equivalent of Boyle's first tome, etc. The great confusion arises in that while Boyle in his preface was thinking of the romance as falling generally into six divisions or tomes, he had in the internal headings actually divided the romance into three "parts," each containing eight rather than four "books," a numbering system followed by the compositor and carried along page-by-page with the running titles. Therefore each Boyle "tome" consists of one-half of each Boyle "part," and likewise each Herringman "part" consists of one-half of each Boyle "part." Herringman's title-page, "The First Part," is affixed to the text of Boyle's Part I, Books 1-4; H's "The Second Part" to B's Part I, Books 5-8; H's "The Third Part" to B's Part II, Books 1-4; H's "The Fourth Part to B's Part II, Books 5-8; H's "The Fifth Part" to B's Part III, Books 1-4; H's "The Sixth Part" to B's Part III, Books 5-8.
Mr. Wing, the latest bibliographer, does not list a 1654-55 edition because, as he has written me, he was unable to find a copy of such an edition in any of the libraries he visited in the United States or the British Isles. This failure to discover an example does not prove, of course, that a copy dated 1654-55 never existed.
Mr. Esdaile had not yet located a copy when I last communicated with him in 1939. My inquiries printed in The New York Times, (July 9, 1939) VI, 19, 3; in Notes and Queries, vol. 177, no. 6 (August 5, 1939), p. 98; and in The Colophon, vol. 1, no. 3 (September, 1939), p. 84, produced no information.
See Cambridge University Library: Bradshaw Irish Collection (London, 1916), II, 900. Note appended to Entry No. 5315: "Tomes 1-4 were printed in Waterford, by Peter de Pienne, 1654-55, and the separate titles of these are set out on inserted leaves written by Mr. Bradshaw."
Jenkinson's memory failed here. Parts Five and Six were set up by London printers hired by Herringman.
"Henry Bradshaw, Prince of Bibliographers," in To Doctor R. Essays here collected and published in honor of the seventieth birthday of Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach, July 22, 1946 (Philadelphia, 1946), p. 134. It is not likely that Bradshaw thought of himself as the discoverer of the author of Parthenissa, for in his private collection he had two parts of the romance bearing the author's name and found a third in 1884 listed under Boyle's name in the British Museum Catalogue, vol. II.
I am indebted for this information and for a transcript of Bradshaw's Parthenissa title-page notes to Mr. J. C. T. Oates, Assistant-under-Librarian at University Library Cambridge.
The Bradshaw notes for the title-pages of the other three tomes parallel so closely that for the first tome, except in necessary alterations of part and book numbers, dedica-cation, and dates, that an analysis of Bradshaw's method in drawing up the first title-page will suffice for the others.
The full imprint on the title-page of Cook's Monarchy reads, 'Printed at Waterford in Ireland by Peter de Pienne in the yeare of our Lord God, 1651.'
E. R. McC Dix 'Irish Provincial Printing Prior to 1701,' The Library, 2nd Series, II (1901), 341-38.
See Bradshaw's notes entitled "A Century of Notes on the Day-Book of John Dorne," a day-book edited by F. Madan, in Collected Papers of Henry Bradshaw, pp. 421-50. For his notes Bradshaw designed an elaborate title-page, carefully designating lineation and letter sizes and surrounding the whole with a double border in which he printed appropriate maxims.
In de Pienne's headlines they are the frequent disappearance of the periods after 'Part' and 'Book' numbers.
I recorded the existence of this volume in the University of Virginia Abstracts of Dissertations (Charlottesville, Va., 1940), p. 16, and later supplied Mr. Wing with imprint information for his Short-Title Catalogue.
Professor R. H. Griffith of the University of Texas English faculty has kindly reexamined the volume and confirmed the results of my own investigation.
The existence of this set, bearing the 1705 bookplates of the Duke of Beaufort, was first brought to my attention by Mr. Esdaile, who had discovered it among the listings of an English book dealer's catalogue. I succeeded in locating it several years later among the holdings of the Huntington Library and recorded its existence in the printed abstract of my dissertation. Mr. Wing has included the three unique Moseley imprints of the set in Volume II of his Short-Title Catalogue . . . 1641-1700, but cites them erroneously as parts of "another edition."
These imprints are not included in the list of works published by Moseley which was compiled by John Curtis Reed, "Humphrey Moseley, Publisher," Oxford Bibliographical Society Proceedings, II, 2 (1928), 104-116.
Obvious differences in the two settings of type are the broken tail on the second swash 'R' in Northumberland on the title-pages of the second and fourth parts, and the clipped base on the right leg of the first 'A' in the phrase 'A ROMANCE' on the title-pages of the first and third parts.
If the method for printing the title-pages of the third and fourth parts simultaneously, as outlined above, is accurately reconstructed, there once must have existed or still do exist unrecorded two title-pages of 'The Fourth Part' with variant imprints: one, a hybrid imprint like that on the Yale University Library Part Three title-page; the second, a correct Moseley imprint like that in the Huntington set. It is unlikely that Moseley offered for sale only three of the four parts of Parthenissa while Herringman at the same time was offering for sale all four parts.
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