University of Virginia Library

William Barley, Elizabethan Printer and Bookseller
by
John L. Lievsay

William Barley, the subject of this brief sketch, was a minor Elizabethan whose shortcomings remained far enough on the hither side of the law, and whose virtues lacked enough of being spectacular, to prevent the recording of either in the Dictionary of National Biography. Yet in many respects he was a worthy, even remarkable,[1] representative of his age. And, since his years of London activity overlap those of numerous lesser literary figures and coincide almost exactly with those of William Shakespeare, the curious student of our literary history finds in the record of his career and interests much to repay investigation.

We have his own word that he was born about 1565;[2] but where, deponent sayeth not. Possibly his family was originally of Sussex. Some support for this conjecture may be seen in his being twice before the Court of High Commission for illegal sale of printed matter in the Sussex town of Cowdry,[3] and again in his dedicating two of his publications to residents of that county.[4] He first appears in the London records as a member of the Drapers' Company, his term of apprenticeship in that company ending in 1587.[5] Apparently there is no record of his translation from the Drapers' to the Stationers' Company, which must have taken place shortly thereafter. Such translations were not uncommon; but in Barley's case the change must have involved some irregularity. It is difficult, otherwise, to account for the fact that a man who had followed the stationer's trade for sixteen years should be made free of the Company only so late as 1606.[6]

Whatever may be the facts behind his obscure and possibly clandestine entry into the ranks of the Stationers, it is a matter of record that between 1591 and 1614 Barley's name is associated—as printer, publisher, agent, or patentee—with approximately one hundred publications. The number is not great enough, of course, to place him among the most noteworthy members of his profession; but it is sufficiently impressive to warn the historian of the period that Barley is not entirely negligible. What is here proposed, therefore, is a cursory examination and evaluation of his output.

So far as his own printing and publishing are concerned, Barley's career falls

into two clearly marked active periods separated by a long and unexplained period of virtual silence. The first and more vigorous period extends from 1591 to 1599; the second begins in 1606 and continues to 1614. In the "dead" period between 1599 and 1606 only three imprints bearing Barley's name have been discovered.[7] Throughout these more than two decades Barley's interests, as reflected in the titles issued, remained pretty much the same: music, popular patriotic and sensational topical matters, works of utilitarian or "improving" nature, mild religious guidance, and, at the fringe, a few works which might almost step into the category of belles-lettres. A tradesman himself, it is clear that he was intent upon entertaining, instructing, and improving the members of his own class.

By way of illustrating this somewhat narrow range of interest let us examine for a moment Barley's offerings for a single year, 1595. This, the peak year of his earlier period, saw the issuing of Adriano Banchieri's The noblenesse of the Asse, a curious piece of lore appealing to the popular love of paradox; Nicholas Breton's Marie Magdalens Loue, a bit of religious, sermonizing prose to which is added A Solemne Passion of the Soules Loue, a highly alliterative poem in the common six-line ballad form; and B. H.'s The Glasse of Mans folly, and meanes to amendment of life, a series of preacherly attacks, in a kind of debased Euphuism, upon the vices of drunkenness, whoring, and excess of dress. In this last book the unsigned address "To the Christian Reader," for which Barley may himself be responsible, gives an interesting and characteristically Barleian apology for the publishing of the work:

Other publications of 1595 were the Strange and wonderfull things happened to Richard Hasleton in his ten yeares Trauailes in many forraine Countries; John Hawkins' A Salade for the Simple . . . out of Prouerbs; and Thomas Johnson's Cornucopiœ, Or diuers secrets: Wherein is contained the rare secrets in Man,

Beast, Foules, Fishes, Trees, Plantes, Stones and such like, most pleasant and profitable, and not before committed to bee printed in English. Newlie drawen out of diuers Latine Authors into English by Thomas Iohnson. Notwithstanding the mouth-filling pretensions of the title-page, Johnson's compilation is in reality a rather slender collection of outrageously "unnatural" natural history in which all the entries, as if directed to very simple readers, are exceedingly brief. Johnson is possibly to be identified with the "T.I." or "T.J." whose sensational pamphlet Barley published in the same year under the appropriately descriptive title, A World of wonders. A Masse of Murthers. A Couie of Cosonages, etc.

A pamphlet of similar cosening and conny-catching claptrap is the anonymous Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a rich Churle in Hampshire, by the subtill practise of one Iudeth Philips, a professed cunning woman, or Fortune teller. With a true discourse of her vnwomanly vsing a Trype wife, a widow, lately dwelling on the back side of S. Nicholas shambles in London, whom she with her conferates (sic), likewise cosoned: For which fact, shee was at the Sessions house without New-gate arraigned, where she confessed the same, and had iudgement for her offence, to be whipped through the Cittie, the 14. of February, 1594. For convenience in wading through this title-page epitome, the printer has grouped the lines paragraph-wise; and for the reader's greater delectation and conviction, since "seeing is believing," he has also supplied a crude woodcut of this modern Judith bestriding her saddled and bridled Holofernes. The historian, however, hot upon the scent of current events, will do well to place this veracious account beside his copy of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville; for of authentic Hampshire or London chronicle there is here no trace. The whole episode of the bridled "churl" is, in fact, lifted bodily from Henry Chettle's Kind-Harts Dreame, a work published three years earlier.

Two plays and two pamphlets of topical interest by the egregious patriot-propagandist, Henry Roberts,[9] complete Barley's output for 1595. One of the plays was W. Warner's translation—which has the distinction of being the first published in English—of Plautus' Menœchmi. The other, an early instance of an English play printed in Roman letter, was Robert Wilson's The Pedlers Prophecie. Neither performance has much to commend it as a work of art.

With the two pamphlets we are carried into the midst of the bustling swagger of British seafaring life in the Great Age. The first of these, Lancaster his Allarums—to give it only an inch or two of its page-long title—a tall, thin quarto in black letter and roman, recounts a typical freebooter's sortie into Brazil. It is true that certain "men of worth"—duly enumerated—lost their lives in the adventure; but the patriotic reader is left to infer that this trifling detail was more than offset by the fetching home of fifteen good ships laden with "spoyles and rich commodities . . . which was Sinemon, Sugar, Pepper, Cloues, Mace, Calloco-cloth and Brassel-wood." The second of Roberts' pamphlets, of which a single copy has survived,[10] this time in verse, though lacking the lavish detail of Lancaster his Allarums, is launched upon the same salt-spray of British naval

enthusiasm and bears the stirring title, The Trumpet of Fame: Or Sir Fraunces Drakes and Sir Iohn Hawkins F[are]well: with an encouragement to all Saile[rs] and Souldiers that are minded to go in this worthie enterprise. . . . Barley knew where to place his appeal: No Elizabethan worthy of his salt could possibly have felt other than aggrieved that he had but one life to sacrifice at the side of a Lancaster, a Drake, or a Hawkins.

The sensational, the patriotic, the pseudo-marvelous, the utilitarian and improving, the mildly religious, and the quasi-literary—these, as represented in the foregoing titles, constituted Barley's stock in trade. Lacking representation there, however, is one important item to which we must now turn our attention.

In 1575 the Queen issued a twenty-one year patent for the printing of ruled music paper and of "all music books whatsoever." At that time the patent was looked upon as of little consequence and went uncontested to the musician Thomas Tallis and his pupil, William Byrd. By 1596, however, the printing of these musical supplies had apparently become a more lucrative endeavor. When the original patent expired, therefore, Barley, ever alert to turn an honest or even a slightly tarnished penny, stepped into the breach and published his Pathway to Musicke (1596)[11] and A New Booke of Tabliture (1596). For these, lacking music type at that time,[12] he made shift to print from wooden blocks.

No further musical publications by Barley can be traced before 1598, in which year Thomas Morley, the musician, secured for himself a renewal of the expired Tallis-Byrd patent. Thereafter, until Morley's death in 1602 or 1603, Barley issued various musical works as one of Morley's several assignees. Just how this association came about is obscure. Pattison[13] conjectures that Barley's earlier "conflicts with authority may have enabled Morley to drive a harder bargain with him than with a better-established printer." This seems not unreasonable; but the arrangement may also have resulted from their being neighbors in Little St. Helens, Bishopsgate, though Morley's residence there has been disputed.[14] Certain it is that in the years 1596-97 a far more interesting figure than Morley was haunting Barley's neighborhood. The records[15] show that the petty collectors of subsidy were in those years finding it difficult to lay hands upon the taxes or person of one "Willelmus Shakespeare," resident "In Warda de Bishopsgate . . . In parochia Sancte Helene." One cannot help wondering whether the tax-delinquent poet-player and the law-flouting anti-monopolist printer ever exchanged views

—or the time of day—in the parish streets or within the walls of the printing shop in Little St. Helens.

But to return to Barley's musical ventures. During the period from 1598 to 1602 Barley issued, as Morley's assignee, some half dozen publications: the Sternhold and Hopkins' Whole Booke of Psalmes. With their woonted Tunes (1598?), and again, with Richard Alison's music, The Psalmes of Dauid in Meter. The plaine song to be sung and plaide vpon the lute, orpharyon, citterne or base violl (1599); John Bennet's Madrigalls to Foure Voyces (1599); John Farmer's The First Set of English Madrigals: To Foure Voices (1599); Anthony Holborne's Pauans, Galliards, Almains, and other short AEirs both graue and light, in fiue parts, for Viols, Violins, or other Musical Winde Instruments (1599); and Thomas Deloney's collection of ballads, Strange Histories, Of Kings, Princes, Dukes, (etc.) . . . Verie pleasant either to bee read or sunge (1602).

What happened to Morley's patent immediately after his death is not known; but by 1606 the rights had passed to Barley.[16] Perhaps there is a connection between Barley's new rôle and his having been made free of the Company of Stationers in that year. In any event, from 1606 to 1613 all English music books were printed by him or by his assignees. With the rather numerous[17] productions of these latter we are not here directly concerned. Barley himself, in his second period, seems to have printed but three: Thomas Weelkes' Ayeres or Phantasticke Spirites for three voices (1608), Thomas Ravenscroft's Pammelia. Musicks Miscellanie (1609), and Thomas Robinson's New Cithare Lessons (1609). To these should possibly be added T. S.'s folio broadside with musical notes, A Psalme of Thanksgiuing, to be sung by the Children of Christs Hospitall (1610), printed for Barley by Edward Allde.

Barley's rôle among our early printers of music is thus clearly one of considerable importance.[18] It has, as a matter of fact—and with some justice—hitherto been regarded as his chief claim upon our remembrance, though I am inclined to believe that an equally good case can be made out for him on other grounds.

Before turning to a discussion of his more purely "literary" associations, it may be well here to mention a miscellaneous group of titles further illustrative of Barley's range of interest. What is probably his first known publication, The Honourable Actions of . . . E. Glemham, Esquire [19] . . . against the Spaniards (1591), is obviously part of the patriotic afterwash of the Armada. A Most

wicked Work of a wretched Witch wrought on R. Burt (1592) bespeaks an interest which he and his fellows shared with James I—and not a few of their New England descendants. Gods Arrowe against Atheists (1593) is a long and labored tract by the esteemed puritan preacher, Henry Smith, popularly known as "Silver-tongued Smith." Present Remedies against the Plague (1594) speaks for itself, as does A Booke of Curious Strange Inuentions, called the First Part of Needleworks (1596). The Pathway to Knowledge, also of 1596, is a substantial black-letter quarto, largely of elementary mathematical nature. Especially useful (and therefore attractive to Barley and his clientelle) would have been the method of "keeping of a marchants booke after the Italian maner," which concludes the work. Epulario, Or, The Italian Banquet (1598) is a cook-book "wherein is shewed the maner how to dresse and prepare all kind of Flesh, Foules or Fishes. As also how to make Sauces, Tartes, Pies, &c. After the maner of all Countries." And The Penniles Parliament of Threed-bare Poets: Or, All Mirth and Wittie Conceites (1608) is a kind of modified and inferior jestbook, a second part to the famous Jack of Dover.[20]

I reserve to a place of its own the little morsel known as Strange Newes out of Kent, of a Monstrous and misshapen Child, borne in Olde Sandwitch, vpon the 30. of Iulie last, the like (for strangenes) hath neuer beene seene (1609). A crude cut on the title-page, reproduced in the text,[21] graphically depicts a misshapen creature of dumb-bell shape, head set in breast (i.e., with no neck, like Mandeville's anthropophagi), and with too many fingers and toes on the ducklike hands and feet. According to the statement preceding the account proper, the tract is published (and written by Barley?) as a warning to Englishmen for

Then follow six names of witnesses, four men and two women. Their social level, and that of the prospective readers, may be gauged by the three whose trades are specified: Barley knew as well as you or I that every reader is looking not merely for facts but for what our college freshmen call the true facts; and a fact attested by such a "personage of credit" as "M. Dickson, a Cooper, in Thames streete, neere to Saint Dunstons church" is just bound to be a truer fact than one sworn to by any old John a' Nokes or John a' Styles.[24]

To come now to the most important consideration of all: What, if anything, do we owe to Barley in the realm of literature? The answer is, Not much that could not be spared; yet some things which we should be loath to relinquish to oblivion. Mention has already been made of his publishing the earliest English translation from Plautus—an accidental distinction, no doubt. But during the '90's Barley also published five other plays,[25] among them that curious dramatized sermon on repentance known as A Looking Glasse for London and England (1594), by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge.[26] The others are of less intrinsic interest: George Peele's The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First (1593); two anonymous plays, The True Tragedie of Richard the Third (1594) and The Life and Death of Jacke Straw, a notable Rebell (1594); and Robert Wilson's The Pedlers Prophecie (1595).

Barley is sometimes disparagingly referred to as a publisher of ballads, and it is true that most of his verse offerings are of sub-literary calibre. Still, even here, he cannot be dismissed entirely. It will suffice to recall his publication of Nicholas Breton's A Solemne Passion of the Soules Loue (1595; 1598), and to remind ourselves that to him we owe the preservation, in a fragmentary and unique exemplar,[27] of Thomas Watson's second sonnet sequence, The Teares of Fancie. Or Loue Disdained (1593).

Only two works of (admitted) prose fiction figure in Barley's list, and both are translations—or are said to be. The first, allegedly "done out of French" and doubtfully ascribed to Barley himself as translator,[28] is The Delightful History of Celestina the Faire (1596). If this euphuistic romance is less entertaining than those of Lyly, Greene, or Lodge, it is hardly less so than those of Melbancke, Dickenson, and Turner; and it is certainly to be preferred to the conglomerative pastiches of John Hind. The book has, incidentally, nothing whatever to do with the better-known Spanish work, La Celestina, with which the STC has confused it.

Of the second, and undoubted, translation little need be said. It is a rendering by "W.B."—probably William Braunche (or Branch)—of Pope Pius II's The Most Excellent Historie, Of Euryalus and Lucresia (1596), an erotic tale already long familiar to English readers through earlier versions. In style it is even more exaggeratedly euphuistic than Celestina the Faire, as the following sentence may suggest:

There remains to be assessed Barley's relation to certain prose pamphlets of half a dozen lesser Elizabethan writers whose works he printed or sold. These are among the most interesting of the publications with which Barley is connected; but, unfortunately, the precise nature of his connection with them is frequently shadowy, often hinting of something just short of piracy. We have seen, for instance, how one of his anonymous sensational pamphlets made use of Chettle's Kind-Harts Dreame. In exactly the same way, but with more extensive verbatim pillage, two other of his anonymous books represent reprints, under new titles, of works already published. His Pilgrimage of Man, Wandering in a Wildernes of Woe (1606) is simply a disguised re-issue of John Alday's popular translation (1566?) of Pierre Boaistuau's Theatrum Mundi; and his Court of good Counsell (1607) is made up of selected verbatim transcriptions from the Third Book of George Pettie's translation, The Civile Conversation (1581), of Stefano Guazzo. No doubt there are still other instances of this kind of bookmaking among Barley's publications; but it is a problem beyound the modest scope of this paper to discover them or, having discovered them, to determine just how far Barley is himself responsible for this crafty dealing with other men's wares.

In addition to those already mentioned, Barley published an illustrated and undated issue of the Troublesome Trauailes of Edward Webbe;[30] a reprint of Thomas Harman's Caveat under the title—probably influenced by Greene's popular series—of The Groundworke of Conny-Catching (1592); and a reprint of Nashe's blast against Gabriel Harvey, The Apologie of Pierce Pennilesse: Or Strange Newes, Of the intercepting certaine Letters (1593), better known from the running-title of the earlier editions as Foure Letters Confuted. The last of Barley's publications that need be noticed here is his original (and sole) edition of Thomas Dekker's A Knight's Conjuring, done in earnest: discovered in jest (1607).

I have not tried to depict Barley as an important figure in Elizabethan culture, nor have I here been able to set down all of the little that is positively known about him. I have, further, no doubt that some of his conduct was highly reprehensible. But even on the basis of the small evidence here submitted, I suggest that his interests and associations make of him a person about whom we would gladly learn more.

Notes