A Date and a Printer for A
Looking Glasse
for London and England, Q4
by
Berta Sturman
In his Bibliography of English Printed Drama [no.
118],
Sir Walter Greg places the undated University of Chicago copy of A
Looking Glasse for London and England (first printed 1594)
between
Q1602 (c) and Q1617 (e), remarking "it is not clear whether the edition is
actually earlier than (e) or not; it is, however, placed here because it was
printed page for page from (c) and is, like the earlier editions, in black
letter." C. R. Baskervill
thinks it came well before the 1617 quarto: "In fact, it may have followed
close on Q3."
[1] J. Churton Collins
(see the preface in Volume I of his edition of Greene, 1905) refers to it as
Q5.
There is no internal evidence of date, except that three references to
the Queen occur in the last scene in the editions of 1594, 1598, and 1602.
Baskervill notes that these have been retained in the undated quarto,
whereas the edition of 1617 refers to the King. But this is inconclusive,
since references to Elizabeth were occasionally retained in texts printed
during the reign of James. For example, the 1610 Quarto of
Histrio-mastix employs the speech by Queen Elizabeth, and
the
1606 Quarto of The Return from Parnassus contains an
allusion
to the Queen's day [III,1] and a reference to breaking the Queen's peace
[IV,2]. We must turn, then, to the external evidence of printing
practices.
This undated Q4 contains no distinguishing ornaments or initials, such
as appear in the earlier quartos, except a lace ornament. It is almost
impossible to distinguish watermarks in the paper, but there seem to be
traces of two different marks. All those distinguishing features which are
sometimes helpful in dating an undated text seem to be wanting.
However, a further expedient remains. Q4 follows, page for page, the
1602 edition, but it does not look like the work of the shop which printed
the first three editions. Greg says of it: "The printer has not been identified,
but the work is very inferior and is unlikely to be Creede's."[2] Close examination of this text,
then,
might reveal individual peculiarities to identify the press from which it was
issued.
One such peculiarity is immediately apparent. At the beginning of the
text, on A2, is a lace ornament, a regular printers' substitute for the more
costly woodblock or engraving. The piece of type is cast into an abstract
design rather than a letter of the alphabet. A dozen or more such identical
pieces seem to have accompanied a printer's stock of letters. Usually such
type ornaments are placed in the forme in such a way that a regular pattern
will result, most often a simple repetition like /// or \\\;. Sometimes
two or four of the ornaments are placed in positions which combine to form
a larger pattern, like this: ⋀ or this: ◇. This larger pattern is
repeated until the space at the compositor's disposal has been filled. For
this text, at least, the compositor seems to have inserted the pieces into his
composing-stick at random. It is this lack of arrangement, rather than any
peculiarity of the individual pieces of type, which is unusual.
One other irregularity meets the eye at once. Printing-house custom
seems to have been to sign texts with Arabic numbers, although some
black-letter texts were signed with Roman. This quarto of A Looking
Glasse has seven gatherings signed with Arabic numbers, two with
Roman. So far as I can see there is no evidence of more than one
compositor at work here —
only of one confused or hurried man, haphazardly using now one system,
now the other, in an unusual way.
The play was printed with a mixed font. This was frequent practice
during the last years of the period when black-letter fonts were being slowly
replaced by italic fonts. Even in the smallest printing houses, damaged
types were discarded as soon as they were discovered. When a letter came
to be in short supply the quantity was pieced out by the addition of some
from a similar but not necessarily identical font. Such a makeshift would
serve until a fresh supply of type was secured. Knowledge of such mixed
fonts can be useful to the scholar upon occasion, for a distinctive
combination tends to recur over a short time but disappears over a longer
period. The black-letter work of Valentine Simmes, for example, shows
double forms of the capital letters C, E, G, H, P, T, and Y in 1597 and
1599, but in 1604 double forms occur only for C, T, and W.
In the Chicago copy only the capitals D and M show such a mixed
font. Each of these letters appears in a normal black-letter form (two
slender uprights appear just to the right of the heavy, slightly curved,
vertical of the D, and a slender upright line stands on either side of the
central heavy vertical of the M), and also in a slightly different form (only
one stroke follows the vertical of the D; the slender upright appears only
to the right of the central shaft of the M). These variant D's and M's
appear haphazardly, the variant D a little more frequently than the variant
M.
In addition, a broken form of the capital G appears. In it a piece of
the back is missing and a part of each one of the inner vertical lines. The
break seems to be diagonal; the missing part of the left-hand vertical is
above the missing piece of the right-hand line.
I sought, therefore, a small printing house where the workmanship
was not very careful, whose work showed several of these characteristics:
a jumbled type ornament, mixed Arabic and Roman numerals in the
signatures, a mixed font showing variant capital M's and D's, and a capital
G broken in a particular way.
The earliest example I have found of such printing is not a complete
text at all, but the last three gatherings of a larger work. In Dekker's
Bachelors' Banquet, 1603, the signatures H-K seem to be of
different workmanship. The running-titles are different and the type seems
to be more worn. The variant D does not appear, but the variant M is
present on H3v, H4, and K2. The broken G occurs on
H2v. All the
signature numbers in these three gatherings are set in Roman rather than
Arabic numbers. F. P. Wilson, in the preface to his edition of The
Bachelor's Banquet, explains that there were really two 1603
editions
of this text, both by Creede, and that when it was decided to print up a
second edition to satisfy the popular demand, Creede printed the second
edition (1603b), the one in which we are here interested, from the first
(1603a). Presumably to expedite matters, 1603b was set up in three
sections: A-D, E-G, and H-K.[3] Both
the
1603 editions
carry the imprint "Printed by T. C. and are to be solde by T. P. 1603."
The initials T. P. undoubtedly stand for Thomas Pavier, the publisher for
whom Creede had printed the 1602 edition of
A Looking
Glasse.
In 1603 also appeared an anonymous pamphlet, Present
Remedies Against the Plague, printed for Pavier and carrying his
device but bearing no printer's name. In it appear both forms of the D and
M and the broken G. A lace ornament, similar to that in A Looking
Glasse, is used here for a headpiece, the type dropped in, in no
particular order.
In 1604 the play Jacke Straw (Greg, no. 114) was
similarly printed for Pavier with no printer's name. In it we find the variant
D's and M's and the broken G, the same kind of ornament used in the same
haphazard fashion, and signature marks which, although they contain no
Roman numerals, are somewhat erratic, no signature at all appearing on
A3, B3, C3, D3, E2, or E3.
Finally, in 1605, we find three plays which apparently belong to this
same group. In 1605 Pavier published The Fair Maid of
Bristowe (Greg, no. 211), Captaine Thomas Stukeley
(Greg, no. 220), and The First Part of Jeronimo (Greg, no.
221). All appeared with Pavier's device on the title page.
Stukeley, Jacke Straw, and A Looking
Glasse were on a list of twelve titles (Greg, p. 16) transferred to
Pavier in 1600; The Fair Maid of Bristowe was entered to
Pavier on 8 February 1604-5. Although The Fair Maid is the
latest title in the group to be entered, it may have been printed at the same
time as the other two Pavier plays. Greg says of it: "The printer has not
been identified . . .the typographical arrangement, however, closely
resembles that of Captaine Thomas Stukeley . . . and I
Jeronimo . . ., and all three no doubt came from the same press."
Not only is the typography of these three plays generally similar,
but all three show the variant D's and M's, and in Stukeley
the
broken G occurs. The disordered ornament appears as a tailpiece in I
Jeronimo and in The Fair Maid. A combination of
Roman
and Arabic numbers is employed in the signatures of all three.
One more book may be included in this group. A Canterbury
Visitation Article for 1605 (STC no. 10158), printed by R. Blower
for T. Pavier, seems to have been set from the same font of black-letter
type. The disordered lace ornament appears on A2v and
C3v. Only
the second of the three signatures is signed with Roman numerals. There
are no variant D's, but the variant M occurs on A4v, B1,
B1v, and
B2.
We have then seven texts and a part of an eighth, all of which show
the confused ornament, the mixed Arabic and Roman type in the signatures,
a mixed font showing variant capital M's and D's, and a capital G broken
in a special way.
The confused ornament appears as a headpiece in Jacke
Straw. In a different but equally haphazard arrangement it serves a
similar purpose in A Looking Glasse. It is used a tailpiece in
The Faire Maid, and in I Jeronimo. In the
Visitation Article and in Present Remedies it
occurs
twice: at the beginning and at the end of the text. The same pieces of type
may,
and probably do, appear and reappear, but their arrangement is always
different and apparently random.
Signing of the third leaf in a gathering is regularly omitted in
Jacke Straw, and in the second sheet only the first leaf is
signed. Otherwise, this volume seems to have fairly regular signatures in
its five gatherings. The same practice of omitting the signature on the third
leaf occurs twice in Captaine Thomas Stukeley, however, and
twice in I Jeronimo, both of which show a mixture of Roman
and Arabic numbers in their signatures. Of our eight texts, five show such
a combination, and all five, except for A Looking Glasse, are
dated 1605.
On the three gatherings which this printer did for The
Bachelor's Banquet, only the variant M appears. The variant forms
for both the D and the M occur in the plague pamphlet, as they do in all of
the plays in the group. The Visitation Article, like The
Bachelor's Banquet, shows no variant D's. This may be taken to
mean that an extra supply of capital D's became available before the
Article was printed, but it more probably reflects only the
brevity of the texts involved. In both instances only three sheets were
printed.
The broken G occurs in four of our texts: on H2v
of The
Bachelor's Banquet (1603), on A3 and C4v of
Jacke
Straw (1604), on D4 and F2v of Captaine
Thomas
Stukeley (1605), and on F2 of A Looking Glasse for London
and England.
The Visitation Article bears the name of Ralph Blower
as
printer, and this suggests that the other seven typographically similar texts
probably came from Blower's press. Consequently I examined twenty-one
of the thirty texts which Morrison lists as printed by Blower between 1600
and 1616. Of these, only the 1605 Visitation Article shows
three
of the peculiarities described above. Two other works (STC nos. 5876 and
11232), both printed in 1607, have an ornament like that in A
Looking Glasse but bear none of the other characteristics. The other
eighteen examined show none of the typographical peculiarities of A
Looking Glasse.
In 1603 Blower printed London's Mourning Garment
(STC no. 16757) and in 1607 The Court of Good Counsel
(STC
no. 5876). Both are in black letter but neither comes from a font with
mixed M's and D's or with a broken letter G. Seven texts that do show one
or more of these variant letters are dated between 1603 and 1607. This
suggests that the Chicago copy of A Looking Glasse was also
printed between 1603 and 1607.
It may be possible to suggest a more precise dating. The disordered
lace ornament recurs steadily from 1603 through 1607, but the mixed D's
and M's disappear after 1605 and the broken G appears only in 1603, 1604,
and 1605. Moreover, the mingling of Roman and Arabic numbers in the
signatures occurs only in 1605. On this evidence one might say that Q4 of
A Looking Glasse was probably printed between 1603 and
1605, very possibly in the winter of 1604/5, and that it is indeed the fourth
edition.
Except for his portion of The Bachelor's Banquet,
Blower
printed all of this group of texts for Pavier. He apparently undertook a little
emergency
work for Pavier or Creede when
The Bachelor's Banquet was
being hurried off the press and, despite the fact that his work is not equal
to Creede's, received additional work from Pavier in succeeding
years.
Creede had printed A Looking Glasse for Pavier in
1602
(c) and may have parcelled out this subsequent edition to Blower in much
the same way that he had employed Blower in the printing of The
Bachelor's Banquet in 1603. Printing rights in the play, however,
had
belonged to Pavier since 1600 and it seems more likely that Q4 A
Looking Glasse (d) was one in a group of five plays that Blower
printed for Pavier in 1604-1605 quite independently of Creede.
It is evident that Blower did not invariably put his name to everything
that issued from his press. Of those to which his name or initials are
appended there seem to be no very lengthy or important works. He appears
to have been a very minor London printer of such things as Visitation
Articles, sermons, pamphlets, etc. In 1615 he was returned as having one
press and there is no particular reason to surmise that he had ever had
more. Immediately after the close of his apprenticeship he evidently was
associated with the Jaggards, one of whom, John, had been a
fellow-apprentice under Tottell. In 1600, however, Blower and William
Jaggard were fined for printing Sherley's Journey. Blower
does
not seem to have printed for Jaggard thereafter. In 1600 he printed Webbe's
Rare and Most Wonderfull Things for Pavier. During the
years
between 1602 and 1608, Pavier's name appears as publisher on most of the
title pages issuing from Blower's press. The addition of these seven texts
makes the association inescapable. Blower's name occasionally appears
alone, and once in a while he printed for another publisher, but for the
most part his limited printing facilities seem to have been used in Pavier's
service.
Notes