University of Virginia Library

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