University of Virginia Library

The Printing of James Shirley's The Polititian (1655) [*]
by
Robert J. Fehrenbach

In 1655 Humphrey Moseley brought out The Polititian, a play written by James Shirley in 1639. The procedure used in printing The Polititian was extremely rare for the seventeenth century: the play was printed in both octavo and quarto formats machined from the same typesetting. These two "simultaneous issues" of one edition, as W. W. Greg calls such products,[1] contain apparent signature errors, and Edward Huberman, in an attempt to determine the priority of the printing of the two formats, studied the signature misprints and concluded that the octavo and quarto sheets of this bibliographical rarity were printed in no consistent order.[2] Sometimes, he argues, the octavo sheets were printed first and the appropriate quarto sheets followed in the press; at other times the process was reversed. In his description of The Polititian in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, Greg agrees with Huberman's analysis of the printing procedure (II, 861). Having examined thirteen copies of the 1655 text,[3] I believe that there was a consistent order of printing, and that still additional copies of a pre-Restoration drama should be included in the list of fakes made up by the infamous bibliophile, Thomas J. Wise.

The Gentleman of Venice (1655), another play by Shirley published by Moseley and The Polititian's companion piece in publication, was also printed in this unusual manner. The close printing relationship of these two plays is relevant to a discussion of the priority of the two sizes of The

Polititian, for if the publications were intimately related in the press, they probably would have been printed by the same procedure, and the second to have come from the press would surely have been machined by the same process as the first.

Both plays were published in quarto sizes to match many of Shirley's plays previously printed in quarto, and in octavo formats to fit with Shirley's recently published octavo volume, Six New Playes (1653), also issued by Humphrey Moseley. This is the only logical explanation that accounts for this unusual and complicated printing procedure.[4] Greg, who discusses the octavo issues of the two plays as a "collection," believes it quite probable that only the quarto issues of the two plays were sold separately and that the octavo copies were always sold bound together as a supplement to Six New Playes (III, 1124-1125).[5]

In addition, the two 1655 publications contain typographical similarities which indicate their proximity in the press. "James Shirley" on the title-page of both sizes of both plays is from the same typesetting. The imprint is exactly the same in all copies save for two small but significant variations to be discussed later.[6] The head-line, "The Epistle Dedicatory," is the same in both publications as is the signature "JAMES SHIRLEY" on the same page.[7] Also, the rules and the type of the word FINIS are the same in both plays.[8] All of these identical typographical features have been verified by measurement. Several identical head ornaments are found in both publications, and only these two plays of Shirley's carry the head-line, albeit of different typography, "The names and small Characters of the Persons"[9] and contain brief descriptions of each character in the dramatis personae.[10] In the rest of the plays printed by Humphrey Moseley in 1655,[11] none of these similarities exists except for an occasional similar ornament. All this evidence indicates that The Gentleman of Venice and The Polititian

were very close in the press, one probably being printed immediately after the other.

Two variations exist in the otherwise identical imprints of both plays. A gap, the width of one piece of type, appears between the H and the u in Humphrey in the quarto issues of The Gentleman of Venice and in both sizes of The Polititian. Greg believes that this gap occurred when the compositor made the change from the octavo forme to the quarto forme in the course of printing The Gentleman of Venice and that this space was carried over into the printing of the title page of The Polititian (II, 857). Furthermore, the e in be is properly placed in the imprint in The Gentleman of Venice but is raised significantly in the imprint in The Polititian. These two typographical variations indicate that The Gentleman of Venice was printed first and that the imprint, which was set up correctly, experienced some minor, unnoticed variations as it stood in type or was transferred from one galley to another. For The Polititian to have been printed first, we would have to believe that the compositor corrected one error in the imprint (in be) and ignored another even more obvious mistake (in Humphrey).

Because of the various limitations connected with early printing it is highly unlikely that an entire work, unless it were an extremely short piece, stood in type at any one time. It is much more reasonable to assume that a forme or two was placed in type and after the desired number of sheets were printed, the type was distributed and reused for other formes. Similarly, when one work was printed in both octavo and quarto formats from a single typesetting, it is unlikely that one size was printed entirely before the other size went to the press. It is more likely that a printer first imposed the type-pages in one forme and printed the sheets of the appropriate format; then he reimposed the type-pages in the other forme, made the necessary signature changes, and machined the sheets of the other size. The question of the printing priority of the two sizes of each of these two plays is, then, a question of which sheets were printed first, not which entire format. Greg warns that it is unwise to assert that a printing priority of octavo sheets to quarto sheets, or quarto to octavo, was consistently followed.[12] But if all of the evidence suggests one process, only extreme caution would prohibit one from making a reasonable conjecture about the printing priority of the sheets.

No octavo copy of The Gentleman of Venice contains any signature misprint (Greg, II, 857). In three quartos examined by Huberman, in all of the quartos examined by and brought to the attention of Greg, and in the one quarto of The Gentleman of Venice I examined, B1-B3 are misprinted C1-C3 and quires A and E are fully signed.[13] Greg notes that in the

quarto, A2 and K2 are left unsigned while the signature K2 appears on K4 (II, 857). All of these misprints in the quarto (except the misplacement of K2 on K4 and the omission of A2 which indicate nothing but carelessness) can be explained by the retention of all or part of the octavo signatures when the compositor reimposed the play for the quarto issue. A4 does not appear in quarto, but it is normal for octavo. E4 appears where C4 appears in octavo (p. 33 of both sizes); the E is correct for quarto, but the 4 is correct for octavo. Finally, those sheets (B1-B3) that are misprinted C1-C3 in the quarto issue are right for octavo. From the first-mentioned variation in the imprint (the gap between the H and the u in Humphrey) and from the misprinted signatures, it is reasonable to believe, as does Greg (II, 857), that the octavo sheets were printed before the quarto sheets in The Gentleman of Venice.

In all quarto copies of The Polititian, only one misprint of a signature is found: A4, which already has been noted as unusual for quarto but normal for octavo, appears in the quarto issue. Unlike The Gentleman of Venice, however, there are apparent signature misprints in two of the octavo copies; the remainder of the smaller-sized copies carry correct signatures. In an octavo issue in the British Museum (hereafter referred to as BM8) C2 is misprinted as E2, and in another octavo in the University of Texas Library (hereafter referred to as T8) C3 is misprinted as E3, C5-C6 as F1-F2, D2-D3 as G2-G3, and D6 as H2.[14] All of these misprints are correct signatures for quarto. From an examination of the unusual A4 signature in all the quartos and the several misprints in two of the octavos, both Greg (II, 861) and Huberman (p. 107) conclude that some sheets were printed first in octavo and then reimposed in quarto and that others went first to the press in quarto and were reimposed in octavo.

In my examination of BM8 and T8, however, I discovered: (1) those leaves with the supposed signature misprints, contain typographical variants identical with those found in the regular quarto sheets;[15] (2) an occasional leaf in T8 and BM8 which is unsigned in both octavo and quarto and which corresponds in pagination (e.g., [K3] in quarto and [E7] in octavo are both page 67) contains the typographical characteristics of the quarto leaf instead of those of the octavo leaf; (3) in those leaves with signature misprints (as well as those unsigned leaves that share typographical

variants with the corresponding quarto leaves) the chain-lines are horizontal, normal in quarto, while the chain-lines of the rest of the leaves are vertical, an octavo characteristic; and (4) the watermark in each of the suspected leaves, where it can be determined, is in the quarto position. In short, octavo copies BM8 and T8 are filled with inserts, cutdown leaves from quarto copies, and, like the other octavos, do not contain misprints. The only authentic misprint in both sizes of The Polititian is the A4 in the quarto copies.

Further evidence that T8 and BM8 are modern made-up copies and do not represent "confusion of sheets in binding some of the individual volumes" which Huberman offers as another possible explanation (p. 107) is that BM8 is in the Ashley Library in the British Museum and T8 is in the Wrenn collection of the University of Texas Library, the two private libraries with which Thomas J. Wise, the famous fraudulent bibliophile, had his closest association.[16] D. F. Foxon, who discovered Wise's deceptive handiwork with pre-Restoration plays, cites all of the plays in Wise's library (the Ashley Library) that appear to be made up. The Polititian, not found in that list, clearly should be added.[17]

The evidence and conclusions about the printing of The Polititian, then, are these: it was printed in both octavo and quarto issues, probably as soon as The Gentleman of Venice, also printed in simultaneous issues, cleared the press. As the octavo sheets of the latter probably were printed before the quarto sheets, there is no reason to believe that the process would have been changed for The Polititian. Moreover, the one authentic signature misprint in The Polititian indicates the octavo-to-quarto procedure. Apparently the compositor benefited from the signature errors in The Gentleman of Venice and made only one in the printing of The Polititian.

Notes