University of Virginia Library

I. The Printer of Section 1

In the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Section 1, in fours collating B-K4 L2 and containing The Mad Lover, The Spanish Curate, and The Little French Lawyer, and Quire b, four leaves in the preliminary section containing commendatory poems, were printed by Thomas Warren senior. His identification depends primarily upon a block which appears in the Folio on sigs. E1 and b2v as well as in A collection of all the publicke Orders Ordinances and Declarations of both Houses of Parliament . . . by T. W. for Ed: Husband, 1646 and in Dugdale's History of St Paul's Cathedral . . . Printed by Tho. Warren, MDCLVIII; in addition, two ornamental initials from Section 1 are found in books printed by T. W. in 1649 and 1651.[1]

Warren had been granted his freedom on 2 April 1638 and had registered his first book for publication on 1 August of the same year, having set up as a stationer in partnership with Joshua Kirton. [2] Over the next seven years his name appeared as bookseller of some twenty items, but in 1645 twenty-two titles appeared as printed by T. W., fifteen of which issued Parliamentary ordinances for Edward Husband, who styled himself Printer to the House of Commons.[3] T. W., as the

imprint of the Collection of publicke Orders suggests, was Warren, the only known member of the Stationers' Company at the time whose name corresponds with the initials; he seems to have acquired a printing business by marrying Alice, the daughter of Matthew Law and the widow of a Norton, who had been operating a press in her own right in 1641 and 1642.[4] In 1646 and 1647 T. W. printed the following works: If, as Bald believed (p. 30), most of the Folio work was done in the autumn and winter of 1646, it seems likely that several of these books would have been in production concurrently with Section 1.

I have seen five of them. Three (A 10, C 1214, and F 461) are of modest size, but one (H 3808) is a folio in fours running to 943 pages of text and a 24-page appendix. Its manufacture may have begun soon after it was ordered printed by Parliament on 5 August 1644, but, as it concludes with an ordinance of 17 November 1646, it apparently was in press along with Section 1.[5] The book is printed in a variety of founts, including, I believe, the Folio fount. Warren's work on Aglaura (S 6126) is a subject to which we shall return.

There is no evidence to indicate how many presses Warren operated or how many workmen he usually employed, but at the time of his engagement on Section 1 he clearly was equipped to undertake printing jobs of substantial size. The fact that at least one of his books evidently was produced over a period of some two years, during which other works bearing his imprint were published, is indication enough that he did not throw all the resources of his shop into the manufacture of one book, completing it before commencing another. None of

the Beaumont and Fletcher plays assigned to Warren appears to have been reallocated to another shop, but the brevity of Section 1 suggests that he was unwilling or unable to commit himself to as much work for the volume as the other printers engaged by Moseley.[6] What exigencies of scheduling or other circumstances led Warren to assign at particular times compositors or presses to this or another job cannot be known, but we must approach an analysis of the printing of Section 1 with the initial assumption that other books perhaps requiring the Folio workmen and their equipment were in simultaneous production.