University of Virginia Library

Piracies of Two Plays by Farquhar by Shirley Strum Kenny

Sometime around 1733 one of the most smoothly professional pirates ever to abuse the English book trade perpetrated a number of unauthorized editions of old plays. Obviously pirates of the mid-eighteenth century, as those of any other period, sought anonymity, but while they spent considerable effort on hiding their own identity, they seldom attempted to disguise their books as legitimate editions. A pirate's imprint might either be false or vague—"Printed for the Booksellers of Town and Country"; and he might even legitimize his work by actually printing it abroad outside the limits of English copyright. He might crudely imitate an engraving, but an imitation was at the very most a half-hearted effort to foist his product off as the one that he imitated. Pirates wanted profits, and they wanted anonymity to protect them from the law, but they cared little for the odor of authenticity.

The pirate now under discussion is obviously of a different breed. In 1948 Giles E. Dawson was the first to identify any of his remarkable handiwork. The counterfeit editions of Hamlet, 1723, Othello, 1774, and Macbeth, 1729, all of which appear in the first volume of a Folger Shakespeare Library copy of The English Theatre of 1731-33, a collection of old plays published by William Feales, are astonishingly similar to the originals; ornaments are copied with exquisite care, and the placement of signatures and press figures is calculatedly close to those of the edition that was imitated.[1] In 1955 D. F. Foxon found another specimen of the counterfeiter's handiwork, a piracy of the 1732 edition of Steele's The Lying Lover, which, while not so close an imitation as the Shakespearean piracies in matters of placement of signature and inclusion of press figures, still contains careful forgeries of the individual factotums, headpieces, and tailpieces of the original. The pirated Lying Lover was discovered in another copy of The English Theatre, and as Dawson had believed Feales a prime suspect, Foxon felt his discovery tied Feales, albeit on circumstantial evidence, even more closely to the piracies.[2] What is remarkable about these piracies and what links them without question is the trouble the pirate took to disguise his copies of the plays as authentic editions published by legitimate booksellers.

I have acquired copies of two more piracies, obviously by the same hand, imitations of the 1733 editions of George Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a copy of the same pirated Beaux' Stratagem in a collection of plays shelfmarked PR1241 S4 Cage. Although the piracies of Farquhar's plays do not reveal the identity or for that matter the motivation of the industrious pirate, I have found evidence to make me suspect that Feales may have been falsely accused by his twentieth-century investigators. The two Farquhar forgeries provide new information on the pirate's technique and his single-mindedness, and they serve as a reminder that there are probably a good many more piracies circa 1733 sitting respectably undetected in rare book collections.

The legitimate "Eighth Edition" of The Beaux' Stratagem was published with the imprint: 'LONDON: | Printed for Bernard Lintot; and sold by | W. Feales, at Rowe's-Head, against St. Clement's | Church in the Strand. | [short rule] M.dcc.xxxiii.' It was a page-by-page reprint of the 1730 "Seventh Edition" with the imprint 'LONDON: | Printed for Bernard Lintot, at the Cross-Keys, | between the Temple-Gates, in Fleetstreet. | [short rule] | M. dcc xxx.' It included as frontispiece an engraving from a plate used as early as Lintot's edition of 1714, used later in the 1730 edition, and reused again in the 1736 edition, which bears the imprint

'LONDON: | Printed for Bernard Lintot; and sold by | W. Feales, at Rowe's Head, the Corner of Essex-|Street in the Strand. | [short rule] | M. DCC.XXXVI.' ['LONDON:' and date in red.] An ornamental initial on p. 5 of the 1733 edition reappears on p. 84 of the 1736 edition, and collation proves that the 1736 edition derived from the legitimate 1733 edition.

The legitimate "Eleventh Edition" of The Recruiting Officer carries the imprint 'LONDON: | Printed for Bernard Lintot; and sold by | W. Feales, at Rowe's-Head, against St. Clement's | Church in the Strand. | [short rule] | M.dcc.xxxiii.' It is a reprint of the "Tenth Edition," published by Lintot in 1723, and it contains an engraving from a plate used in that edition. The engraving was reused later in Lintot's edition of 1736, which bears the imprint 'LONDON: | Printed for Bernard Lintot; and sold by | W. Feales, at Rowe-Head, the Corner of Essex-|Street in the Strand. | [short rule] | M.DCC.XXXVI.' ['LONDON:' and date in red.] The text of the 1736 edition derives from the legitimate 1733 edition rather than the piracy.

The piracies of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem are page-by-page reprints of the legitimate editions of 1733 with almost identical title-pages, but they do not follow the originals line by line; both have some differences in lineation on about half the pages. What is remarkable about the piracies, however, is not the setting of the text, but the care with which the engravings and carved ornaments were imitated by the collaborating artist.

The forgeries of Farquhar's plays are the first examples to come to light of engravings as part of the handicraft of the pirate under consideration; neither the Shakespeare plays nor The Lying Lover had frontispieces. The piracies of the two 1733 editions of Farquhar closely resemble the legitimate editions in the frontispiece engravings and every carved ornament; there can be no question that an artist, and a skillful one at that, was hired specifically to counterfeit the engravings and ornaments so that they would defy detection. Differences in the legitimate and counterfeit engravings become apparent under minute examination: In the engraved frontispiece of the pirated Beaux' Stratagem, there are no buttons on the skirt of Aimwell's coat; the buttonholes on Archer's pocket are missing; the furbelows on the dress at the left are wider than those of the original; the capitals on the doorway are taller and somewhat more elaborate; the chandelier is slightly broader. In The Recruiting Officer, the difference can be most easily recognized by the fact that the man at the extreme left in the piracy has only four buttons instead of the seven of the original; there are of course again many differences in detail that can be detected by examining the fake and the real together, but the two must be compared to see the differences.

Actually copying engravings was not a particularly rare procedure in the 1730's. Both Feales and another bookseller, probably Robert Walker, issued editions of Steele's The Conscious Lovers, for example, with two

different imitations of the Van der Gucht engraving in Tonson's edition of 1733. Feales's copy, which was reversed from the original (the easiest way to copy an engraving), appeared in an edition he issued in 1735, a year before the copyright expired. Feales's name had appeared in the imprint of Tonson's 1733 edition, and the new edition bore his own imprint, 'Printed for W. Feales . . . and the Book-sellers of London and Westminster.' The 1740 edition, 'Printed for the Booksellers in Town and Country' after copyright expiration, and found in Walker's The Best English Plays, contains a second imitation, this one not reversed. But neither copy pretended to be Tonson's 1733 edition.

Oddly enough, in the frontispieces in both Farquhar plays, the "forger" was an artist perhaps superior to the man he imitated. Although his lines tend to be heavily drawn and his faces less delicate than those by his predecessor, he shows a finer hand at detail, usually better skill at shading, and greater talent at depicting wigs and clothes. Sometimes he added detail rather than slavishly imitating the original. My point is, of course, that he was a man of considerable talent, many shades above the craftsmen who usually took on the work of shabbily counterfeited engravings like those of The Conscious Lovers. The engravings in the two Farquhar plays, taken along with the headpieces and ornamental bands, were obviously aimed at duplicity far more secretive than that shown by Feales and Walker with The Conscious Lovers.

Although it is even more difficult to describe the differences in ornaments than to spot them, the following list will point out some ways to distinguish the two editions of The Beaux' Stratagem:

                 

Page and ornament	Legitimate edition	Piracy
A2v Ornamental band	To fill out lines composed of standard fleurons, one semicolon is used in each band.	Exclamation points used to fill out lines; one upright, one inverted in upper band; both inverted in lower band.
P. 3 Headpiece	Horizontal line and dot on ball in middle of ornament.	Vertical lines on ball.
P. 5 Headpiece	Three faint bricks on bottom row of wall; leaves at top right point left; four indentations on battlement; two lines on tower to represent windows in facade.	Four bricks.
		Leaves point down.
		Three.
		Three lines.
P. 49 Ornamental band	Exclamation point to fill out line of fleurons.	Only fleurons.
P. 68 Headband	Two star ornaments, seven fleurons.	Two small fleurons with seven other fleurons.

 

P. 90 Headband

Composed of standard floral ornaments. In middle one piece of a different ornament used.

Only floral ornaments used.

The title-page also is a close copy of the original, varying noticeably only in the use of a swash D in 'DRURY' and in the rules at the bottom of the page. The text of the play is not so closely copied, however, as are the ornaments and other more conspicuous details. Although the piracy is a page-by-page reprint, there are substantive variants such as 'Face' for 'his Face' (19.11), 'naughty' for 'naught' (20.2), 'a Reparation' for 'Reparation' (20.3.), 'must' for 'most' (43.38), 'first' for 'fifth' (45.40), 'us' for 'me' (69.35). The most surprising of the substantive variants is the catchword on p. 11, 'Aim.' incorrectly replacing 'Arch.'; the printer was so unusually careful in noticeable details that his failure to correct the variant in catchword position is curious. There are also numerous variants in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, 'Old' for 'old' (Dramatis Personae), for example, 'good nature' for 'Good-nature' (14.34), 'Dear?' for 'Dear;' (16.11), 'you' for the incorrect 'your' (16.21), 'tho' for 'though' (46.18), etc. And there are of course the many points at which the piracy does not follow the copy line for line, for example on pp. 10.28-29; 11.30-35; 14.27-28; and 64. 6-15.[3]

No press figures were used in either edition, but the running-titles and catchwords of the piracy, with the one exception of p. 11, are meticulous imitations of those of the original. Signatures are not precisely placed to match the legitimate edition of 1733, but seven of the eighteen seem calculatedly close to the original. The very fact that there was more concern for counterfeiting engraving, title-page, ornaments, and running-titles, and for approximating placement on the page than there was for the accuracy of the text indicates that the printer's primary goal was to avoid discovery when he marketed his copies.

The ornaments in The Recruiting Officer are more closely imitated than in The Beaux' Stratagem, but they can be distinguished by comparing the original and imitation. For example, on A6, an odd ornament is inserted in a line of fleurons in the original but not in the imitation. On the titlepage, the counterfeit edition includes a Y shaded backwards in the word 'COMEDY'; a swash D in 'DRURY'; and no period after Æneid'. Again the running-titles, signatures, and catchwords resemble the original with few exceptions; the signature on p. 29 incorrectly reads B2 instead of B3 as in the original; the catchword 'a' on p. 43 is missing in the piracy; and the catchword on p. 75 reads 'Bal.' instead of 'Ball.' as an abbreviation for Justice Ballance. There is, as in The Beaux' Stratagem, less precision in placement of signatures than Dawson found in the Shakespeare piracies.

Characteristically, less concern is shown for composition than for the more obvious elements of the page. Forty pages contain differences in lineation. There are again numerous substantive changes, usually careless misprints: 'acquaint' for 'acquit' (A3v l. 16), 'Shropshire' for 'Shrewsbury' (13.29), 'Force' for 'Forces' (17.17), 'Letter says' for 'Letters say' (29.36), 'liberty' for 'your liberty' (35.38), etc. The printer's attitude toward accidentals is also casual; on a single page, p. 21, for example, one finds 'Psha?' for 'Psha!' (l. 10), 'Welch' for 'Welsh' (l. 19), the substantive omission 'far' for 'far as' (l. 24) and 'Complexion' for 'Complection' (ll. 26-27). The pirate consistently spells 'Battle' instead of 'Battel'. He does not hesitate to change spelling or punctuation. His concern is, once again, for what shows.

The pirate-printer was even able to practice certain economies. The same headband had been used in Lintot's editions of The Lying Lover, 1732, on A2; The Recruiting Officer, 1733, p. 95; and The Beaux' Stratagem, 1733, p. 89. A single counterfeit ornament appears in the piracies of The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem, and although I have not seen Mr. Foxon's Lying Lover, I would not be surprised to find it there. Again, another ornamental headband appeared in the originals on A4 and p. 54 of The Lying Lover and p. 3 of The Beaux' Stratagem, and the pirate doubtless saved work by reusing his imitation of it too.

While no one could quarrel with the efficiency of the pirate—his ruse, after all, worked, and he remained undiscovered for more than two hundred years—almost anyone could marvel at his motivation. With The Recruiting Officer, first published in April 1706, and The Beaux' Stratagem, first published in April 1707, as with the piracies described by Dawson and Foxon, the copyright had expired 10 April 1731 according to the Copyright Law of 1710. Dawson conjectured that the Shakespeare piracies occurred after 1731; Foxon knew The Lying Lover could be no earlier than 1733. With the Farquhar plays, obviously the piracy can not predate 1733, since that is the date of the editions which were imitated. Therefore copyright was not a legal issue. It is true that the owners of old copyrights managed by bluffing, largely through temporary injunctions and the threat of costly legal suits, to keep younger and less well-heeled booksellers away from lucrative copyrights such as Shakespeare.[4] But if The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer could fall into the category of copyrights worth fighting over, it is scarcely believable that The Lying Lover, a dismal failure on stage that folded after six nights and never played again until a last run of four nights in 1746,[5] could be worthy of dispute.

The most logical explanation is the one that both Dawson and Foxon suggested: copies were surreptitiously printed in order to fill out collections

of plays when the old runs of single plays had been exhausted. Dawson and Foxon concluded that the culprit might well be William Feales: the copies they found were bound in The English Theatre, the collection which Feales pieced together by buying up old copies of plays and later supplemented with new copies when the old ones ran out. Furthermore, none of the piracies that they found bore Feales's imprint. The Shakespearean piracies were sold by various booksellers, A. Bettesworth and F. Clay; Mary Paulson, Bettesworth, R. Caldwell, and Clay; and Tonson, J. Darby, Bettesworth, and Clay. The Lying Lover was printed for Lintot. Foxon conjectured that perhaps Feales pirated it rather than Steele's other plays because the other three were published by Tonson, with whom Feales was on good terms, "but perhaps difficulties arose with Lintot."

The pirated Beaux' Stratagem, however, cancels the probability of such an explanation, for the "good" 1733 edition bore the names of Lintot and Feales together on the imprint. Obviously there would be little point in Feales's counterfeiting his own legitimate edition. Even the possibility that Feales could have reprinted the 1733 edition to fill out volumes of The English Theatre after a quarrel with Lintot must be rejected, for the next edition, in 1736, once again cites both names in the imprint. Furthermore, whereas the first four piracies to be discovered appeared in copies of The English Theatre, the two Folger copies of The English Theatre contain copies of the legitimate 1730 and 1733 editions of The Beaux' Stratagem and The Recruiting Officer; the Folger copy of the pirated Beaux' Stratagem is bound in a two-volume nonce collection under a binder's title "Select Comedies" and "Select Tragedies", which includes plays dated 1724 to 1747 printed variously for Tonson, Lintot, Knapton, Longman, Draper, Watts, and others. Undeniably the piracy could have appeared in The English Theatre, but in the case of Farquhar we have no evidence that it did.[6]

Feales typically bought remainder stocks of plays and reissued them in collections with his title-pages. By 1733 he had a thriving business with Tonson, issuing new editions of Shakespeare with his name in the imprint, and he also published in conjunction with Lintot, John Clarke, J. Watts, J. Woodward, the Wellingtons, Bettesworth, Clay, and other booksellers. Robert Walker, in his attempt to free Shakespeare from Tonson's tight grip in 1734, denounced Feales as a member of the greedy establishment who were trying to retain illegal rights to print best sellers such as Shakespeare.[7] Feales was in very good odor indeed at the probable time of the piracies, and apparently he was embarked on most lucrative publishing ventures. For him surreptitiously to counterfeit his own legitimate stock simply does

not make sense, even if he needed to replenish a diminishing stock. He could have openly had The Beaux' Stratagem reissued as he did The Conscious Lovers in 1735. There could be no sane business reason to engage in piracy. It would seem that he bought these copies of Shakespeare and Steele in good faith.

Who, then, was the pirate? Unless the forged headpieces can be traced, it will be hard indeed to indict anyone, but as Professor James G. McManaway pointed out to me, if the pirate was really concerned about detection, he would have abandoned the headpieces after using them. The pieces that were imitated can be linked with books printed for Lintot. The initial C on p. 5 of The Beaux' Stratagem belongs to a set of initials, identifiably similar, used by Lintot's printer in various plays. The headpiece on p. 5 was used on A3 of the fourth edition of The Works of Mr. Edmund Smith, published by Lintot in 1729; the one on p. 89 appears on A5v and the one on p. 3 on A6 of Baker's Tunbridge Walks, printed for Lintot and sold by Feales, 1733; and the one on p. 89 reappears on p. 95 of the 1733 Recruiting Officer. In each case, it is the legitimate ornament rather than the copy that appears. But I have not discovered the counterfeits in any texts that postdate the piracies, and obviously they would not have appeared earlier since they were made in order to resemble the ornaments in the 1733 editions. Nor have I found elsewhere the ones used in the Shakespeare or The Lying Lover.

Robert Walker comes to mind as a possible suspect. He locked horns with Tonson and Feales on printing Shakespeare in 1734-35.[8] Walker was publishing under his own imprint by 1729,[9] but nothing is known of his activities between then and 1734; at any rate, he was certainly on the scene at an appropriate time to counterfeit the 1733 editions. However, the meticulous care and secretiveness of the pirate is completely uncharacteristic of Walker's blatancy and his crude printing. Walker openly defied Tonson's phony claim of copyright in 1734-35. Furthermore his printing skill was not notable, and he used and reused a very meagre store of carved ornaments in the Shakespeare and The Beauties of the English Stage of 1740, none of which are those of the piracies.

Surprisingly, however, when Walker printed an edition of The Recruiting Officer in 1739, he used as copy not the legitimate edition of 1733 or 1736, but the forgery. Consistently his text agrees with that of the pirate on substantives as well as accidentals. The only exceptions are those points at which the pirate is obviously wrong; for example, 'acquit' once again replaces 'acquaint' in a reference to acquitting a manager of a charge (A3v l. 16), and the misspelling 'whithin' (38.31 of the piracy) returns to

'within'. With the exception of that kind of error and, rarely, a non-significant change ('myself' in the original [30.10], 'my self' in the piracy, 'myself' in Walker), Walker very closely follows the piracy in every case in which it differs from the original. The use of the piracy as copy could be a mere coincidence, but at least it suggests the possibility that in his early days Walker was far more careful and discreet about printing plays than he was to be with Shakespeare and The Beauties of the English Stage.

But if Walker is suspicious, he is certainly not indictable. And so for now, the pirate retains his well-deserved anonymity. His skill was consummate. Surely in the future, magnifying glasses in hand, we will find that his range was wider than the odd assemblage of six plays that we have thus far discovered. And perhaps, with sufficient diligence and good luck, we will even unmask him. Even if his face remains unknown, however, his hand will probably be increasingly visible.

Notes