University of Virginia Library

Abraham Fleming: A Learned Corrector in 1586-87
by
Elizabeth Story Donno

I

Textual investigators are increasingly coming to acknowledge the role of an in-house proofreader or an outside "learned corrector" in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; given the emphasis on the importance of the function in two seventeenth-century manuals—one from the continent and one from England—such acknowledgement is perhaps somewhat tardy. In his Orthotypographia (Leipzig 1608), Hieronymous Hornschuch says that a corrector is bound to check everything two or three times, while in his Mechanic Exercises (1683-84) Joseph Moxon calls for a second and sometimes a third proof before the forme goes to press; this is followed by a "review" (or revise).[1] Though these injunctions have at times been claimed as archetypal rather than practical, they would seem in fact to reflect something of current practice as interpreted by Donald F. McKenzie in his provocative article "Printers of the Mind" and by Peter Blayney in his study The Texts of King Lear and their Origins.[2]

Although the size and affluence of the printing house were clearly determinants in the employment of proof correctors, a most important one was the nature of the subject matter, if legal, theological, or Holy Writ. When Bishops Sandys, for example, was appointed to prepare the Bishops' Bible, he recommended that the text be diligently surveyed by well-learned men before printing began and that skilful and diligent correctors attend while it was being printed; for the printing of the Geneva Bible a few years later, the Queen's printer Christopher Barker declared that he had retained three learned men as correctors.[3] These instances of course relate to perhaps the most important text for the period, but what was the extent of proof correcting for other important but not sacrosanct texts? The concern of this essay is with an example of the second sort.

Instances of marked proof thought to represent different stages of correction have been discovered, among them the page from Antony and Cleopatra—well known because of its inadvertent inclusion in a copy of the first Shakespeare Folio—with its seventeen marked and two unmarked errors; this, McKenzie has observed, may represent a revise since the earlier stages would have been the least likely to survive. David Foxon has called attention to a later instance—the separate proofsheets of William Cartwright's Royall Slave (1639, 1640), which, in their freedom from obvious error, he suggested,

may represent "second proofs," and Blayney has referred to other examples of single proof-sheets, frequently printer's waste, ranging in date from 1526 to 1625.[4]

Recently the Huntington Library has obtained a much more extensive and impressive example from the sixteenth century: two bound copies of proofsheets of Holinshed's Chronicles published in 1587 in three volumes. This second edition expanded and brought up to date matters relating to Ireland, Scotland, and England, some of which were of great concern to the government as evidenced by the castrations to which it was subjected by the Privy Council and/or their examiners.[5] Published by a syndicate of London printer-publishers—John Harrison, George Bishop, Ralph Newberrie, Henry Denham, and Thomas Woodcock, the first two of whom had been members of the initial three-man syndicate that published the original edition in two volumes ten years earlier—it undoubtedly involved an enormous expenditure.[6] When entry was made in the Stationers' Register in 1584, two of the members of the syndicate—Bishop and Newberrie—were serving as wardens. Added, then, to the political importance the government attached to the texts was its financial importance to the five printers subsidizing the venture; for the reading public its importance lay in its registering the history of the nation in "perpetuall memorie" (or "infamie") as the Scots presbyterians were quick to point out in their objections to the including of certain matters (Donno, "Some Aspects," pp. 233-238).

According to the title page, editorial credit is given to John ap Vowell "and others," but it has been recognized for some time that it was Abraham Fleming who served as the general editor, with Vowell contributing to the Irish history, Francis Thynne to the Scots, and Stow to the English; due recognition is given to them by initials or names within the text and to other various contributors.[7] In addition to his editorial duties of compiling and organizing the texts, Fleming had other duties equally onerous; they include the extensive indices that he prepared for the three volumes (apart from the contributions on Ireland by Vowell who himself indexed these); the careful proofreading of the texts, certainly for the first two volumes as will be demonstrated below, and in part for Volume 3, where several hands were at work; finally, the necessary splicing and substitution of materials as a result of official scrutiny. How the marked proofsheets came to be preserved is something of a mystery; the most likely explanation is that it was Fleming himself, who, having "sweated mightily" in correcting and expanding the text (as Thynne puts it in his bibliography of sources), kept them as a testament to his manifold efforts.[8]

Little biographical information has come to light about proof correctors in Elizabethan London, leaving the twentieth-century student with only a vague sense that they were probably "learned" and willing or unwilling accessories to litigation. On the basis of two Chancery suits, Percy Simpson was able to specify the names at least of three: Richard Day, a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, who worked for his printer father from 1576 to 1579, replacing one William Gace, and Robert Hewes of London who was working

as a press corrector for Henry Middleton in 1587.[9] With Fleming, the case is different. For more than a decade preceding the publication of the Holinshed he was involved with at least fifteen printing houses in a variety of capacities: as poet, translator, editor, "gatherer," i.e. compiler, indexer, and finally as learned corrector, and a sharp sense of his personal predilections emerges from his printed comments. These are a pronounced religious fervor, a sense of intellectual superiority, and a truculent mode of expression. During this period (drab though it seemed to C. S. Lewis and may seem to us), the literary efforts of writers like Barnabe Googe, Arthur Golding, Timothy Kendall, George Whetstone, Reginald Scot, as well as Fleming himself, contributed to developing a broad reading audience to the economic benefit of printer and publisher alike. Fleming's commendatory verses to their works indicate that he was very much in touch with the London literary scene in the 1570's and '80's.

II

"Londoner borne," as he was to specify a number of times in works published from 1582 on, Fleming had gone up to Cambridge in 1570 where his brother Samuel had preceded him, having entered King's (from Eton) five years earlier at the age of seventeen. From the date on his epitaph which Fleming himself composed, he, too, would have been either seventeen or eighteen years old when he became a sizar at Peterhouse.[10] Even though he was not to receive his degree until 1581-82, he had been looking to a career in London publishing even earlier since his first two publications identify him as "student." In the dedication to the first of these, a translation of the Bucolics of Virgil (STC 2 24816, 1575) into "plaine and familiar . . . verse," i.e. riming fourteeners, which was accompanied by alphabetical annotations, he complains that the "printer" was sparing of cost—"coveting to compasse much with little charge"—and in such haste to have the work dispatched that he lightly regarded what he, Fleming, "by tossing, tumbling, and ruffling divers authors to and fro" had collected and assembled (A3). The printer was John Charlewood, the publisher Thomas Woodcocke, later a member of the Holinshed syndicate. Despite such sparing of cost, Fleming puffs the practical value of the publication, specifying as one of its advantages "a mitigation of expence, or (that I may speake more familiarly) a saving of money," this on the grounds of the inclusion of an abridged "dictionary" which by itself would exceed the price of "this libell by pence, groates, and shillings" (A4). Both dedication and address to the reader are signed "Abraham Fleming, Student."

After listing the errors to be corrected, Fleming moderates his tone in requesting the gentle reader to mark and amend those that have escaped the translator's pen, the compositor's hand, the corrector's eye, and the printer's press, a clear indication that the work had been proofed either by the translator himself or someone in the printing house. He ends his text with the statement in Latin that it was a work of fourteen days during left-over and stolen hours, a statement made perhaps in emulation of Thomas Phaer who had been careful to specify the number of days required for each book of his

translation of the Aeneid (1558), for example, Book 2: Opus viginti dierum; Book 4: Opus quindecim dierum, etc.

Curiously, Fleming published another version of the Bucolics at the very end of his secular career, this time "not in foolish rime (the nice observation whereof many times darkeneth, corrupteth, perverteth, and falsifieth both the sense and the signification) but in due proportion and measure" (A4v). And he continues, "As for envie I defie it; and to find faults I wish silence, whose only worke it is to barke at other mens painfull labours . . . ." This appeared in 1589, together with a translation of the Georgics (or Rurals, STC 2 24817), both dedicated to Archbishop Whitgift; the publisher again was Thomas Woodcocke. In the second dedication Fleming roundly asserts that he cares not for the curious and malicious: "both being persons swift to prejudicate, but slow to deliberate; ripe to deface and discountenance, but rawe to correct or imitate the commendable travels of well affected Students" (A2). The conclusion of the text reads FINIS propositi, laus Christo nescia FINIS, which as will appear later served as his personal mode of identification during the last six years of his career in London publishing.

His second publication as a student (1576) was also a translation, a "pamphlet or skantling," i.e. an abridgement of John Caius's treatise on English dogs. Concluding his address to the "well disposed Reader" comes this somewhat churlish statement: "As for such as shall snarr and snatch at the Englishe abridgement, and teare the Translatour, being absent, with the teeth of spightfull envye, I conclude in brevity their eloquence is but currishe[;] if I serve in their meate with wrong sawce, ascribe it not to unskilfulnesse in coquery, but to ignoraunce in their diet. . . . His and his Friendes, Abraham Fleming" (STC 2 4347).

The printer and publisher was Richard Jones, who according to McKerrow's Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers was on the whole an orderly member of the Stationers' Company and had a long career.[11] At this date he seems not to have had a complete Greek fount, for after the alphabetical index, the first of many Fleming was to compile, comes the listing of four errors to be corrected, followed by the explanatory remark, "There bee also certaine Accents wanting in the Greeke words which, because we had them not, are pretermitted: so have wee byn fayne to let the Greeke words run their full length, for lack of Abbreviations" (H3).

Since no other publication identifies Fleming as "student," one may conclude that he went to London some time in 1576 or 1577, though he does not identify himself as Londoner so far as I have noted until 1582.[12] It was during these two years that he composed the commendatory poems mentioned above and contributed verses to the account of Frobisher's second voyage published in 1577 (STC 2 22265/6) as he was to do again the following year for the third voyage (STC 2 7607). He also published four translations, some merely pamphlet size, but all no doubt "though breefe and compendious, yet pithie and profitable" as he expressed it in STC 2 18413). For two of these Woodcock was again the publisher, while Ralph Newberrie, later a member of the syndicate, was the publisher of one, and perhaps it was he

who enlisted Fleming in his first indexing project—a large table of both words and matter for the 1576 edition of Googe's translation of Palingenius' Zodiac of Life, the fourth that Newberrie had published. Such active involvement with authors and publishers during this two-year period suggests that Fleming had turned his sights away from Cambridge toward the opportunities in London—an inference his tardy B.A. would also support.

In 1579 Fleming began his important connection with Henry Denham, later not only a member of the syndicate but also the printer of the Holinshed. In possession of a large stock of initials, ornaments, and borders, he had acquired around 1574 William Seres' patent for printing the Psalter, Primer for little children, and all books of private prayers in Latin and English; both stock and patent he was later to use in Fleming's behalf. One of two items published in 1579 was a "prettie pamphlet . . . replenished with recreation," a translation of Synesius' mock-encomium of baldness; to this was annexed the "Tale of Hemetes," which had been delivered before the queen at Woodstock (1575), "newly recognized," that is, revised, both in Latin and English. Since the Tale, which had greatly pleased the queen, was formerly assumed to be by George Gascoigne, Sidney Lee in the DNB accused Fleming of having boldly appropriated it for this 1579 publication. Later it was ascertained that the Tale is an anonymous work and that in angling for foreign employment, Gascoigne had translated the manuscript into Latin, French, and Italian in order to demonstrate his linguistic skills, and it was this triple translation that he presented to the queen on New Year's Day, 1576. Though A. W. Pollard observed that Fleming's "recognition" amounted to very little, his investigations at least absolved him from the charge of bold annexation.[13]

The following year Fleming showed his literary ingenuity by writing a biography of William Lamb, a long-lived public benefactor who had been a gentleman of the Chapel Royal to Henry VIII and who among his other public works built a conduit in Holburn (1577) stocked with one hundred and twenty pails to enable women to sell water. Utilizing only Lamb's will, Fleming was able to spin out a Memorial of his accomplishments; among them he refers to a prayerbook called the Conduit of Comfort, published under his, i.e. Lamb's, name, (C3v, together with a marginal reference). According to STC 2 (11037.3), a work of this title, assigned to Fleming, was published by Denham in 1579 (3 leaves extant, BL). It was entered in the Stationers' Register 26 June as "composed by Abraham fflemminge" with a fifth impression appearing in 1624.[14] Fleming comments that the benefit of this prayer-book "being bought for a little monie, [Lamb] was willing should be generall, even as the Conduite which he founded not severall but common." In 1580 Fleming again paid tribute to Lamb, devising an epitaph on his "godlie life and death," a broadside which Denham, as with the earlier Memorial, printed for Thomas Turner (STC 2 11038). He was to insert this material into the Holinshed as drawn from an "unspecified memorial"—his own—still in print, based on Lamb's "last will and testament."[15]

Increasingly during the years 1580 to 1582, Fleming's efforts as translator, editor, or compiler were concentrated on religious works, and most of these

included proper indices of the principal points of doctrine as well as tables of commonplaces, the latter items indicating one direction toward which publishers were looking. Fleming was now being employed by a number of different houses though for two popular devotional treatises Denham was again both printer and publisher. The first of these entitled The Diamond of Devotion, Cut and squared into sixe severall points (with special titles such as A Swarme of Bees which consists of a hundred maxims beginning with B) has an elaborate four-piece border on each page, a design greatly delighting Henry R. Plomer.[16] Appearing in 1581, it went through five editions. The second (1582), the Monomachie of motives (STC 2 11048), was equally elaborate.

Though as early as 1580 Fleming had augmented John Baret's quadruple dictionary (An Alvearie, STC 2 1410) by means of specialized indices including two hundred proverbs—a number that would have been increased had not "the gatherer bene surcharged with other necessarie and dailie businesse" (4N4)—he was to revise and augment others during the years 1583-85, including John Withal's very popular Short Dictionary (which went through fifteen editions plus several issues up to 1634 under various editors); to the text of 1584, with three more editions to 1599, Fleming added six hundred rhythmical verses and interspersed proverbial statements throughout. For the English translation the next year of the Nomenclator of Hadrian Junius (STC 2 14860) he provided a "dictional Index," consisting of c. 1400 principal words, which, in Fleming's view, was devised according to an "exquisite method." Following the list of errors to be corrected comes the trunculent statement: Cætera ut possis castigato.[17]

Except for this one index, from 1585 up to 1587 Fleming was not named, it seems, in any published work so one may well conceive that during this time he was assiduously at work on the text of the three volumes of the Holinshed. In his capacity as general editor, he made brief insertions, specifying that they were taken from Grafton's Abridgement, Stow's Summary and other such helps as came to hand; these he takes care to acknowledge in the margin, for example, "Abr. Fl. ex I.F. [Martyrologia]". Unlike his rhyming, Fleming's prose is serviceable though it often reflects his strong Protestant and anti-papal sentiments as in this instance newly appended to the reign of Queen Mary: "Thus farre the troublesome reigne of Queene Marie the first of that name (God grant she may be the last of hir religion) eldest daughter to king Henrie the eight." After his editing and indexing duties came the arduous task of proofreading which is discussed below; that he was well occupied during this period is attested by the apology he appended to the index to Foxe's Eicasmi seu meditationes in sacram Apocalypsin, printed also in 1587 by George Bishop, a member of the syndicate (entered 7 March 1586): "O kind reader, I request you, as you are fair minded to correct the more serious errors which you may notice have crept into this index because of the absence of the proof reader from the press, and bear with patience the more trivial errors. Ab. Fl."[18]

By the end of January 1587 the three volumes were ready for submission

to the Privy Council; on 1 February they directed Archbishop Whitgift to stay further sale until the contents had been reviewed and reformed, naming three examiners who for greater speed should divide the work among themselves and others they thought meet for the purpose.[19] This examination resulted in excisions with the consequent need for splicing the text as mentioned above.

III

The remainder of this account deals with the proof corrections on the basis of the copies at the Huntington. Volume 3, the first obtained, was discovered in Quaritch's basement by Jerry D. Melton, a Holinshed buff. Having purchased the volume, he carefully correlated the marked corrections with another of his copies, sometimes two, and recorded nearly 6,000 instances, a record on deposit at the Huntington (along with the volume itself which it later purchased). In most cases the corrections called for were made, the vast majority having to do with spacing, punctuation, and replacement of defective type and wrong founts. Though Volume 3 shows the hands of several correctors, some corrections can be recognized as Fleming's, for example, when he shows honor to the deity in altering secundum Deū to secundũ Deum and to himself in substituting a marginal statement of four lines by John Cheke with one of his own of three lines (this not made in all copies that I have seen). As a result of Melton's having written up an account of his findings, Volumes 1-2 (bound as one) amazingly surfaced, and these the Huntington purchased at auction; the pre-sale estimate of the number of corrections was more than 2,000 even though some pages have no marks.[20]

Their number may seem extraordinary (but compare Hinman's projection from Antony and Cleopatra cited in n. 4). Even more extraordinary is their overall quality, which may be termed "finicky" in their emphasis upon typographical excellence. Some, very, very few, relate to clarity of expression as in the following two most conspicuous examples from Volumes 1-2:

A vast number relate to punctuation, which of course also contributes to clarity. For much popular literature casualness may have held the day, but

for writing in Latin its importance was clearly recognized; Moxon, too, it may be remembered, declared that a corrector ought to be very sagacious in pointing.[21] Fleming obviously concurred. Many of the corrections have to do with inserting commas and colons, which are marked for spacing before and after insertion, and correcting terminal punctuation. Many have to do with the esthetics of the page; thus broken line endings are regularized most fastidiously (see Fig. 1), with the spelling adjusted to compensate for insertions, or to end a sentence at the end of the print-line, or to improve hyphenation. Marginalia is repositioned to accord with the text and preferential spelling (horsses, towards, there for ther, and advise (as a noun) indicated. Except for those indicating transposition of words or phrases, the proofreading marks would be intelligible to any corrector today.

Though I have only spot-checked the more than 2,000 corrections of Volumes 1-2 with other copies, such examination shows that the compositor was not only conscientious but even long-suffering: for a letter written by a Scot he was asked, for example, to open the inner forme in order to insert the expected Scottish "u" in five words (prison, condition, consumption, etc., 1.256.a.4-31) that had been set without it in the 1577 edition (1: 371-2). All five words have it introduced, including "consumptioun". In some cases the lack of correction was no doubt inadvertent: for example (in the History of England, 99.b.29) the correction within the text calls for substitution of a question mark followed by a capital. This was made in two of the three copies at the Huntington, but the parallel marginal correction calling for the substitution of a final j for the second i in "Gregorii," in accord with typographical convention, was ignored in all three copies. Given then the type of correction being made—no substantive matters but only "typographical infelicities," as McKenzie puts it (p. 46)—one concludes that the proof copies represent the later stage of correction that Moxon describes.

A further point of interest about these copies is that, not surprisingly, they duplicate the castrated version of the text. Clearly the syndicate, including its printer, would not risk preserving materials that the Privy Council had ordered excised. Some few copies, in fact, did survive, but in the eighteenth century the noted antiquarian Thomas Hearne had seen only two, and the Huntington Library's Longden copy includes only Volumes 1-2, none of 3.[22] In the castrated copies some few pages did escape excision (for example, in 3: 1328-31 [6M3-4] should have been cancelled and replaced by

a substitute paged 1328/30, but in the Huntington Library's Bridgewater copy, the Ringler copy formerly on deposit, and Melton's two copies pages 1328-31 were not excised).

Evidence for Fleming as learned corrector is shown by the following telltale notations. In the address to the "Readers studious in histories" which introduces the history of England from earliest times (Vol. 1), he comments on the difficulties of antiquarian research, a task not "for everie common capacitie, naie it is a toile without head or taile even for extraordinarie wits, to correct the accounts of former ages so many hundred yeares received, out of uncerteinties to raise certeinties, and to reconcile writers dissenting in opinion and report." Above his name in typography comes the written inscription O quicquid donatur ingratis dilapidatur. (Whatever is given to ingrates is put down), followed by the abbreviation for "quoth", (Fig. 2), on sig. Y6.

This holograph inscription appears again at the bottom of the title page to the Description of Scotland, again at the bottom of the title page to the History of Scotland, and for a fourth time at the end of the Index to that history.

The second telltale sign is not holograph but printed; this, as mentioned earlier, served as a personal mode of identification for Fleming and appears at least ten times at the end of indices "gathered" by him from 1583 to 1589, and (apart from the presence or absence of a comma) is invariably set up to indicate a punning contrast: FINIS propositi, laus Christo nescia FINIS, which may be rendered "The end of the undertaking (but) to Christ be praise unending."[23] It appears in Volumes 1 and 2 at the end of each of the three tables he prepared (but not at the end of the one for Irish matters prepared by Hooker) and again at the end of the table for Volume 3, the table itself prefaced by the truculent statement: "If the reader be not satisfied with this table, let him not blame the order, but his owne conceipt."

At the end of the Chronicles proper, there is a bibliography of sources, identified as compiled by Francis Thynne, followed by a prayerful epilogue, this surely by Fleming. After duly commending history as the most valuable study next to that of the word of God, he concludes by invoking His blessing on the queen and her kingdom, beseeching that He protect her from the "pernicious practices of satans instruments," and to save her as the "apple of his eye."

With the completion of his onerous chores as editor, indexer, and certainly

main proof corrector of the first two volumes of Holinshed, Fleming's religious fervor won out, and in 1588 he took holy orders. Except for the translation of the Virgilian items published in the following year and the re-ordering of Cancellar's prayer-book in 1591, as mentioned earlier, he gave over his long and hardworking connection with London printing houses, but he continued to remain "Londoner," serving as chaplain to the Countess of Nottingham and rector of St. Pancras Soper-lane. After his ordination he delivered eight sermons at Paul's Cross; somewhat ironically for one so actively involved in publication, no one of these was printed.[24]

Notes