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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,
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
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