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Notes
Hornschuch's statement is cited by Peter W. M. Blayney, The Texts of King Lear and their Origins (1982), I, 192; Moxon's appears on pp. 238-239 in the edition by Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (1962).
A. W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, The Documents (1911, pp. 289, 328). According to a patent in the Oxford archives c. 1641-42, the "books of God and of the Statute law" were to be printed with greater care and examination than for ordinary ones. At that date the king's printers maintained four correctors ("att 50£ per Añ) a peice when other printers maintain but one for the like quantity of work"); the rates and prices of books were said to be the same as that which obtained forty years earlier. Cited in Percy Simpson, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries (1935), p. 179.
Charlton Hinman notes that if as many errors had been proof corrected throughout the Folio as for A and C, the press variants would have totaled something like 10,000, The First Folio of Shakespeare (The Norton Facsimile), 1968, pp. xix-xx; Foxon, "The Varieties of Early Proof: Cartwright's Royal Slave, 1639, 1640," The Library, 5th ser., 25 (1970), 151-154; Blayney, pp. 194-195.
For an account of some reasons for the castrations, see my piece, "Some Aspects of Shakespeare's Holinshed" HLQ 50 (1987), 229-248. The problems of splicing the text for both editor and printer resulting from the intervention of the censors can be briefly illustrated from Vol. 3: replacing castrated leaves 6V1 to 7I6 (pp. 1419-1538) were a new 6V1 (pp. 1419/1420), a new leaf oddly signed A, B, C, D, E (paged 1421/1490), another signed F, G, H, I (paged 1491/1536), plus an unsigned leaf (paged 1537/1538).
The multiple pagination, together with the castrations, make it difficult to compute the actual length of the work. Stephen Booth has estimated the number of words at three and a half million (The Book Called Holinshed's Chronicles [1968], p. 1), and Anne Castanien has estimated the number of pages at 2752 with more than a hundred pages of indices, charts, etc. ("Censorship and Historiography in Elizabethan England: The Expurgation of Holinshed's Chronicles," unpublished dissertation, Univ. of California, Davis, 1970, p. 136 n.). Henry Bynneman, who had held the queen's patent for all dictionaries, chronicles, and histories and printed the 1577 edition, declared in 1582 that such printing in these few years had cost him £1,200 (Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640, I, II, 1875, I, 116). The 1587 edition was of course much larger than the 1577.
Both Sarah C. Dodson ("Abraham Fleming, Writer and Editor," University of Texas Studies in English, 34 [1955], 51-66) and William E. Miller ("Abraham Fleming: Editor of Shakespeare's Holinshed," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 1 [1959-60], 89-100) have discussed aspects of Fleming's career. Indeed Miller percipiently suggested (p. 91) that Fleming was a "learned corrector" but equated it with "editor" (pp. 94, 100); in the case of the Holinshed this turns out to be correct.
For an example of the problems resulting from censorship, see n. 5. Materials relating
Simpson, pp. 138-139. For Oxford printing in the Elizabethan period he was able to cite only the classical scholar at Magdalen College John Sanford, who had served as corrector for a Latin text published in 1592 (p. 164); to this single instance James Binns ("STC Latin Books: Evidence for Printing-House Practice," Library, 5th ser., 32 [1977], 7-8) has been able to add the name of Angel Roche, commended for his proof-reading skills in the dedicatory letter of de Bury's Philobiblon published in 1599.
Fleming died in 1607—"circiter," as he says in the epitaph, age fifty-six. This is quoted in Athenae Cantabrigienses, ed. C. H. and Thompson Cooper (1861), II, 459-464, where they list fifty-seven titles of books and manuscripts with which Fleming was involved in one or another of his various capacities as translator, indexer, etc., together with an extensive list of manuscripts drawn from Fleming's papers by Francis Peck (see n. 8).
R. B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, Ireland, and of Foreign Printers of English Books, 1557-1640 (1910).
Another industrious compiler and translator during the same period, Thomas Hill (otherwise known an Didymus Mountain), also makes a point of identifying himself as "Londoner."
Pollard, Introduction to The Queen's Majesty's Entertainment at Woodstock (1903, 1910); see also C. T. Prouty, George Gascoigne, Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, and Poet (1942), pp. 221-225.
There is no attribution in STC 2 of any work by William Lamb. The title was a popular one: A. F. Allison and V. F. Goldsmith (1976) assign two such titles to W. Cowper and W. Fleetwood in their listing of anonymous books (Titles of English Books, 1475-1640). Such collections may have been thumbed into extinction as was the case with Fleming's 1591 revision of James Cancellar's popular Alphabet of Prayers (STC 2 4562) which exists in a single copy (Folger) while Oxford possesses a single leaf with colophon dated 1593.
3.1311.a.60-1313 a. 46. References to Holinshed are by volume, page, column α and b and line number.
Denham published the Alvearie alone and then with Newberrie Fleming's revision of the Veron-Waddington dictionary (STC 2 24678) in 1584 and the Junius-Higgins (STC 2 14860) in 1585. The Coopers (see n. 10) also credit Fleming with substituting the English vocabulary for the French in Morelius' Verborum Latinorum cum Graecis Anglicisque . . . Commentarij (1583) though DeWitt T. Starnes (Renaissance Dictionaries: English-Latin and Latin-English [1954], p. 205) questions their authority for this. One may note that the volume proper has commendatory verses by Fleming, that it was entered to Newberrie and Denham in 1584, and that, according to STC 2 18101, some copies have Fleming's name on the title page as compiler of the index.
Cited and translated in Binns' "STC Latin Books: Further Evidence for Printing-House Practice," Library, 6th ser., 1 (1979), 352.
Acts of the Privy Council of England, 1542-1604 (n.s., ed. J. R. Dasent, 1890-1907), 1586-87, pp. 311-312. One of the designated examiners—Henry Killigrew, an experienced diplomat—left England 25 June 1587 with Leicester on his return to the Low Countries and so the examination was probably completed by then. Since the 1577 edition had already been examined, the pages under scrutiny were not extensive—Harrison's enlarged Description of England (which may not have been reviewed); the materials added to the Irish history (from 1546 where Holinshed left off, plus a translation of Giraldus); and the more crucial extension of Scots material from 1571 to 1585 and of the English from 1576 to 1586.
For Melton's account of his discovery, see the Antiquarian Book Monthly Review (Jan., 1982), 8-11; for an account of Volumes 1-2, secured at auction, see Daniel Woodward, "The Proof of the Printing . . . ," Huntington Library Calendar (July-August, 1982), 4-5.
See Binns, "STC Latin Books . . . ," (1977), n. 9 above for Latin authorial citations and Moxon, p. 247. As Morse Peckham has observed, "Punctuation is not a form or dress
Called in at an unspecified date by Burghley to answer for a passage found offensive to the Earl of Shrewsbury, Thynne supplied a revision, admitting, however, that some few copies had earlier been dispersed. This interview must have taken place before the castrations were ordered by the Privy Council since the page on which Thynne's revision would have appeared was cancelled along with other matters thought to be offensive to the Scots (Donno, "Some Aspects," pp. 233-238).
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