University of Virginia Library

§16. When, How Many, and How Fast?

I have argued that the complexity of ToP shows the printer's response to a
high but short-lived demand for a text, so it behooves us to ask: were they first put
on sale, how many copies were printed, and how long did it take to print them?
Although ToP is the most thoroughly documented stage production before 1640,
the archival record fails to give straightforward answers to these questions. The
relevant documents are as follows: 41

• 17 October 1633: a letter from Thomas Coke to his father Sir John mentions
  that the King had requested the masque "about a fortnight agoe". "Who is the
  poet or who makes the maske dance I doe not yet understand." 42 We do not know
  whether Thomas was simply not privy to the decision process, or whether the
  organizers had not yet picked their poet. But if his chronology can be trusted, the
  members of the Inns had only four months to find a writer, commission music,
  construct sets and costumes, learn the parts, and pull it all together. No wonder
  that Coke, in the same letter, reports "no law studied in the Ins of Court now all
  turnd dancing scools".
• Bulstrode Whitelocke, in his Memorials of the English Affairs, gives an even
  shorter timeline, dating the original idea ofthe masque to "about Allholantide"—
  so, around the beginning of November, with three months to prepare. 43
• 17 January 1634: Shirley is admitted to membership in Gray's Inn. This honor
  is recorded on the earliest states of the title page of ToP, so it would seem to
  provide a terminus post quem for the first printing. However, I have suggested in
  my discussion of the title-page variants in §4A that Shirley's claim to the honor
  might have anticipated its actual granting, which created an embarrassment that
  led to the subsequent deletion of "of Grayes Inne" from the title pages of Phase
  II of the preliminaries. So, this timepoint could be less significant than it seems.
  It is possible, however, that his actual admittance was contingent on delivery of
  the completed manuscript.
• 24 January: the publisher William Cooke brings a copy of ToP to Stationers
  Hall for license and registry. The entry, signed by Cooke, reads "Entred for his
  copy under the hands of Master Attorney Sir John ffinch and Master weaver
  warden The maske of the four Inns of Court with the Sceane as it is to be presented
  before his Maiesty at Whitehall the third of ffebruary next." (Finch was one of the
  eight members of the main committee overseeing the masque, and one of two
  from Gray's Inn. Edmund Weaver was the Stationers' Company official who
  recorded the entry.) The wording of the entry shows that the clerk, as we would
  expect, was looking at a manuscript rather than the printed book. It is entirely
  possible that Norton was already hard at work on ToP, but a scrupulous printer
  (which Norton was not) would have waited until entry was completed.
• 3 February (first performance): a warrant is issued for payment of £15 to
  "mr Sherley poett for the Masque in full of his gratuity". 44 Fifteen pounds re-
  presents the Middle Temple's quarter-share of the total amount: expenses for the
  masque were borne equally by the four Inns of Court. So, on the day of first
  performance, Shirley is authorized to be paid £60 in full for the text. However,
  a further warrant of 21 November 1634 requests £5 for Shirley on behalf of the
  Middle Temple, its share of a total additional payment of £20. 45 No reason is
  given for this warrant; either the the Inns decided on a bonus to the handsome
  original fee, or it involves compensation for writing the epilogue "A Speech to the
  King and Queenes Maiesties", which was added to copies of the last printing of
  ToP. In either case, we are still lacking pieces of the puzzle, for Shirley's eighteen-
  line addendum was certainly not worth one-third of the whole masque text. A
  general accounting of all expenses for the masque complicates matters further by
  recording a total of £100 paid to Shirley. 46 The accounts often present this sort of
  confusion. Even the second warrant's November date offers no evidence bearing
  on the printing of the epilogue, for the warrant belongs to a group of late settle-
  ments for services that were mostly rendered in February 1634 or earlier.
• John Finet, in his undated memoirs, 47 describes both performances of ToP
  and mentions "the description of the Maske since being printed". This seems to
  mean that the book was not finished even by the time of the second performance
  on 13 February. But drawing a definite conclusion from Finet's wording runs the
  risk of being over-literal.
• Between 3 and 13 February: Justinian Pagitt writes to his cousin Tremyll, 48 "I
  have sent you a booke of our Masque which was presented on munday last." So,
  the second performance had apparently not yet taken place. At the time of writ-
  ing, Pagitt was a member of the Middle Temple in his early twenties, and he rode
  in the procession introducing the first performance. We cannot say for certain
  that the "booke" he sent was a printed copy, but it would seem extravagant to
  prepare a 7500–word manuscript to send away to a cousin. All of the surviving
  eyewitness accounts focus on the visual and social aspects of the performance;
  none mentions the qualities of Shirley's text.
• 19 February: William Gawdy writes to his father Framlingham, sending him
  a copy of "the booke". 49 William, aged about 22, had used family connections
  to get a ticket to the second performance. Again it is not certain that he was
  sending a printed copy, but the combination with Pagitt's letter adds to the evi-
  dence that the book had come out at least by mid-February. If manuscripts were
  circulating, Pagitt and Gawdy would more likely refer to them as "copies" than
  as "books". 50 Furthermore, neither man is known to have had direct access to
  Shirley, and it was only from Shirley or the very few organizers of the event that
  complete transcriptions of the masque could legitimately have been had. (Even
  the actors would have received copies only of their own parts, with cues.) The
  circumstances of the masque made it ideal for publication, and it was in nobody's
  interest to cut into potential profit by encouraging scribal circulation.
• 21 November 1634: John Herne, disburser of funds for the masque, issues
  a warrant for 25s. payable to "mr Wakelye—printer". 51 This figure represents
  the Middle Temple's quarter-share of a £5 payment to the book wholesaler (not
  printer) Thomas Walkley, who was evidently acting as middleman between the
  Inns and the publisher William Cooke. As with Shirley's fees, we do not know
  precisely what this payment was meant to cover, and the date of the warrant
  probably has little relation to the dates of services rendered.

From a marketing standpoint, it would have been ideal to have the printed
book available the day of the first performance, if not a few days before. Milit-
ating against that were the short timeline from the conception of the masque to
its performance and the inevitability of many last-minute changes, particularly
in the procession. Whitelocke's memoirs tell of adjustments made to head off
squabbles over matters like precedence and color schemes. 52 Such frictions must
have been constant, especially in the staging of a masque that dealt so overtly
with class conflict. 53 In §9A, I showed that the first impression of quire A, which

contains the description of the procession and the decoration of the Banqueting
Hall, was printed after the text of the masque itself, comprising quires B-D. This
sequence probably reflects the order in which the sections arrived at Norton's
shop. A professional like Shirley would first compose the more laborious liter-
ary portion of his commission, then turn to the reportage. Small changes to the
latter could be incorporated up to, and even during, the printing of the quire
containing it. 54

Printed masques conventionally preface the main text with a description of
the set design in the past tense, and the title page almost always gives an exact
date of performance. These features create a framing device that presents the
performance—usually the only one—as a fait accompli. This convention might
have no more value in dating the publications than a condemned criminal's "last
words", which might be already printed and available at the public execution. 55
But there is no more reason to suppose that masques were printed in advance of
their performance than there is for any other type of dramatic text. Specifically,
we have no evidence that the first printed ToP was available before or at the first
performance, but we have good reason to believe that it came out shortly after-
wards, even before the second performance.

As to how many were printed, there is no archival record. In fact, we have
almost no figures for the edition size of any early Stuart dramatic text. The only
report for a play that I am aware of is 1500 copies for the second edition of Beau-
mont's Philaster (1622, STC 1682), but Peter Blayney cited this as an optimistic
response to an unusually successful first edition, and therefore atypical. 56 David
Bergeron found that the print runs for the Lord Mayors' shows in the 1630s gen-
erally ran 300–500, 57 but neither the genre nor the intended readership of these
brief accounts compare closely with those of a play or masque. Edition sizes of
non-dramatic works that emerge in archival sources vary widely, and since the

motive for recording the numbers is often a disciplinary action for irregular print-
ing, we need to exercise caution in treating the figures as normative.

In the absence of relevant archival records we can draw our evidence only
from the number of surviving exemplars. I have been able to locate 55 reason-
ably complete copies of ToP (which I define as lacking no more than one quire).
This represents an average of 13.75 copies per printing. I performed a survey of
39 editions of other individually printed masques catalogued in ESTC. These show
an average survival rate of 10.64 copies per edition (σ = 5.84; in contrast to ToP,
none of them shows evidence of reprinting from standing type). One is tempted,
then, to suppose that ToP's average print run was somewhat higher than average
for a masque. It was also unique in running to four impressions; only Chapman's
Memorable Maske, Campion's Discription of a Maske, Heywood's Loves Maistresse, and
Daniel's True Discription of a Royal Masque went into a second edition before 1640.
We could extrapolate from our reasonably hefty sample to conjecture that the four
printings of ToP yielded a total of about 1.3 ˙ 4n copies, where n is the average
print run for a masque and 1.3 is the factor by which the average print run of ToP appears to exceed that of an average masque. However, these figures rest on shaky
foundations. For several reasons, ESTC often fails to list all known copies of an
edition. This incomplete reporting could magnify the apparent disparity between
ToP's numbers and those of other masques which have not attracted as much scru-
tiny. Even if the factor 1.3 is valid, the higher-than-average survival of ToP could be
partly the result of higher retention rates due to the masque's contemporary fame.
And because we have no good evidence for the normal print run of a masque, as-
signing a value to n in the equation above is a very subjective process.

The relative sizes of ToP's four printings are also hard to fix. If we use quire C
as the most stable marker of which phase a particular copy of ToP comes from,
the numbers of survivors are 19, 10, 17, and 9 respectively. By the time I was
reaching the 50-copy mark, I assumed that the relative distributions had stabi-
lized. But I was surprised when, late in my investigations, several more copies of
ToP emerged and most of them clustered in Phase III. This skewing of the data
scuttled my preliminary conclusion that a large first printing was followed by
three approximately equal but smaller ones.

Is the spread in the survival rates of the four printings of ToP statistically significant? Suppose we assume that each production phase yielded the same
number of copies. A random sample from the entire printing history should yield
approximately equal numbers from each printing—again, 13.75 in our case. Out of a sample of 55, the chances of drawing 19, 10, 17, or 9 copies of any one print-
ing would only be about 3, 6.6, 7.1, and 4% respectively. 58 So, the dispersion ap-

pears significant, and we have reason to believe that the first and third printings
were larger than the second and fourth, perhaps by a factor of 11/2 to 2.

The temptation to estimate the print runs from these admittedly wobbly
figures is a powerful one, as some of my respected predecessors have demon-
strated with recourse to even skimpier data. I hope that the disclaimers above
will safeguard any speculations I make from hardening into claims if they are
quoted later. I will guess that the anticipation generated by the run-up to ToP's performance led Walkley or Cooke to set the initial print order optimistically
at 1200 copies. Perhaps they would have gone higher had it not been for the
Stationers' Company restriction. The three remaining printings might have con-
tained 750, 1000, and 750 copies respectively, yielding a total of 3700 copies, or 16,650 sheets. 59

The printed masque, to my thinking, was a nine-days' wonder that the text
alone could not sustain once the impact of the public spectacle faded. How
long did the interest last, and how long did it take Norton to produce the four
printings? We can start by estimating the time required for the first printing.
The initial setting contained about 24,800 ens of visible text type, not including
skeletons and display text. Donald McKenzie, in his The Cambridge University Press
1696–1712 (Cambridge: University Press, 1966), cites an exceptional typesetter
who averaged about 10,600 ens per day over a five-week period in 1702, but a
more normal rate was 6,300 ens for that compositor, and usually lower for other
individuals. 60 In January 1634, John Norton had two apprentices, the senior one
having close to seven years' experience. 61 We have no evidence that he also
employed a journeyman, but recall from �8B that a document dated one year
later charged Norton and Okes with hiring illegal workmen unaffiliated with the
Stationers' Company. This allegation makes it impossible to estimate the number and skills of workers thatNorton
could potentially put onto a job. But let us as-
sume that either Norton or his senior apprentice, working flat-out, were capable
of setting 10,000 ens per day. Based on this rate, the undistracted composing of
ToP should have occupied two and a half man-days. So, typesetting should not
have been a bottleneck in getting ToP onto the market.

Presswork went slower than composing, for a comparable amount of text. In
the case of the Cambridge Press, McKenzie found that "an output of well over
1000 perfected sheets a day from a full-press [employing two men] was quite
regularly achieved and sustained for lengthy periods." 62 ToP comprised four and

a half sheets. If we apply McKenzie's finding to my hypothetical figure of 1200
copies for the first printing of ToP, a full-press dedicated to the one job should
have taken about five and a half days—just short of a regular work-week—to
machine the nine formes of ToP, not counting the time to change the formes. If
Norton delegated two men to the press and one man to composing (and distrib-
uting, for the first italic raid), he should have been able to complete Phase I with a hard six-day week's work plus an extra day or so. Of course, preparing for
the job—making design decisions, casting off copy, readying the paper, cutting
frisket sheets, and the like—would have taken some additional time. But one can
imagine Norton receiving copy as late as the day of registry—24 January—and,
if necessary, having finished books from Phase I available very shortly after the
first performance nine days later.

The later printings, since they re-used standing type to varying degrees, de-
manded much less composition time. Norton's shop set 24,800 ens for Phase I;
Phase II involved the resetting of about 9680 ens, Phase III (including its sub-
phases) 3960, and Phase IV 4110. Nicholas Okes had to set 6220 ens for his
Phase III quire D; then his Phase IV was either an unaltered reimpression or was
printed as part of Phase III. I have figured his total press time as the same either
way. Using my thoroughly unreliable edition sizes, and the rates of work given
above—setting 10,000 ens a day and printing 1000 sheets a day—and rounding up to the half-day, we arrive at the following approximate figures:

TABLE 43. Estimate of minimum production time for all copies

So, the entire production cycle of ToP required a little less than one man-
week of composing, and somewhat less than three weeks at full-press. Of course
these calculations cannot give an actual total. We assume, for instance, that com-
posing and presswork often went on simultaneously—a sensible apportionment
of labor in Norton's small shop would be two men printing and one composing.
His partner Okes could have been working concurrently on his share, so his

hours (though only less than two days) should not figure in the total time. And
my estimates of the print runs could be too high. All of these factors would com-
press the computed time required to print all the copies. It is worth noting that
the imprint date remains 1633 in all four impressions. For this publication Nor-
ton was using the legal calendar, in which the year date changed on Lady Day
(25 March). If the fourth printing of the ToP preliminaries began after this day,
he would have had some motivation for advancing the year date to emphasize
the book's currency. But this would have been a small improvement, and we have
seen that Norton's attention to detail was fitful at best. Still, we can say with some
confidence that Norton could not have turned out all four impressions of ToP in
less than three or four weeks.

This is a best-case estimate, and I have not factored in some contingencies
that must have dilated the history. For instance, besides the preliminary jobs al-
ready mentioned (design, frisket cutting, etc.), I have omitted the time required
to compose the title page, other display lines, and skeletons. Every setting or
resetting implies a distribution; because that job can be put off indefinitely, or
run concurrently with printing, I have ignored it in my calculations. Most impor-
tantly, the later italic raids show that Norton had one or more other jobs in train
along with ToP, as was normal in printing shops. Since I have not been able to
identify these jobs, I cannot gauge their impact on the ToP history.

The paper evidence, on the other hand, serves to constrain the timeline. I
have assembled watermark information, in more or less detail, for three-fifths of
the copies of ToP as well as (mostly single copies of) fourteen of the twenty-seven
publications Norton put his name to in 1633 and 1634. Among this group, ToP is almost unique in having one type of mark that I have not found named or
described anywhere. In one version, it is a fat spindle with pointed or slightly
rounded terminations; in the other, one end of the spindle is either a full semi-
circle or softly flattened into a broad but still curved base, the other end being
pointed. (Figure 4 gives slightly idealized renderings.) All varieties have a sinuous
line inside, running roughly down the long axis, usually connected to the spindle
at the sharper end and sometimes terminating in a loop inside. Most of the forms
have an additional short line coming out of each end, often with its own termi-
nating loop. I have found eight spindle variations in ToP, and in Phases I-III of
quires A-D it is the dominant type of mark. Second most common is a hand, usu-
ally containing the initials "PD" (four varieties). Another has initials "GM", and
in a sixth variety the initials are lacking or illegible. The hands all have a flower
or a grape cluster at the fingertips. The third type of mark includes six varieties
of pot, two containing the initials RP or RF. One of these may have a handle and
might therefore be called a jug. Finally, there is one example of a broad mark
(over four centimeters) of uncertain form, but apparently bracketed by two short
convex columns. I have called this "posts". In all the copies examined, only one
sheet (quire C of B.L. Ashley 1696) seemed to lack a mark. The frequencies of
the marks in quires A-D are as follows: 63

[Description: FIGURE 4. Spindle watermarks in Triumph of Peace. ]

TABLE 44. Distribution of watermarks by phases

         

Phase	Spindle	Hand	Pot	Posts	No mark
I	29 (71%)	9 (22%)	2 (5%)	0	1 (2%)
II	22 (92%)	1 (4%)	0	1 (4%)	0
III	18 (90%)	2 (10%)	0	0	0
IV	9 (36%)	12 (48%)	4 (16%)	0	0

The spindles, I believe, are significant for two reasons. First, their frequency
drops at Phase IV, with hands coming into the majority and pots making a surge.
Although the sample size is small, these shifts could indicate a transition into a
different mixture of paper stocks and hence a rather longer pause after Phase III
than after I or II. Secondly, of the other books printed by Norton in 1633–34
that I was able to examine, only one contains a spindle: that is the Huntington
copy of the seventh quarto of Richard II , dated 1634. It has two specific versions
found in ToP, as well as two ToP hands, along with two marks which I found in
Richard II only. The received wisdom about printers' paper stocks is that they
bought only what they needed for specific jobs, and this makes economic sense.
Indeed, the stock found in ToP Phases I-III is consistent with a single batch of
paper assembled by a vendor from the products of two or more makers. The
odd post or pot could either be odds slipped into the ream by the vendor or
leftovers from a previous lot remaining in Norton's shop. In practice, the end of
a job never precisely coincides with the end of the paper supply, and Norton was
a busy man, printing about 250 edition-sheets that we know of in 1633 (though
that number drops to around 150 the next year). A more sensible response to a
continuous need for the middling-quality pot-sized paper found in virtually all
of Norton's books of the period would be to periodically estimate the projected
demand for incoming work and top off an in-shop supply that all the jobs could
draw upon. Thus, we would expect frequently to find the same marks (by which

I mean paper from the same specific moulds) in publications printed around the
same time. This is the sort of evidence we find in ToP and Richard II , 64 and I pre-
dict that if more copies of the latter are examined, they will contain a proportion
of spindles to hands comparable to that of Phase IV of ToP. A finding of similar
paper stocks would indicate that the two books were printed in quick succession,
ToP first, or even with some overlap.

The distinctive mixture of marks in the four phases of ToP tightens their
temporal bond. It reinforces the evidence that Norton produced the first three
impressions in as short a time as he could. It also shows that there is little chance
that he paused for long between Phases III and IV. Standing paper, like stand-
ing type, is vulnerable to appropriation by more urgent projects. The fact that
the paper in Phase IV shows significant overlap with the distinctive paper stock
used in the previous printings is consistent with my finding of broken types from
Phase III recurring in Phase IV (�9D). Both support a conclusion that Norton
did not wait long before embarking on the last impression. I would guess that the
four print runs were all over within two months.