Printer's Error

by Rebecca Romney

  While the practicalities of casting off wouldn’t have had a huge impact on our interpretation of Shakespeare, typesetting mistakes certainly have. In Richard II, Sir Stephen Scroop approaches King Richard to inform him of how deep the rebellion against him runs. “White beares have armed their thin and hairless scalps against thy majestie.” Apparently King Richard was so despised that even the follically challenged wild animals of England were reaching for their swords—or the typesetter’s hand slipped into the e box of type, which sat next to the box of d’s After all, “White beards [old men] have armed their thin and hairless scalps against you” makes a whole lot more sense.

  For years, people were confused about a seemingly nonsensical list of questions found in a speech in The Merchant of Venice—until it was realized that the compositor had just run out of periods and substituted question marks in their place. That doesn’t change the meaning at all, does it./?

  In the middle of King Lear, “Edmond,” an illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, gets a name change to “Bastard” in the stage directions and speech prefixes. Entire studies have been written on the significance of this appellation, as if the change showed that “his ‘bastard’ birth shaped and defined Edmond’s true self.” Or it’s entirely possible that the capital E, which was in heavy demand in a play text with frequent Enters and Exits, was sidestepped by calling [E]dmond “the Bastard,” a move that had no significance whatsoever outside the printing shop.

  So the history of print mangled Shakespeare a bit here and there, but it made up for it by immortalizing him to the ages. Single quartos were printed sporadically throughout his career as a playwright, but the first attempt to gather his plays into a printed “collection” of great Elizabethan dramas took place in 1619, three years after his death. And who better to print those plays than the object of Shakespeare’s one recorded resentment: William Jaggard.

  The printer of the falsely attributed Passionate Pilgrim was doing rather well for himself. In 1608 he purchased the business holdings of James Roberts, a well-respected London printer who had already published a few Shakespeare plays. By 1610, Jaggard was named the official Printer to the City of London, the nexus of which was the storefronts that lined St. Paul’s Cathedral.

  At first glance it might seem odd that a cathedral churchyard could be the center of the Elizabethan book trade, but the architect of this bizarre state of affairs was the same as many other bizarre states of affairs in sixteenth-century England: Henry VIII. In 1534, Henry took upon himself the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England, effectively gut-punching the authority of the Catholic Church. This was followed two years later by a wave of legal actions that dissolved every monastery, convent, and friary in England, Wales, and Ireland. All income and assets were pillaged and turned over to the Crown.

  St. Paul’s Cathedral, built five hundred years before, was appropriated and turned into a center of commerce. Overlooking the irony of Jesus casting out the moneylenders from the temple (or perhaps a blasphemous nod to it), the Catholic chapels, shrines, crypts, and other holy buildings in the churchyard were sold off as rental spaces to entrepreneurs, who were mostly Protestant. At one point, fish, fruit, ale, beer, and “other gross wares” were being sold in St. Paul’s, so in comparison, selling books there would not have been that odd. Books are at least two times more dignified than fish and six times more dignified than beer.

  By 1611, St. Paul’s Churchyard was the respectable heart of the London book trade, and William Jaggard was the man to whom you waved as he sauntered by your wares. It’s unlikely Jaggard would have waved back, however. By 1612, William Jaggard, the Printer to the City of London, was going blind.

  Ah, syphilis. In a time before penicillin, when the primary cure for syphilis was highly toxic mercury treatments, we don’t know if Jaggard went blind from his STD or its “cure.” Whatever the actual cause, by 1613 Thomas Milles, one of Jaggard’s clients, noted that the printer had lost his eyesight completely. Jaggard’s son Isaac was admitted that same year to the Stationers’ Company, which oversaw printing, and assisted his father in future business ventures.

  One of the most important of these ventures involved an extensively illustrated anatomy book by the London doctor Helkiah Crooke (a regrettable name for any doctor). On the market by 1615, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man immediately landed both Crooke and Jaggard in hot water for pornographic indecency—not so much for the “body of man” as the “body of wo-man.”

  Part of the publishing process in 1614 included submitting the text to the Bishop of London for censorship and approval. When Dr. Crooke did this, the Anglican bishop took particular offense at illustrations contained in “Of the naturall parts belonging to Generation,” which is doctor-speak for “This is the section where we talk about penises and vaginas, so let’s be adults please.” Only, surprise, surprise, the dickpics wouldn’t be the issue. Plate VI contains the drawing of a dissected female torso and abdomen, including the labeled reproductive system. Perhaps most scandalously in this medical encyclopedia is the “vaginal cleft in full anatomical detail.”

  The Bishop of London immediately took the book to the College of Physicians. The president of the college looked it over and issued his own verdict: indecency. But not for vaginal clefts. The Mikrokosmographia was the first comprehensive anatomy volume to be published in English rather than Latin. The president of the College of Physicians didn’t like this one bit. If anyone could just crack a textbook and read the words, who knew what mayhem might ensue?

  Even though England had won the battle for an English Bible, that was the Word of God, not pictures of naked ladyfolk. A responsible pedagogical illustration meant for educated men would transform into vulgar pornography if viewed by those who hadn’t been properly trained. Only educated men could get away with looking at nudity and remain free from moral corruption. A book containing nude pictures and written in the common English tongue might fall into the hands of people who were never meant to read about vaginas—women, for example. If the Mikrokosmographia were published without “the naturall parts belonging to Generation” being excised, the president of the College of Physicians threatened to “burn it wherever he found it.”

  After attempts to intimidate Dr. Cooke failed, the college went after William Jaggard, summoning him to appear before an assembled court. But Jaggard was blind, and presumably didn’t feel like it, so he sent his wife instead. The college yelled at her for a while, then sent her back to her husband, confident that Jaggard would change his mind about the printing. He did not. Mikrokosmographia was published in the spring of 1615 with no changes made whatsoever. As far as we know, the Bishop of London took no further action, the president of the College of Physicians did not become a serial book arsonist, and the city didn’t collapse because women could read anatomically accurate descriptions of va-jay-jays.

  Writers and scholars have at various times attempted to cast William Jaggard as a villain in the history of print. Charges of false advertising and forgery have followed him for hundreds of years. But there’s another picture of Jaggard that has slowly emerged from the historical record: one in which we see a defiant old printer who stuck to his guns when it came to censorship and the rights of printers and publishers. Did he imply that Shakespeare was the author of the collected poems in The Passionate Pilgrim? Yes. Did he bite his thumb at the Bishop of London and the College of Physicians when they were squeamish about feminine clefts? Also yes. Did he go blind from an STD? Irrelevant. Did he fake the title pages in a collection of plays prominently featuring Shakespeare? Okay, this one deserves a little more explaining.

  Sometime in the early months of 1619, rumors likely started circulating that Jaggard, along with a prominent stationer, Thomas Pavier, was printing a collection of plays primarily written by Shakespeare. As far as we know, the two made sure to secure rights for the individual plays from the printers who owned them. No one would have cared outside of two very prominent members
of the theatrical community: John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of the King’s Men players.

  Heminges was the oldest member of the King’s Men, and a close acting partner of Shakespeare’s since the formation of the original Chamberlain’s Men in 1594. Besides his work with Shakespeare’s plays, Heminges is best known as the CFO of the acting troupe. He was one of the eight primary shareholders of the company, and quickly became their head accountant. By the time of his death, he personally held a quarter of the shares in both the Globe and the Blackfriars, the two theaters owned by the King’s Men. And at a yearly salary of around two hundred pounds (the cost of attending university, for example, was about thirty pounds a year), Heminges was described in 1619 as a man of “great living wealth and power.”

  Few details are known about Heminges outside his interactions with the theater. Even less is known about his close financial partner, Henry Condell. Condell first shows up in the historical record as an actor in 1599, and four years later we find his name prominently displayed on an official list of King James I’s royal theatrical servants. He almost surely was among the twelve King’s Men who in 1604 were invited to travel to Somerset House as the king’s personal eye candy.

  Although actors have not always sported the best reputations in society, in May 1603 (the year of the “bad” Hamlet), Shakespeare, Heminges, and Condell, among other King’s Men players, were invited into the service of His Majesty’s groom of the chamber. These lower-level courtiers were responsible for tasks such as handing royal clothing to a “squire of the body,” who would then dress the king.

  The title was largely ceremonial, but some of the King’s Men did serve as glorified coatracks on at least one occasion when Spanish delegates arrived in London to negotiate peace with England in 1604. The King’s Men were instructed to stand around in their new scarlet cloaks, doublets, and breeches for eighteen days and look pretty. They weren’t to perform anything; they were just to demonstrate to the Spaniards that King James I could take very talented people and make them stand in one spot for two and a half weeks. In a receipt dated August 1604, the king commended his players for a job well done.

  Heminges and Condell’s close relationship with the Lord Chamberlain (who oversaw the groom of the chambers, and under whom the King’s Men served as royal actors) proved highly advantageous when rumors started circulating of William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier’s forthcoming Shakespeare collection. The Lord Chamberlain issued an edict in May 1619, suddenly making it illegal for anyone to publish a play of Shakespeare’s without first securing the permission of the King’s Men players. Despite holding “rights to copy” for many of the plays, it appeared that Jaggard and Pavier’s project was shut down.

  Then copies of the Shakespeare plays slotted for the collection began surfacing—as individually dated quartos. These quartos contained printing dates ranging from 1600 (twenty years earlier) to 1608 to 1619, just before the Lord Chamberlain’s edict. The words “Printed for T.P.” (Thomas Pavier) are found on six of the ten plays, and for that reason, they have been branded the Pavier Quartos. Except for two plays attributed to the work of “J. Roberts” in 1600, there are no immediately obvious indications as to who printed them.

  For hundreds of years, it was believed that, after Heminges and Condell used their Crown connections to make printing Shakespeare illegal, Pavier abandoned the idea of a collected works and just started dumping his inventory. It was assumed that he had previously purchased surplus copies of Shakespeare play texts (printed in 1600 and 1608), which included such well-known plays as The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear. His personal collection also included the plays Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy.

  (Side note: if you took a Shakespeare class in college and don’t recognize those last two titles, don’t worry, you weren’t so hungover that you forgot two whole Shakespeare plays. While Sir John Oldcastle and A Yorkshire Tragedy were at times thought to be the work of Shakespeare, they have since been definitively rejected from the canon as apocryphal.)

  Presumably, Pavier halted the printing endeavor with Jaggard, sold off the last of his Shakespeare surplus, and then sat in a room with a slow-burning fire and a glass of sherry throwing darts at portraits of Heminges and Condell. But in 1908, W. W. Greg, one of the most influential Shakespeare scholars of the twentieth century, published On Certain False Dates in Shakespearean Quartos, and smashed the surplus theory to pieces.

  Greg and other bibliographers demonstrated that, despite the claims on the title pages, all ten plays were printed together in 1619 in the same printing shop. Forensic evidence showed that paper from the same job stock was used in plays that were supposed to have been printed twenty years apart; that the unique watermarks created by the original papermakers didn’t match the proposed dates (Henry V, for example, was supposed to have been printed in 1608, but “appeared to have a watermark dated 1617 or 1619”); and the personal stamps (or “devices”) used by printers such as “J. Roberts” had clearly been stamped much more recently than claimed. (Even with the naked eye, it’s easy to see that the stamp used in one of these quartos allegedly printed in 1600 is actually older and more weathered than the same stamp from 1605.)

  At the dawn of the twentieth century, almost three hundred years after the Pavier Quartos were created, judgment was finally passed: forgery. Perhaps most damning is the sequencing of the quarto pages. Because they were intended to be part of a broader collection, the first three plays (the two parts of The Whole Contention [2 and 3 Henry VI] and Pericles) were printed together, and therefore carried continuous signatures. “Signatures” are small letters printed at the bottom of the pages as a guide for putting sheets in the right order when binding.

  After Pericles, the presses abruptly halted. When they started back up again, the last seven plays were printed with their own individual signature sequences. This would very strongly suggest that something significant happened in early 1619 between the printing of plays one through three and plays four through ten. Something like a plague, or a fire, or a meddling Lord Chamberlain.

  Today there’s little doubt that William Jaggard was the silent printer behind the unlawful 1619 publications. Some scholars now suggest we should be calling this group the Jaggard Quartos instead of the Pavier Quartos. Not only did Jaggard continue to pursue the Shakespeare project, but he altered the title pages to make it appear that the plays had been printed before the Lord Chamberlain’s ban.

  So we find Jaggard, now blind and four years from the icy grip of death, biting his thumb at the authorities once again. What would have motivated the old printer to do this? Money? Sure, that’s one explanation. Ideally, one makes money by printing things (fingers crossed). Though it’s unlikely Jaggard thought he’d be able to recoup his printing costs on a scrabble of play texts before Death came a-knocking for him. Jaggard and Pavier have been branded literary pirates by early twentieth-century scholars (most notoriously by Greg’s bibliographic buddy, A. W. Pollard), but recent studies have suggested a much different fight taking place.

  It would be best to start with the evidence brought against William Jaggard. Did he forge the title pages? Yes. We absolutely know that. How? Because he signed the forgeries. Ladies and gentlemen, the prosecution rests because the defendant is clearly an idiot.

  Or is he? When printing a book in this period, it was customary to include a unique ornament, or “device,” on the title page. Below this stamp, a printer would record his name, the place of publication, and the date. The forged Pavier Quartos have the stamp, but below that, just “London” and a false date. Here’s the thing, though, that stamp (McKerrow device #283, a rectangular woodcut with flowers in the center encircled by the Welsh motto “Heb Ddieu, Heb Ddim,” or “Without God, without all”) was Jaggard’s personal device. He’d been using it since 1610, and most recently in an official catalogue of upcoming publications printed nine months before the forged quartos. In the catalogue, the stamp is included on the ti
tle page with “London / printed by W. Jaggard / 1618” beneath it.

  Any printer, publisher, bookseller, or bookbinder in London would have looked at that specific stamp and known who printed the item. Was Jaggard really that stupid, to use his own personal seal on a work of forgery? Was his syphilitic mind finally just giving out on him? Possibly, but some scholars have suggested that Jaggard’s stamp is an ornately designed Go hang yourselves, you malt-horse drudges from a printing curmudgeon who resented the King’s Men and the intrusive Lord Chamberlain.

  This royal interference didn’t upset only Jaggard, but also the established practices and guidelines of the Stationers’ Company, the organization that formed the spine of the entire Elizabethan book trade. The Stationers’ Company was originally a guild of copyists, bookbinders, and booksellers that predated Gutenberg’s press by about forty years. By 1557 it had secured a royal charter and become the trade company that oversaw all printing in London.

  Copyright as we understand it didn’t really exist in Elizabethan England, but probably the closest thing to it was the Stationers’ Register, which kept track of who had purchased rights to the publication of specific works. The Stationers were given power to run their organization without significant royal oversight in exchange for policing their own members, and their charter required them to seize or restrict publications that weren’t officially licensed. So, for centuries, the Stationers were the gatekeepers, preventing the London book industry from collapsing in on itself.

  The only major exception to the Stationers’ autonomy was the royal prerogative to grant patents, which allowed certain printers (or, in even rarer cases, the authors) themselves the exclusive “privilege” to print popular works such as the Bible or annual almanacs. Printers would insert the words cum privilego on their title pages to announce that they held these royal patents, which voided anyone else’s previous rights to copy. This species of biased royal meddling usually doesn’t sit well with normal folks. It makes them do strange things, such as dress up as Native Americans and dump perfectly good tea into harbors.