15 - The Printing of Books

Summary

'Whole volumes in folio'

'Whole volumes in folio' has a fine expansive ring about it, but we do well to remember that in the first place few, if any, Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists could expect to have their works presented to the reading public in so sumptuous a form, and that in the second place few of them seem to have harboured any such ambition. There is not, it is true, a great deal of evidence from the dramatists themselves about their attitude to this question. Yet it seems probable that many of those who thought about it at all would have subscribed quite cheerfully to the view expressed by Thomas Hey wood in his Epistle to the Reader prefixed to his play The English Traveller (1633): 'True it is, that my playes are not exposed vnto the world in Volumes, to beare the title of Workes (as others), one reason is, that many of them by shifting and change of Companies, haue beene negligently lost, Others of them are still retained in the hands of some Actors, who thinke it against their peculiar profit to haue them come in print, and a third, that it neuer was any great ambition in me, to bee in this kind Voluminously read.' This statement should be taken in conjunction with an earlier one by Heywood, prefixed to his play The Rape of Lucrece (1608): 'It hath beene no custome in mee of all other men (curteous Readers) to commit my plaies to the presse.. .for though some haue vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the Stage, and after to the presse, for my owne part I heere proclaime my selfe euer faithfull in the first, and neuer guiltie of the last.' It would be improper to assume that these opinions were necessarily shared in toto by all Heywood's fellow-dramatists.