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- THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 9
four and twenty years earlier. The publisher had just then begun business for himself, and his prospects were still insecure.
Every detail in the history of the enterprise pertinently illustrates the unscrupulous methods which the customs of the trade encouraged the Elizabethan publisher to pursue. But it is erroneous to assume that it was reckoned by any extensive public opinion of the day personally discreditable in Jaggard to publish under Shakespeare’s name work for which the poet was not responsible. In all that he did Jaggard was justified by precedent, and he secured the countenance and active co-operation of an eminent member of the Stationers’ Company, whose character was deemed irreproachable.
William Jaggard, who was Shakespeare’s junior by some five years, having been born in 1569, enjoyed a good preliminary training as a publisher. His father, John Jaggard, citizen and barber-surgeon of London, died in William’s boyhood, and he and a brother, John, both apprenticed themselves on the same day, September 29, 1584, to two highly reputable printers and publishers, each of whom was in a large way of business and owned as many as three presses.¹ Henry Denham, William’s master, twice Under-Warden of the Stationers’ Company, lived at the sign of the Star in Paternoster Row. John’s master was the veteran Richard Tottel, twice Master of the Stationers’ Company, who won lasting fame at the outset of his career by his production in 1557 of that first anthology of English verse which is commonly known as Tottel’s Miscellany.² Tottel’s
¹ For the details and dates in the career of Jaggard and his brother I am indebted to Mr. Arber’s Transcript of the Stationers’ Registers.
² The full title of this volume, of which The Passionate Pilgrim was a descendant, ran:—“Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, and other. Apud Richardum Tottel, 1557.” The book reached an eighth edition in 1587.
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