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- The copyright of *Venus and Adonis*, of which Field was the first owner, has a somewhat complicated history. The details illustrate the confused methods of Elizabethan publishing. Shakespeare may be absolved from responsibility for the involutions of the story. A new chapter opens after the appearance of the second edition early in 1594. A few months later, on June 25 of that year, Field found it convenient to make over the copyright in the poem to the publisher Harrison. The transfer is thus recorded in the Stationers’ Company’s Register²:
[1594] 25 Iunij
Assigned over unto him [i.e. Master Harrison, Senior] from Richard Field in open Court holden this Day a book called *Venus and Adonis* vj.
The which was before entered to Richard Field 18 Aprilis 1593.
With this act of self-abnegation on Field’s part another has to be associated. In this same month of June, Shakespeare
¹ Field had been employed by Harrison to print in 1590 an elaborate treatise on mechanical inventions by Cyprian Lucar, and in 1592 had at Harrison’s expense produced two works by foreign authors:—Simon Verepaeus’s *De epistolis Latine conscribendis*, and an English translation of Vasco Figueiro’s *The Spaniards Monarchie and Leaguers Olygarchie*.
² Arber’s Transcript, ii. 655.
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44 VENUS AND ADONIS
had his second poem, *Lucrece*, ready for the press. Contrary to expectation, the copyright of the *Lucrece* was acquired on June 9, not by Field, but by Harrison. The arrangement, whatever its cause, was a perfectly friendly one; Field accepted a commission from Harrison to print in 1594 the original edition of *Lucrece*, of which Harrison had just acquired the copyright, as well as a third edition in 1596 of *Venus and Adonis*, the copyright of which Harrison had bought from Field two years previously. In the latter case the imprint ran:—«Imprinted at London by R. F. for Iohn Harison.»
That issue of 1596 brought to a close the association alike of Field and Harrison with the publishing of Shakespeare’s writings. The three earliest editions of *Venus and Adonis* and the first edition of *Lucrece* came from the press of the poet’s fellow townsman, and there the connexion of his press with Shakespeare’s work ended.
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