Properties
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- 13924
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- 2026-01-30T06:24:48.293Z
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- 13894
- text
- Blount’s licence.
Much mystery surrounds the original publication of the play in 1609. The Stationers’ Registers show that on May 20, 1608, Edward Blount, the most cultivated publisher of the day, obtained a licence for its publication. The entry runs:—
[1608] 20 Maij
Entred [to Edward Blount] for his copie under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and Master Warden Seton A booke called. The booke of Pericles pryce of Tyre vjd.¹
On the same day Blount also obtained a licence for ‘A booke Called Anthony and Cleopatra’. In spite of these grants Blount had no hand in publishing Pericles. Nor is Antony and Cleopatra known to have been published till seventeen years
¹ Arber, iii. 378.
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PERICLES 21
had passed away, when it appeared in the First Folio of 1623, of which Blount was one of the syndicate of five publishers.
*Pericles* was published in 1609 by Henry Gosson. Gosson was an undistinguished ‘stationer’, although his family had been for some time closely connected with the trade. He was apprenticed to his father, Thomas Gosson, who was in active business from 1579 to 1600, and died early in 1601. Henry was admitted a freeman of the Company *per patrimonium* on August 3, 1601, his widowed mother, Alice Gosson, standing surety. In 1603 he established himself at the sign of the ‘Sun’ in Paternoster Row, where *Pericles* was published six years later. He mainly confined himself to chapbooks, pamphlets of news, and ballads, but most of the occasional works of John Taylor, the Water Poet, were issued by him.
Gosson employed many printers, and it is not easy to identify the press to which he entrusted his ‘copy’ of *Pericles*. But there is some ground for assuming that it came from that of William Jones, in Ship Alley, Red Cross Street. Jones, who served his apprenticeship with a man of position in the trade, John Windet, took up his freedom in 1596, and carried on a small printing business from 1601 to 1626. The form of imprint on the title-page of Gosson’s edition of *Pericles* associates it nearly with a quarto pamphlet in prose by George Wilkins, which Jones printed for Gosson (without date) about 1605.²
¹ The elder Gosson took up his freedom on February 4, 1577, as the apprentice of Thomas Purfoote. Besides Henry, he had two sons, Edward and Richard, both apprenticed to the Stationers; but they never reached the rank of freemen of the Company.
² The pamphlet is entitled ‘Three Miseries of Barbary’, and the imprint runs: ‘Printed by W. I. for Henry Gosson, and are to be sold in Pater Noster Rowe at the signe of the Sunne.’ There is a copy in the British Museum. All excepting the prefatory page is in black letter. In 1606 Gosson employed the veteran, James Roberts, to print for him in quarto a prose
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PERICLES
There is no notice in the Stationers’ Register of a transfer of the copyright of *Pericles* from Blount to Gosson. It may be that Gosson issued the work in defiance of Blount’s just claim to it, or that Blount tacitly withdrew his pretensions owing to inability to obtain an authentic copy of the piece. The incoherence of the text in the first edition, the carelessness with which it was printed and produced, indicates that the ‘copy’ followed some hasty and unauthorized transcript, and that the type was not corrected by an intelligent proofreader. Malone asserted with truth—‘There is I believe no play of our author’s, perhaps I might say in the English language, so incorrect as this. The most corrupt of Shakespeare’s other dramas, compared with *Pericles*, is purity itself.’
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