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- ¹ These premises enjoyed a traditional fame. They had been long in John Harrison’s occupation, until at the close of 1596 Leake took them over; he remained there till 1602.
² Cf. *Peter Short, Printer, and his Marks*, by Silvanus P. Thompson, F.R.S. (Bibliograph. Soc.), 1898.
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14
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
Typographical defects and characteristics.
miscellany is not high. Misprints abound. Numerous lines are as they stand barely intelligible. Such defects were mainly due to imperfections in the ‘copy’, but they bear witness, too, to hasty composition and to carelessness on the part of the press corrector. Few of the irregularities are beyond the ingenuity of a conscientious overseer to remove. In Poem IX, the second line of the sonnet is omitted. There is only one catchword in the whole volume, viz. ‘Lord’, at the foot of B 8 (recto). Capitals within the line are not very common, but are employed most capriciously. In Sonnet IV, three of the fourteen lines begin with small letters instead of capitals. At V, l. 7, ‘eases’ rimes with ‘there’. Spelling eccentricities which are scarcely to be differentiated from misprints, include —II, l. 12, ‘ghesse’ for ‘guess’; V, l. 1, ‘deawy’ for ‘dewy’; XIII, l. 10, ‘symant’ for ‘cement’; XIV, l. 15, ‘scite’ for ‘cite’; ‘scence’ for ‘sense’ (the word ‘sense’ is correctly spelt VIII, l. 6); l. 19, ‘ditte’ for ‘ditty’; XVII, l. 4, ‘nenying’ for ‘renying’; l. 8, ‘a nay’ for ‘annoy’; l. 12, ‘wowen for ‘women’; XVIII, l. 34, ‘prease’ for ‘press’; l. 51, ‘th’ are’ for ‘the ear’. The volume was a small octavo and the meagre dimensions of the ‘copy’ led the printer to set the type on only one side of the leaf in the case of twenty-five of the twenty-eight leaves of text. At the top and bottom of each page of text is an ornamental device of ordinary pattern—no uncommon feature in small volumes of verse of the period.
II
Jaggard’s precedents
The part that Jaggard played throughout the enterprise followed abundant precedents. It was common practice for publishers to issue, under a general title of their own devising, scattered pieces of poetry of varied origin. His brother’s master, Tottel, had inaugurated the custom in 1557,
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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 15
and *Tottel’s Miscellany* had a numerous progeny. Nor was Jaggard the only publisher arbitrarily to assign the whole of a miscellaneous anthology to some one popular pen.
Opportunities for gathering material for such anthologies abounded. Printed books, for example, novels and plays, which were interspersed with songs, could always be raided with impunity. But it was from manuscript sources that the anthological publishers sought their most attractive wares. Short poems circulated very freely in manuscript copies through Elizabethan England. An author would offer a friend or patron a poetic effusion in his own handwriting. Fashion led the recipient to multiply transcripts at will as gifts for other worshippers of the Muses. There were amateurs who collected these flying leaves in albums or commonplace books.¹ The author exerted no definable right over his work after the MS. left his hand. His name was frequently omitted from the transcript. A publisher, in search of ‘copy’, recognized no obligation to consult the writer of unprinted verse before he sent it to press. It might be to his interest to enlist the aid of an amateur collector in extending his collections, and to him he might be ready to make some acknowledgement. But the author’s claim to mention was usually disregarded altogether. As often as not, both collector and publisher were in ignorance of the name of the author of unsigned poems which
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