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- Jaggard obtained the licence for the publication of Heywood’s *Troia Britanica* on December 5, 1608, on somewhat peculiar conditions. The entry in the Stationers’ Company’s Register described the work, without mention of Heywood’s name, as ‘A booke called *Brytans Troye*’, and the exceptional provision was added ‘that yf any question or trouble growe hereof. Then he [i.e. Jaggard] shall answere and discharge yt at his owne losse and costes’. When the book duly appeared, Heywood did not question Jaggard’s right to publish it, and no strictly legal ‘question or trouble’ seems to have grown thereof. But Heywood bitterly complained of Jaggard’s typographical carelessness. He requested Jaggard to insert a list of ‘the infinite faults escaped’. But Jaggard was obdurate and insolently retorted (according to Heywood’s statement) that
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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 47
‘Hee would not publish his owne disworksmanship, but rather let his owne fault lye upon the neck of the author?’¹
Three years later, in 1612, Jaggard inflicted on Heywood the further indignity of filching from *Troia Britanica* translations in verse of two of Ovid’s Epistles, which were first published in that volume. He added them to the third edition of *The Passionate Pilgrim*, all the contents of which Jaggard continued to assign on the title-page to Shakespeare’s pen. Heywood was in no temper to suffer this new injury at Jaggard’s hands in silence. In an address to another printer, Nicholas Okes, who published for him his prose *Apology for Actors*, in 1612 (soon after the appearance of the third edition of Jaggard’s ‘Passionate Pilgrim’), Heywood not only exposed Jaggard’s misconduct, but claimed to have interested Shakespeare in the matter. His protest was issued (he declared) in the great dramatist’s name as well as in his own. Heywood’s words run: ‘Here, likewise, I must necessarily insert a manifest injury done me in that worke [i.e. *Troia Britanica*] by taking the two epistles of Paris to Helen, and Helen to Paris, and printing them in a lesse volume (i.e. *The Passionate Pilgrim* of 1612) under the name of another, [i.e. Shakespeare], which may put the world in opinion I might steale them from him, and hee, to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name: but, as I must acknowledge my lines not worth his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] patronage under whom he [i.e. Jaggard] hath publish them, so the author, I know, much offended with M. Jaggard that altogether unknowne to him presumed to make so bold with his name.’
Jaggard was not, as we have seen², the only publisher who had made ‘so bold with’ Shakespeare’s name as to put it
¹ Heywood’s *Apology for Actors*, 1612, Sh. Soc. 1841, p. 62.
² See p. 21, note 1.
Shakespeare’s alleged protest.
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48 THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
to books in which he had no hand. But it was characteristic of Shakespeare to ignore the wrongs which Jaggard and Jaggard’s colleagues in trade were in the habit of doing himself and other authors. Heywood’s statement offers the only extant evidence that Shakespeare deigned to notice the nefarious practices in which the state of the law of copyright enabled Jaggard and his like to indulge with impunity. But Heywood’s exposure was not without effect. Jaggard stayed the issue of the volume with the statement on the title-page that all the contents were ‘By W. Shakespeare’. He cancelled that title-page and inserted in unsold copies a new one from which Shakespeare’s name was expunged. No name was suffered to take the vacant place.
The text of 1612.
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