Printing in Shakespeare's England

I'm Helen Smith, professor of Renaissance literature at the University of York.

So I want to ask, First of all,

how much you think about the book you're reading when you're reading,

not the words or the sense of the book, but the book itself.

Does the size of the book the design of the cover its

front make a difference to how you read the text inside,

How you think about how you present yourself to other people,

how you experience the story that you're engaging with

and how much thought do you give to the question of how many people

it took to me take the book happen whether you're reading a printed Codex?

That's a book with pages band together along one edge

in the in the standard way or a digital text.

These are questions that have increasingly exercised

academics and scholars in recent years and

the questions that are going to be important to us today thinking about the

shape of Shakespeare's books and how different

they looked when they were first printed

than they do in any edition in which you will access them today.

What difference does it make to your study of Shakespeare's plays and poems to

know that they haven't always looked to the same as they do now,

to think about the different people who had

a hand in bringing them to life and capturing

them on the page to know that you're just one in a very long line of readers.

He was met these plays in one incarnation or another,

so let's take a step back before we get to all of that.

How did printing get to England in the first place?

What was the technology that was used to print Titus Andronicus,

Shakespeare's first played to hit the bookstores

in 15 94?

And what happened at the same time to what we call Scrabble culture

the work of writing out books and other text by hand,

and the only way to make multiple copies of books before the advent of print

printing was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Germany in the 14 fifties.

It wasn't exactly printing Gutenberg invented but the use of movable type.

Each letter shaped cast on its own small bit of metal says it could be combined

with other letters to form words and then

undone again distributed back into its type cases

that it could be used over and over again.

Printing wasn't actually Gutenberg's invention.

It had been used for centuries in China and Korea,

and he was also drawing on technologies like the wine press or the olive oil press.

So he was using materials and techniques that were already present in

and around the culture and much further a field even in China.

The hara as a form of movable type made from clay

so that we like to tell the story of Gutenberg inventing

printing and revolutionaries in the world is perhaps more the case.

As Emma Smith points out in her book, Portable Magic,

that from a global perspective, the question about Gutenberg seems less.

How did you do it? And more. What took you so long?

The other thing that scholars have thought about recently

is the extent to which the printing revolution,

as we sometimes call it,

might have been a revolution in materials rather than techniques.

Paper, as Daniel Bell ingratitude and others have argued,

was really crucial to the spread of print across Europe.

And more widely, you could print on vellum and other materials,

but producing them was an expensive and time consuming process,

whereas paper in the 14th and 15th centuries became increasingly quick and

easy to make increasingly reliable and increasingly of a higher quality.

Whatever the exact story, which is to tell,

printing certainly did spread across Europe,

creating networks of knowledge and exchange,

spreading debates about the Reformation and counter reformation,

those huge religious upheavals that change the shape of Europe and the world,

and spreading also propaganda against the Ottoman Empire,

the tremendous Islamic force that was also very present in

English and European imaginations and reality at this time.

Printing, of course,

came relatively late to England out there on the fringes of Europe.

It was in 14 73 that William Caxton, an English merchant and diplomat,

printed the first book in English.

Not yet in England.

He printed his own translation of the story of

Try Resale of the History of Troy in Bruges,

where he was working,

and it was in 14 76 that he moved back

to England and set up his own press in Westminster.

Caxton printed many things,

but there was certainly an emphasis on literary writing

and a pride in British authors and English traditions,

especially in Chaucer.

That's at the stage for much of what was to come in the decades that followed.

So printing did spread throughout England,

although it didn't really spread that far.

The church and choir, um,

quickly realised the potency of this new craft and the trouble it could cause,

and they worked hard to restrict printing to London,

Oxford and Cambridge until at least the 16 forties

north of the border.

The picture was a bit different,

but it's certainly true that Edinburgh was also the heart of Scottish printing.

In those early years, printing was confined to particular cities,

in particular places,

and it was closely scrutinised.

It wasn't long before stationers,

the name we used to describe the printers and booksellers,

and sometimes Bookbinders and other workers who were part of making

a printed book had become firmly part of the establishment.

The station's company, as it came to be known,

was incorporated that is given a royal charter in 15 57

and then a new royal charter the next year,

when Queen Elizabeth the first came to the throne in 15 58

printers and publishers have become part of the English landscape,

but the But the work of incorporating or the work of becoming a

formal body certainly didn't stop quarrelling

and infighting between printers or booksellers,

of course, and it also didn't stop illicit or seditious printing,

whether at home or abroad.

Outside London outside the university,

townspeople had secret presses tucked away in houses moving from place to place,

and people also printed books for the English market.

Over on the continent, particularly Catholic text,

which continue to circulate even under English Protestant Elizabeth,

there were repeated attempts to control and regulate printing.

There were systems of licencing where booksellers

had to get permission to publish books.

There were restrictions,

and the numbers of printed impresses occasional book burnings,

even sweeping acts of censorship,

including the bishop span of 15 99 that forbade

the printing or circulation of all sorts of plays,

especially histories, poems, especially satires and pamphlets.

We do sometimes overstate the novelty of printing by

the time we get to the 15 nineties,

when Shakespeare's poems and plays began to be printed.

When we talk about printing as a new technology in the late 16th century,

it's a little bit as they were talking about the typewriter as a new technology now.

It had already been around for 140 years,

and it has become very much part of the cultural and creative landscape.

Think, too, about how quickly we've got used to the Internet and how quick, quickly.

Now we can access

and work with technologies on screen.

That would have been unthinkable to us since 60 or 70 years ago in this country.

So that sense, I suppose, of print as a revolution and something new.

But by the time we get to the 15 nineties and the marketplace of print something that

was thoroughly ingrained in the English psyche and

which many many readers were able to access,

not everyone could read.

Of course, literacy rates were much, much lower than they are today,

but printed text circulated in other ways, too.

In particular,

Adam Fox has done important work to show how morality continue to matter.

Someone who could read would take a copy of a printed text and read it

aloud to those guys that around in a village setting in the tavern or elsewhere,

making sure that the influence of print was felt far

beyond those who could actually read the printed page,

especially so in the church, of course,

where a minister would work with the Bible

to a population who were often largely illiterate.

It also wasn't the end of manuscript.

Even though many books were printed, there was a certain snobbishness about print.

Many people, particularly the nobility,

preferred to keep their work in manuscript.

Most famously, perhaps, John Done.

The poet never had his poems printed in his life, too.

Time they circulated widely in manuscript were

read by groups of friends and acquaintances.

And then we're only printed sometime after Dunn's death.

So there's that real sense in which print was only one option.

If you were a writer wanting to get your

work out there to a readership in early modern England

in 15 98 Francis Miers suggested that manuscript was a bit classier than print,

as Cherries be fulsome when they be thoroughly right because they'll be plenty,

he said.

So books be stale when they be printed in that they be common.

He wanted to keep reading for himself and his friends.

Miers is now best known for his praise of Shakespeare,

which similarly celebrates the exclusivity of manuscript.

So Shakespeare's sonnets, which weren't published until 16 oh nine are valued me,

as suggested in 15 98 at least in part because not many people got to read them.

The sweet, witty soul of of it, he said, lives in mellifluous and honey tongue.

Shakespeare witness his Venus and Adonis his ludicrous,

his sugared sonnets among his private friends

and print and manuscript also coexisted together.

People wrote in their books, just as they do today.

And people wrote down bits from other people, from other people's books to

Ben Johnson jokes about bad poets who steal verses from other people,

writing them down while they sat in the theatre,

and Shakespeare make similar jokes as well.

Francis Bacon suggested that these have changed the whole

face and state of things throughout the world.

Printing gunpowder and the Maras Needle the compass.

These, of course,

tell us how much books had to do with

geopolitics because the other items in Bacon's list gunpowder and

the compass are very much to do with colonialism

and exploration and also to deal with military power.

It's easy sometimes to overstate the influence

of print takes Bacon's comment too far,

but I hope what I've suggested here is that we shouldn't underestimate it either.

Books by the 15 nineties were a thing in print, and we're definitely here to stay.