Sadece LitRes`te okuyun

Kitap dosya olarak indirilemez ancak uygulamamız üzerinden veya online olarak web sitemizden okunabilir.

Kitabı oku: «Shakspere & Typography», sayfa 3

Yazı tipi:

Among other publications of Vautrollier was an English translation of Ludovico Guicciardini’s Description of the Low Countries, originally printed in 1567. In this work is one of the earliest accounts of the invention of printing at Haarlem, which is thus described in the Batavia of Adrianus Junius, 1575. ‘This person [Coster] during his afternoon walk, in the vicinity of Haarlem, amused himself with cutting letters out of the bark of the beech tree, and with these, the characters being inverted as in seals, he printed small sentences.’ The idea is cleverly adapted by Orlando:

these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character.
As You Like It, iii, 2.

Lastly, it would be an interesting task to compare the Mad Folk of Shakspere, most of whom have the melancholy fit, with

A Treatise of Melancholie: containing the Causes thereof and Reasons of the Strange Effects it worketh in our Minds and Bodies.
London, 8vo., 1586.

This was printed by Vautrollier, and probably read carefully for press by the youthful Poet.

The disinclination of Shakspere to see his plays in print has often been noticed by his biographers, and is generally accounted for by the theory that reading the plays in print would diminish the desire to hear them at the theatre. This is a very unsatisfactory reason, and not so plausible as the supposition that, sickened with reading other people’s proofs for a livelihood, he shrunk from the same task on his own behalf. His contemporaries do not appear to have shared in the same typographical aversion. The plays of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were all printed in the life-time of their authors. Francis Quarles had the satisfaction and pride of seeing all his works in printed form, and showed his appreciation and knowledge of Typography by the following quaint lines, which we quote from the first edition, literatim:

On a Printing-house

The world’s a Printing-house: our words, our thoughts,
Our deeds, are Characters of sev’rall sizes:
Each Soule is a Compos’ter; of whose faults
The Levits are Correctors: Heav’n revises;
Death is the common Press; fro whence, being driven,
W’ are gathered Sheet by Sheet, & bound for Heaven.

From Divine Fancies, 1632, lib. iv, p. 164.

II. THE TECHNICALITIES OF PRINTING, AS USED BY SHAKSPERE

Nature endows no man with knowledge, and although a quick apprehension may go far toward making the true lover of Nature a Botanist, Zoologist, or Entomologist, and although the society of ‘Men of Law’, of Doctors, or of Musicians may, with the help of a good memory, store a man’s mind with professional phraseology, yet the opportunity of learning must be there; and no argument can be required to prove that, however highly endowed with genius or imagination, no one could evolve from his internal consciousness the terms, the customs, or the working implements of a trade with which he was unacquainted. If, then, we find Shakspere’s mind familiar with the technicalities of such an art as Printing – an art which, in his day, had no such connecting links with the common needs and daily pleasures of the people, as now – if we find him using its terms and referring frequently to its customs, our claims to call him a Printer stand upon a firmer base than those of the Lawyer, the Doctor, the Soldier, or the Divine; and we have strong grounds for asking the reader’s thoughtful attention to some quotations and arguments, which, if not conclusive that Shakspere was a Printer, afford indubitable evidence of his having become at some period of his career practically acquainted with the details of a Printing Office. We propose, then, to carefully examine the works of the Poet for any internal evidence of Typographical knowledge which they may afford.

But here, at the outset, we are met by obvious difficulties. Would Shakspere, or any poet have made use of trade terms and technical words, or have referred to customs peculiar to and known by only a very small class of the community in plays addressed to the general public? They might have been familiar enough to the mind of the writer, but would certainly have sounded very strange in the ears of the public. Shakspere was too artistic and too wise to have committed so glaring a blunder. His technical terms are used unintentionally, and with the most charming unconsciousness. Therefore, when we meet with a word or phrase in common use by Printers, it is so amalgamated with the context, that although some other form of expression would have been chosen had not Shakspere been a Printer, yet the general reader or hearer is not struck by any incongruity of language.

What simile could be more natural for a Printer-poet to use or more appropriate for the public to hear than this:

Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince;
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you.

Winter’s Tale, v, 1.

Here, surely, the Printer’s daily experience of the exact agreement between the face of the type and the impression it yields must have suggested the image.

Printers in Shakspere’s time often had patents granted them by which the monopoly of certain works was secured; and unscrupulous printers frequently braved all the pains and penalties to which they were liable by pirating such editions. It is this carelessness of consequences which is glanced at by Mistress Ford when debating with Mistress Page concerning the insult put upon them by the heavy old Knight, Sir John Falstaff:

He cares not what he puts into the Press when he would put us two.
Merry Wives, ii, 1.

What printer is there who has put to press a second edition of a book working page for page in a smaller type and shorter measure but will recognise the Typographer’s reminiscences in the following description of Leontes’ babe by Paulina:

Behold, my Lords,
Although the print be little, the whole matter
And copy of the father …
The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.

Winter’s Tale, ii, 3.

Is it conceivable that a sentence of four lines containing five distinct typographical words, three of which are especially technical, could have proceeded from the brain of one not intimately acquainted with Typography? Again, would Costard have so gratuitously used a typographical idea, had not the Poet’s mind been teeming with them?