Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While his stage is littered with books and papers, writings and volumes, Shakespeare’s plays pay little attention to the technologies which reproduced them for dissemination among a reading public. One of the playwright’s few explicit references to the printing press and its associated industries occurs in 2 Henry VI. Confronting Lord Saye, the rebel Jack Cade complains: “Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school; and whereas before our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used, and contrary to the King his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill” (4.7.29–34). The action of the play takes place during the 1450s, the very decade in which Gutenberg constructed the first hand press, and, crucially, the movable type which made his invention workable: an invention which did not reach English shores until 1475. The first English paper mill was not constructed until 1494, and it took the best part of two centuries to establish a healthy domestic industry for the production of printing or writing paper. The play’s rampant anachronism suggests the extent to which Shakespeare’s concerns are tied to the conditions of print publication in Elizabethan, rather than Henrician, England. That period is also the focus of this chapter, and the following account will touch on the issues of ... log in or subscribe to read full text