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?
I will do it, sir, in print.
Love’s Labour Lost, iii, 1.
The deep indentation made on the receiving paper when the strong arm of a lusty pressman had pulled the bar with too great vigour is glanced at here:
Think when we talk of horses that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth.
Henry V, Chorus.