Of Cicero’s Oration Vautrollier issued several editions, and had the privilege ‘ad imprimendum solum’ granted him; and to this work also, on at least two occasions, Shakspere refers:
Hath read to thee
Sweet poetry and Tully’s Orator.
Titus, iv, 1.
Sweet Tully.
2 Henry VI, iv, 1.
The fact to be noted with reference to these classical quotations is this: Shakspere quotes those Latin authors, and those only, of which Vautrollier had a ‘license’; and makes no reference to other and popular writers, such as Virgil, Pliny, Aurelius, and Terence, editions of whose works Vautrollier was not allowed to issue, but all of which, and especially the last, were great favorites in the sixteenth century, as is shown by the numerous editions which issued from the presses of Vautrollier’s fellow-craftsmen.
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: