BEAUMONT, Francis and FLETCHER, John. Comedies and Tragedies. Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher Gentlemen. Never printed before, And now published by the Authours Originall Copies. London: Printed for Humphrey Robinson, at the three Pidgeons, and for Humphrey Moseley at the Princes Armes in St Pauls Church-yard. 1647

2° in fours. First collected edition. Lacks portrait frontispiece of Fletcher. Title page backed. Pp. [i-lii], 1-75 [76], 1-143 [144], 1-165 [166-168], 1-71 [72], 1-172, 1-92, 1-50 [i.e., 52], 1-28, 25-48. All pages are in order confirmed by the catchwords though page numbers as occasionally misnumbered. With the usual occasional mispagination. A few marginalia and some brown foxing spots on the first few and final pages (neither affecting the readability of the text. Wing B1581, Pforzheimer 53

Modelled on previous folio publications of the works of Shakespeare and Jonson, the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher Folio brought together thirty-four plays and a masque. According to its publisher Humphrey Moseley, it comprised all of Beaumont and Fletcher’s unpublished work except for Fletcher’s Wild Goose Chase; Moseley was particularly focused with the “unpublished” aspect because he and Robinson did not own the rights to plays previously published by other stationers. Unlike the publishers of the Shakespeare First Folio, who assembled a syndicate of rights holders in order to include previously published plays, Moseley and Robinson were unable to acquire the missing rights.[1] Despite the authorial claims in the title, most of the plays they did assemble were by Fletcher, either alone or in partnership with Philip Massinger or others; modern scholarly opinion holds that Beaumont contributed to only seven plays in the collection.

As critics have remarked, the 1647 Folio is a particularly collaborative and multivocal book. The volume contains plays written by Beaumont and Fletcher, both individually and collaboratively. In addition to their eponymous partnership, both authors also collaborated with other playwrights, including Massinger, Middleton, Field, Ford, Rowley, and Jonson.[2] The dedicatory epistle to Philip Herbert, 1st Earl of Montgomery and 4th Earl of Pembroke, is signed by ten actors of the King’s Men. James Shirley and Humphrey Moseley both offer addresses to the reader; and thirty-seven people contributed commendatory verses. The volume’s collaborative nature also extends to the material text. Moseley farmed out the printing of the folio to as many as eight different printers, not all of whom have been identified. The printers involved who have been established with some certainty are Thomas Warren (I), Robert White (I), Edward Griffin (II), Ruth Raworth, and Susan Islip.

Susan Islip and Ruth Raworth belong to the fascinating and exclusive cohort of early modern women printers. Like most of their female peers, Islip and Raworth were printers’ wives who took over their husbands’ printing shops after their husbands’ deaths.[3] Presumably, even though their names did not appear on the title pages, both women worked in the printing shops during their marriages. Susan Islip was “active” c. 1641-61. Her husband, Adam Islip, died in 1639, leaving his presses to his apprentice Richard Hearne. Hearne died in 1646 and Susan, who had continued printing during the intervening period, took over completely.[4] Ruth Raworth is considered “active” during 1645-48, the years between the death of her first husband, printer John Raworth, and her marriage to her second, printer Thomas Newcombe.[5] Ruth Raworth and Susan Islip printed a volume of James Shirley’s poems for Humphrey Moseley in 1646; all four figures were reunited in the labor of the Beaumont and Fletcher folio.

Dr. Molly G. Yarn

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Hammersmith, James P., ‘The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Section 7’, The

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 69 (January 1975), 206-25

Henning, Standish, ‘The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Sections 4 and 8D-

F’, Studies in Bibliography, 22 (1969), 165–78

Turner, Robert K., ‘The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647, Section 2’, Studies in

Bibliography, 20 (1967), 35–59

Turner, Robert K., ‘The Printers and the Beaumont and Fletcher Folio of 1647: Section 1 (Thomas

Warren’s)’, Studies in Bibliography, 27 (1974), 137–56

[1] These would be acquired and added to the 1679 Second Folio. When Moseley recovered the manuscript of Wild Goose Chase in 1652, he printed the play in folio to allow readers to insert it into their copies of the 1647 Folio.

[2] In fact, Massinger’s contributions to the folio outnumber Beaumont’s.

[3] For more on women in the early modern book trade, see the work of Maureen Bell, Helen Smith, et.al. The collection Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England, edited by Valerie Wayne (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020) includes multiple chapters on women stationers, as well as a preliminary list of women stationers, 1540-1640, compiled by Alan Farmer. Neither Islip nor Raworth are included, as they worked post-1640.

[4] Susan Islip and Mary Hearne, presumably Richard’s widow, collaborated on three issues of a volume entitled Theatre of God’s Judgment in 1648.

[5] Raworth also printed the first edition of Milton’s minor poems in 1645. Regarding the punctuation and pointing of that volume, David Masson remarks that such things “should be set right by the printer, or by the printer and himself together […] The printer of that volume was Ruth Raworth; but Milton himself, if not Moseley too, must be supposed to have revised the sheets as they came from that lady’s printing-office, and so to be responsible for the pointing” (Masson 104).