William Jaggard

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William Jaggard (born ca. 1568, died 1623) was an Elizabethan and Jacobean printer and publisher, best known for his connection with the texts of William Shakespeare, most notably the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. Jaggard's shop was "at the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key in Barbican."^[1]

Jaggard printed a wide variety of common materials, including ballads—one example being Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudesle (1610).^[2] In 1605 Jaggard bought out the business of the elderly James Roberts, a printer with several minor connections to the Shakespeare canon;^[3] most notably, Roberts printed the second quarto of Titus Andronicus for bookseller Edward White in 1600. Roberts also owned the concession to print the handbills that the actors' companies used to advertise their productions. Jaggard, however, did not obtain the same monopoly till 1615.

Jaggard had a twenty-year involvement with works of the Shakespeare canon, starting with his publication of the questionable collection The Passionate Pilgrim under Shakespeare's name in 1599. Jaggard printed an expanded edition of the same work in 1612. In 1619 Jaggard was at the center of the cryptic False Folio affair; and in the period 1621-3 he and his son and successor Isaac Jaggard were occupied, along with bookseller Edward Blount, on the massive task of bringing the First Folio into print.

(Given his apparently less-than-respectable links with The Passionate Pilgrim and the False Folio, commentators have wondered why John Heminges and Henry Condell, the two members of the King's Men who compiled the texts of the First Folio, chose Jaggard for the First Folio job. Some scholars have argued that it may have been a matter of necessity; Jaggard's shop had the capacity to get the work done. Jaggard was old, infirm, and blind by the time the First Folio was ready for publication, and in fact died before the book appeared at the end of 1623; necessarily, it was his son Isaac Jaggard who was most directly involved with the work on the Folio.)

Jaggard was unusual in that he functioned as both a printer and a "stationer," or bookseller. In Jaggard's era these functions were normally separate. Books were published by stationers, members of an organized guild, the Stationers Company, and then sold in the stationers' shops. Printers and stationers were both businessmen, with their own apprentices and journeymen; printers functioned independently on many jobs (as with the actors' handbill business mentioned above)—but for the printing of books the printers usually worked for the stationers (as Roberts worked for White in the cited case of Titus Andronicus Q2). In anachronistic modern terms, the printers might be regarded as blue-collar artisans while the stationers were more like white-collar entrepreneurs. A few individuals functioned in both capacities, William Jaggard being perhaps the best example of this dual function.

To modern book collectors and bibliophiles, Jaggard is known as the printer and publisher of Edward Topsell's The History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608), famous for their lush and often-reproduced illustrations. The Topsell books can serve to correct a misapprehension about Jaggard's work: from the number of typographical errors and cruxes in the First Folio, it is often assumed that the Jaggards did a bad job of printing the book. While their execution was far from perfect, it should not then be inferred that the Jaggards were low-quality craftsmen. The Topsell volumes show another side of Jaggard's professional accomplishment.

William Jaggard's brother John Jaggard was also a printer and publisher, and held the rights to print the essays of Sir Francis Bacon.

A remote descendant of William Jaggard, a man of the same name (1868–1947), set up a printing and bookselling establishment in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1909—the Shakespeare Press, 4 Sheep Street. The bibliophilic later Jaggard was also responsible for "Book Prices Current" (1887), a massive record of books sold at auction, and the similarly massive "Shakespeare Bibliography" (1911). [1]

[edit] Notes

1. ^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 249.
2. ^ Notes and Comments, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 1957), p. 302.
3. ^ Halliday, pp. 416-17.

[edit] References

• Willoughby, Edwin Eliott. A Printer of Shakespeare. London, Philip Allan & Co., 1934.