Humphrey Moseley

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Humphrey Moseley (d. 1661) was a prominent publisher and bookseller in mid-17th-century England. He was admitted as a "freeman" to the Stationers Company, the guild of London booksellers, in 1627; he was selected Warden of the Company in 1659. His shop was located "at the signe of the Prince's Armes in St. Pauls Church-Yard" in London.

Moseley is best known for the Beaumont and Fletcher First Folio of 1647, which he published in partnership with stationer Humphrey Robinson ("at the Three Pidgeons"). Yet Moseley also published a range of other important Jacobean and Caroline playwrights, including Philip Massinger, James Shirley, Richard Brome, and Thomas Middleton. In the 1640s and 1650s Moseley dominated the market for English poetry, issuing a series of single-poet collections—most prominently John Milton (Poems, 1645), but also John Donne, Edmund Waller, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and Sir John Suckling.

In terms of the Cavalier/Roundhead conflict that dominated their generation, the poets and playwrights published by Moseley were, in the main, Royalist sympathizers—almost inveitably, since the Puritans were generally hostile to drama and imaginative literature, and closed the theatres during their rule. Moseley was known to have Royalist sympathies himself—which makes his role as publisher to the Puritan Milton surprising.^[1]

Moseley published works by alchemists, including Robert Fludd; he also published Sir Francis Bacon, and, curiously, the music of René Descartes. And he printed a wide variety of general-interest works—Thomas Barker's The Art of Angling (1659) being only one example.

Moseley has earned the respect and praise of bibliographers and collectors for the quality and selection of his output. He is also a footnote in Shakespeare studies, due to two sets of entries Moseley made in the Register of the Stationers Company that touch upon Shakespeare. (Such registrations were claims to the rights to publish a given work, and had to precede any legal publication.) On Sept. 9, 1653, Moseley registered the play Cardenio as the work of William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, and plays titled Henry I and Henry II as the work of Shakespeare and Robert Davenport. On June 29, 1660, he registered three plays, The History of King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy, and Iphis and Iantha, or A Marriage Without a Man, a Comedy—all allegedly by Shakespeare. Scholars have universally rejected the sheer idea of such plays as Shakespearean works (though the prospect of a Shakespearean treatment of Ovid's story of Iphis and Ianthe is startling to contemplate).

Moseley collected a large body of dramatic manuscripts during the years the theatres were closed during the Puritan regime (1642-60), with the likely intent of future publication. Any such plans were forstalled by his untimely death at the very beginning of the Restoration. Part of his collection of playscripts eventually found its way into the possession of antiquarian John Warburton, only to be consumed in the notorious kitchen burnings, in which Warburton's cook used the manuscripts as scrap paper.