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3 - Print, literary culture and the book trade

from 1 - Modes and means of literary production, circulation and reception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
David Kastan
Edited by
David Loewenstein  and
Janel Mueller
David Loewenstein
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Janel Mueller
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

The advent of printing in England

In Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the rebel Jack Cade orders Lord Saye to be beheaded on the anachronistic grounds that he had ‘caused printing to be used’ and had ‘built a paper mill’ (4.7.30–3). William Caxton would not in fact set up the first printing press in England until 1476, some twenty-six years after the encounter the play represents, and still another twenty years would pass before John Tate would establish the first paper mill on English soil. Yet if Cade is an unreliable historian as he seeks a justification for his reflexive opposition to authority and order, he correctly intuits that print would have a profound effect upon the social life of England.

Certainly it could be claimed that print was one of those inventions that, in Bacon’s famous phrase, ‘changed the fate and the state of things in all the world’, although it did not work quite as bluntly as Jack Cade feared to secure aristocratic power and privilege. Its effects were unpredictable and slow to be felt at first, and few in the first decades of printing could have sensed its eventual impact. Initially it was little more than an improved means of textual reproduction, a technique of ‘artificial writing’ that served as a faster, cheaper way of producing multiple copies of the texts that had previously circulated in manuscript. Indeed early printed books tried very hard to reproduce the form and feel of manuscripts (typefaces, for example, mimicking the popular forms of script), though, of course, their ability to do so did not bring the age of manuscript production to an end.

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The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature , pp. 81 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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