would naturally commit interests which might come into conflict with those of members of the trade. It would be another matter, however, if the actors were in a position to bring outside interest to bear against the pirates, through the licensers, or through the Privy Council on whom ultimately the licensers depended. And this in fact seems to have been the way in which a solution of the problem was gradually arrived at. Apart altogether from plays, there are instances upon record in which individuals, who were in a position to command influence, successfully adopted a similar method. We find Fulke Greville in 1586 writing to Sir Francis Walsingham, on the information of the stationer Ponsonby, to warn him that the publication of the Arcadia was being planned, and to advise him to get 'made stay of that mercenary book' by means of an application to the Archbishop or to Dr. Cosin, 'who have, as he says, a copy to peruse to that end'.[1] Similarly we find Francis Bacon, in the preface to his Essayes of 1597, excusing himself for the publication on the ground that surreptitious adventurers were at work, and 'to labour the staie of them had bin troublesome and subiect to interpretation'. Evidently he had come to a compromise, of which the Stationers' Register retains traces in the cancellation by a court of an entry of the Essayes to Richard Serger, and a re-entry to H. Hooper, the actual publisher, 'under the handes of Master Francis Bacon, Master Doctor Stanhope, Master Barlowe, and Master Warden Lawson'.[2] The actors, too, were not wholly without influence. They had their patrons and protectors, the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Admiral, in the Privy Council, and although, as Mr. Pollard points out, it certainly would not have been good business to worry an important minister about every single forty-shilling piracy, it may have been worth while to seek a standing protection, analogous to the old-fashioned 'privilege', against a series of such annoyances. At any rate, this is what, while the Admiral's contented themselves with buying off the printer of Patient Grissell, the Chamberlain's apparently attempted, although at first with indifferent success, to secure. In 1597 John Danter, a stationer of the worst reputation, had printed a surreptitious and 'bad' edition of Romeo and Juliet, and possibly, if
- ↑ Letter in Grosart, Poems of Sidney (1877), i. xxiii. Pollard, F. and Q. 8, says that on other occasions Sidney's friends approached the Lord Treasurer and the Star Chamber.
- ↑ Pollard, F. and Q. 7, 11. I am not sure that the appearance of Bacon's name can be regarded as a recognition of the principle of author's copyright. He may have been already in the High Commission; he was certainly in that of 1601.
