William Shakespeare, Quartos, The Merchant of Venice, 1600 [1619] - Title page, imprint detail

Description:A text published without the permission of Shakespeare’s acting company.

Every press had to be licensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London and no printing was allowed except in London, other than by one printer in each of the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. Only the Queen’s printer might have more than three apprentices and the Stationers' Company was empowered to search for and to destroy all unlicensed printing presses. Even so some printers, seeking good sales published without permission of the Company, or of the text owners, and in 1619 William Jaggard, printed for publisher Thomas Pavier several quarto texts of Shakespeare’s plays the title pages of which implied that they were the first editions that had been published a few years earlier. These included two quartos printed in 1600 by James Roberts, whose business Jaggard had purchased about 1608.

Full title: William Shakespeare, The excellent history of the Merchant of Venice, with the extreme cruelty of Shylocke the Jew, Written by William Shakespeare. [London], printed by J. Roberts, 1600. [i.e. William Jaggard for Thomas Pavier, 1619].