Humphrey Moseley

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For the politician, see Humphrey Moseley (MP).

Humphrey Moseley (died 31 January 1661) was a prominent London publisher and bookseller in the middle seventeenth century.

Life

Possibly a son of publisher Samuel Moseley,[1] Humphrey Moseley became a "freeman" (a full member) of the Stationers Company, the guild of London booksellers, on 7 May 1627; he was selected a Warden of the company on 7 July 1659.[2] His shop was located at the sign of the Prince's Arms in St Paul's Churchyard. One of the most productive publishers of his era, Moseley's imprint exists on 314 surviving books.[3]

Drama and poetry

Moseley is best known for the

William D'Avenant. In the Commonwealth era Moseley dominated the publication of drama: "the plays brought out by him far outnumbered those of any other publisher."[4]

In the 1640s and 1650s Moseley dominated the market for English poetry, issuing a series of single-poet collections—most prominently

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.[5]

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 forestalled 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.

Other works

Moseley published works by

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. He also engaged in the then-new practice of cataloguing his works – though he did not go as far as some of his contemporaries did, and try to catalogue an entire field of publishing.[6] Moseley included a catalogue of 135 of his publications in his 1653 edition of Five New Plays by Richard Brome, and another catalogue of 180 Moseley products in his 1654 edition of Sir Aston Cockayne's Dianea.[7]

Shakespeare

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

Double Falshood
have been given some standing.

Post mortem

Moseley's last will and testament named his "dear and loving wife" Anne Moseley and his "dutiful child and only daughter," also named Anne, as his executrices. They carried on the business after his death. (Two of Moseley's workers, Henry Penton and John Langford, received bequests of £5 each in the will – provided they continued to work for the firm.) When the widow Moseley eventually liquidated the business, many of the Moseley copyrights were purchased by Henry Herringman, Humphrey Moseley's successor as the dominant publisher of his generation.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Plomer, p. 132.
  2. ^ Though elected a warden, Moseley never attended any of the sessions of the Court of Assistants, which was one of the wardens' duties. Perhaps his health was already failing in 1659.
  3. ^ Sonia Massai, "'Taking just care of the impression': Editorial Intervention in Shakespeare's Fourth Folio, 1685." In Holland, p. 267.
  4. ^ Wright, p. 83.
  5. ^ "Sabrina Alcorn Baron, "Milton, Areopagitica, and the Paradox of Licensing."". Archived from the original on 15 March 2007. Retrieved 7 October 2006.
  6. ^ See: Francis Kirkman; The Old Law; The Careless Shepherdess.
  7. ^ Plomer, pp. xviii, 133.

References

  • Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
  • Holland, Peter, ed. King Lear and Its Afterlife. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • Plomer, Henry Robert. A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667. London, The Bibliographical Society/Blades, East & Blades, 1907.
  • Sutton, Charles William (1894). "Moseley, Humphrey" . In Lee, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 39. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  • Wright, Louis B. "The Reading of Plays during the Puritan Revolution," Huntington Library Bulletin no. 6 (November 1934), pp. 73–108.
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