Humphrey Moseley - Drama and Poetry

Drama and Poetry

Moseley is best known for the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647, which he published in partnership with stationer Humphrey Robinson. Moseley partnered with Robinson on other projects too, and also with Nicholas Fussell (to 1635) and Francis Constable. Moseley issued a range of important Jacobean and Caroline playwrights, including Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, Richard Brome, and Sir 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."

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 inevitably, 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.

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.