Thomas Creede - Printing

Printing

In Creede's era, the disciplines of printing and publishing were generally conducted separately. Books were published by stationers or booksellers, who subcontracted the job of printing to professional printers. Those individuals, like William Jaggard of First Folio fame, who regularly functioned as both publishers and printers, were the exceptions to the general rule. Much of Creede's most noteworthy work, as with Shakespearean texts, followed this model — he worked as a printer hired by booksellers; yet Creede did a not-insignificant amount of publishing too (see below).

For the bookseller Thomas Millington, Creede printed:

• Henry VI, Part 2, Q1, 1594

For Andrew Wise, Creede printed:

• Richard III, Q2, 1598
• Richard III, Q3, 1602

For Matthew Law (who acquired the rights to Richard III from Wise in 1603), Creede printed:

• Richard III, Q4, 1605
• Richard III, Q5, 1612

For Cuthbert Burby, Creede printed:

• Romeo and Juliet, 1599 (the "good" quarto, as opposed to the "bad" Q1 of 1597)

For Thomas Millington and John Busby, Creede printed:

• Henry V, Q1, 1600 (a "bad quarto")

For Thomas Pavier (who acquired the rights to Henry V later in 1600), Creede printed:

• Henry V, Q2, 1602 (another "bad quarto")

For Arthur Johnson, Creede printed:

• The Merry Wives of Windsor, Q1 1602 (yet another "bad quarto")

For Henry Gosson, Creede, along with fellow printer William White, printed:

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Q1, 1609

For Nathaniel Butter, Creede printed the sole quarto of:

• The London Prodigal, Q, 1605, one of the plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha; assigned on the title page to "William Shakespeare"

And for Arthur Johnson, Creede printed:

• The Merry Devil of Edmonton, Q2, 1612; another Apocryphal play.

Creede was responsible for a number of play texts beyond the confines of Shakespeariana. He printed the sole quartos of the anonymous plays The Maid's Metamorphosis and The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, both for Richard Olive, in 1600; he printed the first quartos of George Chapman's Monsieur D'Olive for William Holmes (1606), and Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge and Wentworth Smith's Hector of Germany, both for Josias Harrison (both 1615), and the second quarto of John Lyly's Mother Bombie for Cuthbert Burby (1598). For Richard Hawkins, Creede printed The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) by Elizabeth Tanfield Cary, the first original tragedy by a woman author published in English.

And for Richard Olive, Creede printed one of the more significant non-dramatic texts of English Renaissance drama, the 1592 pamphlet by Robert Greene known as Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, which contains the earliest citation of Shakespeare in a theatrical context yet discovered. For Thomas Bushell, Creede printed the Microcynicon of Thomas Middleton (1599), which was suppressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Inevitably, Creede also worked on many non-dramatic projects, some of serious merit; in 1597 he printed the fifth edition of Spenser's The Shepherd's Calendar for John Harrison the Younger. Equally inevitably, he printed works of ephemeral interest, now forgotten. For Thomas Woodcocke, for instance, Creede printed John Dickenson's Arisbas: Euphues Amidst His Slumbers, or Cupid's Journey to Hell in 1594. Creede printed many of the prose romances of chivalry that were immensely popular in his era. Working in another instance for Richard Olive, he printed Emanuel Ford's Parismus, the Renowned Prince of Bohemia (1598). It must have been a success: nine years later Creede would both print and publish another of Ford's novels, The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia (1607). For Cuthbert Burby, Creede printed the eighth volume of perhaps the most popular novel of the period, The Mirror of Knighthood (1599).