WILLIAM CAXTON
Though William Caxton was a man of medieval taste and temperament, he introduced a sea change in our culture, in the dissemination of works of literature and ways of literacy. He contributed no theories to the intellectual world. His writings are largely forgotten. He invented nothing. But the impact of his entrepreneurial work has proved more radical than the ideas of Wycliffe, Latimer, Cromwell or any other Englishman. He fathered what was to become an informed democracy. That democracy spread through the decay of empire.
Humanism was well begun by the time Erasmus first visited England late in the fifteenth century. The Greek scholar William Grocyn had established principles of critical scholarship; John Colet was lecturing on the Pauline Epistles and setting them into an historical context. “Pure,” or classical, Latin was being reestablished at court “for diplomacy and historiography.” Against this background Caxton’s activity seems to propose a different program, as though English printing would run in the teeth of the universities and their specialisms. The books Caxton printed between 1475 and 1491 answered to medieval tastes. The new elements in popular literature are the books of fools or follies, The Ship of Fools. Just as “cutting-edge” writers were slow to rise to the challenge of electronic publishing, so humanists and printers, even when they approched the classics, were differently impelled. In our tradition, entrepreneurial and intellectual cultures never make comfortable bedfellows.
It’s almost an accident that Caxton occupies the place he does. Had it not been him, another enterprising expatriate returning home might have brought the technology he acquired, though another would have pursued different editorial ends. The key to the invention of printing lay in movable type. Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, born at the end of the fourteenth century, is credited with the introduction of the craft. His Latin edition of the Bible, known as the Mazarin Bible (1450–55), was the first book to be printed in Europe and is still one of the most beautiful. Printing was perfected and it spread, as journeymen left masters and set up for themselves. Printed works appeared in Italy (1453), Basel (1466), France (1470), Hungary (1473), Spain (1473), Poland (1474), Bruges (1474), England (1476), Sweden (1483) and Mexico (1539). By the end of the fifteenth century, as many as 40,000 items had been issued. Books usually appeared as quartos bound between wooden boards and decorated copiously with woodcuts. Print runs were small, averaging fewer than five hundred, with some notable exceptions. The vernacular gained ground, but most fifteenth-century productions were religious or legal works in Latin.
The earliest printed books are called incunabula, from the Latin for “swaddling clothes,” publications from the infancy of printing. An incunabulum, or incunable, is any printed book, booklet, or broadside from the fifteenth century. Incunabula resemble the manuscripts they supersede. They do not sport a title page; instead, author, title, printer, place, and date of publication are provided in a final paragraph, a “colophon.” Some printers devised a woodcut for identification, and the word “colophon” gradually transferred to that emblem. During the Reformation and Counterreformation many incunabula were destroyed; those that survive are prized, some more so than the labored manuscripts of my scribal predecessors.
Caxton was hard-working, an artist in his craft, a dedicated writer-printer (the term “publisher” gained currency in the eighteenth century). Few men of the time possessed his taste or his range of interests, those of a cultured dilettante with only himself and his patrons to satisfy. He shows style in his judgment and his writing. About a third of the more than one hundred books he printed were his own translations. When moved to be emphatic, he is “almost as vigorous as Latimer himself. In his power of writing with a naïve vivacity, while deliberately striving after a more ornate manner, Caxton belongs to his age. He provides, as it were, a choice of styles for his readers.” His most popular book is The Golden Legend.
Born in Kent around 1422, he lived almost to the age of seventy. The English of his childhood he describes as “broad and rude,” colored with idioms and accents of the large Flemish community that lived in Kent. He received—we don’t know where—a good education (though he never trusted his Latin) and began as did many of his class, both English and Flemish, as a cloth merchant. By 1463 he was governor of the merchant-adventurers in the Low Countries. Six years later he gave this up and entered the service of the Duchess of Burgundy, turning to literary work. In 1471 he made a visit to Cologne, saw a printing press at work, and there the prosperous mercer settled down and learned to print.
In 1474 he acquired two fonts of type. They were cut in imitation of ordinary scribal hand. He founded a press in Bruges before returning to England. His first book was Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, dated 1475—the first of his own translations that he printed. It had been popular and much in demand in manuscript. He tired of having it copied and went for print. His versions generally carry a prologue or epilogue—sometimes in verse—that reveals his sense of humor and due modesty.
In 1476 he returned to England, and the next year his press “in a house with the sign of the Red Pale” at Westminster produced Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first dated book printed in England. He printed pamphlets: Lydgate’s Temple of Glass, Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite and others. His edition of the Canterbury Tales, a massive undertaking, appeared at this time, as did The Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pisan, the first book by a woman printed in England. He went on to print more than ninety editions.
Only 370 books of all kinds were printed in Britain before 1500, and this includes different editions of the same work. But because English printing started late and impecuniously, it was largely a vernacular publishing culture. The classics had to be imported because the cost of acquiring fonts was so high. And because the publishing culture was vernacular and Caxton was Caxton, the literary values were generally high.
What else did he print? In 1482, Higden’s Polychronicon, with Caxton revising Trevisa’s 1387 English version and updating it to 1467. This continuation is the one major original work by Caxton that we possess. In 1481: three of his own translations including Reynard the Fox. In 1483: more Lydgate, plus a new edition of Canterbury Tales, with his prologue showing the esteem in which he held Chaucer. He placed a memorial tablet to his poet in Westminster Abbey. About this time he also published Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame and, in September 1483, Gower’s Confessio Amantis. In 1485: Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. In 1489: The Fayttes of Arms, generally attributed to Christine de Pisan. In 1490: Eneydos, not a translation but a romance based on the Aeneid—the book that so irritated Gavin Douglas. Caxton in his preface reflects on the speed of change in English: “And certaynly our langage now used varyeth ferre from that wgiche was used and spoken when I was borne.” He comments on variety of dialect and declares: “And thus bytwene playn, rude, and curious I stande abasshed, but in my judgemente the comyn termes that be dayli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe.” John Skelton helped revise the book for the press, so Douglas’s blame should be spread between Caxton and the first great English poet of the sixteenth century.
In 1491 he died, having just completed translating St. Jerome’s Lives of the Fathers, which Wynkyn de Worde, his foreman who became his successor, published in 1495, declaring that the version was completed on the last day of Caxton’s life.
Given his background and his independence of means, Caxton never printed for a market but consulted his own taste, leading rather than following his readers. His editions were small. He edited with care, a custom his immediate successors did not honor. Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson were printers more than publishers. Pynson published a Canterbury Tales among the law books that were his specialty. Three years after Caxton died Pynson printed Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, translated from Boccaccio. He also first published Mandeville’s Travels and in 1509 Barclay’s translation of The Ship of Fools. His most durable literary text appeared betweeen 1523 and 1525: Froissart’s Chronicle, translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners. But he suffered from lack of type, especially Greek. Scholars sent their work abroad when English manufacturers were unequal to the typographical challenge.
When a manuscript of a printed text survives, often the printed version shortens or abridges the original—especially with Pynson (whose English was poor). Owing to lack of type and the cost of composition in time and resources, such truncations were published and may have displaced original texts. Scribes had drowsed from time to time, or—unable to keep up—dropped a line here and there. But what Pynson did was more cynical. One scribe may err while another gets it right. But 500 copies, all identically corrupt, do damage. Technology replicates cheaply; it can also spread corruption.
Wynkyn de Worde was more interested in poetry than Pynson. But his 1498 Canterbury Tales shows his carelessness: the text was hardly edited at all. He did not always date his books, but many of them were literary, including Skelton’s The Bowge of Court. Wynkyn printed at least 640 books, 150 poems and romances. Robert Copland was his chief translator and could be a good editor. In 1581 he wrote the poor play The Castell of Pleasure, in which a skeptical exchange between author and printer occurs:
Like publishers down the generations, he laments the demise of the printed book as a force to be reckoned with. His lament is issued before the art of printing in England has had even half a century’s innings.
After 1521, new English books were fewer, but not for the reasons Copland adduced. The revival of learning meant a concentration on educational works and classical texts. Erasmus was not good for English-language publishing. The English printers were poor and growing poorer; Continental printers targeted the English market: the Dutch, Belgians and French especially. When in 1525 at Worms an edition of Tyndale’s New Testament was issued, a change began: thereafter many foreign publications were controversial or subversive, works by exiles, refugees and “unsettlers.” The Stationers’ Company, incorporated 1557, was granted a national monopoly on printing. The issue was one of control: stemming the flood of foreign imports and limiting the independence of native printers.
Gentlemen in England were contemptuous of books made by machine. So great was the prejudice that scribes sometimes copied from print for the “authentic” reader. Early typecasters designed letters that imitated scribal practice. The new crept in under the guise of the old. If prejudice was pronounced in England, it existed on the Continent as well. The Abbot of Spanheim’s letter De laude scriptorum manualium urges continuance of parchments and manuscripts as more durable, more appropriate than printed books. Durability, the long term; and, of course, the importance of the monasteries in scribal work. If the reproduction of texts became a secular activity, the Church would lose control—which it did. Some English and many German monasteries got presses.
Caxton’s revolution was decisive but not dramatic. It took a long while for its effects to work their way through the literary system. The author might have been expected to derive some benefits; and he did, three hundred years later. Until the eighteenth century, there was close commerce, but not equal dealing, between authors and printer-publishers. Some relationships were exemplary. Erasmus lived at his printer-publisher Frobe’s house. Gabriel Harvey was maintained by his printer. Authors might be professional servants or employees of the publisher. They called regularly at their printers to correct proofs—part of the agreement. The printer considered himself absolved from all errors: the author was responsible. (Caxton was the exception: he had been a scrupulous proofreader. Wynkyn de Worde was content with a lower standard than his master. Proofreaders were costly professionals, often too costly.)
Printing took place near the markets where manuscripts were available for sale. Cathedral precincts were most popular, Paternoster Row at St. Paul’s, the Red Pale near Westminster—Caxton’s almonry. Oxford, Cambridge, Southward, St. Albans, York, Tavistock: wherever there were strong ecclesiastical interests or major civic institutions. A few bootleg printers emerged, servicing the outlawed religious groups—to begin with, the Puritans. One such dissident ended up publishing from Manchester.
Printing grew during the fifteenth century. When the sixteenth dawned, though the old scribal arts survived, and the taint of “trade” made publishing distasteful to gentlemen, the multiply produced text was a fact of life to which readers and writers were learning to adjust, just as today there is an adjustment between producers, readers and publishers to new technology: electronic publishing. Caxton provided crucial texts and an even more crucial example. After his return from Bruges in 1476, things would change, and keep changing. The way a poet conceives and then visualizes a poem, the way a reader sees it disposed on the page, the change of feel to the fingers from vellum to paper, the loss of contact with readers, the emergence of middlemen between writer and audience, the greater authority of a multiply produced text, the development of rules and consistencies of usage: all these considerations weighed with every person, writer or reader, for whom a poem was a creative space. The architecture of that space was adjusted to something less flexible, as though language were under arrest and enduring the disciplines that would bring it to classical stability and perfection.