James Shirley's Triumph of Peace: Analyzing Greg's

Abstract

T surviving exemplars of James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace (London, 1633/4) have defeated the attempts of generations of bibliographers to classify them. Any two copies are likely to show some pages with identical typesettings, some with partly different settings, and some entirely different. The title page comes in four variants of authorship and edition statements (fi g. 1): 1. By James Shirley, of Grayes Inne, Gent. 2. By James Shirley, Gent. 3. By James Shirley, of Grayes-Inne, The third Impression. 4. By James Shirley, of Grayes-Inne, Gent. The third Impression. These states have an obscure connection with the text pages that follow, whose dozens of permutations require one to specify the state of each page in order to fully characterize a copy. The normal hand-press taxonomy of edition, impression, issue, and state is inadequate to sort the copies into well-behaved families. As convoluted as The Triumph of Peace (henceforth “ToP ”) may be, part of the reason for bibliographers’ diffi culty in coming to grips with it was the unavailability, until the 1960s, of a technology that could supply quick and cheap reproductions of complete copies for thorough comparison. W. W. Greg, who came closer than anyone to understanding the book, died in 1959, the year the Xerox machine was introduced. (He would have had to wait another half-century for the silent invasion of library reading rooms by digital cameras and smartphones.) In 1946, he published a paper entitled “The Triumph of Peace: A Bibliographer’s Nightmare”.1 His chief purpose there was to point out inconsistencies in the account of the work by William Jackson and Emma Unger in the Pforzheimer catalogue published several years earlier.2 However, he concluded that “a fi nal solution will have to wait till a bibliographer equipped with the necessary skill and patience fi nds the leisure and the opportunity to make a thorough scrutiny of all available copies.”3 The descriptions of ToP that Greg published fi ve years later in his Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration showed no further