Who Rpinted Shakespeare's Fourth Folio?

“R OF DENMARK.” WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS INFAMOUS LARGE-LETTER BLUNDER IN SHAKESPEARE’S FOURTH FOLIO (1685, hereafter F4)—one of the most “embarrassing, excruciating, and egregious errors in English”? The “HAMLET / RPINCE of DENMARK” internal title page appeared on signature 3E6r, page 59, in the “Tragedies” section (figure 1). According to Fredson Bowers, writing in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1951, we will never know the printer of that section “until we know everything there is to be learned about seventeenth-century types.” Bowers doubted we could ever list the full set of F4’s printers because F4 was printed anonymously, and the volume left few clues about its printers. While George Watson Cole’s 1909 “examination of the letterpress show[ed] that a copy of the Third Folio was apparently broken into three portions and sent to three different printers,” Bowers himself only got as far as attributing the first of F4’s three separately paginated parts. The purpose of this note is to identify the other two printers involved in F4, one of whom, John Macock, was the printer whose shop was responsible for F4’s Hamlet. Regrettably, this short note does not include everything there is to be learned about seventeenth-century types.