Liber C, folio 303 recto
Terms of use
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers has graciously contributed the above image from their collections to Shakespeare Documented under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. For any further use, visitors should contact the Clerk of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers at clerk@stationers.org.
Document-specific information
Creator: Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
Title: Liber C
Date: 1595-1620
Repository: Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, London, UK
Call number and opening: Liber C, fol. 303
Terms of use
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers has graciously contributed the above image from their collections to Shakespeare Documented under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. For any further use, visitors should contact the Clerk of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers at clerk@stationers.org.
Document-specific information
Creator: Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers
Title: Liber C
Date: 1595-1620
Repository: Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, London, UK
Call number and opening: Liber C, fol. 303
Folger Shakespeare Library staff, "Stationers' Register entry for the transfer of The Merchant of Venice and another book in 1619," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/433.
The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, Liber C, folio 303 recto. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/433.
The Merchant of Venice was originally entered into the Stationers' Register on July 22, 1598, by James Roberts. Roberts never produced any editions of the play, and transferred the rights to Thomas Hayes on October 28 of that same year. Having published the first quarto edition in 1600, Hayes died sometime before 1619, and left the rights to The Merchant of Venice and a book entitled The Ethiopian History of Heliodorus to his young son Lawrence in an entry in Liber C of the Stationers' Company on July 8, 1619, shown above. This is possibly due to the fact that William Jaggard printed an illegal second quarto edition of The Merchant of Venice in 1619 with a title page bearing the first edition's date and printer falsely. Lawrence Hayes issued the third quarto edition in 1637, and the play did appear in both the First and Second Folios.
Liber C and the other registers with Shakespeare’s works are still kept by the Stationers’ Company in their archives.
[Current transcription based on Arber; check back soon for a transcription that conforms to Shakespeare Documented conventions]
of both the wardens, Indentures to bind children
Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London: 1554–1640 A.D. 5 vols. (London: privately printed, 1875–94), 3:651.
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks, "The Merchant of Venice (The Jew of Venice)," Ed. Alan B. Farmer and Zachary Lesser. Created 2007. Accessed 15 January 2016. http://deep.sas.upenn.edu.
Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson, "1047. The Merchant of Venice," in British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue. Vol. 3, 1590-1597 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 341-46.
Last updated February 8, 2020
