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George Eld
George Eld (died 1624) was a London printer of the Jacobean era, who produced important works of English Renaissance drama and literature, including key texts by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Middleton.
Eld was the son of a carpenter from Derbyshire. He served an eight-year apprenticeship to bookseller Robert Bolton, starting in 1592, and became a "freeman" (a full member) of the Stationers Company on 13 January 1600. He established himself in his own printing business in 1604, at the sign of the White Horse in Fleet Lane, by marrying the widow of not one but two master printers. His shop featured two or perhaps three presses, and four compositors – a substantial operation for the time. Eld entered into a partnership with Miles Fletcher in 1617; Fletcher took over the business after Eld died of plague in 1624.
In Eld's historical era, most stationers concentrated on either printing or bookselling; and most publishing was done by the booksellers, who commissioned the printers to print their works. Eld was primarily a printer during his career, working on specific projects for specific booksellers.
In his two-decade career, Eld printed a wide variety of works; when the printer is identified on title pages only with initials, researchers have used Eld's characteristic title-page device, "two volutes with foliage," for supporting evidence. He is the "G. E." who printed William Camden's Remains of a Greater Work (1605) for Simon Waterson, John Selden's The Duello (1610) for John Helme, and Peter Gosselin's The State Mysteries of the Jesuits (1623) for Nicholas Bourne.
Eld worked regularly for Thomas Thorpe; the two produced more than twenty titles together. These included the first quartos of Jonson's Sejanus (1605), Volpone (1606), and The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty (in one volume, 1608). They also issued John Marston's What You Will (1607), and George Chapman's All Fools (1605) and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608).
Thorpe and Eld were also involved in two "dubious publishing enterprises" – one, a failed attempt to print a work to which they did not have the rights, and the other, a successful such attempt of some work by Thomas Coryat.
Thorpe and Eld's most significant project was the 1609 first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In 1612, Thorpe and Eld also issued a work of modern Shakespearean controversy, the Funeral Elegy that Donald Foster proposed as a work by Shakespeare, without convincing most scholars and critics.
More Shakespeare: Eld printed the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, for Richard Bonian and Henry Walley. Some critics have complained that the text in this volume is so poor that it should be classed as a "bad quarto;" how much blame for this should fall on Eld, and how much is due to a faulty manuscript source that Eld had to work with, is open to question. (Eld's Sejanus text, in contrast, is excellently printed.) Eld has also been identified as the printer of John Smethwick's third quarto of Hamlet (1611 in literature).
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George Eld
George Eld (died 1624) was a London printer of the Jacobean era, who produced important works of English Renaissance drama and literature, including key texts by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Middleton.
Eld was the son of a carpenter from Derbyshire. He served an eight-year apprenticeship to bookseller Robert Bolton, starting in 1592, and became a "freeman" (a full member) of the Stationers Company on 13 January 1600. He established himself in his own printing business in 1604, at the sign of the White Horse in Fleet Lane, by marrying the widow of not one but two master printers. His shop featured two or perhaps three presses, and four compositors – a substantial operation for the time. Eld entered into a partnership with Miles Fletcher in 1617; Fletcher took over the business after Eld died of plague in 1624.
In Eld's historical era, most stationers concentrated on either printing or bookselling; and most publishing was done by the booksellers, who commissioned the printers to print their works. Eld was primarily a printer during his career, working on specific projects for specific booksellers.
In his two-decade career, Eld printed a wide variety of works; when the printer is identified on title pages only with initials, researchers have used Eld's characteristic title-page device, "two volutes with foliage," for supporting evidence. He is the "G. E." who printed William Camden's Remains of a Greater Work (1605) for Simon Waterson, John Selden's The Duello (1610) for John Helme, and Peter Gosselin's The State Mysteries of the Jesuits (1623) for Nicholas Bourne.
Eld worked regularly for Thomas Thorpe; the two produced more than twenty titles together. These included the first quartos of Jonson's Sejanus (1605), Volpone (1606), and The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty (in one volume, 1608). They also issued John Marston's What You Will (1607), and George Chapman's All Fools (1605) and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608).
Thorpe and Eld were also involved in two "dubious publishing enterprises" – one, a failed attempt to print a work to which they did not have the rights, and the other, a successful such attempt of some work by Thomas Coryat.
Thorpe and Eld's most significant project was the 1609 first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. In 1612, Thorpe and Eld also issued a work of modern Shakespearean controversy, the Funeral Elegy that Donald Foster proposed as a work by Shakespeare, without convincing most scholars and critics.
More Shakespeare: Eld printed the 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, for Richard Bonian and Henry Walley. Some critics have complained that the text in this volume is so poor that it should be classed as a "bad quarto;" how much blame for this should fall on Eld, and how much is due to a faulty manuscript source that Eld had to work with, is open to question. (Eld's Sejanus text, in contrast, is excellently printed.) Eld has also been identified as the printer of John Smethwick's third quarto of Hamlet (1611 in literature).