printing and selling of plays, however, was of course only one fragment of the general business of book-production. Censorship was applied to many kinds of books, and was also in practice closely bound up with the logically distinct problem of copyright. This to the Elizabethan mind was a principle debarring one publisher from producing and selling a book in which another member of his trade had already a vested interest. The conception of a copyright vested in the author as distinct from the publisher of a book had as yet hardly emerged.
The earliest essay in censorship in fact took the form of an extension of the procedure, under which protection had for some time past been given to the copyright in individual books through the issue of a royal privilege forbidding their republication by any other than the privileged owner or printer.[1] Three proclamations of Henry VIII against heretical or seditious books, in 1529, 1530, and 1536, were followed in 1538 by a fourth, which forbade the printing of any English book except with a licence given 'upon examination made by some of his gracis priuie counsayle, or other suche as his highnes shall appoynte', and further directed that a book so licensed should not bear the words 'Cum priuilegio regali' without the addition of 'ad imprimendum solum', and that 'the hole copie, or els at the least theffect of his licence and priuilege be therwith printed'.[2] The intention was apparently to distinguish between a merely regulative privilege or licence to print, and the older and fuller type of privilege which also conveyed a protection of copyright. Finally, in 1546, a fifth proclamation laid down that every 'Englishe boke, balet or playe' must bear the names of the printer and author and the 'daye of the printe', and that an advance copy must be placed in the hands of the local mayor two days before publication.[3] It is not quite*
- ↑ Pollard, Sh. F. 2. 'Cum priuilegio' is in the colophons of Rastell's 1533 prints of Johan Johan, The Pardoner and the Friar, and The Wether, and 'Cum priuilegio regali' in those of his undated Gentleness and Nobility and Beauty and Good Properties of Women.
- ↑ Procl. 114, 122, 155, 176. The texts of 1529 and 1530 are in Wilkins, Concilia, iii. 737, 740; that of 1538 in Burnet, Hist. of Reformation, vi. 220; cf. Pollard, Sh. F. 6, and in 3 Library, x. 57. I find 'Cum priuilegio ad imprimendum solum' in the colophon of Acolastus (1540) and in both t.p. and colophon of Troas (1559); also 'Seen and allowed &c' in the t.p. of Q_{2} of Gorboduc (c. 1570), 'Perused and Alowed' at the end of Gammer Gurton's Needle (1575), and 'Seen and allowed, according to the order appointed in the Queenes maiesties Injunctions' in the t.p. of The Glass of Government (1575). Otherwise these precautions became dead letters, so far as plays were concerned.
- ↑ Procl. 295 (part only in Wilkins, iv. 1; cf. Pollard, Sh. F. 7). The
