Printed Books in Early Modern England

Origins of Moveable Type Printing

Para1In mid-15th century Germany, the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg combined his metallurgical talent with other technologies to create a printing press with moveable type. His first task was to develop a way to easily cast letters in a matrix, a specific type of mold that allowed for the cast letter to be extracted and used elsewhere. He developed the hand mold, a tool that when combined with the matrix and molten metal, produced movable type letters. Then he adapted screw press machinery, then used in wine production, to press the printing plate onto the paper. Gutenberg produced many books, the most famous of which was the Bible he printed in Latin in 1455.
Para2Gutenberg’s printing technology spread rapidly across Europe, with Paris becoming an early center of the book trade. Printing took another two decades to become established in England. The first printed text in England was produced by William Caxton in 1476, an edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Popular Printed Materials

Para3The most popular publications during this era were the Bible or other religious texts, such as sermons by popular preachers or pamphlets explaining sectarian views. The Protestant Reformation emphasized believers reading the Bible in their own language, so translations in vernacular languages began to be printed, such as William Tyndale’s New Testament printed in English in 1525. The first complete version of the Bible in English was Myles Coverdale’s 1535 edition.
Para4Other popular printed works included broadsheets, an early form of newspaper, and also ballads printed on a single page. Broadsheets were a key element in this new system as they were cheap enough to print but entertaining for common people and bought in large quantities. The English Broadside Ballad project features more than 9000 examples these works.

Printing of Early Modern Plays

Para5A quarto was a book featuring bound leaves of paper that had been folded twice. They were often sold stitched, but not fully bound and with the edges of the folds uncut. They were the Elizabethan equivalent of modern paperbacks. Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays, approximately half of them, were published in quarto, which made his plays much more accessible not only to readers and book collectors but also to competing acting troupes.
Para6A folio was more expensive book format than a quarto and owning one indicated higher wealth. Many literary works were still created on demand for wealthy patrons and kept in manuscript, but authors like Ben Jonson used printed books to reach larger audiences of literate people by producing work for the general public. In 1616, Jonson paved the way for Shakespeare’s First Folio by publishing The Workes of Benjamin Jonson in a folio format, and he was criticized for treating plays as literature. This did not deter Jonson, who added more works and published a second edition folio of his plays and essays in 1640. He also wrote a dedicatory poem to his fellow author that appears in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works.
Para7William Shakespeare’s former colleagues from the playing company The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled 36 of Shakespeare’s playscripts into a volume in 1623 to celebrate his work some seven years after his death. Only half of these plays had been printed before in quarto. Without the First Folio, texts of plays such as The Tempest and Macbeth would not have survived. About 750 volumes of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies were printed, and about 235 are known to survive today. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, holds the world’s largest collection of these volumes, with a total of 82.

Key Print Sources

Man, John. The Gutenberg Revolution: the Story of a Genius and an Invention That Changed the World. Transworld Digital, 2010.
Poe, Marshall. A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Voss, Paul J. Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England. The Sixteenth Century Journal vol. 29, no. 3, 1998, pp. 733–756.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. The Printing Press. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/publishing/press1.html#proof. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.
Fumerton, Patricia, dir., et. al. The English Broadside Ballad Archive. The University of California at Santa Barbara, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Accessed 24 Jun. 2024.
William Caxton. BBC - History - Society and Culture - Art. British Broadcasting Corporation, 7 Dec. 2002. The Way Back Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20021207094350/www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/art/caxton_william.shtml. Accessed 16 Jun. 2020.
Werner, Sarah. Early Printed Books. Version 1.02. https://www.earlyprintedbooks.com. Accessed 26 Jun. 2024.

Prosopography

Aaron Cope

Aaron Cope was a student at Utah Valley University.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Printed Books in Early Modern England
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Aaron Cope, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globablink Research Internship
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.