FYI July 22, 2020

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On This Day

1598 – William Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, is entered on the Stationers’ Register. By decree of Queen Elizabeth, the Stationers’ Register licensed printed works, giving the Crown tight control over all published material.

The Stationers’ Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers’ Company of London. The company is a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England. The Register itself allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work, and constituted an early form of copyright law. The Company’s charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions and bar the publication of unlicensed books.

For the study of English literature of the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries—for the Elizabethan era, the Jacobean era, the Caroline era, and especially for English Renaissance theatre—the Stationers’ Register is a crucial and essential resource: it provides factual information and hard data that is available nowhere else. Together with the records of the Master of the Revels (which relate to dramatic performance rather than publication), the Stationers’ Register supplies many of the certain facts scholars possess on the works of William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and all of their immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.[1]

By paying a fee of 4 to 6 pence, a bookseller could register his right to publish a given work. One example: the Stationers’ Register reveals that on 26 November 1607, the stationers John Busby and Nathaniel Butter claimed the right to print “A booke called Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear, as yt was played before the Kinges maiestie at Whitehall vppon Sainct Stephens night at Christmas Last, by his maiesties servantes playinge vsually at the Globe on the Banksyde.” (They paid sixpence.)[2]

Enforcement of regulations in this historical era was never as thorough as in the modern world; books were sometimes published without registration, and other irregularities also occurred. In some cases, the companies of actors appear to have registered plays through co-operative stationers, with the express purpose of forestalling the publication of a play when publication was not in their interest.[3]

In 1710, the Copyright Act or Statute of Anne entered into force, superseding company provisions pertaining to the Register. The company continued to offer some form of registration of works until February 2000.

 
 

Born On This Day

1849 – Emma Lazarus, American poet and educator (d. 1887)
Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish causes.

She wrote the sonnet “The New Colossus” in 1883.[1] Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903,[2] on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.[3] The last stanza of the sonnet was set to music by Irving Berlin as the song “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The last stanza was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song “The Lady of the Harbor” written in 1985 as part of his song cycle “Three Women”.

Lazarus was also the author of Poems and Translations (New York, 1867); Admetus, and other Poems (1871); Alide: An Episode of Goethe’s Life (Philadelphia, 1874); Poems and Ballads of Heine (New York, 1881); Poems, 2 Vols.; Narrative, Lyric and Dramatic; as well as Jewish Poems and Translations.[4]

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FYI

One bullet each.

 
 
 
 
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The Rural Blog: New toolkit aims to help rural communities develop (and journalists cover) paramedicine programs and more ->

 
 
 
 
NSFW

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

Recipes

By Laurie Dixon, Taste of Home: 30 Incredible Cornmeal Recipes