William Caxton

ca. 1422-1491

Though the thirty years Caxton spent as a mercerer are often eclipsed by his introduction of printing to England, the dimplomacy and business sense he gained during this period are at least partially responsible for the success of his midde-age venture. After serving as Governor of the English Nation at Bruges for nine years, Caxton began a translantion of the Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, demand for which caused him to take up printing. Having learned the trade under Johan Veldener, he opened a shop in Bruges, where he printed five other books beside the Recuyell. Two years later, he introduced printing to England, choosing Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as his first title in folio, and opened a shop at Westminster, from which he issued over 100 (extant) titles.

For a pioneer printer, Caxton had a remarkable range of tastes - or certainly a clear sense of the tastes of his readership. He published the works of the great writers of antiquity in translation (including Ovid, Vergil, and Cicero), prose romances (Blanchard and Eglantyne, The Four Sons of Aymon), mythical stories (The History of Jason), beast fables (Reynard the Fox, Aesop's Fables, religious and philosophical works (The Curial, Boethius's Consolation, The Moral Proverbs of Christine de Pizan), historical works (Trevisa's translation of Higden's Polychronicon, a Description of Britain), chivalric romances (Paris and Vienne), and also grammar books, vocabularies, statues of the realm, indulgences, and other miscellaneous pieces. Most of all, he published the best literature England had to offer at the time, including the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Confessio Amantis, Le Morte Darthur, and many of the minor works of Chaucer and Lydgate.

Universal as Caxton's tastes were, he showed a marked preference for chivalric literature, an interest that dates at least as far back as his association with the Duchess of Burgundy (ca. 1470) and probably farther. Before publishing Le Morte Darthur in 1485, he translated and printed Godfrey of Bouillon and The Ordre of Chyualry (in whose prologue and epilogue, respectively, he mentioned the stories of Arthur), and afterward Charles the Grete, Paris and Vienne, and The Fayttes of Armes and Chyualry. The works on Godfrey, Charlemagne, and Arthur were apparently planned as a series designed to honor the three Christian Worthies. It should not be surprising that the work honoring the English Worthy, Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, is the one for which Caxton is most remembered.

Caxton finished printing Le Morte Darthur on 31 July 1485; the book most likely took about ten months to print. Only one typeface was used, type 4*, probably because there are no running heads or titles. Five-line woodcut initials are used at the beginning of each of the twenty-one books, and a similar three-line series is used for chapter beginnings. Otherwise, the folio is not decorated: there are no illustrations or borders, which suggests that there was no decoration in the manuscript Caxton printed from. This book survives in two extant copies: the only complete one is housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York; the other, which lacks eleven of the original leaves, is in the John Rylands University Library in Manchester. Aside from two sheets that were completely reset, there are few variant readings between the two copies.

Caxton divided Malory's text into twenty-one books and 506 chapters and added a table of rubrics, a prologue, and a colophon. The table and prologue were printed after the rest of the text was set, as the signatures indicate; this may account for the discrepancies between the table and the text itself. The basis for Caxton's layout cannot be fully determined, since his exemplar is no longer extant, but it is worth noting that nineteen of the twenty book divisions have some counterpart in the only manuscript version of Malory's work, wh ich was in his office while the Morte was being printed.

Caxton's role as editor of Le Morte Darthur is unclear. His English is a more "standard" dialect than that of the manuscript, and his version is generally regarded as the more readable; but without his copy text we cannot ascertain how much of the revision can be assigned to Caxton. The section in which the two versions differ most is that of Arthur's War with Lucius, Caxton's Book V, which is twice as long in the manuscript as it is in the printed text. Scholarly debate on this issue has produced two conflicting arguments. Some, after comparing his text with the manuscript, have charged Caxton with revising the Roman War episode and by extension the entire work. Others, citing Caxton's statement in his prologue and his editorial habits with other texts, believe that he did in fact print "according to his copy", and that someone else - perhaps Malory himself - revised the text he printed. Even if we follow Caxton's critics, the revision attributed to him is not an unreasonable exercise of editorial duty.

Caxton's prologue to Le Morte Darthur is unlike his others, notably in what he leaves out. He fails to identify a patron, though Anthony Wydville is surely the "certain gentleman" he mentions. This may be because Richard III, who had ordered Wydville's execution two years earlier, still had the crown when the Morte was published. He also fails to dedicate the work, perhaps because the most likely recipient of such praise would have been Edward IV. And he gives us very little information about the author, though Malory's own political connections may have prevented this. Such political risks, along with other hesitations expressed in his prologue, make us wonder that Caxton decided to publish Le Morte Darthur at all. Had he not, Arthurian literature from the sixteenth century to the present might well have been deprived of its major English source.