Beale Pirated Edition of Bacon's Essayes
The Essaies of Sr Francis Bacon Knight, the Kings Aturney Generall. His Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. Seene and Allowed.
London: [John Beale] for John Jaggard, 1613.
Price: $6,000.00
About the item
Beale piracy, with "Aturney" on title-page. Title within border of printer's ornaments, head- and tailpieces, woodcut initials, "Of the Colours" section title. [232] pp. Collation: A^2-O^8 P^3 (lacking blanks A1 and P4). Small 8vo. Beale Pirated Edition of Bacon's Essayes. Contemporary vellum, manuscript title on spine. Title and terminal leaf soiled and worn, with some small chips at edges, small void in the title touching the ornamental border, two small voids in terminal leaf costing a couple letters. ESTC S100361; Gibson 9; Pforzheimer 29.
Item #319858
There were three editions of Bacon's Essayes dated 1613 with a Jaggard imprint. The first, printed by Jaggard after the 1612 Beale edition of the Essayes, has the spelling "Atturny" for "Attorney" on the title-page. The other two printings, which spell "Attorney" as "Aturney" (as here) and "Atturney" are in fact counterfeit editions, printed by the same John Beale whose 1612 edition stood as the model for Jaggard's 1613 edition. There is some debate about Jaggard's right to print the Essayes, as he never registered the work with the Stationers' Company (see Pforzheimer 29 for the arguments).
The Essayes of statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) treat moral and political topics in "a terse, aphoristic style … which Bacon conceived as a genre setting down discrete observations on life, and aspiring to some kind of objective validity" (ODNB). "In an age of complicated and superficial verbiage, [Bacon] turns the licence of imaginative and allusive expression into an instrument of accurate and chastened thought" (Cambridge History of English and American Literature). The Essayes were originally circulated in manuscript among Bacon's friends — the threat of a pirated edition by Richard Seeger lead to Bacon entrusting the work to Humfrey Hooper for publication in 1597.
