Everything about Thomas Millington totally explained
Thomas Millington (
fl. 1591 –
1603) was a
London publisher of the
Elizabethan era, who published first editions of three
Shakespearean plays. He has been called a "stationer of dubious reputation" who was connected with some of the "
bad quartos" and questionable texts of Shakespearean bibliography.
He was the son of a William Millington, a "husbandman" of Hamptongay,
Oxfordshire, and was apprenticed to a Henry Carre for a period of eight years, beginning on St. Bartholomew's Day (August 24) in 1583. Thomas Millington became a "freeman" (full member) of the
Stationers Company on
November 8,
1591. For a time he was in partnership with fellow guild member Edward White; their shop was located, and their title pages specify, "at the little north door of
Paul's at the sign of the Gun."
Millington's business was at the lower end of the publishing scale in Elizabethan England; he printed many
ballads, including some by
Thomas Deloney. In
1595 he published
The Norfolk Tragedy, a ballad based on the story of
Babes in the Wood. During the mid-1590s Millington was fined three times by his guild for issuing ballads to which he didn't own the rights and similar small offenses. He also printed playbooks — most notably, of three of Shakespeare's plays:
- On March 12, 1594, Millington entered into the Stationers' Register the early alternative version of Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2, short-titled The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (the full title is much longer). He published the play in quarto later that year, in a text that's generally classed as a bad quarto. The printing was done by Thomas Creede.
- In 1595, with no Register entry, Millington published the early alternative version of Henry VI, Part 3, called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York — another "bad quarto." The printing was by "P. S."
- In 1600, in partnership with stationer John Busby, Millington published the first quarto of Henry V, yet another bad quarto, again printed by Creede. Millington didn't enter the play into the Stationers' Register, though an entry dated August 4, 1600 cites the play and notes it's "to be stayed." This apparently was an attempt by some party, perhaps the Lord Chamberlain's Men or a representative, to prevent the publication of Henry V. If so, the attempt was clearly unsuccessful; and another Register entry dated ten days later, on August 14, transfers the rights to the play to stationer Thomas Pavier.
Millington published the
second quartos of both
The First Part of the Contention and
The True Tragedy in 1600. And he'd a link to one other Shakespearean play: when John Danter published
Q1 of
Titus Andronicus in 1594, the volume's title page states the book would be sold at Millington and White's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard. In a Stationers' Register entry of
April 19,
1602, Millington transferred his rights to the two
Henry VI plays and
Titus to Pavier, the same man who gained the rights to
Henry V two years earlier.
Thomas Millington published
Henry Chettle's
England's Mourning Garment in 1603, but then disappears from the historical record — as did fellow publisher
Andrew Wise in the same year. The major outbeak of
bubonic plague in London in 1603 might not have been coincidental; printer
Peter Short died in 1603, while publisher
William Ponsonby passed on in 1604.
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