22Valentine Simmes, Printer

Valentine Simmesʼs printing career is chequered with incidents. Although at first apprenticed to the bookseller Henry Sutton he was transferred at his own request to the printer Henry Bynneman, and was presented for his freedom in 1585 by Bynnemanʼs widow.^[161] He attracted attention from the authorities for printing undesirable material and books belonging to others. In 1589 he was in trouble as a compositor of the Martin Marprelate press, and in 1595, while printing the ‘Grammar and Accidenceʼ, his press was seized, type melted, and apprentice transferred. Again in trouble in 1599, the year An Humorous Dayʼs Mirth was printed, he was listed among fourteen printers forbidden to print satires or epigrams. Despite such trouble, Simmes printed over twenty plays, at least ten of which are by Shakespeare. The only other extant edition of a Chapman play printed by Simmes is The Gentleman Usher (1606).

23Greg describes the type used in Simmesʼs printing house as ‘ordinary roman and italic type of a body approximating to modern pica (20 ll. = c. 82 mm)ʼ.^[162] Upper case italic was short, and since the compositor preferred to set all speech prefixes in italics, he often had to resort to roman type, especially letter L, which was in frequent use.