34 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



Shakespeare, is entirely fanciful. Richard Field, a 

 friend of Shakespeare, had come to London in 1579, 

 and served his apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier ; 

 shake- anc j Field was Shakespeare's first publisher, having set 

 up for himself by 1587. It has been suggested that 

 before this time Shakespeare worked in Vautrollier's 

 printing office. On the other hand, it has been 

 universally received that Vautrollier was Bruno's 

 publisher in England, and Bruno usually corrected 

 his own proofs. Hence the two may have met, 

 Shakespeare and Bruno, in a grimy printer's den. The 

 idea is charming, but it has to yield before the light 

 of fact. Shakespeare did not come to London until 

 1586, and there is no proof that he worked with 

 Vautrollier. Bruno had left England by the end of 

 1585, and there is no proof that Vautrollier was his 

 printer. The suggested analogies between one or two 

 ideas in Hamlet and Bruno's conceptions of trans- 

 migration, of the relativity of evil, and the rest, are 

 of the shallowest. 1 Thomas Vautrollier, a French 

 printer who came to London some years before, and 

 set up a press in Blackfriars, was said (by Thomas 

 Baker) to have gained an undesired notoriety as 

 Bruno's printer, and to have been compelled to leave 

 England for a period, which he spent in Edinburgh, 

 to the advantage of Scottish printing. The Triginta 

 Sigilli and all the Italian Dialogues of Bruno were 

 certainly published in England, although Venice or 

 Paris was set down as their place of publication. 

 According to Bruno, this was "that they might sell 

 more easily, and have the greater success, for if they 



1 Cf. the Quarterly Re-view, Oct. 1902. The references are Tschhchwifx, : Shake- 

 speare -For schungen Hamlet, 18685 W. Kbnig, Shakespeare -Jahrbuch, xi. j Frith' 's 

 Giordano Bruno j on the other side Beyersdorjf, Giordano Bruno und Shakespeare ( 1 8 8 9) ; 

 Furness in the New Variorum Shakespeare. 



