William Jaggard

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William Jaggard (c. 1568–1623) was an English printer and publisher active in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. He is best known for his connection with Shakespeare’s texts, especially the First Folio published in 1623. His shop stood at the sign of the Half-Eagle and Key in Barbican, London. He was the son of John Jaggard, a London barber-surgeon. After an eight-year apprenticeship with printer Henry Denham, he became a freeman of the Stationers Company in 1591. He built one of the largest print shops of his time and was later helped by his son Isaac, who took over after Jaggard’s death in 1623.

The Jaggard business published and printed many kinds of works. Their materials were often sold by booksellers like Matthew Lownes. Jaggard became the official Printer to the City of London in 1611 and was chosen to print the general catalogue of English books in 1618–19. His brother John Jaggard was also a printer and published editions of Sir Francis Bacon’s Essays.

Jaggard printed a wide range of material, including ballads and literary works by writers such as Richard Barnfield and John Davies of Hereford. Notable prints include Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608), which show high-quality craftsmanship.

In 1608 Jaggard bought James Roberts’ printing business, aiming to gain a monopoly over handbills, a goal he did not fully achieve until 1615. He became involved with Shakespeare’s works around 1599, beginning with The Passionate Pilgrim (a collection printed under Shakespeare’s name) and printing an expanded edition in 1612. From 1621 to 1623 his shop worked on the First Folio, the project that gathered Shakespeare’s plays into a single volume. By the Folio’s time, Jaggard was old, ill, and nearly blind; his son Isaac likely did the actual printing. He died in November 1623.

Views on Jaggard are mixed. Some see him as a capable printer whose questionable ethics emerged mainly in his Shakespeare work. A later relative, Captain William Jaggard, started a Shakespeare-focused printing and bookselling venture in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1909 and published a major Shakespeare bibliography in 1911.