John Dryden, Henry Herringman, and the dedication of restoration playbooks

This article re-evaluates John Dryden’s relationships with his stationers and demonstrates how Restoration book-trade practices could influence literary meaning. Modern scholarship celebrates Dryden’s work with his later bookseller Jacob Tonson the Elder (1655–1736), centring Tonson as the dominant figure behind the marketing of literary culture in the long eighteenth century and the burnishing of Dryden’s critical reputation in that period. One consequence of this emphasis, however, is that the significance of the poet laureate’s work with his first stationer, Henry Herringman (1628–1704), has been occluded, underestimated, or disparaged. Focusing on the printed dedications to Dryden’s new quarto playbooks, including the much-reviled dedication to /The State of Innocence/ (1677), I offer quantitative and qualitative analysis to show that Dryden and Herringman modelled an influential format and practice for new playbook publication which Tonson imitated rather than ignored