A Note on the Quarto Chapbooks of the English <i>Don Bellianis</i>

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the publication of a large number of Iberian books of chivalry in English translation, including Don Bellianis of Greece, originally written in Spanish in the mid-sixteenth century by Jerónimo Fernández. Don Bellianis was first translated into English in 1598 but had two continuations added in the second half of the seventeenth century that were originally composed in English by Francis Kirkman. While the rest of Iberian chivalric romances stopped being printed in the last decades of the seventeenth century, Don Bellianis was given a new lease of life thanks to its publication in new, shorter formats during the eighteenth century. This note discusses the three chapbook editions printed in London in quarto by William Onley, Charles Brown, and Thomas Norris at the turn of the eighteenth century and sheds new light on their dating and relation to each other. It shows that Brown used Onley’s edition as copy text and printed his edition at the end of 1712, in contrast with the ESTC’s record dating it to between 1682 and 1707. Norris’s edition is based on Brown’s and was printed between 1713 and 1715, rather than in 1715?, as the ESTC indicates. Based on evidence from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, together with a bibliographical examination of the copies, the new publication dates herein proposed contribute to a better understanding of the place these chapbook editions occupy in the circulation of Don Bellianis in eighteenth-century England.