You might try an English Roundhand kind of font like Chancery?

ChrisL

Probably the closest you are going to get to the first printings is Founders Caslon. Caslon was making his first faces then, and they were revivals of the Dutch types in which I am guessing the first Shakespeare editions were published. It is not blackletter.

If you dig around this website:

http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/

...you will find many examples of 17th century printed works of Shakespeare's. I don't know whose types they were using, but they weren't Caslon's. He was from about a century later. They look Dutch to me. Something like Janson would be about right.

Mark,
what a great find for source material on early Shakespeare publications!

That's what is so useful about the web... results within minutes!
Remember searching through mountains of books in the library (NYC Public Library on 42nd st. for me) for source and reference material?

The only MAJOR difference is close examination of printed material as opposed to screen resolution. You can't have everything... yet.

What I love about the site Mark found is the Illustrations of 1600 London. Wow they had angels flying around the city then, how cool.

Whoops, sorry about forgetting the little matter of a century. But I still say Founders Caslon will look more like that early stuff, though it is too light. Another way to go would be with one of the Fleishman revivals, especially Farnham.

I put "shakespeare facsimiles" in Google and it was on the first page. I love Google.

If you want to evoke the time in which the play was first performed or published, then types like Caslon or a Fleischmann revival are all much too late and in completely the wrong style. Shakespeare's plays date from the very early years of the 17th century, and the typography of the first folio edition is essentially late renaissance or mannerist. See, for example, this facsimile page.

Ferguson's Pica Roman Type in Elizabethan England is worth consulting to get an idea of the kind of generic type popular in England during Shakespeare's lifetime. The elaborateness of style and quality of printing had advanced by the time of the first editions of Shakespeare's work, but Caslon's types are too close to the baroque to really substitute.

All that said, I think you could have much more fun responding typographically to the content of Lady M's soliloquy rather than to the historical period of its composition.

>completely the wrong style

Ok, point taken.

But are there any digital types out there with the 'antique' look from that period? That's why I was thinking of Founders Caslon or the Farnham, which is so mannered as to look a little different and suggest another era. Ok they're historically wrong, but they can suggest 'antique'...

But as you say, maybe to suggest 'old' is not the best route anyway.

Adobe's new Garamond Premiere Pro wouldn't be too far off in style, perhaps in the medium weight for a little extra ruggedness (Elizabethan and Jacobean printing tended to be quite heavy).

well good old search on google makes an appearance...I like looking in books which I've spent the last week buried underneth in my uni's library. I was only asking for help, I have done a fair bit of research on the internet since asking for help and also spent most of yesterday in the letterpress at uni to work out what would work, sourcing Jacobian fonts and such.

Honestly this is why I tend not to post here, but just lurk because you ask a question and countless times people just rip you to shreds. I don't know everything, I thought most of you guys were professionals hence my asking your learned opinion.

To those who helped thank you, I now have some other avenues to work along.

Bec