Thomas East was a specialist in music printing during one of the richest eras of musical composition in England (1588-1608). He worked with composers as prominent as William Byrd and Thomas Morley; he also premiered many of the most acclaimed anthologies of English Renaissance music. East's achievement in music printing has long been the subject of scholarly attention. However, one largely unexplored facet of East's work is a group of his prints which were not what they appeared to be. For these peculiar prints, East appears to have carefully reconstructed his earlier work so that his new editions closely resembled older prints. Thus it is not surprising that many of these so-called "hidden editions" were only recently discovered and others are not yet cited in bibliographic catalogs or musicological studies. They have not been fully clarified as to real dating and purpose, despite their historical importance in matters of dating and assessing the popularity of Elizabethan music.
For this study, three types of evidence--shared stocks of paper among editions (based on watermark patterns), evidence of type deterioration, and the fortuitous case of a dated watermark--were used to determine the date when the hidden editions were produced. This in turn opened the way to a more profound understanding of East's business practice. It provided compelling data to support an hypothesis that East skimmed the paper from legitimate editions to produce hidden editions. The new chronology established by the paper evidence sheds new light on the effects of the Elizabethan music monopoly upon music dissemination. It also reveals a hitherto unknown role that East played as a surreptitous music publisher and entrepreneur in the music trade.