Nathaniel Butter - Drama

Drama

King Lear was entered into the Stationers' Register on 26 November 1607, by Butter and colleague John Busby. The first quarto edition of the play was published the following year, printed by Nicholas Okes, with Butter listed as publisher. Busby appears to have dropped out of the enterprise prior to publication.

Scholars have given Butter's volume intense scrutiny, since it, along with the contrasting First Folio text of the play, is crucial to the "textual problem" of King Lear. Q1 of Lear was the first play printed in Okes' shop; the origin and nature of the manuscript text that underlay the printed version is a matter of uncertainty.

The case of King Lear Q1 grew complicated in 1619, when William Jaggard reprinted the play, apparently without Butter's permission, in his cryptic false folio affair. This problematic second quarto was issued with the false date of 1608 and the false inscription "Printed for Nathaniel Butter." Butter's London shop was at the sign of the Pied Bull, and the title page of his genuine 1608 Q1 is marked "to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere St. Austins Gate." To differentiate between Butter's genuine 1608 Lear edition and Jaggard's false one, scholars have termed Butter's volume "the Pide Bull edition" after its title page inscription.

In addition to Shakespeare's play, Butter published a range of other playbooks. One of these was the first quarto of The London Prodigal, one of the plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. The title page of Butter's 1605 edition assigns the play to Shakespeare — an attribution universally rejected by scholars and critics.

Similarly problematic was Butter's edition of Thomas Heywood's play about Queen Elizabeth, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. Butter registered Part 1 of the play on 5 July 1605, and Part 2 on 14 September of the same year, and published the two parts in separate quartos in 1605 and 1606 respectively. In his 1612 prose work An Apology for Actors, Heywood complained that Butter's text of his play had been pirated from the theatre, by an audience member who recorded the play in shorthand — one of the few indications that such practices occurred in the era of English Renaissance drama. Heywood's complaint did not prevent Butter from reprinting both texts, repeatedly, into the early 1630s.

Butter published various other plays, including:

• the first quarto of Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (1605)
• Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (1607)
• Fulke Greville's closet drama Mustapha (1609)
• Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1630)
• the third and fourth quartos of Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece (1630, 1638).

He also published Dekker's prose work The Bellman of London (1608), and the 1607 second edition of Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures, a source for Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre.

On 21 May 1639, Butter left the playbook business: he transferred all his copyrights to plays to fellow stationer Miles Fletcher, and for the remainder of his career concentrated primarily on the news.