Nicholas Okes - and Others

And Others

Okes printed a range of other texts in Jacobean and Caroline drama, beyond the confines of the Shakespeare canon. They include:

• Gervase Markham's The Dumb Knight (1608), for John Bache;
• Jonson's The Masque of Queens (1609), for Richard Bonian and Henry Walley;
• Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1611), for Thomas Archer;
• Arthur Hopton's Speculum Topographicum, or The Topographicall Glassee (1611), for Simon Waterson;
• Webster's The White Devil (1612), also for Thomas Archer;
• Heywood's The Brazen Age (1613), for Samuel Rand;
• John Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque (1614), for John Trundle;
• Thomas Tomkis's Albumazar (1615), for Walter Burre (plus two subsequent editions);
• the first two quartos of Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster (1620, 1622), both for Walkley;
• Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1623), for John Waterson;
• Shirley's The Wedding (1629), for John Grove;
• Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633), for Richard Collins;
• Heywood's A Maidenhead Well Lost (1634), for John Jackson and Francis Church;
• and some of the city entertainments of Thomas Dekker.

(In some cases, the line between bookseller/publisher and printer may not have been as clear-cut as in others. It is worth noting that Albumazar was entered into the Stationers' Register on 28 April 1615 — not by publisher Burre as would have been the norm, but by printer Okes; which suggests that Okes was more than just the printer hired for the job.)

The above list represents first editions. Okes also printed:

• the third, fourth, and sixth quartos of Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 1 (1615, 1616, 1635), for Robert Basse (#3, #4) and Richard Collins (#6);
• the second and third editions of Tomkis's Lingua (1617, 1622), for Simon Waterson;
• the second and third editions of Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (both 1635) for John Smethwick;
• the collected edition of Samuel Daniel's plays (1623), for Simon Waterson.

Inevitably, Okes also printed works of many sorts that had nothing to do with the drama; these included religious works by John Donne and others — and also Thomas Cooper's The Mystery of Witchcraft (1617). He printed Robert Tofte's translation of Ariosto's Satires (1608) for Roger Jackson, and Gervase Markham's The English Arcadia (1613) for Thomas Saunders. Okes also printed Rachel Speght's A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617) for Thomas Archer — one of the few works authored by a woman printed in this period.