Nicholas Okes - Shakespeare

Shakespeare

One of Okes's earliest jobs was the printing of the fifth edition of Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece (1607) for the bookseller John Harrison (the fourth octavo edition, O4; often called, inaccurately, Q5). In the following year, 1608, Okes printed the famous and crucial first quarto of King Lear for Nathaniel Butter. Q1 of Lear was the first play (of many) printed by Okes; it has been argued that some of the peculiarities in that intensely studied volume resulted from the inexperience of Okes and his compositors with works of drama.

In 1622, Okes printed the first quarto of Othello for Thomas Walkley. Okes worked on several projects with Walkley in the years around 1622 — though he also took Walkley to court in a financial dispute. (This in itself was not unusual: Walkley struggled financially in his early years in business, and was sued by other colleagues too.)

In a more remote Shakespearean connection, Okes printed The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607) for Francis Faulkner and Henry Bell. This was a key soure for The Puritan, one of the plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha.