William Stansby - Printer

Printer

As a printer Stansby worked for many of the booksellers of his era; he also worked repeatedly for several stationers over the years. For John Smethwick, Stansby printed several editions of the collected Poems of Michael Drayton (1609–30), plus several of the later editions of prose works by Robert Greene, like Menaphon (1616, 1631) and Never Too Late (1621). Stansby printed collections of the sermons of Barten Holyday for Nathaniel Butter. (He also printed Holyday's only play, Technogamia, for John Parker.)

For Edward Blount, Stansby printed an English translation of John Owen's Latin epigrams (1619), and Six Court Comedies (1632), the first collected edition of the plays of John Lyly. And for Blount and William Barret, Stansby printed Thomas Shelton's first English translation of Cervantes' Don Quixote (2 volumes, 1612).

Stansby printed works by Samuel Purchas for Henry Featherstone, and works by Joseph Hall for Featherstone and for Butter. He printed Sir Walter Raleigh's A History of the World (1614) for Walter Burre. And Stansby printed a wide range of works significant in their day but now largely forgotten. Sir Dudley Digges's The Defence of Trade (1615), printed for John Barnes, and William Slater's Palae-Albion (1621), printed for Richard Meighen, are two of many examples.

Also for Meighen, Stansby printed the first edition of John Clavell's A Recantation of an Ill Led Life (1628).

In some cases, printers are identified on title pages only by initials; yet bibliographers can employ title-page colophons and other clues to make identifications. On this basis, Stansby is the "W. S." who printed the second quarto of Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost (1631) and the undated fourth quarto of Hamlet (c. 1630), both for Smethwick. In 1617 Stansby printed the tenth edition of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis for William Barret.