Valentine Simmes - Shakespeare

Shakespeare

In an eight-year period from 1597 through 1604, Simmes printed nine Shakespearean quartos for various London stationers or booksellers.

For the bookseller Andrew Wise, Simmes printed:

• Richard III, Q1 (1597)
• Richard II, Q1 (1597)
• Richard II, Q2 (1598)
• Richard II, Q3 (1598)

For Wise and William Aspley, Simmes printed:

• Henry IV, Part 2, Q (1600)
• Much Ado About Nothing, Q (1600)

For Thomas Millington, Simmes printed:

• Henry VI, Part 2, Q2 (1600)

For Nicholas Ling and John Trundell, Simmes printed:

• Hamlet Q1 (1603) — the "bad quarto."

For Matthew Law, Simmes printed:

• Henry IV, Part 1, Q3 (1604).

Also for Nicholas Ling, Simmes printed Q3 of The Taming of a Shrew (1607), the alternative version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. (Scholars dispute the exact nature of the relationship between the two versions.) And for Thomas Pavier, Simmes printed Q1 of Sir John Oldcastle (1600), a play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha. For "the Widow Newman," Simmes printed the second, 1607 edition of Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures, one of the sources for Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre.