Everything about Nathaniel Butter totally explained
Nathaniel Butter (died
February 22,
1664) was a
London publisher of the early 17th century. The publisher of the first edition of
Shakespeare's King Lear in
1608, he's also been regarded as one of the first publishers of a
newspaper in English.
Beginnings
Nathaniel Butter was the son of a Thomas Butter, a bookseller; the son followed the father's profession. Nathaniel became a "freeman" (a full member) of the
Stationers Company on
February 20,
1604, and registered his first title before the end of that year. In his career, Butter concentrated on bookselling and publishing; as was a common practice in his era, he commissioned printers to print his books, and worked with most of the printers of his generation.
Drama
King Lear was entered into the
Stationers' Register on
November 26,
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's 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
July 5,
1605, and Part 2 on
September 14 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 didn't prevent Butter from reprinting both texts, repeatedly, into the early 1630s.
Butter published various other plays, including:
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
May 21,
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.
Controversy
17th-century stationers not infrequently got themselves in trouble with the strict
censorship rules of the
Stuart monarchy, resulting in fines, or, in rare cases, imprisonment. Butter got into significant trouble when he published a quarto pamphlet criticizing the
1619 accession of the new
Holy Roman Emperor,
Ferdinand II, titled
A Plain Demonstration of the Unlawful Succession of Ferdinand II, Because of the Incestuous Marriage of His Parents (
1620). This document, printed for Butter by
William Stansby, falsely claimed to be printed "at the Hague" to avoid trouble — a gesture that proved fruitless. (In the complex religious politics of the time, radical Protestants and
Puritans were hostile to Ferdinand, and the Stuarts were hostile to Puritans.) The London authorities pursued the matter vigorously: by the spring of
1622 Butter was petitioning to be released from prison, pleading for mercy on behalf of himself, his pregnant wife, and their three children. The printer Stansby followed Butter into custody, and in petitions of his own he blamed the whole affair on Butter. The petitions of both men were successful, and they were released, after short incarcerations, to continue their careers.
News
Until Butter's historical era, news in England was transmitted only in
manuscript form; early circulating news manuscripts — rather like hand-written newspapers, available by subscription from the earliest news services — were becoming more common in Butter's generation, and Butter himself was actively involved in their creation and dissemination. He also printed pamphlets on topical and controversial subjects, like the Calverley murders that were dramatized in
A Yorkshire Tragedy, as well as international reporting like
News from Spain and
News from Sweden. Butter's shop at the Pied Bull was itself a kind of early news agency; news correspondent (in the literal sense)
John Pory sent and received his communications from there, and news-conscious customers came in to find the latest tracts and pamphlets.
The next step in the evolution of the modern newspaper occurred at the start of the 1620s, when a group of London publishers and printers began disseminating printed news sheets based on the Dutch style of news bulletin, called the "coranto," that was a recent innovation at the time. This group included Butter, Thomas Archer,
Edward Allde, Bartholomew Downes, William Newberry, and William Shefford, with Archer and Butter as apparently the most prominent participants. Archer was jailed for printing corantos without permission in
1621 — but in the same year a license to publish the news bulletins was issued to an "N. B.," most probably Butter. All of the extant copies of the
Corante, the "earliest English newspaper" (1621), bear the initials "N. B."
On
May 23,
1622, Butter published the first edition of a periodical variously called
News from Most Parts of Christendom or
Weekly News from Italy, Germany, Hungaria, Bohemia, the Palatinate, France and the Low Countries. "From its miscellaneous contents and periodicity of production, it's regarded as the true forerunner of the English newspaper." In 1624, Butter partnered with colleague Nicholas Bourne to continue publishing the
Certain News of the Present Week, or, more succinctly, the
Weekly News. Butter's innovation of a regular printed news journal caused an explosion of imitators, most of which were far more sporadic, temporary, and ephemeral than Butter's effort. "Nathaniel Butter's
Weekly News was the first English newspaper which appeared duly numbered like our newspapers of the present day."
(The
Weekly News was printed as a small quarto-sized pamphlet or booklet, in contrast to the earlier single-sheet corantos. These "newsbooks" remained the dominant form until the mid-1660s, when the more modern newspaper format appeared. Butter's periodical reported only foreign news; the Stuart regime discouraged reportage of domestic news in England.)
Butter's achievement was controversial in its time; among other hostile responses, one critic, playing on Butter's name, referred to his publications as "Batter" that "besmear each public post and church door...."
Ben Jonson in particular was hostile and dismissive toward the new enterprise, and ridiculed Butter in his
1625 play
The Staple of News. In a nice irony, Jonson borrowed the plot for his play from
The London Prodigal, issued a generation earlier by Butter. Jonson's play, seasoned with "butter" puns, caricatures Butter as Cymbal, the head of the news agency the Staple of News. Jonson also mocked the nascent news industry in his
1620 masque
News from the New World Discovered in the Moon.
In 1630, Butter and Bourne reaching the peak of their success, winning a patent from King
Charles I for the publication of news and history, in return for a £10 annual donation toward the upkeep of St. Paul's Cathedral. Their enterprise remained controversial, however: just two years later, in October
1632, the
Star Chamber issued an edict banning all "gazettes and pamphlets of news from foreign parts." (In their mere existence, news reports of the combat of the
Thirty Years' War were seen as implicit criticisms of the royal policy of neutrality.) When that prohibition was lifted in
1638, Butter returned to the news trade — until the start of the
English Revolution in
1642.
Butter's publications often carried verbose titles, like
A True Relation of a late very famous Sea-fight, made betwixt the Spaniard and the Hollander in Brasil, for many days together: Wherein the odds was very great, which made the success doubtful, but at last the Hollander got the Victory (
1640).
Miscellaneous works
Among the varied products of Butter's enterprise, his editions of
George Chapman's translations of
Homer — the
Iliad in
1611, and the
Odyssey in
1614 — stand out.
And in his long career, Butter published a wide range of other material: from joke books like
The Cobbler of Canterbury (1608), to Tobias Gentleman's
England's Way to Win Wealth, and to Employ Ships and Mariners (
1614), to religious works like Abraham Darcy's
The Original of Idolatries (1624), to polemics like
Joseph Hall's An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament (1640) — and virtually everything in between.
After 1642, Butter declined into obscurity. According to his terse 1664 obituary, "Nath: Butter an old stationer, died very poore."
Further Information
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