Nathaniel Butter

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.

[2] 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.

On 21 May 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.

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.

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.

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.

[13] In a nice irony, Jonson borrowed the plot for his play from The London Prodigal, issued a generation earlier by Butter.

They additionally began a news magazine series called 'The Swedish Intelligencer' that ran successfully under variant titles to 1634.

(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.)

In 1638 they were granted 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.

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.