Nicholas Ling

He has also been credited by some critics with editing England's Helicon (1600), a collection of Elizabethan lyric poems.

[6] A few months later James Roberts printed the much more substantial and accurate second quarto according to the "true and perfect copy" of Shakespeare's manuscript.

[7] Gerald D. Johnson suggests that Trundell had acquired a garbled version of the text, which was quickly published in association with Ling to meet demand.

Roberts had been given official access to Shakespeare's manuscript by the company, as he had entered it as a forthcoming publication in the Stationers' Register in 1602.

[8] In 1607 he transferred 16 copyrights to John Smethwick, among them three Shakespeare plays (Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost) as well as The Taming of a Shrew.

The publisher's device of Nicholas Ling was a codfish entwined with honeysuckle. [ 1 ] The codfish, also known as a "ling," is a rebus of Ling's last name. The honeysuckle is an phonetic anagram of his first name: "Nicholas"="Honisocal." [ 2 ]