Burre was made a "freeman" of the Stationers Company — meaning that he became a full-fledged member of the London guild of booksellers — in 1596.
From 1597 to 1622 he did business in a sequence of three London shops; the most important was at the sign of the Crane in St Paul's Churchyard (1604 and after).
In the span of a decade, Burre published the first editions of four plays by Ben Jonson:[1] Beyond the confines of the Jonson canon, Burre issued a number of other first quartos of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays — Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600), Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters (1608), Thomas Tomkis's Albumazar (1615), George Ruggle's Ignoramus (also 1615), and perhaps most importantly, Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613).
(One scholar, Zachary Lesser, has argued that Burre specialised in publishing plays that had initially failed on the stage.
[5] This story is certainly apocryphal, since The History of the World in fact sold well, going through three editions in its first three years in print.