Robert Allot | |
|---|---|
| Died | 1635 |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Bookseller, publisher |
Robert Allot (died 1635) was a London bookseller and publisher of the early Caroline era; his shop was at the sign of the black bear in St. Paul's Churchyard. Though he was in business for a relatively short time – the decade from 1625 to 1635 – Allot had significant connections with the dramatic canons of the two greatest figures of English Renaissance theatre, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.
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Et tu, Brute? Visiting Bauman Rare Books Part 4 of 5
Transcription
Hi! Welcome to Staxpeditions - On Tour. Our crew from Iowa is here in Las Vegas for the American Library Association Conference So we stopped by Bauman Rare Books to say hello to Rebecca Romney. "Hello." Here we go [Theme music] When people talk about old books or they talk about documents, they talk about dust and they talk about crumbling pages, but it's so interesting that the further back go the stronger they are the and they can handle it. People find it fascinating that we can have a book from 1880 and it's going to look much worse than a book from 1580 yes but then again he even before the industrial age (This is actually a good example) These types of things...this is actually Julius Caesar, this is a 1691 quarto called quarto because of the format but has since become kind of colloquially a word for an individual printing of a single Shakespeare play and what you have here these things were essentially the equivalent of ephemera they were a type of ephemera for the time. They weren't really meant for fancy libraries. There's actually a very famous quote by Thomas Bodley saying he didn't want playbooks in his library. That was kind of like "riff-raff" I can't remember the word that he used but it was something very derogatory Yeah, you have to have these nice fancy works not "plays" which were at the time sort of the equivalent of what we would say a popular TV show her some or a movie or something like that and so these weren't really meant to be anything big and fancy it's really fascinating to look through There is the "Et Tu Brute?" there. It's funny, you have things like... marginalia can be frowned upon, right? Writing in your books, but in fact a lot of the time these days we're finding that people are very eager to see marginalia because there's so much that you can learn from that. The provenance of books, the history, and how they have had this winding path down to today to 2014 in Las Vegas How this Shakespeare quarto end up in Las Vegas in 2014? It's fascinating and oftentimes books are only handed very quietly person to person over the years as not easily as traceable provenance, so any time you have marginalia, we're saying, Oh - there's a hint into this book's life! Well, one of the things I love is when you can see it's actually a really emotional connection when you can read this marginalia, along with the text and see that this person, this reader, sometime in the past was in exactly the same position that I'm in. You know, and they were sitting here just that I am, and this is what they thought and this is what they saw, that is the resonance of that type of Historic Record. But that always turns right back on this reader right now and just like me and also just like me - I will also someday be gone. Right. Well, it helps us Remember our history. Here you are, you're in the 21st century and think what relevance would someone in the eighteenth century have to me? And then you read some of their notes and you realize people are people. No matter what time period, no matter where they are and you know we're all just one big family. and we don't want to forget that If we forget that...that's when the bad parts of history start repeating itself. repeating itself. Speaking of this is the paradox of marginalia that comes from working in Special Collections. with the circulating collection we tell people not to write in these books but two hundred years from now we're going to be so happy to have any copy of those books that had been marked up. So we say, "Don't write in those books but secretly...[Patrick tells people to write in library books?!?!] In PENCIL [Theme music] [Theme music]
Background
Robert Allot became a "freeman" of the Stationers Company (a full member of the London guild of booksellers) on 9 November 1625. Allot was a younger son of an Edward Allot of Crigleston in Yorkshire, near Wakefield. Robert's brother, another Edward Allot (died 1636, age 33), was a surgeon and Bachelor of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Nineteenth-century commentators sometimes confused Robert Allot, the publisher who died in 1635, with an earlier Robert Allot, a minor poet and fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge and Linacre Professor of Physic, who edited the verse anthology England's Parnassus (1600). In actuality, the two Robert Allots were uncle and nephew.[1]
Shakespeare
An entry in the Stationers' Register dated 16 November 1630 transferred the rights to sixteen Shakespearean plays from Edward Blount, one of the publishers of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, to Robert Allot; these were sixteen of the eighteen plays in the First Folio that had not been previously published in quarto editions.[2] Possession of the rights to the sixteen plays made Allot the "principal publisher"[3] of the Shakespeare Second Folio when it appeared in 1632.
Jonson
In 1631, at the same time he was working on the looming Second Folio, Allot was slated to serve as the publisher of a second collection of works by Ben Jonson. Jonson planned the volume as a supplement to the famous 1616 folio of his plays, masques, and poems; the proposed second volume was to include works Jonson had written in the intervening years. Jonson, however, became dissatisfied with the quality of John Beale's printing of the texts; he cancelled the venture. [See: Ben Jonson folios.]
Others
Allot also published other dramatic texts of his era, including Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor (1629) and The Maid of Honour (1632), and Aurelian Townshend's 1631 Court masque Albion's Triumph. He published volumes of work by Sir Thomas Overbury, George Wither, James Mabbe, and Thomas Randolph. He issued a number of the chivalric romances that were immensely popular in his era. Allot also served as the London retail outlet for books printed at the press of Oxford University.[4] In another direction, Allot bought and sold books with the Cambridge bookseller Troylus Atkinson, who served the town's university community.[5]
And of course Allot published many now-obscure writers and works, from Elizabeth Joscelin's The Mother's Legacy to Her Unborn Child to the Microcosmography of John Earle, Bishop of Salisbury.
Post mortem
After his death, Allot's widow married stationer Philip Chetwinde, which gave Chetwinde Allot's rights to plays by Shakespeare and Jonson. Chetwinde used Allot's Shakespearean copyrights to publish the Shakespeare Third Folio of 1663/4. Rights to Jonson plays were utilized in the second folio of Jonson's works (1640/1) published by Richard Meighen.
References
- ^ Joseph Hunter, New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare, London, J. B. Nichols and Son, 1845; Vol. 1, p. 130.
- ^ E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, p. 480.
- ^ Andrew Murphy, ed., Shakespeare in Print: A History and Chronology of Shakespeare Publishing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003; p. 52.
- ^ Falconer Madan, The Early Oxford Press, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1895; pp. 302–3.
- ^ David John McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 225, 289–90.
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This page was last edited on 20 April 2022, at 21:22