Robert Allot
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Robert Allot (died 1635) was a London bookseller and publisher of the early
Caroline era The Caroline era is the period in English and Scottish history named for the 24-year reign of Charles I of England, Charles I (1625–1649). The term is derived from ''Carolus'', Latin for Charles. The Caroline era followed the Jacobean era, the ...
; 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 The English Renaissance theatre or Elizabethan theatre was the theatre of England from 1558 to 1642. Its most prominent playwrights were William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Background The term ''English Renaissance theatr ...
,
William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
and
Ben Jonson Benjamin Jonson ( 11 June 1572 – ) was an English playwright, poet and actor. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence on English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satire, satirical ...
.


Background

Robert Allot became a "freeman" of the
Stationers Company The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers (until 1937 the Worshipful Company of Stationers), usually known as the Stationers' Company, is one of the livery company, livery companies of the City of London. 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 Yorkshire ( ) is an area of Northern England which was History of Yorkshire, historically a county. Despite no longer being used for administration, Yorkshire retains a strong regional identity. The county was named after its county town, the ...
, near
Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 109,766 in the 2021 census, up from 99,251 in the 2011 census. The city is the administrative centre of the wider Metropolit ...
. 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.


Shakespeare

An entry in the
Stationers' Register The Stationers' Register was a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. This was a trade guild given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with England's publishing industry, including prin ...
dated 16 November 1630 transferred the rights to sixteen Shakespearean plays from Edward Blount, one of the publishers of the
First Folio ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...
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 Quarto (abbreviated Qto, 4to or 4º) is the format of a book or pamphlet produced from full sheets printed with eight pages of text, four to a side, then folded twice to produce four leaves. The leaves are then trimmed along the folds to produc ...
editions. Possession of the rights to the sixteen plays made Allot the "principal publisher" 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,
masque The masque was a form of festive courtly entertainment that flourished in 16th- and early 17th-century Europe, though it was developed earlier in Italy, in forms including the intermedio (a public version of the masque was the pageant). A mas ...
s, 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. ee: Ben Jonson folios">ee: Ben Jonson folios.


Others

Allot also published other dramatic texts of his era, including Philip Massinger">Ben Jonson folios.">Ben Jonson folios">ee: 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 (poet), 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. In another direction, Allot bought and sold books with the Cambridge bookseller Troylus Atkinson, who served the town's university community.David John McKitterick, ''A History of Cambridge University Press,'' Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004; pp. 225, 289–90. 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 The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller, roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually a ...
of 1663/4. Rights to Jonson plays were utilized in the second folio of Jonson's works (1640/1) published by
Richard Meighen Richard Meighen (died 1641) was a London publisher of the Jacobean and Caroline eras. He is noted for his publications of plays of English Renaissance drama; he published the second Ben Jonson folio of 1640/41, and was a member of the syndicat ...
.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Allot, Robert Publishers (people) from London English booksellers 1635 deaths Year of birth unknown