15 Facts About Cuthbert Burby

Cuthbert Burby was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras.

Cuthbert Burby is known for publishing a series of significant volumes of English Renaissance drama, including works by William Shakespeare, Robert Greene, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe.

Early in his career as a publisher, Burby issued works in the famous controversy between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey.

Curiously, Cuthbert Burby published works in their exchange by both Nashe and Harvey; his connection, it appears, was not personal or ideological – just business.

Cuthbert Burby published Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller and Lenten Stuff.

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Cuthbert Burby had subsidiary connections with the Shakespeare canon as well.

Cuthbert Burby published Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres, which contains an important reference to Shakespeare and a list of Shakespearean works produced up to 1598.

Cuthbert Burby published the first two quartos of The Taming of a Shrew, the early alternative version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

Also, Cuthbert Burby issued the two early quartos of Edward III, the one play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha that is most commonly seen as having at least some of Shakespeare's work in it.

Cuthbert Burby published a number of other plays, attributed or anonymous, during his career:.

Cuthbert Burby often worked with the printers John Danter and Simon Stafford, as with many of the texts listed above.

Also in 1594, Cuthbert Burby published The Second Report of Doctor Faustus, Containing His Appearances, and the Deeds of Wagner – an anonymous prose work that elaborated the story of the magician, and which was written to capitalise on the success of Marlowe's famous play Doctor Faustus.

Cuthbert Burby was one of the three publishers who issued Robert Allot's verse anthology England's Parnassus in 1600.

Cuthbert Burby published many religious works, as did all the publishers of his era; and he issued some of the multi-volume chivalric romances that were the best-sellers of the age, like The Mirror of Knighhood and Champions of Christendom.

In 1609 Cuthbert Burby's widow assigned his copyrights – mainly of theological works – to the publisher's former apprentice Nicholas Bourne.