Thomas Walkley
Thomas Walkley was a London publisher and bookseller in the early and middle seventeenth century. He is noted for publishing a range of significant texts in English Renaissance drama, "and much other interesting literature."
Career
Walkley became a "freedman" of the Worshipful [Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers|Stationers Company] on 19 January 1618. His shop was located first at the sign of the Eagle and Child in Britain's Burse, until about 1630; later at the sign of the Flying Horse near York House; and finally at the sign of the Golden Mortar and Pestle between York House and Charring Cross. Walkley struggled financially in his early years, and had trouble paying his printers; but his fortunes improved by the later 1620s, as he benefitted from important political contacts. Yet political fortunes shifted in the turbulent century: in 1649 Walkley got into trouble with the Commonwealth government, which issued a warrant against him for dispensing royalist material from the sons of the late King Charles I, then on the island of Jersey. He was vigorously active in publishing for nearly three decades, though his output slackened after 1645.Drama
In drama, Walkley's most important volume was the 1622 first quarto of Othello, printed for him by Nicholas Okes. The book provided a "good text" of the play, and was the only early Shakespearean quarto that divided its play into five Acts.In addition, Walkley issued other key editions of plays and masques, including —
- the first two quartos of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King ;
- the first two quartos of Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster ;
- the first quarto of Beaumont and Fletcher's Thierry and Theodoret ;
- Philip Massinger's The Picture ;
- both of Ben Jonson's 1631 masques, Love's Triumph Through Callipolis and Chloridia;
- Thomas Carew's masque Cœlum Britanicum ;
- Sir William Davenant's 1634 masque The Temple of Love;
- Sir John Suckling's Aglaura ;
- Davenant's 1638 masque Luminalia;
- Davenant's 1639 masque Britannia Triumphans;
- Davenant's Salmacida Spolia, the final royal masque of the early Stuart era.
Walkley also released the first English translation of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid in 1638, just a year after its first French printing.
Other works
Beyond the confines of drama, Walkley was active in the area of non-dramatic poetry. He published —- George Wither's Fidelia ;
- Wither'sWorks ;
- John Barclay's The Mirror of Minds ;
- Thomas Carew's Poems ;
- Cooper's Hill, the best-known work of Sir John Denham;
- Edmund Waller's Poems.
Walkley published translations by Thomas May, along with pamphlets, Parliamentary speeches, legal documents, and a varied body of general literature, from Aesop's Fables to a history of the Roman Emperor Nero. He was also the publisher for works by the royal favorite George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, a fact crucial in his later prosperity. Walkley's entire output for the year 1627 was devoted to Buckingham's cause. That powerful connection gained Walkley the rights to the Parliamentary List and the Catalogue of Nobility, two highly profitable publications that Walkley released in multiple editions over many years.