Thomas Cotes

Thomas Cotes (died 1641) was a London printer of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, best remembered for printing the Second Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1632.

Thomas Cotes became a "freeman" (a full member) of the Stationers Company on 6 January 1606; he was a former apprentice of William Jaggard, who would print the First Folio with his son Isaac. Cotes ran his own printing shop from 1620 to 1641; from 1635 on, he was in partnership with his brother Richard Cotes (died 1653). Their shop was in the Barbican in Aldersgate Street. (Their sister Jane was married to another printer, Robert Ibbitson.) On 19 June 1627, Thomas Cotes acquired the business and copyrights of Isaac Jaggard, son and heir of William Jaggard, from Jaggard's widow Dorothy.

A royal decree of 1637 named Thomas Cotes one of the twenty Master Printers of the Stationers Company.

In his substantial career, Cotes was a major producer of play texts of English Renaissance drama. He printed the first quarto of The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) for publisher John Waterson, and the second edition of Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess (1629) for Richard Meighen, who was one of the partners in the Second Folio syndicate. He printed more than a dozen plays for Andrew Crooke and William Cooke, including many by James Shirley; he printed Pathomachia for Francis Constable. His quartos of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1635) and The Bloody Banquet (1639) were rare instances in which Cotes functioned as both publisher and printer. In an age when the two functions were often separate, Cotes largely confined himself to printing, and left publishing to booksellers like Meighen, Crooke and Cooke, and others.

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