Thomas Pavier

Thomas Pavier (died 1625) was a London publisher and bookseller of the early seventeenth century. His complex involvement in the publication of early editions of some of Shakespeare's plays, as well as plays of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, has left him with a "dubious reputation."

Pavier came to the business of publishing in an unusual way: instead of serving the normal apprenticeship in the Stationers Company, he was one of several young men who transferred to the Stationers from the Drapers Company on 3 June 1600. Pavier had served an apprenticeship under William Barley, a draper who doubled as a bookseller. Pavier was able to set himself up in business that year; his shop was located at the sign of the Cat and Parrots, "over against Pope's Head Alley" in Cornhill.

Over the course of his quarter-century career, Pavier grew rich by publishing popular works of Puritan literature in multiple editions. At the start of his career, however, he worked at the lower end of the prestige scale in printed matter in his era: he primarily published ballads, chapbooks, pamphlets, and playbooks. One of his earliest products in the ballad line was The Fair Widow of Watling Street and Her Three Daughters (c. 1600). He followed this with many comparable works, with titles like The Lamentable Murthers of Sir John Fitz (1605), A Cruel Murther in Worcestershire (1605), The Fire in Shoreditch (1606), The Traitors' Downfall (1606), The Shepherd's Lamentation (1612), and The Burning of Tyverton (1612). He also published ballads by Thomas Deloney and Samuel Rowlands.

Pavier's firm prospered and he eventually rose to be his guild's Junior Warden in 1622, but Pavier never abandoned ballads. In the years 1612–20, when the Stationers Company limited ballad printing to only five of its members, Pavier was one of the five. In 1624 he was a member of the "Ballad Stock," a syndicate of stationers dedicated to the production of ballads in print.

One of Pavier's earliest acts as a stationer was to enter the popular though anonymous play Captain Thomas Stukeley into the Stationers' Register on 11 August 1600 (though the earliest edition now known was Pavier's of 1605). He published several other plays, including the anonymous The Fair Maid of Bristow (1605), and The First Part of Hieronimo (1605), the anonymous "prequel" to Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Pavier also published editions of Kyd's play: he obtained the rights to The Spanish Tragedy on 14 August 1600 and issued the fourth edition in 1602. He published the third quarto of A Looking Glass for London, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, also in 1602, and the second quarto of the anonymous Jack Straw in 1604.

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