Walter Burre

Walter Burre (fl. 1597 – 1622) was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, best remembered for publishing several key texts in English Renaissance drama.

Burre was made a "freeman" of the Stationers Company — meaning that he became a full-fledged member of the London guild of booksellers — in 1596. From 1597 to 1622 he did business in a sequence of three London shops; the most important was at the sign of the Crane in St. Paul's Churchyard (1604 and after).

In the span of a decade, Burre published the first editions of four plays by Ben Jonson:

Beyond the confines of the Jonson canon, Burre issued a number of other first quartos of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays — Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1600), Thomas Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters (1608), Thomas Tomkis's Albumazar (1615), George Ruggle's Ignoramus (also 1615), and perhaps most importantly, Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1613). In the latter volume, Burre wrote the dedicatory letter to Robert Keysar, shareholder and manager of the Queen's Revels Children, the company of boy actors that had premiered the play in 1607; Burre congratulated Keysar on preserving the play after its initial failure, which Burre explained by noting that the audience failed to understand the "privy mark of irony" in the work.

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