William Leake

William Leake, father (died 1633) and son (died 1681), were London publishers and booksellers of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. They were responsible for a range of texts in English Renaissance drama and poetry, including works by Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

William Leake I, or William Leake the elder, started in business as a bookseller around 1586. His shops were at the sign of the Greyhound in Paternoster Row, and at the sign of the Holy Ghost in St. Paul's Churchyard. In 1596 he acquired the rights to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis from John Harrison the elder, and published six editions of that very popular poem from 1599 to 1602 in literature (the fifth through tenth editions, or the third octavo edition, O3, through the eighth, O8).

The elder Leake published the first quartos of Anthony Munday's two plays about Robin Hood, The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington (both 1601). Leake published editions of John Lyly's Euphues the tenth edition (both parts) in 1605, the eleventh in 1607, the twelfth in 1607 (Part I) and 1609 (Part II), and the thirteenth in 1613. He issued Robert Southwell's Saint Peter's Complaint and Other Poems in 1595, and Thomas Greene's A Poet's Vision, and a Prince's Glory in 1603.

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