Blount

Blount (or Blunt), EDWARD (b. 1565?), the printer, in conjunction with Isaac Jaggard, of Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. Published according to the true Originall Copies (1623), usually known as the first folio of Shakespeare. It was produced under the direction of John Heming (d. 1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627), both of whom had been Shakespeare’s colleagues at the Globe theatre, but as Blount combined the functions of printer and editor on other occasions, it is fair to conjecture that he to some extent edited the first folio. The Stationers’ Register states that he was the son of Ralph Blount or Blunt, merchant tailor of London, and apprenticed himself in 1578 for ten years to William Ponsonby, a stationer. He became a freeman of the Stationers’ Company in 1588\. Among the most important of his publications are Giovanni Florio’s Italian-English dictionary and his translation of Montaigne, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and the Sixe Court Comedies of John Lyly. He himself translated Ars Aulica, or the Courtier’s Arte (1607) from the Italian of Lorenzo Ducci, and Christian Policie (1632) from the Spanish of Juan de Santa Maria.

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