a small quarto-sized pamphlet or booklet, in contrast to the earlier single-sheet corantos. These "newsbooks" remained the dominant form until the mid-1660s, when the more modern newspaper format appeared. Butter's periodical reported only foreign news; for which they subscribed.) Butter's achievement was controversial in its time; among other hostile responses, one critic, playing on Butter's name, referred to his publications as "Batter" that "besmear each public post and church door...." Ben Jonson in particular was hostile and dismissive toward the new enterprise, and ridiculed Butter in his 1625 play The Staple of News. In a nice irony, Jonson borrowed the plot for his play from The London Prodigal, issued a generation earlier by Butter. Jonson's play, seasoned with "butter" puns, caricatures Butter as Cymbal, the head of the news agency the Staple of News. Jonson also mocked the nascent news industry in his 1620 masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon. In the early 1630s, Butter and Bourne reached the peak of their success with newsbooks selling well as a result of the successes of Gustavus Adolphus's campaign. They additionally began a news magazine series called 'The Swedish Intelligencer' that ran successfully under variant titles to 1634. Their enterprise was controversial, however: in October 1632, their weekly publication was banned all "gazettes and pamphlets of news from foreign parts." (In their mere existence, news reports of the combat of the Thirty Years' War were seen as implicit criticisms of the royal policy of neutrality.) In 1638 they were granted a patent from King Charles I for the publication of news and history, in return for a £10 annual donation toward the upkeep of St. Paul's Cathedral. Butter remained committed to reporting news of the war – until the start of the English Revolution in 1642. Butter's publications often carried verbose titles, like A True Relation of a late very famous Sea-fight, made betwixt the Spaniard and the Hollander in Brasil, for many days together: Wherein the odds was very great, which made the success doubtful, but at last the Hollander got the Victory (1640). Miscellaneous works Among the varied products of Butter's enterprise, his editions of George Chapman's translations of Homer – the Iliad in 1611, and the Odyssey in 1614 – stand out. And in his long career, Butter published a wide range of other material: from joke books like The Cobbler of Canterbury (1608), to