edition of Thomas Heywood's play about Queen Elizabeth, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. Butter registered Part 1 of the play on 5 July 1605, and Part 2 on 14 September of the same year, and published the two parts in separate quartos in 1605 and 1606 respectively. In his 1612 prose work An Apology for Actors, Heywood complained that Butter's text of his play had been pirated from the theatre, by an audience member who recorded the play in shorthand – one of the few indications that such practices occurred in the era of English Renaissance drama. Heywood's complaint did not prevent Butter from reprinting both texts, repeatedly, into the early 1630s. Butter published various other plays, including: the first quarto of Samuel Rowley's When You See Me You Know Me (1605) Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon (1607) Fulke Greville's closet drama Mustapha (1609) Dekker's The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1630) the third and fourth quartos of Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece (1630, 1638). He also published Dekker's prose work The Bellman of London (1608), and the 1607 second edition of Lawrence Twine's The Pattern of Painful Adventures, a source for Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre. On 21 May 1639, Butter left the playbook business: he transferred all his copyrights to plays to fellow stationer Miles Fletcher, and for the remainder of his career concentrated primarily on the news. Controversy 17th-century stationers not infrequently got themselves in trouble with the strict censorship rules of the Stuart monarchy, resulting in fines, or, in rare cases, imprisonment. Butter got into significant trouble when he published a quarto pamphlet criticizing the 1619 accession of the new Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, titled A Plain Demonstration of the Unlawful Succession of Ferdinand II, Because of the Incestuous Marriage of His Parents (1620). This document, printed for Butter by William Stansby, falsely claimed to be printed "at the Hague" to avoid trouble – a gesture that proved fruitless. (In the complex religious politics of the time, radical Protestants and Puritans were hostile to Ferdinand, and the Stuarts were hostile to Puritans.) The London authorities pursued the matter vigorously: by the spring of 1622 Butter was petitioning to be released from prison, pleading for mercy on behalf of himself, his pregnant wife, and their three children. The printer Stansby followed Butter into custody, and in petitions of his own he blamed the