Robert Allot

Robert Allot was a London bookseller and publisher who was in business for a relatively short time — the decade from 1625 to 1635 — but had significant connections with the dramatic canons of the two greatest figures of English Renaissance theatre, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

Robert Allot became a full member of the London guild of booksellers, or as it was called, “a freeman of the Stationers Company” on 9 November 1625. On 16 November 1630, Allot received the rights to sixteen Shakespearean plays from Edward Blount, one of the publishers of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. These rights made Allot the "principal publisher" of the Shakespeare Second Folio when it appeared in 1632. In 1631, Allot was contracted to serve as the publisher of a second collection of works by Ben Jonson, which was planed as a supplement to the famous 1616 folio of his plays, masques, and poems. The second collection was to include works Jonson had written in the intervening years, but Jonson was not satisfied with the quality of John Beale's printing of the texts and has cancelled the venture.

After Allot’s death his widow married stationer Philip Chetwinde, which him Allot's rights to plays by Shakespeare and Jonson.