John Benson

Who was John Benson?

John Benson was a London publisher of the middle seventeenth century, best remembered for a historically important publication of the Sonnets and miscellaneous poems of William Shakespeare in 1640.

John Benson began his career as a stationer in 1635; he maintained shops in Chancery Lane and St. Dunstan's Churchyard in Fleet Street. In his publishing career, Benson generally concentrated on the lower end of the market for printed matter in his era; he "specialized in the publication of ballads and broadsides." Yet he published books too, like Joseph Rutter's The Shepherds' Holy-Day; he issued Ben Jonson's Execration Against Vulcan in 1640.

Benson partnered with other stationers for some projects. He joined with fellow stationer John Waterson to publish the first quarto of Fletcher and Massinger's The Elder Brother. Benson and John Saywell issued Francis Quarles's Hosanna, or Divine poems on the Passion of Christ; in 1651 Benson formed a partnership to print music books with John Playford. Their edition of John Hilton's Catch That Catch Can, a collection of "catches, rounds, and canons", appeared in 1652.