Career
F. G. Fleay says that "he seems to have been given to piracy and invasion of copyright". Roberts was made free of the Company of Stationers on 27 June 1564, and on 24 June 1567 began to take apprentices. The first entry to him is for An almanacke and pronostication of Master Roberte Moore, 1570.
He was one of several who petitioned the company for pardon on 27 January 1577-1578, after having presented certain complaints.
With R. Watkins he had a patent for almanacs and prognostications for twenty-one years from 12 May 1588. This patent lasted to the end of the reign of Elizabeth.
James I granted for ever the right to the Stationers" Company from 29 October 1603. Roberts took over John Charlewood"s books on 31 May 1594, including the right of printing playbills, which William Jaggard unsuccessfully applied foreign
About 1595 Roberts probably married Charlewood"s widow, Alice.
He was presumably later widowered, as he is also said to have married a daughter of the stationer Thomas Heyes, with whom he published The Merchant of Venice in 1600. The court of assistants ordered, on 1 September 1595, "that James Roberts shall clerely from hensforth surcease to deale with the printinge of the Brief Catechisme", recently printed by him, and that he should deliver up all sheets of the book On 25 June 1596 he was admitted into the livery.
Roberts continued to print Charlewood"s catalogue of poetry for a variety of publishers including works by Henry Constable, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and Philip Sidney"s Apologie for Poetrie (1595), as well as the collection England"s Helicon (1600).
He printed satires: Thomas Nashe"s Christ"s Tears over Jerusalem (1594), John Marston"s Scourge of Villainy (1598), and Everard Guilpin"s Skialatheia (1598). He also continued to print playbills for The Lord Chamberlain"s Men (Shakespeare"s company), he registered five plays belonging to the company but never published any of them himself: The Merchant of Venice (1598), A Larum for London (1600), and Troilus and Cressida (1603).
He also entered a lost play Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose and printed the second quarto of Shakespeare"s Titus Andronicus for Edward White. A long list of books belonging to Roberts towards the end of his life is reprinted in Joseph Ames, Typographical Antiquities (ed William Herbert, ii 1031–1032).
Roberts first lived in Saint Paul"s Churchyard, London, at the sign of the Sun.
He afterwards had a house in the Barbican. He printed down to 1606, after which his activity ceased.
