When visiting Drummond of Hawthornden over Christmas 1618, Jonson declared (without recorded explanation) that half his comedies were not in print (Informations, 306). As well as lost early works disowned by the playwright, these must have included the two recent masterpieces, Bartholomew Fair (first performed October 1614) and The Devil Is an Ass (mid-autumn 1616). Previously, Jonson’s practice had been to publish in quarto, fairly soon after their first performances, those plays he wished to acknowledge (with the probable exception of Epicene, which seems to have first appeared in print in the 1616 folio). But the three plays that eventually made up what for convenience here is called volume two of the second Folio reached the reading public only after Jonson’s death and after protracted and tortuous delays.

The first sign that Jonson wished to have his later plays published came not with the Fair and the Devil but with The Staple of News. Shortly after its first performances in February 1626, John Waterson laid claim to this play by entering it on the Stationers’ Register on 14 April: ‘John Waterson[.] Entred for his Copie under the handes of Master Doctor WORRALL and Master Islip warden A booke Called The Staple of Newes being A Comedie./ … vj^d’ (Arber, 1875-94, 4.156) . In the event, however, no quarto seems to have been printed, and the play is next recorded when Waterson’s rights were transferred to Robert Allott (or Allot) on 7 September 1631: ‘Master Allott. Assigned over unto him by a note under the hand of Master John Waterson a booke called The stapell of Newes written by Master Ben: Johnson . . . vj^d’ (Arber, 4.260) .

This transfer signalled a serious attempt by Jonson — ‘finding himself now near the close or shutting up of his circle’ (Mag. Lady, Ind., 79-80) — to get his later plays read. That year, the Fair, the Devil, and the Staple were, as recorded on their title-pages, ‘Printed by I.B. for Robert Allot’. It is just possible that there was some intention to make the plays available separately, since each title page announces that the wholesale copies ‘are to be sold at the signe of the Beare, in Pauls Church-yard’, Allott’s office and bookshop. Separate copies of Devil were indeed being advertised in the 1650s, although this may have been because supplementary copies of this play alone had been printed in 1641 (see below; also Greg, 1939-59, 3.1078 , and Williams, 1977, 92 ). Clearly, however, Jonson conceived of the plays as forming a distinct folio volume, or part of such a volume, a successor to the great folio of 1616 . In a letter to the Earl of Newcastle (cited below) he refers to individual plays as a ‘piece’ and a ‘morsel’ of ‘my book’, while he did not include his latest play, The New Inn (1629), which appeared separately in an octavo edition in 1631 (entered on the Stationers’ Register by Thomas Alchorne, 17 April that year, and printed for him by Thomas Harper). Typographically, they also constitute at least the beginnings of a volume: Bartholomew Fair encompasses signatures A-M4v (three sheets in sig. A, the preliminaries, and pairs in the play itself) and, after the preliminaries, is paginated 1-88. The Devil Is an Ass follows on with signatures N-Y4, paginated 91-170, and (omitting sig. Z as inappropriate for a new text) The Staple of News starts with sig. Aa, though the double-letter signature becomes single from C3, continuing until rounded off with a three-sheet gathering at I6. Pagination, however, here begins afresh at p. 1. As these signatures indicate, the three plays were printed, and were intended to appear, in chronological order.

Three plays alone would have made for a much shorter volume than F1 and would have left much of Jonson’s writing over the previous fifteen years out of print. It is conceivable, therefore, that, on the lines of F1, Jonson also intended to include some of the more recent masques and poems, even though he was publishing The New Inn elsewhere. A possible indication here, as Martin Butler argues in the Textual Essay on The Masque of Augurs (1622), is that the revised version of this masque was certainly in existence by 1631 and might have been prepared for inclusion in F2.

Be that as it may, Jonson’s ambitious project was to be frustrated, apparently because of his extreme dissatisfaction with ‘I.B.’, Allott’s printer John Beale, whose work does indeed blemish all three plays with innumerable errors. Initially, this may seem surprising, for both Allott and Beale were substantial presences in the contemporary book-trade. Robert Allott took freedom of the Stationers’ Company on 7 November 1625 (Arber, 3.686) , established himself quickly, and was especially productive in the early 1630s. He continued as a publisher and bookseller until his death in 1635, when his business at the Black Bear in St Paul’s Churchyard went initially to his widow Mary. On 1 July 1637, Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News were among sixty-one books transferred from Mary to John Legatt and Allott’s old servant Andrew Crooke (Arber, 1875-94, 4.387 ; Williams, 1977, 76-7; Devil was probably omitted by oversight).

It is not known why Jonson did not return to Stansby for his projected second folio volume — it may be because Stansby’s business had begun a gradual decline about 1628 — but Allott must have seemed a sound alternative.   He had built up a busy practice within a few years, and he was at this time expanding beyond the works of religion that were the staple of his business into works of drama. In 1629 he published Massinger’s The Roman Actor; in 1630 came Randolph’s Aristippus;   on 16 November that year Edward Blount signed over all his rights in sixteen Shakespeare plays to him (Arber, 4.232, 243) , and in 1632 he was to be one of the publishers of Shakespeare’s second Folio; also in 1632 he published both of Aurelian Townshend’s court masques.  

Beale was not one of the printers frequently employed by Allott, and it may be significant that of the six texts on which he is known to have worked for him, four are dramatic or quasi-dramatic and only one is religious.   Publishers of plays tended not to employ the few printers with high standards of craftsmanship, but to choose among the more competent of the lower-priced printers (Blayney, 1997, 405) . Here Beale must have seemed a sensible choice: he was an independent printer from 1611 until his presumed death in 1643, a master-printer from 1613 and a senior member of the Stationers’ Company. He was repeatedly described as rich during the 1620s and 30s, and was one of ‘four rich printers being men of great worth’ against whose alleged abuses of power lesser printers were petitioning in 1621 (Greg, 1967, 52-3, 60-1, 170-1, 259 ; Arber, 1875-94, 4.528 ). That the ‘I.B.’ of Jonson’s title-page is indeed the well-established John Beale has never needed to be seriously questioned. The ornament on that page centring on a griffin’s head turned to the left has the arms of the Stationers’ Company to the top left and of Beale himself to the top right (device 374 in McKerrow, 1913) . Elsewhere the page layout, the worn quality of the type, and especially the ornaments and initials are readily recognised from Beale’s other work. The two ornamental headpieces used throughout all three plays — first, the head of a woman with an elaborate headdress, seen between pairs of peacocks and winged putti blowing horns; second, a pair of putti reclining on capital A shapes with a bowl of fruit between them, a grotesque head beneath, and various animals towards the edges — can be traced to the Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier in the 1570s,   but they are frequent in Beale from his earliest work.   A Beale fingerprint is that he often began texts with a factotum initial showing the beginning of human history: Eve’s handing of the apple to Adam. In 1631 alone, his texts with this include: John Preston, Sermons Preached before His Majesty; Charles Fitz-Geffry, The Curse of Cornhoarders; Pierre du Moulin, The Buckler of the Faith; and The Spanish Bawd, translated from Fernando de Rojas .   Act 1 Scene 1 of Bartholomew Fair duly begins with it.

Despite Beale’s standing, Jonson was disgusted by his workmanship. In letter 15 — sent with a copy of The Devil Is an Ass to the man he used to term ‘my best patron’, William Cavendish, then Earl of Newcastle — he complains:

It is the lewd printer’s fault that I can send Your Lordship no more of my book done. I sent you one piece before, The Fair, . . . and now I send you this other morsel, the fine gentleman that walks in town, The Fiend; but before he will perfect the rest, I fear he will come himself to be a part, under the title of The Absolute Knave, which he hath played with me. My printer and I shall afford subject enough for a tragicomedy, for with his delays and vexation I am almost become blind[.] (CWBJ, 6.343)

Amid the rueful facetiousness, Jonson’s exasperation shows here in a vicious joke, for in later 1631, when this letter must have been sent, John Beale was literally blind: an annotation on a list of master-printers in 1630 describes him as ‘blind and rich’.   The letter to Newcastle not only confirms that the three plays were being printed in chronological order and that at least such a major patron as the Earl was eventually receiving presentation copies, but also makes clear how deeply Jonson was dissatisfied with what nevertheless remains our only source for the text of these three plays. It suggests that the enterprise of a second folio in 1631 was doomed. It is most unlikely that copies were ever for sale that year, rather than presentation copies of the individual plays, or sometimes perhaps of the three stitched together, being sent to patrons and friends.   The survival of a few large-paper copies (see Textual Essay for Bartholomew Fair) confirms at least the intention to dispatch such gifts, although Newcastle is the only known recipient.

The upshot of Jonson’s dissatisfaction was presumably that he refused to authorize publication. The decision must have been his rather than the publisher’s because the copies were preserved by Allott and his successors, who would have been hoping to be able to publish them at some point. Until then, the piles of unusable paper will have been a keen source of exasperation, since paper was expensive and a major investment was lying fallow.

Quite how this impasse was reached has aptly been described as ‘a mystery’ (Riddell, 1997a, 66) , but some factors can be established and some conjectures advanced. Beale’s print shop was exceptionally busy in 1631. In this year alone, it is known to have printed some thirty volumes (only two relatively small volumes of which were shared with other printers), whereas in 1629-30 the combined total had been about eighteen volumes, with the three largest shared among several printers. The actual production is likely to have been significantly higher, since a good deal of contemporary printers’ work has been lost without trace. According to D. F. McKenzie (1992), 394, 398, the total capacity of the printing trade was far in excess of the surviving works, and it may not be much of an exaggeration to say that at least a third of the items printed in the mid-seventeenth century have been lost, though proportionately more among ephemera than sizeable books. In 1631 alone, Beale is known to have printed some 500 edition-sheets (i.e. it would have required 500 sheets of paper to produce a single copy of each book, with the number of pages per sheet varying with the format of the individual books), as opposed to a total of some 560 edition-sheets over the two previous years.   Of this, the Jonson folio made up only a small proportion, sixty-three sheets, even though it was one of the biggest jobs of the year. Assuming a standard print-run of 1,500 copies (Gaskell, 1972, 162) and a high working year of 300 days, this would mean that at least 2,500 sheets of paper were being machined each day, almost twice as many as in the recent years, and representing some ten hours’ work each day simply in passing the sheets through the presses at the regulation speed of 250 impressions an hour, a faster rate than was normally achieved in practice (Gaskell, 1972, p. 139) . To sample this output after reading Jonson’s plays is to be struck by how carefully almost all of it is printed, and this reveals an arresting double standard. Most of the output consists of what were seen as respected works of religion and history, and, although Beale’s type always looks worn and tired, the printing is competent and even simple misprints are not readily spotted.   Sound work is also apparent in the relatively few texts of imaginative literature, including those of the gentlemanly amateur theatre, such as Ralph Knevet’s quarto Rhodon and Iris: A pastoral, as it was presented at the Florists’ Feast in Norwich (1631), and Thomas Randolph’s Cambridge entertainment Aristippus, or the Jovial Philosopher, Presented in a Private Show, printed for Allott in 1630. Sampling the 450 folio pages Beale set for All the Works of John Taylor the Water-Poet (1630) reveals few errors. The same goes for another substantial folio, the translation from Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd, or the Tragi-Comedy of Calisto and Melibea (1631) , a work in dialogue for Allott that is set out as a twenty-one act play-text.  

But in Beale’s work for the professional theatre, errors meet the eye at almost every turn. Jonson’s apart, these were the plays he printed for the popular stage in this period (all of them in quarto): Massinger, The Maid of Honour (1632), Shackerley Marmion, Holland’s Leaguer (1632) , Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1633) , and Ford, The Broken Heart and Love’s Sacrifice (both 1633). All are messily printed, and where there are authoritative modern editions, the editors comment on the workmanship as varying from the mediocre to the poor. For example, T. J. B. Spencer says of the text of The Broken Heart: ‘Whatever the precise nature of the copy the printer was using, he must be judged to have dealt with it with a care and accuracy rather less than average for play-books of the period. That is to say, there is evidence of much carelessness by the compositor.’   What emerges from this is that Beale and his men were careful and professional proof-readers except when they were setting plays for the popular theatre. It is as if, like Sir Thomas Bodley when establishing the great library in 1612, they ranked such plays with ephemera unworthy of their best attention. This attitude is not uncommon; for example, the first quartos of Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), indisputably literary texts dedicated to a great nobleman, are very much cleaner than those of the early quartos of Shakespeare’s plays. The texts of professional dramatists do on the whole seem to have been printed more carelessly than non-dramatic texts. Even so, Beale’s work was exceptionally bad. For example, Peter Happé reports in his Textual Essay on the third volume of F2, printed by John Dawson Jr. for Thomas Walkley, that the total of errors remaining in The Magnetic Lady after stop-press corrections is only eleven, in A Tale of a Tub seventeen, and in The Sad Shepherd again eleven. In Bartholomew Fair alone, the total of significant errors left uncorrected approaches 500 — an average of about five a page, with over twenty on some pages — and that omits the numerous errors in spacing as the prose is squeezed into the pages, especially in Act 5. While the two later plays are set somewhat less crudely, errors — of all kinds but especially in the perverse punctuation — remain commonplace. Lest it be thought that Beale’s blindness prevented him from properly supervising the work, his occasional earlier books in this unrespectable genre are also slipshod.  

It is unlikely, therefore, that in the normal run of his business Beale would have produced work satisfactory to Jonson, nor was he likely to respond well to exacting demands being made on behalf of mere popular plays, especially in a very busy year. Jonson, for his part, was not well placed to intervene, since he was seriously ill. Even if he was not as completely confined to his rooms as has traditionally been thought, he certainly lacked mobility.   The location of Beale’s workshop is not known, but it was almost certainly remote from Westminster (where Jonson had moved from Fleet Street in January 1631) and cannot have been easily accessible to the ailing playwright. The book-trade was concentrated around Paul’s Churchyard, and even the known establishments nearest to Westminster, those around Holborn, would have been some two miles away through rough and crowded streets. In view of the exasperation expressed in Jonson’s letter to Newcastle, it is very likely that there was some personal breakdown between him and Beale. Jonson did not suffer fools gladly and the printer was known as ‘of great estate, but a very contentious person’ (Arber, 1875-94, 3.701) . Together with the high demands on Beale’s workshop in 1631, this may help to explain why his plays are more shoddily printed than Beale’s other work for the popular theatre. Nevertheless, the situation is peculiar, because, unlike the other works, Jonson’s plays are not cheap quartos but in a folio volume, in the dignified format of theology, classical culture, and other scholarship. Moreover, as shown below, Beale set out to design a handsome volume, a companion to his work in more respectable genres.

This suggests that the antagonism between playwright and printer became extreme. Indeed, Jonson’s letter to Newcastle gives the impression that there had been sustained wrangling between the two of them. Perhaps confirming this evidence of hostility are unmistakable signs of Jonson’s intervention in the printing process of Bartholomew Fair: in gatherings B and A, respectively the first and last gatherings of that play to be set (see below for details). Throughout all three plays, and especially in the first two, occur occasional press-corrections so trifling that it is hard to see why busy printers, rather than an obsessive author, should have interrupted their work to make them. But these corrections are so arbitrary, so insignificant, and so inconsistent, and leave so many neighbouring and often more egregious errors untouched, that they seem half-hearted tinkering by printers rather than punctilious interventions by the author. But gatherings B and A of the Fair have stop-press corrections that are clearly authorial in origin, not least because they occur only in the last few copies being printed, the large-paper presentation copies. To a businessman like Beale it would have seemed economic insanity to stop the press virtually at the end of the run to make (as in gathering B) as many as sixty corrections. It is quite conceivable that this belated response of Jonson’s to the very first gathering to be set was enough to bedevil relations between the two hot-tempered men.

Eventually, after Jonson’s death and after litigious exchanges of extreme complexity between competing publishers,   the sheets of the three plays rejected by their author were bound together as volume 2 of Jonson’s Works and appeared in 1640-1, initially and usually with a general title-page added on the first page of Bartholomew Fair. Beale had left this page blank, probably as a protective cover but possibly for such a general title to be added when the volume was ready for sale. Within a double box-rule framing the whole page, this reads: ‘THE | VVORKES | OF | BENJAMIN JONSON. [swash B, 1-4 N] | [rule] | The second Volume. | [rule] | CONTAINING | THESE PLAYES, | Viz. | 1 Bartholomew Fayre. | 2 The Staple of Newes. | 3 The Divell is an Asse. | [rule] | [ornament within vertical rules] | [rule] | LONDON, [swash ^1-2 N] | Printed for Richard Meighen, | 1640.’ The ornament portrays a griffin seated on a stone or book, under which is a ball with wings, a device found most recently in the work of Bernard Alsop and Thomas Fawcett, who apparently printed the page for Meighen.   But the gremlins still had not finished with Jonson. This title-page reversed the order of the second and third plays, so that against chronology, pagination, and the author’s intentions two-thirds of the copies of F2 follow the title page and print Staple before Devil. Moreover, it became apparent during the tangled history of preparing this volume that too few copies of the Devil were available. Accordingly, the play was reprinted by Thomas Harper in 1641, and the new variant bound together with the 1631 texts of the other plays. Harper’s text has no independent authority, and it is sadly in keeping with the history of this publication that while it corrects a few errors, it ignores — and adds — many more.

* * *

The tragi-comic mess of this volume originated in the wretched press-work of Beale’s men. The 1616 folio had been Jonson’s monumentum aere perennius and he could not have tolerated such slapdash work as a companion to it. It needs to be said, however, that Beale’s work is not slovenly through and through. It is careless rather than downright incompetent, and the volume’s failings stem from a lack of systematic proof-correction and not from an initial and pervasive off-handedness.

Beale’s presentation of the plays is not meticulous — for example, the layout of the Persons and the Epilogue differs from play to play — but in fundamentals his is not a niggardly performance. He designed a more elegant and elaborate volume than John Dawson, Jr. was to prepare for the later plays in the third volume of F2. In F1 Jonson and Stansby had collaborated on a modern classic, a typographically sumptuous book that gave plays from the popular theatre the dignity of the ancients. Whereas the Shakespeare folios and the later folio of Beaumont and Fletcher have crowded double-column pages, Beale follows Stansby’s spacious single-column layout, with a norm of forty-seven lines of type to the page rather than Stansby’s forty-five (as opposed to sixty-six per column in Shakespeare’s first folio). The setting of the text and marginal notes within rules gives a more boxed-in effect than Jonson would probably have preferred, but it is a handsome page in line with Beale’s presentation of his work in religion and history.   Indeed, the use of ornaments and illuminated initials is more lavish in Beale than in Stansby; the division into acts and scenes is punctiliously and more elegantly marked; the title pages with their ornaments, rules, and variety of type are more striking than the plain title pages that became the norm within F1; and the overall effect is not of skimping but of an attractive, ‘printerly’ page. It is not a script for performance but a literary work mediated through the dignity of print, in keeping with Jonson’s practice of writing plays that were much too long for performance in full and were destined to have an existence independent of the theatre, however well they adapted to the stage (see Bart. Fair, Stage History). Hence he preferred his texts to be presented with complex punctuation and frequent italics and brackets, so emphasising the literariness of the experience of reading. Similarly, the numerous marginal notes and the extensive preliminaries transcend performance even as they preserve it; they often record theatrical occasions and actions, but they also set the script of the play at a self-conscious distance.

In certain other ways Beale does a professional job. He is, for example, just as careful as Stansby to avoid widows and orphans and to begin as many scenes as possible — in fact thirty-seven out of ninety-four in all three plays — on a new page (Wright, 1991, 260) . Intricate episodes such as the theft of Cokes’s second purse in 3.5 of the Fair, requiring Nightingale’s song to be co-ordinated with the comments of other characters and with stage directions, are handled with expertise. The innumerable errors that survive in print are almost always small and obvious; there are relatively few places where editors have to make substantive emendations rather than correct errors in punctuation or other accidentals.

Moreover, Beale retains many of the qualities of a characteristic Jonson play-text, in line with Jonson’s careful self-fashioning in F1 (Donovan, 1999, 64) . Despite differences in house-style, there are many similarities between his pages and those of F1 and the earlier quartos, those publications where Jonson was the first English dramatist to enhance his claim to be an author of weight by making typography a distinctive part of his self-presentation, ‘a vehicle for the self-created author’ (Jowett, 1991, 265) . In particular, the title pages echo those of F1 in giving the play’s genre, its date, and the company by which it was performed. That of Bartholomew Fair differs, aptly, in incorporating the dedication to the late king. The division of the action into acts and scenes adopts Jonson’s practice, following the first printed editions of classical comedy, by beginning a new act after the stage has cleared and a new scene when a significant character enters, whether or not this cuts into the flow of dialogue (as it does, for example, at Bart. Fair 2.4 and 4.6). Similarly, Jonson’s practice established some thirty years earlier of failing to note most entrances or exits in the course of a scene and listing all the characters required within a scene in a ‘massed entry’ at the start (with characters’ names in capitals) is found here in F2(2) as in F1. Likewise, speakers are here identified by abbreviated forms of their names, in caps and small caps, while characters mentioned within the spoken dialogue again have their names emphasised typographically, though now by italics rather than caps and small caps. Elsewhere, the frequent use of italics is very much as in F1: for place-names, technical terms, quotations, songs, foreign phrases, forms of address such as the Stagekeeper’s sirreverence and Gentlemen in his speech opening Bartholomew Fair, and most interestingly for words or phrases that invite a special emphasis or ironic inflection of the speaker, when words are, so to speak, uttered with raised eyebrows (as when the triumphant Justice Overdo says to Win Littlewit in her ostentatious disguise: ‘Let me unmasque your Ladiship’). Morever, Jonsonian traces survive even in the spelling of the text, and in the punctuation. It is also possible, at least with Bartholomew Fair, that Beale’s men were having to work not from the meticulously revised authorial copy assumed by some modern editors but with ‘foul papers’, imperfectly finished and perhaps less than thoroughly punctuated. Nevertheless, the irresponsible lack of finesse manifest throughout the printing is enough to justify Jonson’s exasperation and frustration.