The third volume of Jonson’s second folio of 1640-41, ‘F2(3)’, has a tangled publishing history. Competing publishers fought over the rights to the contents, which caused printing to be interrupted until the legal disputes were settled. The most important piece of evidence in this history is a one-sided deposition, a bill filed in Chancery by the eventual publisher of F2(3), Thomas Walkley, on 20 January 1641. (The bill itself gives the year as ‘1640’, but this reflects old-style dating, where the new year started on 25 March.) This bill falls in the middle of a dispute between Walkley and fellow publishers, Andrew Crooke and John Benson. Despite the obvious bias of the deposition, which advances only Walkley’s side of the story, and the absence of any surviving response from Crooke or Benson, it discloses some significant facts about the disposal of Jonson’s manuscripts at his death and their subsequent printing. It is therefore worth quoting in its entirety:  

xx. Januarij. 1640.
Pindar

To the right hono^ble S^r Edward Littleton K^t Lord keeper of the greate seale of England

Humbly complayning sheweth vnto y^r good lordshipp yo^r Daylie Orato^r Thomas Walkeley Cittizen & stationer of London.

That whereas seuerall of the writings and workes of Beniamin Johnson late deceased and not before printed were some shorte tyme before his decease presented vnto & giuen by the said Beniamin to S^r Kenelme Digby to dispose thereof at his will and pleasure.

To whose care & trust the said Beniamin left the publishing and printing of them and delivered him true & perfect Copies for his better & more effectual dooing thereof,

And the said Beniamin shortly after dyeing, the said S^r Kenelme Digbye in pursuance of the said truste reposed in him deliuered the same Copies to yo^r Orato^r to haue them published and printed according to the intencon of the said Beniamin Johnson freely bestowing the benefit of the printing thereof on yo^r Orato^r,

Wherevpon yo^r Orator having procured licence for the printing thereof and having to his great charge caused them to be printed before such tyme as yo^r Orato^r had the same from the printing house or that they were fully perfected, one John Benson & Andrew Crooke having notice that yo^r Orato^r was in hand w^th the printing of the same bookes and that there was like to bee some profitt made thereby

They the said Benson & Crooke having obtayned by some casuall or other indirect meanes false & imperfect Copies of the same works did make an Entry in the Hall of the Company of Stationers of London in their owne name for the printing & publishing of the same workes, the Company not knowing of yo^r Orator^res interest therein or of yo^r Orator^res printing thereof,

w^ch vndue and irregular proceeding of them the said Benson & Crooke comming accidentally to the knowledge of your Orato^r yo^r Orato^r did thervpon make complaynt thereof to one of his Ma^tes Secretaries of State who having heard & vnderstood the thrueth of the proceeding did graunt a warrant, thereby prohibiting the sayd Benson & Crooke from further printing or publishing the same workes or any of them.

But nowe soe it is may it please yo^r good lordshipp that one John Parker a stationer also of London pretending the said Benson to be greatly indebted to him and finding the name of the said Benson to be entred in the hall of the stationers for the printing & publishing of the said workes and knowing that diverse of the said bookes w^ch yo^r Orato^r had at his owne proper charge caused to be printed were accordingly printed and ready for to be published, And knowing also where they were, the said Parker did by some private practice or agreem^t w^th them the said Benson & Crooke cause the said bookes w^ch yo^r Orato^r had soe caused to be printed to be attached in London as the wares of him the said Benson at the suite of him the said Parker for a pretended debt supposed to be owing to him the said Parker by the said Benson and proceeding therevpon in the Guildhall London obteyned a Judgem^t thervpon, yo^r Orato^r being noe way privy thereto or knowing thereof

Which said wares soe attached and for w^ch the said Parker had obtayned Judgem^t in maner as aforesaid are the proper goodes and wares of yo^r Orato^r onely and are of the value of three hundred poundes at the least,

Soe as now yo^r Orato^r having been at aboue two hundred poundes charge in & concerning the printing the same bookes, they are detayned from yo^r Orato^r by him, by whom the same were printed for yo^r Orato^res vse in respect of the said Attachment & Judgem^t, yo^r Orato^r being noe way indebted to the said Confederates or any of them, And the said Benson & C<r>ooke doe giue out that they will in the meane tyme proceed w^th the printing and publishing their Copies whereby yo^r Orato^r is like to be greatly dampnifyed contrary to all equity & good Conscience.

In tender Consideracon whereof, and for that yo^r Orato^r hath noe way to helpe himselfe against the said Judgem^t soe surreptuously obtayned without yo^r hono^res privity as aforesaid nor to be releiued in the p^rmisses but by yo^r lordshipps ayd in this hono^ble Courte, yo^r Orato^res witnesses who should proue the p^rmisses living remotely in places vnknowne to yo^r Orato^r

May it therefore please yo^r lordshipp, the p^rmisses considered to graunt to yo^r Orato^r his Ma^ties most gracious processe of Subpena to be directed to the said John Benson Andrew Cooke & John Parker Comanding them & every of them at a certayne day and vnder certayne paine therein to be limited personally to be & appeare before yo±r± lordshipp in his Ma^tes high Court of Chancery then & there to answere the p^rmisses

And further to stand to and abide such order sentence & Judgem^t therein as shalbe agreable to equity and good conscience

And yo^r Orato^r shall daylie pray &c.

John Vernon

In the light of this evidence, and a lack of any statements to the contrary, some facts can be deduced:

• Jonson left unpublished manuscript material to Sir Kenelm Digby, as his ‘literary executor’ ( H&S, 9.101);
• Digby delivered the manuscripts to Thomas Walkley for publication;
• Walkley had printed a large proportion of the material (to the claimed value of over £300) before the sheets were ‘attached’ (i.e. seized) by John Parker in his legal dispute with Benson and Crooke.

Walkley is somewhat disingenuous in his further claims, especially that he ‘procured licence’ for the materials. In fact he did not enter the works in the Stationers’ Register, which would be the only way fully to protect his rights to the texts. Possibly he thought that he was in possession of the sole copies of Jonson’s papers; possibly he wished to save himself the entry fees for so many individual titles, including fragmentary works like Mortimer. What Walkeley identifies as the company’s ‘not knowing’ of his interests, however, is clearly an attempt to cover his negligence, which, if exposed, would probably have made his claims against Benson and Crooke especially difficult to uphold.

John Benson and Andrew Crooke had secured rights to many of Jonson’s later works in a series of Stationers’ Register entries in 1639 and 1640. On 4 November 1639, Benson entered several poems by Jonson. Over the next three months he entered some additional poems and Gypsies Metamorphosed. Crooke secured, with Richard Sergier, four masques ‘with sundry Elegies and other Poems’ on 20 March 1640 (Arber, 1875-94, 4.487, 493, 498, 500, 503). Although Percy and Evelyn Simpson call Benson ‘nefarious’, and speak of ‘raids on Jonson’s work’ ( H&S, 9.97-8), there is no evidence that Benson and Crooke were doing anything illicit in printing or claiming ownership to these books, as Colin Burrow has shown.   They must have had manuscript copies in order to enter material in the Stationers’ Register, and such materials might have been secured through legitimate purchases. It did not matter to the Stationers’ Company if a publisher procured a text from its author or from another source, although that distinction clearly has bearing upon how authoritative the text might seem to readers. We do know that Crooke, with John Legatt, had previously, on 7 Nov. 1636, been granted the rights to print Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News by Robert Allot’s widow, Mary (Arber, 4.387), so they had some pre-existing claim on Jonson’s work, in a chain that extended directly back to the author’s sale of earlier texts. The Simpsons ( H&S, 9.98) entirely concur with Walkley’s polemical insistence that he held the ‘true & perfect Copies’, while Benson and Crooke ‘obtayned by some casuall or other indirect meanes false & imperfect’ ones, yet there is only Walkley’s own statement to support this view. Because Walkley, by his own admission, did not enter the works at Stationers’ Hall, ‘the Company not knowing of [his] interest therein’, Benson and Crooke legitimately owned many of Jonson’s texts, and there is little reason to suspect immoral business practices.

Walkley asserts in his suit that most of the sheets for F2(3) had already been completed by Walkley’s printer, John Dawson Jr, when they were attached by Benson and Parker. His claim is supported by the fact that, with the exception ofDiscoveries and The Sad Shepherd, all of the texts in F2(3) have a title-page date of 1640. Walkley brought his suit on 20 January 1641, presumably soon after the 1640 sheets were confiscated. His estimated value of £300 for the already printed sheets (which might include the costs of printing, paper, and the purchase of the manuscripts from Digby) must therefore proximate the value of most of his stake in F2(3).

Walkley was eventually able to have the attached sheets returned, but there must have been significant interruption to printing, as he waited to see if he would lose his investment. When production on F2(3) resumed, presumably later in 1641, it was done quickly, with very little stop-press correction (and sometimes without bothering to update the page numbers in the recycled skeleton formes). Using the evidence of title-page dates (each major work in the folio, except the masques, has its own title page), the Simpsons – following the tentative conclusions of W. W. Greg (1931b) – assumed that the interruption to printing occurred just before work began on Discoveries and The Sad Shepherd, the only two works dated 1641, instead of 1640 ( H&S , 9.96). The date of this petition suggests that anything printed in 1641 must have been started after the interruption, and probably after the attached sheets had been returned. Bibliographical examination has shown that this interruption came even later in the printing process, after all but a few sheets of Discoveries and The Sad Shepherd had been through presswork (Giddens, 2003). In other words, although the title pages to these two works were printed and dated after the legal dispute, most of their pages had already gone through the press. The delay therefore seems to have had little material impact on the overall quality of F2(3), and no impact at all on the majority of its sheets.

We know that Walkley eventually came to own the rights to the Works, but we do not know how the dispute with Benson and Crooke came to be resolved. In a 1648 petition to the House of Lords, Walkley makes reference to his ownership of the works. He states:  

That about 6 yeares ago your Petitioner bought a peece of Poetry of Mr Ben: Johnsons which cost him 40li, and printed it by Authority which caused him to disburse 300li more, to the greate weakeninge of your petitioner in his estate.

We learn in this petition that the manuscripts were not ‘freely bestowed’, as Walkley claimed in his 1641 petition. Instead, he paid Digby £40 for them. The Simpsons also note that it is ‘odd’ that Walkley refers to ‘a peece of Poetry’ when he had earlier claimed to have purchased the corpus of Jonson’s works ‘not before printed’ ( H&S , 9.100). They speculate that Walkley here might be referring only to The Underwood and Ars Poetica, but it could also be that he is deliberately vague about his rights to Jonson’s works, not naming titles that he had still neglected to enter into the Stationers’ Register. He claims at the end of this 1648 petition that he already published the works ‘by Authority’ but would like to ‘relycence’ these materials ‘Soe that it may be entred in y^e Common Hall accordinge to Custome’, thereby dodging the issue of non-entry. Walkley’s dishonesty about ever having licensed the works discloses the same kinds of disreputable business practices and false claims to rights that he ascribes to Benson and Crooke.

In fact, Walkley did not make the required entry into the Stationers’ Registeruntil 17 September 1658:  

Thomas Walkley. Entred for his copie under the hand of Master Pulleyn warden a booke called Ben Johnsons Workes ye 3^d volume containing these peeces, viz^t, ffifteene masques at court and elsewhere. Horace his art of Poetry Englished. English Grammar. Timber or Discoveries. Underwoods consisting of divers poems. The Magnetick Lady. A Tale of a Tub. The sad shephard or a tale of Robin Hood. The Devill is an asse. Salvo jure cuiuscunque vj^d.

Walkley’s claim to Devil Is an Ass has no justification. He also leaves out two entertainments and Mortimer. Grouping the material as a single ‘volume’ did, however, mean that he paid the entry fee for only one title.

Although the dispute between Walkley and the other publishers had little effect on the printing of the bulk of F2(3), it does disclose that Jonson’s works were considered valuable property, subject to competition from multiple interested publishers. Jonson, however, may have been a victim of his own willingness to circulate material in manuscript. Clearly Benson and Crooke had access to some of the texts in alternative copies. Nonetheless, these legal records disclose that the underlying manuscripts to Walkley’s F2(3) derive from Jonson’s estate, at least, if not directly from his hand.   This authority does not, however, imply that Walkley’s ownership of the materials was more legitimate than the claims of those publishers, including Benson and Crooke, who entered some of Jonson’s works in the Stationers’ Register between 1639 and 1640. Nor does it imply that F2(3) has the same authorial status as earlier works by Jonson that derive from his personal papers, as Jonson was not able to correct any carelessness, as he had done for F1. In F2(3) we therefore have only a partial instance of Jonson’s famous possessive authorship: the works were certainly printed from manuscripts he owned, and on his authority, but they do not benefit from his editing, as demonstrated famously by the compiler’s comments at the end of the incomplete play, Mortimer: ‘He died and left it unfinished’.

For further accounts of how this dispute touched upon particular works and the wider printing of F2(2) and F2(3), see Colin Burrow's textual essay for the poems (which describes Benson’s publishing of Jonson more fully), John Creaser’s essay on F2(2), and Peter Happé’s essay on F2(3).