There is no early printed text of Jonson’s Informations to William Drummond of Hawthornden, nor is there any evidence to suggest that Drummond had publication in mind when he assembled these notes of Jonson’s visit to Hawthornden. As argued more fully in the Introduction to this text, Drummond seems to have recorded Jonson’s anecdotes and opinions entirely for private purposes, with no view to their wider circulation. Jonson’s Oxford editors believed that Drummond jotted down his guest’s remarks ‘day by day, just as they occurred, and . . . summed up his impressions afterwards in a brief final note of characterization’ (H&S, 1.128 ). Yet the text that has come down to us through Sir Robert Sibbald’s transcription (discussed below) does not look as if it has been put together in such a manner. The sequence of material is not entirely random, but has clearly been arranged in a preliminary, if somewhat casual, way according to subject matter. It is possible that Drummond kept in a separate notebook a private, day-by-day, record of Jonson’s more interesting sayings and opinions during his stay at Hawthornden, from which, shortly before or immediately after Jonson’s departure, he proceeded to construct something resembling the present text, organized not as a daily chronicle but in nineteen loosely thematic sections. Some of these sections are numbered, and some bear brief headings: ‘his Censure of the English Poets’, ‘His judgement of Stranger Poets’, ‘his acquaintance & Behaviour with Poets Living with him’, ‘of his own lyfe, education, birth, actions’, etc. The organization of material has not gone far: repetitions abound, and the record lacks a clear beginning and ending – Drummond’s final summary of Jonson’s character being followed by an appended anecdote, perhaps belatedly recalled, about the reception of Epicene, which logically belongs in another part of the record. The precise dates found towards the end of Informations – ‘he went from Lieth homeward the 25 of January 1619’ (Drummond’s note); ‘January 19 .1619’ (Jonson’s dating of the poems sent to Drummond after his departure) – appear to suggest that the record itself is being assembled in late January, but the evidence is not conclusive.

Drummond’s original manuscript of Informations remained at Hawthornden until his death in 1649, when it passed with the rest of his papers to his surviving son, William (later Sir William) Drummond. That Drummond took no steps to destroy the manuscript may suggest that – like Pepys, leaving his diary to the library of his old college – he recognized the ultimate historical importance of this once-sensitive material, or may more simply be the result of forgetfulness. In 1655 a volume of Drummond’s prose writings was published in London at the instigation of his brother-in-law, Sir John Scot of Scotstarvet. The Informations were not included in this volume, but first emerged to public view in an abridged and re-ordered form some four decades later in the folio volume of Drummond’s Works edited by Bishop John Sage and Thomas Ruddiman and published in Edinburgh in 1711 . This volume was prepared with the full co-operation of Sir William Drummond. Sage (1652-1711), an energetic non-juror and controversialist in his day, is generally thought to have written the historical introduction to the volume. But Sage had been suffering from paralysis since 1706, and had been living in London for about a year from April 1709. He was to die in June 1711, the year of the folio’s publication. It is therefore possible that much of the detailed editorial work fell to the younger editor, Ruddiman (1674-1757), who since 1700 had been employed as an assistant librarian in the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, and was later to make a name for himself as a Latin grammarian and editor of the works of George Buchanan.

As Sir William Drummond appears to have made the entire archive of his father’s papers available to the two editors, the text of the Informations that was printed in the 1711 folio is likely to have been taken directly from Drummond’s original manuscript. What happened to the manuscript thereafter is unclear, and its present whereabouts are unknown. A single outer leaf survives amongst the Hawthornden papers in the National Library of Scotland (reproduced in the Textual Archive), with an inscription identified by Laing (1842, 1 ) as the hand of Sir William Drummond. After Sir William’s death in 1713 the papers of William Drummond senior appear to have been neglected, and it has generally been assumed that Sage and Ruddiman simply failed to return the manuscript of Informations after completing their edition. This was the explanation offered by James Cuming, Secretary to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, when James Boswell enquired about the whereabouts of the manuscript in April 1785 (Hett, 1932, 30-2 ; cf. Laing, 1842, xxii ). Mark Bland has recently suggested, however, that the surviving outer leaf had originally served as a fly-sheet to a slim folio (292 x 183 mm) of approximately forty sheets, probably bound in limp vellum, and that the leaf had become detached through use. He plausibly argues that the volume was borrowed by Sir John Clerk of Penicuik at some time early in the eighteenth century, and was eventually destroyed in a fire at Penicuik House in 1899 (Bland, 2005b ). This theory gains further credibility when it is recalled that it was amongst the Penicuik papers that Douglas Grant in the early 1950s discovered Jonson’s autograph copy of two poems sent to Drummond and transcribed towards the end of Informations (524-552), ‘The Hour-Glass’ and ‘My Picture Left in Scotland’ (Scottish Record Office, GD18/4312; *JnB270, reproduced in the Textual Archive).

The papers of William Drummond of Hawthornden passed in due course to the Reverend Dr Abernethy Drummond, who had taken the name of Drummond after marriage to the poet’s great-grand-daughter, the inheritor of the Hawthornden estate. In 1782 Dr Drummond presented the papers to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, where they remained in their original unsorted and uncatalogued state for nearly forty years until the antiquarian scholar David Laing undertook to examine the collection, and publish an account of its contents. Laing disappointingly failed to discover the original manuscript of Informations. Some years later, however, while working through a volume of Adversaria in the papers of the Edinburgh antiquary and physician Sir Robert Sibbald (1641-1722), he came upon an apparently literal transcript of Informations in Sibbald’s hand. The transcript, now National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 33.3.19, fols.25v-31, bears no date, though Laing believed it had been made prior to 1710, when Sibbald was in his seventieth year. Further clues to dating are to be found within the manuscript itself, where the transcript immediately follows an extract from a letter dated 8 March 1700, and immediately precedes an extract from another letter dated March 1702/3.

Sage, Ruddiman, and Sibbald were thus all studying Drummond’s manuscript at much the same period of time. In the closely-knit scholarly community of early eighteenth-century Edinburgh it is highly probable that they were aware of each other’s interests. Sibbald was a friend of Sage, and through him would also have become acquainted with Sir William Drummond, who is likely to have sanctioned his use of the document. Sibbald had been closely associated with Ruddiman, who in 1696 had seen through the press Sibbald’s edition of Introductio ad historiam rerum a Romanis gestarum. It is possible that Sibbald, having learnt that Sage and Ruddiman were preparing an abridged edition of the Informations, was tempted to make a complete transcript for his own use. Whatever the case, the two surviving versions of Informations present sharply contrasting texts, being clearly prepared for different purposes and different readerships. While it is obviously impossible to establish with complete certainty the relative accuracy of these two versions in relation to Drummond’s now-lost original, something can be said about the general characteristics of the two versions, and the particular readings they present; and some conclusions drawn about their respective standing and authority.

The Sage and Ruddiman folio text of 1711

The colophon of the 1711 folio reads as follows:

The Works of William Drummond, of Hawthornden. Consisting of Those which were formerly Printed, and Those which were designd for the Press. Now Published from the Author’s Original Copies. Edinburgh: Printed by James Watson, in Craig’s Closs, 1711.

Prepared under the watchful eye of his son, the folio was evidently designed to consolidate William Drummond’s reputation as a distinguished Scottish historian, poet, and man of letters. Sage’s episcopal standing would have given the volume a certain dignity, and set limits to the kind of material which might be considered suitable for inclusion. Many of the topics that figure prominently in Sibbald’s transcript are tactfully omitted from the version of Informations that appears on pages 224-7 of the folio (‘Heads of a Conversation betwixt the Famous Poet Ben Johnson, and William Drummond of Hawthornden, January 1619’): the more bizarre and gossipy of Jonson’s anecdotes, the tales of drunkenness and sexual conquest, the jokes and riddles, the curious notes on etymology and points of grammar – even the information about imprese (a topic about which Drummond himself discourses at greater length elsewhere in the folio). The Sage and Ruddiman version of just over 2,200 words thus represents a substantial reduction of Drummond’s original text, which in Sibbald’s transcription extends to nearly 6,500 words.

The sequence of material in Sage and Ruddiman also differs markedly from that in Sibbald’s transcript. In Sibbald, the account of Jonson’s ‘owne lyfe, education, birth, actions’ appears in the thirteenth section of the Informations, while in the Sage and Ruddiman version this section is transferred, with some effect, to the very beginning of the text. In Sage and Ruddiman this account is followed immediately – and in a more orderly fashion than in Sibbald – by Jonson’s comments on his own writings, ‘his Censure of the English Poets’, ‘His judgment of Stranger Poets’, and his ‘Censure’ of Drummond’s own verses; and concludes with Drummond’s sketch of Jonson’s own character. The central and longest section of the Sage and Ruddiman version is thus concerned with literary criticism, flanked on either side by short biographical passages in the manner of the period. The editors further enhance the symmetry by adding, at the end of this account, eight hundred words of Drummond’s own literary opinions, culled from his essay ‘A Character of Several Authors’, written between 1612 and 1616. These serve as a kind of (artificially constructed) riposte to Jonson’s literary opinions, spuriously creating a sense of ‘conversation’ that is strikingly absent from Sibbald’s version of the Informations.

From the opening words of the Sage and Ruddiman text – ‘He (Ben Johnson) said, That his Grandfather came from Carlisle’ – an editorial voice is audible, discreetly attaching names to pronouns, clarifying points of syntax, and smoothing narrative transitions with small explanatory phrases of a kind more usually absent from Sibbald’s transcript: ‘He said, he had spent a whole Night in lying looking to his great Toe’; ‘He used to say, That many Epigrams were ill, because they expressed in the End what should have been understood, by what was said before; as that of Sir John Davies’; ‘He told Donne, that his Anniversary was prophane and full of Blasphemies’, etc. (Sibbald: ‘he heth consumed a whole night jn lying looking to his great toe’; ‘A Great many Epigrams were ill, because they expressed jn the end, what sould have been understood, by what was said that of S. John Davies’; ‘that Dones Anniversarie was profane and full of Blasphemies’, etc.). At times the editors run together two passages which in Sibbald’s transcript are separated by more than a hundred lines, as with ‘Samuel Daniel was a good honest Man, had no Children; and was no Poet; and that he had wrote the Civil Wars, and yet hath not one Battle in all his Book’ (conflating lines 16 and 158 in Sibbald). And again, more contentiously: ‘He said, Shakespear wanted Art and sometimes Sense; for in one of his Plays he brought in a Number of Men, saying they had suffered Ship-wrack in Bohemia, where there is no Sea near by 100 Miles’ (linking lines 35 and 156-7 in Sibbald). Here the phrase ‘and sometimes Sense’ runs beyond the usual mild editorializing of Sage and Ruddiman by inserting a disparaging value judgement that is apparently attributed to Jonson himself. This process of silent editorial insertion was further elaborated in later eighteenth-century recensions of the Sage and Ruddiman text (Donaldson, 1997, 18-19).

The Sage and Ruddiman text includes one curious misreading of Jonson’s remarks about Donne: ‘his Verses of the lost Ochadine he had by Heart’, which in Sibbald’s transcript (line 80-1) reads more intelligibly ‘his verses of the Lost Chaine, he heth by Heart’. On two occasions, however, it provides readings which are preferable to those of Sibbald. The opening sentence of Sibbald’s account begins as follows: ‘that he had ane jntention to perfect ane Epick Poeme jntitled Heroologia of the Worthies of this Country, rowsed by fame, and was to dedidicate [sic] it to his Country’. The phrase ‘this Country’ suggests Scotland, a celebration of whose worthies seems an unlikely project for one who (as Drummond notes elsewhere) ‘thinketh nothing well bot what either he himself, or some of his friends and Countrymen hath said or done’ (558-9); and stands in obvious conflict with Jonson’s intended dedication of the work to ‘his Country’. Sage and Ruddiman’s sequence of possessive pronouns is clearly preferable: ‘That he had a Design to write an Epick Poem, and was to call it Chorologia, of the Worthies of his Country raised by Fame, and was to dedicate it to his Country’. (Other variants in this passage – ‘Design’, ‘Chorologia’, ‘raised’ – for Sibbald’s ‘jntention’, ‘Heroologia’, and ‘rowsed’ – are typical of divergences found elsewhere in the two major texts of Informations.) The second passage in which the Drummond folio provides a clearly superior reading is transcribed as follows by Sibbald: ‘jn a poem he calleth Edinborough the part of Scotland Britaines other eye’ (318). To speak of Edinburgh as ‘the part of Scotland’ makes little sense, unless some words have been omitted. Sage and Ruddiman read however more convincingly: ‘in a Poem he calleth Edinburgh, / The Heart of Scotland, Britain’s other Eye’ – where ‘Heart’ and ‘Eye’ (i.e. bright spot, intellectual centre) serve as mutually reinforcing compliments.

Sir Robert Sibbald’s transcript

There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of Sibbald’s transcript, despite one hapless attempt by an amateur scholar in the 1920s to dismiss it as an eighteenth-century forgery (Stainer, 1925 ; see Simpson, 1926 ; Hett, 1932 ; Love, 2002, 42-50). Nor is it surprising that Sibbald should have been so attracted by the remarkable document that had turned up in Drummond’s papers. Sibbald was a man of wide intellectual interests and accomplishments, who had helped to establish Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens and Royal College of Physicians, had written a history of Fife and Kinross, and won appointments as Professor of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, as Geographer and Physician in Scotland to Charles II, and later as Physician to James II. In one interesting respect his life resembled that of Jonson himself, for, like Jonson, Sibbald had converted unexpectedly to Roman Catholicism, and had chosen subsequently to return to his original faith; an experience that may perhaps have sharpened his interest in Jonson’s biographical narrative (Hett, 1932, 86ff. ). His transcript is penned in an ungainly but generally legible hand, and extends over twelve cramped manuscript pages. The writing runs uncomfortably close to the right-hand margin of the page, causing occasional problems of legibility at the lines’ end – e.g. at line 421 (modernized text 427), where the terminal ‘ –s’ of ‘peeble stones’ has almost vanished into the gutter, prompting earlier editors to read the final word as a singular noun. The terse marginal notations disappear after the first two pages, subsequent pages bearing only occasional and somewhat haphazard marginal numerals denoting the sectional breaks.

Sibbald appears on the whole to have been a conscientious copyist, but may not always perfectly have understood the details he was copying. His careful renumbering of sentences at lines 37-41 of the transcription (36-8 of the modernized text) in order to restore their correct sequence after evidently missing his place suggests an attentive concern for accuracy. His curious rendering at line 480 (489, modernized text) of Jonson’s triumphant boast that he had solved a famous textual crux in one of Martial’s epigrams – ‘the Epigrame of Martial Jin Verpum he Vantes to expone’ (this phrase itself being now, ironically, a matter for textual dispute) – suggests, on the other hand, that he may not have entirely grasped the meaning of Drummond’s note, or of Martial’s epigram. The equally puzzling phrase ‘Parabostes Pariane’ at line 66 (line 63 in the modernized text) may likewise represent Sibbald’s attempt to transliterate two words in Drummond’s hand that he could not quite read, or could not quite understand. Other more obvious errors in Sibbald’s transcript – the reference to Leicester as ‘Worster’ at line 171 (174), to Cuddy in Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar as ‘Coline’, line 83 (89), to Sir Henry Wotton as ‘Sir Edward’, line 88 (84), etc. – are likely to reflect slips on the part of Drummond (or conceivably of Jonson himself). The frequent ambiguities resulting from compressed syntax in the document are also more likely to have been created by Drummond than by Sibbald’s careless transcription: as at lines 19-20 (was it Jonson or Spenser who explained to Ralegh the allegory of The Faerie Queene?; modernized text, 14-15); 470-1 (was it Stow and Jonson who were walking alone, or Jonson and Drummond?; modernized text, 479-80); 343-5 (did the English lord lose his tennis game because he had seen an unpleasant face in the gallery, or did he clout his balls at the unfortunate spectator after the event? modernized text, 351-3) Some of Jonson’s sexual anecdotes, which Drummond (or, possibly, Sibbald himself) has chosen to record in an abridged or semi-coded fashion, may have presented particular difficulties, either on account of their obscurity or their all too embarrassing explicitness (as the heavily overwritten word ‘spente’ [?] at line 59 of the transcript may suggest).

Sibbald’s version of the Informations is almost three times longer than Sage and Ruddiman’s text, and strikingly different in structure. Jonson’s account ‘of his owne lyfe, education, birth, actions’, with which Drummond’s editors had chosen to begin their version, appears at an altogether later moment in Sibbald’s transcript (lines 173ff.), and follows Jonson’s critical and anecdotal remarks about English and foreign poets, and miscellaneous apophthegms. These apophthegms – pithy sayings, witticisms, miscellaneous bits of gossip – were evidently dear to Drummond’s heart, and grow in bulk and prominence as the record continues. The seventeenth section of Informations, entitled ‘Of his Jeasts and Apothegms’ is, tellingly, the longest in the entire record, and flows seamlessly into the eighteenth section, ‘Miscellanies’. Together, these two sections of Sibbald’s transcript are almost as long as the entire folio text of Informations presented by Sage and Ruddiman. Significantly, it was precisely this part of the record that Sage and Ruddiman were most happy to omit from their own account of this meeting between (as they saw it) two serious and dedicated men of letters.

Democritie, A Labyrinth of Delight

Yet Drummond himself may have valued this kind of material more highly than did his eighteenth-century editors, for it forms the basis of another collection of his papers now in the National Library of Scotland (NLS MS 2060 Hawthornden MSS 8; Beal *DrW 353). The collection, a small octavo volume entitled Democritie / A Labyrinth of Delight. / or / Worke preparatiue for his apologie of Democritus, contains a mixed assortment of ‘Pasquills, Apotheams, Impresas, Anagrams, Epitaphs, in French, Italiane, Spanishe, Latine, of this and the late age before’, including a number of anecdotes that appear in a slightly different form in the latter stages of Sibbald’s transcript. The Greek philosopher Democritus (born around 460 BC) sought to explain the nature of the universe and of the human soul in terms of atomistic theory, arguing that while the body is liable to decay, the atoms of which it is composed – and the soul itself, which partakes of the quality of fire, made up of the subtlest atoms – are eternal. The nature of these beliefs may well have discussed by Jonson and Drummond at Hawthornden, for an anecdote of Jonson’s concerning Nicholas Hill, a recent English follower of Democritus who had written on atomic theory, is recorded both in the Informations (346-51; modernized text, 354-9) and in Democritie. The fragmented, unstructured nature of Drummond’s Democritie notebook – containing detached remarks and particles of knowledge (resembling, at a less sophisticated level, the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld or the Pensées of Pascal) – may itself be a conscious allusion to the atomistic theories of Democritus. But in Juvenal’s famous tribute (Satires, 10.33), Democritus had also been hailed as the laughing philosopher, who scoffed at the follies of mankind, and embodied a deeper wisdom than the melancholy Heraclitus. The jokes recorded in Drummond’s notebook are evidently intended as material that might ultimately form some more philosophically ambitious, though jesting, Apology written in the name and spirit of Democritus.

Though a strong plea for the relevance of Democritie to an edition of Informations has recently been entered by Mark Bland (Bland, 2005b ), the variant readings it provides are of relatively slight value in establishing the text of Informations. Drummond appears to have assembled the materials for Democritie some years after compiling Informations, and to have repeated largely from memory the anecdotes recorded in the earlier work. It is therefore unsafe to assume that Democritie provides more trustworthy readings than Sibbald’s transcription, or that it indicates Sibbald’s fallibility as a copyist. On the contrary: the evidence noted above strongly suggests that Sibbald, so far from being a careless or selective transcriber, was painstakingly exact in his work, even when recording comments he may not have fully understood. While the alternative readings found in Democritie testify interestingly to the process of variation to which such often-repeated stories are naturally subject (and are included in this edition chiefly on that account), they rarely provide a reliable guide to what Drummond may once have written in the now-lost original text of Informations. A single emendation (at line 339) is taken from Democritie in the present edition.

Subsequent editorial history

Laing communicated the news of his discovery of Sibbald’s transcript to his friend Sir Walter Scott and ‘other gentlemen well qualified to judge of its genuineness’ before describing his discovery at greater length in a paper presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on 9 January1832. The paper was published in 1857 in the Society’s proceedings, Archaeologia Scotica, along with a somewhat bowdlerized text of Sibbald’s manuscript evidently prepared for the Society in 1832 (Laing, 1832 ). Scott, who had already written acutely about the Informations in his Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (1826) , had meanwhile evidently been drawn to look at Sibbald’s manuscript for himself. In Kenilworth (1831) he makes use of a previously unknown anecdote from Informations (271-3, modernized text) concerning the death of the Earl of Leicester. His footnote in the introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, citing this anecdote, is the first public disclosure of the manuscript’s existence.

In 1842 Laing produced a new edition of Informations for the Shakespeare Society of London (title-page: Notes of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden. January, M.DC.XIX). The text itself is headed ‘BEN JONSON’S CONVERSATIONS / WITH / WILLIAM DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN’, while the title Laing had employed in his earlier edition, ‘CERTAIN INFORMATIONS AND MANERS OF BEN JOHNSON’S TO W. DRUMMOND’, is relegated to a sub-title. In this new edition Laing introduced a number of minor changes of spelling, capitalization, and lay-out, and frequently inserted within square brackets minor corrections or clarifications of Sibbald’s text. At line 318 (modernized text, this edition) he judiciously imported a reading from Sage: ‘The heart of Scotland, Britaines other eye’. His 1842 readings suggest a more attentive scrutiny of Sibbald’s manuscript, and a greater readiness to admit material he had been reluctant to publish ten years earlier. Laing’s 1832 note to ‘Foeda et brevis est Veneris voluptas’ (line 56) had typified his earlier approach: ‘A few words here, not very legible, are omitted, and also one or two anecdotes, near the conclusion, marked with points, but which are unimportant, as having no personal reference to Jonson’ (Laing, 1832, 246, n. 16 ). In 1842 most of these censored anecdotes are restored: those concerning Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, for example (164-5), Sir Henry Wotton (391-4), a romantically-inclined waiting woman (417-20), and Sir John Davies’s anatomically-explicit epigram on a whore (506). Mr Grys’s anecdote to the King (450-2), however, is still omitted. Jonson’s remark that Sir John Roe ‘died in his armes of the pest’ (140) is now printed in full, the phrase ‘in his armes’ having been omitted, perhaps by accident, in 1832. Several dubious readings are retained from the earlier edition, such ‘cwd-piece’ for ‘cod-piece’ (228), and ‘beating, on a St. George’s day’, for ‘brawling on a St George’s day’ (250). Neither the 1832 nor the 1842 edition reproduces the marginalia found in Sibbald’s transcript.

In his 1816 edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, William Gifford had printed the Sage and Ruddiman version of Informations taken from Drummond’s 1711 folio. In revising Gifford’s edition in 1871, Francis Cunningham printed the Sibbald version of Informations, which he entitled ‘CONVERSATIONS WITH WILLIAM DRUMMOND. / CERTAIN INFORMATIONS AND MANERS OF BEN JOHNSON’S TO W. DRUMMOND’. Cunningham’s text is closely based on that of Laing’s 1842 edition, with almost identical inclusions and omissions.

Three editions of the Informations appeared in quick succession during the 1920s. G. B. Harrison’s Bodley Head Quarto edition of Discoveries and ‘Notes of Conversations with BEN JONSON made by William Drummond of Hawthornden January 1619’, published in 1923 , has a text prepared by B. B. Hutchen without emendment from Sibbald’s transcript. A number of textual errors in this edition noted by the editors of the Oxford Ben Jonson in 1925 (1.131) were corrected in subsequent reprints, but other misreadings (such as ‘the Whoores &c’ for ‘the Whoores C.’) lingered on in the revised text.

R. F. Patterson’s edition of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden , published in the same year, takes Sibbald’s transcript as copy text but silently alters the punctuation and capitalization of the original, choosing also to correct within the text some (though not all) errors of fact and nomenclature. Thus ‘my Lord Lisle now Earle of Worster’ in Sibbald’s transcript becomes in Patterson’s text ‘my Lord Lisle now Earle of Leister’, and ‘Sir Edward Wottons verses of a happie lyfe’ becomes ‘Sir Henry Wottons verses of a happie lyfe’, and so on. As already suggested, however, it is usually unclear whether such errors derive from Sibbald, from Drummond, or even from Jonson himself – or where such a process of correction should logically stop. Patterson proposes a number of emendations to Sibbald’s text, of which one (‘quintessenceth’, for Sibbald’s ‘quintessence’: 500) has been adopted in the present edition.

Herford and Simpson’s text of Informations (‘Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden’) is included in the first volume of the Oxford Ben Jonson, published in 1925 (H&S, 1.128-78 ). It is an editorially emended version of Sibbald’s transcript, which incorporates a number of readings from Drummond’s 1711 folio and elsewhere. The text is generally accurate, though some minor misreadings are noted in the collations to the present edition (see e.g. lines 57, 174, 223, 398, 408, 427, 489) or corrected in the new transcription of Sibbald provided in this edition. The Oxford editors supply occasional words within angle brackets to improve the grammar or complete the sense of the transcript, a practice not followed in this edition.

George Parfitt’s modernized text of Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden was published as an appendix to his edition of Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems in 1975. It follows Patterson’s example in silently ‘correcting’ Sibbald’s text, but introduces a considerable number of textual errors, which are themselves corrected in subsequent editions. Ian Donaldson’s edition of Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden in his Oxford Authors Ben Jonson (1985) presents a modernized text based on that established by Herford and Simpson.

This edition

The present edition is a modernized text based on Sibbald’s transcript, with occasional emendations taken from the Sage and Ruddiman’s 1711 folio edition of Drummond’s Works, from other editors, or from a fresh examination of the available evidence. New transcriptions of Sibbald’s manuscript and of Drummond’s Democritie are provided elsewhere in this edition, along with a photographic reproduction of the Sage and Ruddiman text. Obvious errors of fact and name in Sibbald’s manuscript are allowed to remain in the modernized text, such as the references to ‘Sir Edward Wotton’s verses’ and the ‘Earl of Worcester’ (where Sir Henry Wotton and the Earl of Leicester are meant: lines 84 and 174), and the correct forms are noted in the Commentary. Other names which are irregularly spelt in Sibbald’s transcript are corrected within the text to their more usual form, and the original spelling is usually noted in the Collations: thus ‘Assuerus’ becomes ‘Ahasuerus’ (375), ‘Marcellinus’ becomes ‘Messalinus’ (502), ‘Phrenee’ becomes ‘Phryne’ (510), etc. Initials and abbreviated names are kept in that form, and, where appropriate, modernized: thus ‘Sir Ed. Herbert’ (88), ‘Sir J. Davies’ (143), ‘Sir W. Ralegh’ (148), ‘Sir W.’ (150), and ‘Frank Beaumont’ (138; for ‘Franc: Beaumont’), etc. Missing words in Sibbald’s transcript are not editorially supplied (as they are in e.g. the Oxford Ben Jonson) unless they are also to be found in Sage and Ruddiman: thus ‘at the light of dim-burning candle’ (237), with the omitted article ‘a’, faithfully modernizes a phrase in Sibbald’s text that does not recur in Sage and Ruddiman, while ‘might have been the ninth worthy’ (144) imports the word ‘have’ from the Sage and Ruddiman text (Sibbald reads: ‘might been the ninth worthy’).