The Irish Masque at Court was first printed in F1 , occupying signatures 4P2v-4P4v, pages 1000-4. As is the practice in the later masques, the work does not begin on a new page, but continues directly on from Challenge, separated only by a rule, and is itself followed by Mercury Vind., similarly separated. It falls in that portion of F1 which was extensively reset, once the printers realised that they had not run off sufficient copies (see Barriers, Textual Analysis, for a fuller account). It seems to have been during the printing of this quire that the error was discovered, for two of the formes, 4P3v:4 and 4P1v:6, were unchanged. In The Irish Masque, then, no pages were reset and only the first two and the last two pages were reimposed. In the course of this reimposition, apart from typographical variations in the running title as new skeletons were used, only one obvious textual error was corrected, at line 127, where ‘glad, ding’ was corrected to ‘gladding’.

As with a number of masques at the end of F1, there is a striking absence of scenic detail and commentary. It may be, indeed, that there was little or no scenery required for this masque. Inigo Jones was away from court, and his substitute, Constantine de’ Servi, seems to have made a poor impression with Campion’s Somerset Masque performed a few nights earlier. Such stage directions as there are, however, complicate the picture of the copy that might have underlain F1.

The masque begins with the kind of ‘permissive’ direction, in the present tense, for ‘three or four’ footmen, that might suggest an early draft. But this is immediately followed by a list of the names of the four speakers, printed in upper case letters as in the massed headings of the plays. Why there should be the initial indeterminacy is not clear, nor is it obvious whether the heading was added by Jonson, or by another hand. For later in the masque, at 110, there is a past tense description of the footmen’s dance – with twelve participants – and mention of a song for which no lyrics are provided. It is unusual to find a ‘blank’ song in the masques, though there are many examples in the drama of the period, and it may be that it was left to the actors to supply something – perhaps even performing a song in Irish. The next stage direction mixes past and present tenses, as if it had been only partly revised, by Jonson or by whoever prepared the copy.

Since the greater part of the masque is written in stage Irish dialect, it is impossible to guess whether the variations in spellings that occur throughout originate with Jonson, or with the compositors. But it is notable that, throughout, ‘’hem’ is the consistent elision of ‘them’. This is very much a Jonsonian characteristic, and might suggest that the masque was printed either from his manuscript, or an immediate copy of it. It may be that a Jonson holograph of a final draft was skimpily revised by him, or by another hand, but that the reviser omitted to delete the opening ‘permissive’ stage direction.

The spelling of the dialect, however, does pose problems for the editor preparing a modernised text. Herford and Simpson, though presenting an old-spelling text, believing that the ‘printing of the burlesque Anglo-Irish is very bad’, and therefore, blaming the compositors for variation in dialectal forms, attempted in rather haphazard fashion to ‘regularize’ the dialect, often by ‘correcting’ F1’s standard forms to dialectal variations found elsewhere in the text. Orgel also normalised some variations, while leaving others unchanged. It is, in fact, extremely difficult to proceed with absolute consistency, since it is by no means always obvious whether an individual spelling indicates dialectal variation, or is just a customary seventeenth-century spelling which elsewhere in this edition would be normalised without comment. So too, it is not necessarily compositorial incompetence which might account for the variation in forms, which could easily have originated with Jonson himself.

I have tried to be as consistent as is possible, according to the following practices:

• medial ‘u’ and ‘v’ are normalised, and in initial positions where ‘v’ is not being used to indicate a dialectal variation of ‘w’;
• words where the spelling seems to be a usual seventeenth-century form are modernised (e.g. by omitting final ‘e’ or reducing ‘ll’ to ‘l’);
• this extends to some words where the body of the word is given in a normal seventeenth-century form, even if there is a dialectal beginning or ending – eg. ‘dansh’ for ‘daunsh’;
• I have chosen to normalise one or two words which occur only as dialectal forms, but with variations between them, within what seem to be the dominant conventions of the dialectal representation itself. ‘Prithee’ is, for example, to be found as ‘Pre dee’, ‘Pre tee’, and ‘Pretee’, but ‘tee’ is elsewhere overwhelmingly the form used for ‘thee’, and so I have chosen the form ‘Pretee’. ‘Ti’ and ‘ty’ both occur as forms of ‘thy’, and have been normalised as the latter. So too I have imposed uniformity on ‘An’t be’, which occurs in a number of forms.
• I have however, left intact the random variation between dialectal and non-dialectal forms of a number of words such as ‘and – ant’, ‘good – goot’, since such inconsistency, though it might have been generated by compositors, could equally well have been present in Jonson’s manuscript.

4P 3:4 (i)
4P4 (1003)	State 1	State 2
20	glad, ding	gladding

State 1: the rest

State 2: 10, 11, 15, 20, 24, 26, 33, 39, 45

Copies collated (by David L. Gants)

1. Huntington Library, 62100
2. Huntington Library, 62101
3. Huntington Library, 62104
4. Huntington Library, 62105
5. Huntington Library, 495467 (Ford Copy ‘A’)
6. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 1
7. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 2
8. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 3
9. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 4
10. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 5
11. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 6
12. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 1
13. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 2
14. Library of Congress, Yorke W.4.4
15. Gants Personal Copy, Fenton bookplate
16. Gants Personal Copy, Everard Home bookplate
17. British Library, G. 11630 (Grenville copy)
18. Boston Public Library, XfG .3811 .5
19. Boston University, YPR 2600 .C16
20. Wellesley College, qx - English Poetry
21. Bodleian Library, Douce I. 302
22. Huntington Library, 499968
23. Huntington Library, 499967
24. Huntington Library, 499971
25. Huntington Library, 606199
26. Huntington Library, 606202
27. Huntington Library, 606200
28. Huntington Library, 606574
29. Huntington Library, 606576
30. Huntington Library, 606599
31. Huntington Library, 606579
32. Huntington Library, 606582
33. Huntington Library, 606583
34. Brown University, Providence, PR 2600 - 1616
35. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Lewis PR2600 1616
36. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616a
37. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ab
38. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ad
39. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616af
40. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ah
41. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ak
42. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616am
43. University of Texas, Austin, AH/ J738/ +B616an
44. University of Texas, Austin, Wh/ J738/ +B616a
45. University of Texas, Austin, Pforz. 559
46. University of Texas, Austin, Woodward-Ruth 181
47. University of Texas, Austin, Stark 6431
48. University of Virginia, E 1616 .J64