Lovers Made Men appeared in 1617 in an anonymous quarto (lacking attribution to author, publisher or printer) of which only one copy survives, now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The quarto consists of one gathering A4 and two conjugate leaves, with the signature B, although only B1 contains any text. The masque was reprinted, minus its title, as A Masque Presented in the House of the Right Honourable The Lord Haye, in F2 , sigs. C-C4, with only one correction, on C3, where ‘glory in’ is corrected to ‘glory in!’. The state 1 reading is only found in the British Library copy C39.k.9. The absence of the title, perhaps justifying the title-page motto, allowed Gifford to rename the masque as The Masque of Lethe.
The quarto is often said to have been printed for the performers as a souvenir for the audience and, although nothing exists to contradict that view – which is often applied to the other quartos of the 1620s (Time Vindicated, The Masque of Augurs, Neptune’s Triumph, and The Fortunate Isles) – it is interesting to note that the sole exemplar has a price, ‘1d.’, in the upper right corner of the title-page. Whatever its means of dissemination, the Q text is notably accurate, reading ‘outer’ (13), an indubitably better reading than F2’s ‘other’, and giving the main title for the masque. Q also contains the description of Cupid as ‘general’ (109) not found in F2, and although the later version is more metrical, it leaves the strange expression ‘your Cupid’ and undermines the possible military metaphor in ‘line’ (110) which echoes the imagery of ‘civil wars’ (125).
Many of F2’s changes suggest a possibly authorial tidying of the script for publication: in particular, the opening SD (1-2) is translated from present to past tense. This has led past editors to agree that the likely copy-text for F2 was a marked-up copy of Q, and that the changes concentrated on the metrical irregularities of Q, notably at 64, 109, and 111. This may well be the case in 64, which occurs amidst a long passage of octosyllabic couplets (for the dialogue between Mercury and the Fates), but there is some difficulty here in the assumption that metrical regularity was the final desideratum in both the performance and the textual form for all parts of this text. The preference for smooth lines stands at odds with the greater metrical irregularity often found in masque verses, and especially those designed to be to be sung, semi-sung, or spoken over a musical continuo, as seems to be the suggestion in this text. In fact, the verse of Lovers Made Men is generally less irregular than some other masque verses (see the analysis of Mercury Vindicated in Walls, 1983-4, 29 ) and in 108-120 Q alternates octosyllabic and pentameter lines (apart from the short and dramatic tetrameter at 120). The change in F2 is not, then, strictly a correction of metrical irregularity but an imposition of octosyllabic couplets that leaves the pentameters of 113, 115, 117 and 119 unaltered. The revision, if it is such, can only be characterised as ‘sporadic’, in Greg’s apt description (Greg, 1942, 144-46 ).
The other F2 changes also strongly suggest an attempt to invoke the performance for later readers, adding that the scenery was ‘in perspective’ (12), describing Mercury’s use of his caduceus over the fainting spirits, and acknowledging Lanier’s role in the music and scenography (passage inserted after 13). The F2 addition is significant not only for this information, but for the deeply ambiguous claim that ‘the whole Maske was sung (after the Italian manner) Stylo recitativo’. The precise import of this phrase has been much debated by musicologists (see Introduction and 13n.) and at most it seems to suggest that more of the masque, including the dialogue, was sung, perhaps in some imitation of what was perceived to be an ‘Italian’ style without necessarily directly deriving from or borrowing actual Italian forms. Although the phrase is used twice in connection with masques staged in 1617 (it also occurs in Vision of Delight), both the descriptive phrases come from F2, and the danger is that the words represent a later codification of earlier practices under an Italian rubric influenced by the actual introduction of recitative by Lanier into England in the late 1620s.
The editor of Lovers Made Men is faced with two texts that both have some authorial connection and authority. Q shows some signs of authorial spellings (‘’hem’ in 28, 29), and F2 also exhibits possible authorial involvement. In this circumstance it is tempting to produce an eclectic text (as with Augurs, another masque with differing Q and F2 texts both with probable authorial interventions). Nonetheless, given the doubts raised by the nature of the intervention at 108-120 – where the alteration is incomplete, the result of changing aesthetic tastes and choices, or reflects plain ineptitude – and the genuine problems raised by the potential misapplication of later terminology to the earlier text (‘stylo recitativo’), such a solution would be attractive. Indeed, it has been adopted by a number of editors (such as Wells, in A Book of Masques). But given the ‘sporadic’ nature of the authorial intervention in F2, the omission of the title, and the problematic F2 error at 13, on balance Greg’s view of the priority of Q still retains its force.
Accordingly, this edition follows Q. However, unlike earlier editions which have used Q as copy-text (notably Wells), it does not include the additional explanatory material from F2, nor accept the F2 ‘regularisation’ of the metre (as explained above). In presenting Q in this fashion there is some loss of likely authorial descriptions of the masque performance, albeit recalled at an uncertain distance from the original occasion and potentially reshaped by later masque practice. However, the Q text is closest to the original performance, was clearly authorised by Jonson, and retains the textual and metrical evidence of an early experiment with verses ‘spake in song’.
The following copies of F2 were collated for this edition:
1. British Library, C39.k.9 (= Herford and Simpson, M1)
2. British Library, 79.l.4 (George III copy)
3. British Library, C28.m.12
4. Aberdeen University Library, II.f.822342
5. Durham University Library, Cosin AA.III.29
6. Edinburgh University Library, Df.4.55
7. Glasgow University Library, Sp Coll 306f
8. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HN62103
9. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HN499972
10. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HN62101, v2 (large paper copy)
11. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HN606598
12. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, HN606601
13. National Library of Scotland, Newbattle (Lothian) copy