Mortimer His Fall’s title page carries the date of 1640. The play fragment was published as part of F2(3) , that is in the Jonson second folio of 1640-1, and belongs to the collection of Jonson’s works that were given into the care of Sir Kenelm Digby after the author’s death and which were published by Thomas Walkley. As Helen Ostovich explains in the textual essay to The Magnetic Lady, ‘the choice of publisher was probably based on Jonson’s earlier working arrangements, presumably satisfactory, with Walkley, the publisher of Love's Triumph through Callipolis (1630) and Chloridia (1631), the last work issued in Jonson’s lifetime.’

F2(3) was printed in three sections: Magnetic Lady, A Tale of a Tub, and Sad Shepherd share continuous pagination; pagination begins again with a section comprised of the post-1616 masques, The Underwood, and Mortimer; while Horace’s Art of Poetry, the English Grammar, and Discoveries are also paginated together. In other words, Mortimer was printed with The Underwood and the masques – a circumstance that provides evidence about the section’s printer. The masque section begins with Christmas, and is illustrated on sig. B1 by a factotum depicting Salome with the head of John the Baptist. D. F. McKenzie (1972) suggests that this factotum belonged to John Dawson Junior. This seems plausible: Dawson used it, as McKenzie notes, in Robert Ward’s Animadversions of War (1639) and Gilbert Saulnier’s The Love and Arms of the Greek Princes (1640). The Love and Arms of the Greek Princes was a Dawson/Walkley collaboration, and the two collaborated on several other works in 1640-1, including The Third Speech of the Lord George Digby; A Copy of a Letter Written To the Lower House of Parliament; and Ariana. Dawson also published an edition of Richard Brathwaite’s large The English Gentleman and the English Gentlewoman (1641), and produced numerous smaller treatises and almanacs in the same time period. In other words, while he may not have been responsible for all of F2(3), not least because of his extensive commitments to other work, it seems probable, based on the physical evidence of the factotum, that he was the printer of the section that includes Mortimer.

In most bound volumes, Mortimer falls after The Underwood and is bound before the section of works beginning with Horace. However, in some instances, for example in HN6 (Huntington Library 600688), the sections are transposed, with the Horace section preceding that containing the masques, Underwood, and Mortimer. In this case, Mortimer is the final work in the volume. In other rare cases, the paginated sections are themselves broken up. For example, in HN10 (Huntington Library 606592), volume 3 begins with the post-1616 masques, these are followed by Magnetic Lady, Tub, and Sad Shepherd, then Underwood and Mortimer, before the final section of Horace, Grammar, and Discoveries. In other words, the section in which Mortimer is to be found has been split up, with the masques separated out and placed earlier during binding. In HN15 (Huntington Library 62101), Underwood is bound after the Magnetic Lady, Tub, and Sad Shepherd section. It is followed by the three texts that comprise the Horace section, and the volume is finished off by the post-1616 masques and Mortimer. Here again, as with HN6, Mortimer is the final text in the volume.

Mortimer collates 2°: sigs Qq2r-4v. Qq1 contains Philalethes’s concluding speech for Jonson’s entertainment, Love’s Welcome, and thus ends Underwood. Qq1v is blank; Qq2 contains the Mortimer title-page with a blank verso; Qq3 lists ‘The Persons Names’ and has the play’s ‘Arguments’ on the verso; Act 1 of the play begins on Qq4 and the play ends prematurely on Qq4v during a dialogue between Queen Isabel and Mortimer himself. There is a pagination error in the printing of this section. The Underwood ends on page 285 (Qq1), but the printed number on the page is 283, which repeats the number from the previous recto. The verso page is blank, and Mortimer’s title-page, although unnumbered, then falls on page 287 (consistent with the start of Act 1, four pages later, numbered 291). In one copy (HN12, Huntington Library 606603), Mortimer’s pages are bound in the wrong order, with page 291 (the start of Act 1) being the first page, followed by its verso, page 292 (the Isabel-Mortimer dialogue). Then comes the play’s title-page with its blank verso, followed by ‘The Persons Names’ and the ‘Arguments’.

It is possible that the play was set from Jonson’s autograph, although in a text so short it is difficult to be certain. However, the work had never before been printed, and it seems likely that it was an authorial copy delivered into Digby’s care after Jonson’s demise. It contains one instance of Jonson’s characteristic abbreviation, ‘’hem’, and makes use of several hyphenated compound words (‘there-after’, ‘faire-shap’d’, ‘God-like’, ‘Engle-terre’) which Peter Happé (2000, 47) identifies as indicative of Jonson’s meticulous practice. Happé also draws attention to Jonson’s use of -ll for modern -l: this feature is present in Mortimer in the spellings of ‘Levell’ and ‘Councell’.

It is clear that the play was to follow Jonson’s usual practice with act and scene headings, grouping all the characters’ names at the start of a scene and beginning new scenes at the entrances of new characters. In the printed fragment, a new scene clearly begins with Isabel’s entrance to Mortimer after Mortimer’s opening soliloquy in Act 1. The fragment’s punctuation is heavy by modern standards and also seems to conform to Jonson’s common practices. Happé notes that Jonson often used commas ‘to separate vocatives, to separate items such as adjectives, nouns, verbal nouns and phrases from other similar items when followed by ‘and’, and to separate adverbs’ (2000, 48) . This is certainly the case with Mortimer, particularly in the Argument’s brief comment on ‘The Chorus of Countrey Justices, and their Wives, telling how they were deluded, and made beleeve, the old King liv’d, by the shew of him in Corfe Castle’. Happé also comments on Jonson’s frequent use of brackets, ‘used for interruption of the flow of the grammar, sometimes to point up asides’ (48). Again, this is a clear feature of the text of Mortimer in moments such as the Argument’s ‘The third Act relates (by the occasion of a vision, the blind Earle of L. had)’, or Mortimer’s ‘I should thinke / When ’mongst a world of bad, none can be good, / (I meane so absolutely good, and perfect / As our religious Confessors would have us)’. Finally, Happé remarks on Jonson’s frequent use of exclamation marks, sometimes used in place of question marks. Here again, Mortimer follows this practice, particularly in Isabel and Mortimer’s opening exchange.

Interestingly, the play contains a preponderance of French-derived words; for example, ‘subtile’ from the French subtil, a Latinised refashioning of the old French s(o)util (OED, subtile, adj. and n.), and Isabel’s ‘Paritie’, from the Middle French parité. Indeed, Mortimer reflects its subject matter in this choice of spellings: the French-inflected, ‘politique’, is used twice in this short fragment, and, alongside Isabel’s ‘Engle-terre’, begins to emphasise the corruptive influence that the Queen’s nationality has had on the English court. The play also contains the only recorded use of the neologism, ‘dactile’, although this is perhaps a printing error for ‘ductile’ (see OED, Dactile, v.).

Mortimer contains only one substantial variant. After the unfinished dialogue between Isabel and Mortimer on page 292, some copies print the simple note: ‘Left unfinished’, while others contain the more expansive, ‘Hee dy’d, and left it unfinished’. Because there are no other variants, it is difficult to ascertain which is the corrected state. However, it seems likely that the longer, ‘Hee dy’d, and left it unfinished’ is the corrected version because of the expanded information it imparts. Of the forty-one copies of Mortimer collated for this edition, fifteen contained the shorter, ‘Left unfinished’, while the rest provided the more expansive explanation for the play’s incompletion. It is tempting to speculate that HN6 and HN15 were bound with the intention deliberately of placing Mortimer last in the volume because of this association with Jonson’s death. However, only HN6 contains the more popular variant. In HN15, Mortimer ends simply with ‘Left unfinished’. Both of these comments are clearly un-Jonsonian, with the expanded version, in particular, providing tantalizing evidence of an editorial desire to clarify the work’s status as an uncompleted text found among Jonson’s papers at the end of the poet’s life.

COPIES CONSULTED

1. British Library, 79.1.4

2. British Library, C.39.k.9

3. British Library, fol. 1482.d.15

4. British Library, C.28.m.12

5. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Don.d.66

6. Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Gibson 520

7. Cambridge University Library, Brett-Smith.a.7

8. Cambridge University Library, Keynes.D.6.23

9. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.61.20 [transparency text]

10. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.14

11. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.15

12. Chirst’s College, Cambridge, Rouse 8.11

13. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, STC 14754

14. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, L.34.3

15. King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes C.5.14

16. King’s College, Cambridge, C.10.6

17. Newnham College, Cambridge, Young 205b

18. Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.140

19. Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.180

20. Trinity College, Cambridge, VI.12.11

21. Trinity College, Cambridge, Capel F.8

22. David Gants’s personal copy (Qq2-Qq3v only)

23. Huntington Library, 499970 (copy 4, v.2)

24. Huntington Library, 606597 (copy 8, v.2)

25. Huntington Library 499972 (copy 2, v.2)

26. Huntington Library 606601 (copy 21, v.2)

27. Huntington Library 606595 (copy 19, v.2)

28. Huntington Library 600688

29. Huntington Library 495468 (copy 4, v.2)

30. Huntington Library 606598 (copy 20, v.2)

31. Huntington Library 606203 (copy 7, v.2)

32. Huntington Library 606592 (copy 5)

33. Huntington Library 606605 (copy 7, v.2)

34. Huntington Library 606603 (copy 6, v.2)

35. Huntington Library 62103

36. Huntington Library 62100 (copy 2, v.2)

37. Huntington Library 62101 (vol. 2)

38. Huntington Library 606593

39. Leeds University, Brotherton Library, Strong Room Engl.fol.1640 JON

40. Leeds University, Brotherton Library, Lt q JON Brotherton Collection

41. Martin Butler copy

COLLATION

Qq4v

STATE 1: Left unfinished.

STATE 2: Hee dy’d, and left it unfinished.

DISTRIBUTION OF VARIANTS

STATE 1: 10, 15, 19, 20, 24, 27, 29, 30, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41

STATE 2: all other copies