Pan’s Anniversary was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 March 1640, as part of a portmanteau entry for several masques and poems claimed as the copyright of Master Crooke (probably Andrew Crooke; his brother John generally has his name given in full in the Register to distinguish him from his sibling) and Richard Seirger (or Sergier) (Arber, 1875-94, 4.503):
20°. Martij 1639[/40]
Master Crooke and Richard: Seirger
Entred for their Copie vnder the hands of doctor WYKES and master
ffetherston warden
four Masques vizt vjd.
The Masque of Augures.
Tyme vindicated
NEPTUNEs triumphes. and
PANNs Anniuersary or the sheapards holy day.
with sundry Elegies and other Poems by BENIAMIN: JOHNSON
This seems to have been one of a series of attempts by competing stationers to assert copyright in Jonson’s unpublished texts after the poet’s death. Andrew Crooke had been apprenticed to Robert Allot, the stationer involved in the abortive 1631 folio , and after Allot’s death (1635) he laid claim to his copyrights, including Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News, under the provisions of Allot’s will. The Stationers’ Register entry suggests that in 1640 he and Sergier (a stationer who published several volumes in partnership with Andrew and John Crooke) were hoping to issue a composite volume of works by Jonson, though in the event the volume of previously unpublished material that did appear was published by Thomas Walkley (see William P. Williams, 1977 ). Notwithstanding the Stationers’ Register entry, Pan’s Anniversary was printed in F2 , where it occupies sigs. Q3v-R2v, pages 118-24. In F2’s roughly chronological sequence of masques, it is positioned out of place between Neptune’s Triumph and The Masque of Owls, presumably because Walkley (or Sir Kenelm Digby, Jonson’s literary executor) believed it dated from 1625, and hence belonged after Neptune’s Triumph (1624) but before Owls (which was mistakenly dated to 1626). In fact, it should have stood between News from the New World and The Gipsies Metamorphosed.
No press variants occur in the forty-two copies of F2 that have been collated, even though there are several obvious errors, such as ‘ones play-foot’ for ‘one splay-foot’ (85). There are two anomalies in the printing. One is that the last four pages are printed on a single sheet, signed R. This was a change to the pattern of the masque section of F2, which until this point had been printed on gatherings consisting of two sheets. The next masque, Owls, begins a new gathering, S, and the next single sheet, Y, comes at the very end of the section. Secondly, the layout of Pan’s Anniversary differs from that of other masques, in that, with the exception of a single page (R2), the speech headings and main headers (‘HYMNE I.’, ‘REVELLS’, etc) are printed in large capitals, instead of the combination of large and small capitals that are used in all the other masques. Taken together, these two features may be symptomatic of some disruption in the printing, perhaps a brief hiatus in the sequence of F2’s production.
The opening statement attributing the masque to Jones and Jonson, and the spelling of Jonson’s name with an ‘h’, suggest that the copy was taken from a text already circulating in independent form. This could have been a scribal manuscript, or perhaps even a printed quarto, now lost. All of Jonson’s masques from Augurs (1622) to Chloridia (1631) were published in quarto editions that were probably short runs issued for distribution amongst the masque audience; very few copies of these survive, and most lack any indication of printer or publisher. It is striking that the other three masques named in the Stationers’ Register entry were all from this group of previously published texts; possibly Crooke and Seirger held a collection of Jonson masque quartos to which they were trying to establish copyright. The unusually circumstantial heading in F2 (which looks very like the form of words on a printed title-page), and the inclusion of Jones’s name as one of the ‘inventors’ (which is otherwise superfluous in this collection of Jonson’s works), perhaps indicate that Pan’s Anniversary was the first of these masque quartos printed for distribution at the performance; if so, all copies have now disappeared. Jones’s name does not reappear alongside Jonson’s again until Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1631) – a quarto printed ‘to be sold’ – the title-page of which credits both men, as does Pan’s Anniversary, with the ‘invention’. It is very striking that the header of Pan’s Anniversary puts Jones’s name before Jonson’s. When in Love’s Triumph the order of names was reversed, Jones’s angry response led to the final breakdown of his working relationship with Jonson.
The present-tense stage directions in F2 suggest that the underlying manuscript of Pan’s Anniversary was prepared before the performance, but it seems to have been carelessly written out. Supplementary stage directions are needed to make sense of the action in the second antimasque (198, 204), and errors in the long prose passages imply that the dialogue was hard to decipher. Many corrections are needed to the prose punctuation, and F2 has a dash at 82 which marks an abrupt change of direction in the speech but might well be a device adopted by the compositor to remedy a scribal lacuna. Similar dashes in the F2 text of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue were probably inserted because of gaps in the copy. See the Textual Analysis for Pleasure Rec., and Maas (1942) .
Outside the collected editions, Pan’s Anniversary has also appeared in The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of James I, ed. John Nichols (1828) ; Ben Jonson: Masques and Entertainments, ed. Henry Morley (1890) ; English Masques, ed. H. A. Evans (1897) ; Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (1969) ; Ben Jonson: Selected Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (1970) ; and Inigo Jones; The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (1973) . Three musical settings of words from the masque have been published: Geoffrey Turton Shaw’s Three Hymns from Pan’s Anniversary (1917), Arthur Bliss’s Pastoral: ‘Lie Strewn the White Flocks’ (1929), and Norman Frank Demuth’s Pan’s Anniversary: Suite for Chorus (1954).
The copies of F2 collated for this edition are as follows:
1. Boston Public Library, **G.3811.8 (Sir Lister Holte copy)
2. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Fol 1640 JON
3. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt q JON
4. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 1
5. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 2
6. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 3
7. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 4
8. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 5
9. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 6
10. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 1
11. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 2
12. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62101-v.2
13. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62103
14. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 495468 (Schlatter-Shaver copy)
15. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 600688
16. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 606598
17. Houghton Library, Harvard University, fSTC 14751 v.2 (Norton Perkins copy)
18. Houghton Library, Harvard University, HEW 6.10.10. v.2 (Widener copy)
19. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1616a copy 2 [a copy of F2, notwithstanding the call number]
20. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 2
21. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 3
22. New York Public Library, *KC 1640
23. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Vet.A2 d. 73
24. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 520
25. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Don. d. 66
26. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce I.303
27. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 518
28. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (Furness-Schelling copy)
29. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (RBC copy)
30. University of Pennsylvania, PR2600 C40 v.2 (Edwin Forrest copy)
31. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pforz. 560
32. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600
1640 vol. 1, copy 1, Stark 5433
33. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600
1640 vol. 2, copy 2, Woodward-Ruth 1
34. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Wh J738
+B641
35. Clark Library, Los Angeles, *F PR2600 1640c
36. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 1 (C. W. Bradley copy)
37. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 2
38. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640B (Morris Tyler copy)
39. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1977+424 (John Milton Boardman copy)
40. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1978+47 (Norman Holmes Peason copy)
41. David Gants copy
42. Martin Butler copy