There are two surviving texts of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue: the printed text in F2 , and a manuscript, probably contemporary with the performance, in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth (JnB 691). The manuscript is a small quarto, measuring 15.25 x 9.75cm. There are sixteen leaves, arranged in two gatherings of eight. It is not bound, but stitched inside a contemporary guard-cover. Each page (including the blanks) has been lightly ruled at the top, bottom, and sides, approximately 1cm from the edge. The first leaf is blank; the title ‘PLEASVRE / reconcild to / VERTVE.’ occurs on fol. 2, with the verso blank; the text, beginning ‘The Scene / the / Mountaine / ATLAS’, occupies fols. 3-13r; fols. 13v-16 are blank. The scribe’s own page numbering, running from 1 to 12, appears in the top right-hand corners of fols. 2-13. A watermark shaped like a crozier (not the letters ‘J’ and ‘N’, as H&S state) is partially visible in the gutters of fols. 5, 13, and 16. It is similar to nos. 1184-5 in Heawood (1950) , which are found in a book printed at Basle in 1607; the closest example in Briquet (1923) is no. 1314, which comes from paper made in the Low Countries in the 1590s.
The manuscript is a professionally produced scribal text, in a fine calligraphic style, probably produced for a performer or spectator as a souvenir of the occasion. It is clear that several scribal copies of the masque were made in the wake of its performance. Writing four days after Twelfth Night, Edward Sherburn sent one to Sir Dudley Carleton, calling it ‘this little book’ (Masque Archive, Pleasure Rec., 10) – a description that fits the Chatsworth manuscript perfectly – and the same day Nathaniel Brent told Carleton it was not worth ‘the copying out’ (Masque Archive, Pleasure Rec., 12). This suggests that multiple copies were circulating, though it is not clear who was responsible for them. T. H. Howard-Hill (1992) , 125, says that the Chatsworth manuscript ‘seems to have been privately commissioned by the playwright’, but Sherburn and Brent’s letters imply that other people than the author were asking for them. Perhaps interest in the performance was such that a number of spectators commissioned copies for their own use; or perhaps some of those paying for the masque wished to publicize it – rather as, in the next decade, cheap printed quartos of the masques would be prepared for distribution at their performances. Presumably Milton, too, who echoes Pleasure Reconciled in his Masque at Ludlow (1634), had access to a scribal copy.
On the basis of the handwriting, the scribe has been identified as Ralph (or Raph) Crane (fl. 1589-1632), a professional scrivener who, towards the end of his career, developed a close working relationship with the London theatres, and especially with the King’s Men (see Wilson, 1926 ; Howard-Hill, 1972a and 1992 ; and Honigmann, 1996 ). Amongst Crane’s work are manuscripts of Middleton’s The Witch, A Song in Several Parts (a mayoral entertainment, 1622), and A Game at Chess (of which he made three copies), Fletcher’s Demetrius and Enanthe (The Humorous Lieutenant), and Fletcher and Massinger’s Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt. Crane is also believed to have prepared the copy for the printed text of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, for some of the later Fletcher plays, and for at least five (and perhaps as many as seven) plays in the Shakespeare first folio, including the first play in the volume, The Tempest. Most of these texts were scribed in the period 1622-5. Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue is the earliest known theatrical manuscript in Crane’s hand, unless we include the manuscript used for printing Christmas his Masque which (as is argued in the Textual Essay in the present edition) may also have been a Crane transcript.
A great deal is known about Crane’s working practices. His approach to the texts that he was copying was often highly interventionist and editorializing. He was expected to tidy up the rough edges of theatrical manuscripts, and was inclined to polish them presentationally, for example by elaborating stage directions, smoothing out metrical irregularities, and occasionally censoring improprieties (Howard-Hill, 1992 ). It is true that his more radical interventions occur in the chronologically later manuscripts, so that – as far as we can tell – his handling of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue may have been comparatively conservative. There is, indeed, little in the manuscript that could not have originated with Jonson, and its layout and substantive readings agree very nearly with F2. (However, this last point is circular: if F2 was itself printed from a Crane transcript, the two texts would be likely to resemble each other closely.) On the other hand, what Crane made of Pleasure Reconciled was emphatically not a performance text, for several aspects of the implied action remain obscure, and some are contradicted by Orazio Busino’s detailed eyewitness account. For example, it is unclear from the manuscript exactly what kind of encounter takes place between Hercules and Comus; the way that Comus and his followers departs is left only partially explained; we are not told where the Choir is positioned in relation to the rest of the performers; and Pleasure and Virtue seem incompletely integrated into the action. Comparing the manuscript with Busino’s account, we further find that Crane has entirely omitted Hercules’ wrestling match with Antaeus, and that other details do not fully correspond, such as the missing goddess in a white robe that Busino thought he saw amongst the Choir (of course, Busino may have misreported some of the action, but the presence of Antaeus is additionally testified to by his mention in For the Honour of Wales, 156). It is possible that the manuscript represents the masque at an incomplete stage, before all the stage business had been fully worked through. This is also suggested by some awkwardness in the writing of the stage directions: for example the repetition of ‘whole’ in ‘whole grove . . . whole music’ (96), and some ellipsis in the SD at 126-7 (which F2 rewrites and improves). Alternatively, Crane – who is unlikely to have seen the performance himself – may simply have assembled the papers he was given so as to make best sense of them, but in a way that did not fully represent the masque as staged.
Crane carefully processed the manuscript with an eye to its convenience for a reader. He made use of three contrasting hands: the stage directions are in secretary hand, written with a heavy nib; the speeches are also in secretary, but with a finer nib; and the songs are written with a fine nib in an Italian hand. Additionally, italic and secretary are frequently mixed for emphasis. The total effect is very elegant, though it is manifestly a scribal rather than authorial product. There is, for example, no certainty that the words Crane chooses to pick out in contrasting hands were so emphasized by Jonson. Other possible Craneisms in the manuscript include the diaresis on ‘Heröes’ (81; this is paralleled in Jonson’s own manuscript of Queens, 576, though the context in Pleasure Reconciled seems to require a disyllable), and the hyphenated verb+pronoun compounds ‘some-it’, ‘ouer come-it’ (269, 271), which are amongst Crane’s signature effects: compare ‘box-me’, ‘hug-thee’ in other Crane texts (Howard-Hill, 1972a, 40). Additionally, the system of punctuation Crane uses is reminiscent of his tendencies elsewhere. The manuscript is heavily punctuated, and two of Crane’s preferences are clearly marked: colons predominate strongly over semicolons (there are seventy colons but only eighteen semicolons), and question marks (forty-four in all) predominate over exclamation marks (zero). There are also five parentheses, though no examples of Crane’s most idiosyncratic device, the single word in brackets. The Oxford editors argued that the manuscript preserves aspects of Jonson’s own pointing that were lost in F2 (H&S, 7.477-8 ), but this is not really the case. The system of punctuation visible here is not Jonson’s but Crane’s.
Pleasure Reconciled was printed for the first time in the masque section of F2, where it occupies sigs. D3v-E3r (pages 22-9), between The Vision of Delight and For the Honour of Wales. This is a lightly revised version of the text as it appears in the manuscript, with the stage directions changed from their present tense form to the past tense (but only partially carried through in the opening SD). F2 makes some minor corrections to Crane’s text at 176 and 241. H&S considered ‘Here on’ at 107 (in place of Crane’s ‘Upon’) to be an authorial revision, though this is far from self-evident, and there are some indifferent variants at 33, 47, 52, 63, 146, and 177 which might represent changes by author or editor. The most striking substitution is ‘Hymne’ for ‘Song’ (7), which could be Jonsonian second thoughts, though it is possible that ‘Hymne’ was already present in the papers from which Crane worked, and he substituted ‘Song’ to regularize his copy (‘Hymn’ also appears at 247, and in Pan’s Anniversary, another masque that purports to present a religious ritual). In other respects, most of the variants reflect the distinct inferiority of F2’s readings. The manuscript is manifestly superior at 14, 16, 18, 22, 33, 55, 56, 73, 87, 93, 142, 181, 184, 223, 228, 241, and 243, and at 248 and 271 F2 has two dashes that indicate words are missing. It has been suggested that there was a hole in the printer’s copy, for these two lacunae could well have occurred on opposite sides of the same piece of paper (Maas, 1942, 464-5 ). The other main difference is that statements appear at the beginning of the text about the date of the presentation and at the end about the ‘additions’ that were made at the second performance. These could have been authorial, or added at the time by a scribe preparing a joint transcript of Pleasure Reconciled and For the Honour of Wales, but since neither statement is entirely accurate it seems most likely that they were written in 1641 by the editor of F2.
In other respects the two texts are very similar, suggesting that F2 was set up from copy very like that which Crane had produced in 1618. The formal layout of F2 seems to reflect scribal influence. Although the verse indentation is nowhere exactly identical in the two texts, the parallels are very marked – for example, each text handles the pygmies’ dialogue as short lines ranged left (122-5), and the arrangement of Mercury’s fourth song is very similar (276-301) – while the arrangement of the revised stage directions sometimes runs parallel (as at 32). The copy was certainly not authorially revised, for it makes no attempt to correct the shortcomings in the stage directions, other than to cast them into the past tense. It is tempting to speculate that the compositor was working from a Crane transcript, perhaps another of the multiple copies written to order early in 1618. A Cranean hyphen survives in ‘some-it’, though not in ‘overcome it’ two lines later (but the hyphenation of ‘Mag-pies’ and ‘Jack-dawes’ [45] does parallel the manuscript), and both texts use the term ‘Quire’ even though Jonson’s normal practice was to attribute such songs to the ‘Chorus’ (see Golden Age Restored, Textual Essay). The spelling ‘Pigmees’, which is used in the manuscript, reappears in F2 in state 1 of E1r, later corrected to ‘Pigmies’ (see below); this is perhaps another trace of Crane. On the other hand, the punctuation in F2 is quite different, for all the preferences listed above disappear. The density of pointing is virtually the same (F2 has just 4% more punctuation than the manuscript), but F2 has considerably more semicolons than colons (39:25), and adds four exclamation marks to the forty-two question marks that it retains. If the copy did come from Crane, the compositor clearly imposed his own system of pointing. But it is not necessary to speculate about the source of the copy other than to say it must have been scribal. There is little sign that Jonson himself ever prepared the masque for publication.
A few corrections were made to the text as it passed through the press:
| D4v (24) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 4 | !f [i inverted] | if |
state 1: 9, 16, 18, 21, 24, 31, 32, 33, 37
state 2: all other copies
| E1r (25) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 6 | their, feet | their feet |
| 7 | Pigmees | Pigmies |
| 13 | three, . . . four, . . . ten, | three? . . . four? . . . ten? |
state 1: 9, 41, 42
state 2: all other copies
| E2r (27) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 34 | enterweave | interweave |
state 1: 5, 26
state 2: all other copies
Outside the collected editions, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue 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) ; A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, gen. eds. T. J. B. Spencer and S. Wells (1967) , in which volume Pleasure Reconciled is edited by R. A. Foakes; 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) ; Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques (Norton Critical Edition), ed. Robert M. Adams (1979) , second edition ed. Richard Harp (2001) ; Jacobean and Caroline Masques, vol. 2, ed. Richard Dutton (1987) ; and Court Masques, ed. David Lindley (1995) .
The following copies of F2 were collated for this edition:
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, n otwithstanding despite 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 Pearson copy)
41. David Gants copy
42. Martin Butler copy