The Staple of News: Textual Essay

Joseph Loewenstein

John Waterson claimed the printing rights for The Staple of News by entering it in the Stationers’ Register in April of 1626 (Arber, 1875-94, 4.156), not long after its ungratefully received first performances early in February of that year. This was, as John Creaser notes (in his general essay on F2(2) in this database), the first effort towards the publication of any of Jonson’s plays written after 1611. But Waterson did not print the text, possibly because a mild stroke disabled Jonson from preparing the play for print. Whatever its cause, the delay in printing was protracted, and Waterson transferred his rights in Staple to Robert Allot on 7 September 1631 (Arber, 4.260). Jonson and Allot were planning a new collected volume, to include Bartholomew Fair, The Devil Is an Ass, and Staple.

The text was printed by John Beale in the year of this transfer to Allot, and a very few copies were issued at that time (Greg, 1939-59, 3:1075-8), but it was not widely published until 1640 when it appeared as part of the issue we now refer to as the second folio, in fact a very irregular issue. Staple may be found bound with Bartholomew Fair and the first edition of The Devil Is an Ass, with and without Richard Meighen’s general title page of 1640; it may also be found bound with Bartholomew Fair and the second edition of The Devil Is an Ass (1641), again both with and without Meighen’s title-page. That each play had been printed with a separate title page made it possible to sell them separately, and copies originally bound separately do survive. Yet Bartholomew Fair and Devil Is an Ass are signed and paginated continuously, suggesting a plan to present the three plays in the order of their composition and performance. Although the signing of Staple is discontinuous – its first signature is 2A – it is regularly bound after the other two plays, although it can also be found bound between them. This non-chronological ordering is easy enough to explain: on the title-page for the collection which presents it as the second volume of the Jonson’s Works, Staple appears as the second in the list. This trio of plays, in one of the two variant orders – Bartholomew Fair, Devil, Staple or Bartholomew Fair, Staple, Devil – also often heads larger collections of those works not published by Stansby in 1616.

Collation of 32 copies (and spot-checking for known variants in 20 more copies) has revealed an unusual dearth of variants in the printing of Staple. In and of itself, such a low level of correction during printing can witness either to very careful revising prior to presswork or to very careless proof-reading during the printing proper. (It can also simply witness to efforts to balance printing and proofing and respond to pressures and lassitudes in the management of concurrent printing projects.) In the case of Staple, as with the other plays in this collection, we must regard the low level of stop-press correction as consistent with a more general carelessness, possibly induced by the claims of competing printing jobs. Whatever the cause, Jonson’s dissatisfaction with Beale was hardly unwarranted, as John Creaser discusses at some length in his Textual Essay. Most of the stop-press corrections catch obvious mechanical errors largely irrelevant to the text proper: mis-signing of F2, loose type at the top or bottom of a page, a page left with too much white space and therefore vulnerable to smudging. Even so, we cannot speak of Beale’s house as having committed itself to a high level of mechanical finesse: errors of pagination at 2C2 and C4 are left uncorrected, having probably gone entirely unnoticed.

On the basis of recurrence of individual pieces of type in the first five pages of a gathering, Parr concluded that the play was set by formes (Parr, ed. Staple, 4). Casting off presented virtually no difficulties: the bulk of the play is in verse (however casual), with only fairly short prose intermeans appearing at act junctures and thereby allowing for considerable latitude in the handling of vertical spacing. Despite this latitude, which may seem to have been over-indulged on C4v, and under-exploited at the juncture of D1v and D2, Beale’s house was unable to begin Acts 2 or 4 on a new page.

Of the several skeleton formes used to print Bartholomew Fair, Devil, and Staple, two are used in setting all three plays (designated as Skeletons 2 and 3 in John Creaser’s account of the printing of Bart. Fair). Staple was set using these two skeletons and one other, which will be designated here as skeleton X. As will be seen in the table below, signatures 2C/C through F were printed using only skeletons 2 and 3, in a pattern that suggests a period of balanced and, perhaps, concentrated production. All three skeletons preserve the same general layout, with rules marking off a marginal space for commentary, stage directions, and so forth. In the course of printing, these three skeletons were occasionally minutely adjusted to replace rules that had deteriorated; running titles associated with each skeleton are stable, although no running titles appear on 2A1-2, 2A3-4, and I6v, and the running title for 2A2v reads ‘The Induction.’ The skeletons appear thus:

Sheet no.	Signature		Page no. as printed	Skeleton


1	2A	1:4v	[t.p.], 8	X

		1v:4	2, 7	3

2		2:3v	3, 6	3

		2v:3	4, 5	3

3	2B	1:4v	9, 16	2

		1v:4	10, 15	3

4		2:3v	11, 14	X

		2v:3	12, 13	2

5	2C/C*	1:4v	17, 24	3
		[signing changes at* C3]
		1v:4	18, 23	2

6		2:3v	9, 16	2

		2v:3	20, 21	3

7	D	1:4v	25, 32	3

		1v:4	26, 31	2

8		2:3v	27, 30	3

		2v:3	28, 29	2

9	E	1:4v	33, 40	2

		1v:4	34, 39	3

10		2:3v	35, 38	2

		2v:3	36, 37	3

11	F	1:4v	41, 48	2

		1v:4	42, 47	3

12		2:3v	43, 46	2

		2v:3	44, 45	3

13	G	1:4v	49, 56	X

		1v:4	50, 55	3

14		2:3v	51, 54	2

		2v:3	52, 53	3

15	H	1:4v	57, 64	3

		1v:4	58, 36	2

16		2:3v	59, 62	X

		2v:3	60, 61	2

17	I	1:6v	65, [no p. no. at I6v]	X

		1v:6r	66, 75	3

18		2:5v	67, 74	3

		2v:5r	68, 73	2

19		3:4v	69, 72	3

		3v:4	70, 71	X

In a few instances the sequence of the deployment of skeletons can be determined with confidence. We can be sure that after 2B1:4v was printed off and type distributed, skeleton 2 was used to set 2C2:3v, for the compositor failed to change the pagination. Damage to a rule in the same skeleton confirms that the skeleton was next used to set 2C1v:4.

As Creaser observes, Beale’s house did not acquit itself admirably. I count 231 errors in Staple that should probably be traced to poor workmanship rather than muddled copy, although what constitutes a printer’s error must often be regarded as a matter for debate. This list of 231 includes not only transpositions and other garblings, obvious misspellings, mispaginations, mislocations of glosses, and inaccurate numbering of scenes (this latter error plausibly attributable to the copy provided to the press, although Jonson might have hoped that Beale’s men would catch such errors), but also a number of instances of crude or irregular punctuation, capitalization, font-choice, and spacing, typographic features that another textual critic might argue lie within an acceptable early modern norm. This is a larger aggregate of errors than the editors of the CWBJ have discovered in the F2(3) texts, but it is also notably fewer than the roughly 500 ‘significant’ errors that Creaser observes in Bart. Fair. We may therefore regard Staple as badly printed – quite badly when judged against the standard of other folio printings in the Jonson canon, albeit somewhat more carefully produced than its two companion plays in the volume.

Staple is chiefly marred by inconsistencies of presentation. Inconsistency in the handling of abbreviated names in speech headings – ‘Cla’. and ‘Cle.’ for ‘Clerk’; ‘P. Se.’ and ‘P. Se.’ – or in the way characters are named in the massed entries listed at the beginnings of scenes, especially in the rendering of the names of the Pennyboys Sr. and Canter, presents only a slight obstacle to a reader’s efforts to make sense of the play. The use of italics in spoken dialogue for the names of characters, place names, coinages and words recently imported, is appreciably regular. These are typographical conventions recognizable from other plays by Jonson (although in the first folio the names of characters are rendered in spoken dialogue in caps and small caps) Also familiar is the supplementary use of italics for emphasis, and in Staple this convention is implemented no less systematically, and no more so, than elsewhere in the canon. It is impossible to determine whether apparent irregularities in font variation derive from the copy furnished to Beale’s workmen or from their own carelessness.

There is some slight clustering of typographical error, on inner sheet 8, outer sheet 11, and on both sides of sheet 13, and such clustering may indicate the participation of an inexperienced compositor. The incidence of sloppy pointing, speech assignment, and typography on inner sheet 8 from D2v:3 (including a set of odd speech headings – ‘P. Se.’ instead of the standard ‘P. SE.’ at 2.4.59, 61, 69, 72, 81, 92, 98, 105, and 115) seems unusually high, although whether the punctuation of these pages is substantially less helpful than that of others might be contested. Interestingly, inner forme G1 has a number of errors – a rotated ornamental capital, ‘gratefnll’ for ‘gratefull’ on G1v and ‘withou’, ‘Centleman’, and ‘doze’ for ‘dose’ on G4 – yet this is also a forme containing one of the few stop-press corrections, ‘upon hem’ corrected to ‘upon'hem’. It would be more comfortable logically to regard the absence of the apostrophe as a printing fault – a piece of type uninked or dropping out – and not a true variant, but use of the Hinman collator seems to indicate an (admittedly subtle) adjustment of spacing keyed to the presence or absence of the apostrophe. It may be that someone in the printing house had been alerted to the fact that the involvement of an inexperienced compositor had interfered with the composition of this forme and that it would need some attention eventually; but in this case, inattentive proofing did little to catch the errors that the compositor had been missed before printing proper began.

Such sharply localized clusters of error are few; more often, error is dispersed and the person or persons responsible for the defect are difficult to ascertain. The same uncertainty applies to irregularities of punctuation. As in earlier plays by Jonson, the line is variously and heavily pointed. The use of stronger stops to give shape to longer sentences, the helpful use of parentheses to articulate the characteristically deep qualifying self-interruptions, and the idiosyncratic deployment of commas are quite familiar, but so is a degree of irregularity in all the pointing: there is no warrant definitively to ascribe that irregularity to Beale’s house except in such minor cases, like the quite irregular handling of comma before ‘Sir’.

Staple may be said to put unusual pressure on punctuation, for, even more than Epicoene, this is a play about verbal noise. The play is distinguished by its jabber of information and jargon, by phrasal competition and concord, and the parenthetical self-interruptions characteristic of speech in other plays are overshadowed in Staple by the slicings of interpersonal interruption across excited exposition and exchange. But interruption is handled with egregious inconsistency, marked by dash or comma or by no pointing at all (a glance at 2B1 or 2B3v will suggest how irregular is the handling of interruption). Of course, the challenge to graphic representation when one speaker interrupts another, after which the first speaker responds to the interrupter and then goes back to the syntax of the original speech, defies conventions of punctuation. (It may certainly be argued that the steady recourse to the dash to mark interpersonal interruption in the text presented in this edition lends misleading homogeneity to the various kinds of interruption in Staple.) One must absolve both the printers and whoever prepared their copy, even if it were Jonson himself, of the irregularity of presentation. Jonson had simply taken theatrical speech beyond the remit of writing, much less that of punctuation, be it early modern or modern.

Copy for the play seems not to derive from a playhouse document. While a certain amount of stage business is captured in the marginal notes, especially in the early scenes, not enough of such business is documented to enable a reader easily to imagine the stage action. But there may be some contamination from a playhouse document: at 5.4, during the hilariously maniacal episode of Pennyboy Sr.’s ‘trial’ of his dogs, marginal notes describing stage action are especially rich and a cluster of typographic irregularities (and an error in the numbering of 5.5) suggests confusing copy. In general, the ruled margins are used miscellaneously, sometimes to describe a gesture or a character’s disposition, sometimes to state the theme of an action or the local topic of conversation, as in the very special case of 3.2, the long set-piece on the Staple’s news, where the marginal roster of topics promotes a reader’s sense of the orderly shape of the unfolding scene. Only a few marginal notes represent the details of the complex stage business involved in the episode of Pennyboy Canter’s trust in the first three scenes of act 5, but these stage directions are quite inadequate, with some entrances, exits, asides, and confidences sketchily described and others entirely neglected. While this generally untheatrical handling of entrances and exits is characteristic of Jonson’s other printed play-texts – in which, as here, those participating in a given scene are listed as if in a massed entry at the head of each scene – the imperfect articulation of staged action suggests that printer’s copy differed substantially from the sort of text that has been marked up for playhouse use. For the modern reader, seeking a printed record of, or score for, stage performance, the text of Staple can be as frustrating as that of any of Jonson’s plays, with the wonderfully egregious exception of Every Man Out of His Humour, the printed text of which is especially frustrating for the reader who seeks to fix her mind’s eye on the stage.

The list of Persons of the Play on 2A1v is, of course, non-theatrical, a schematic rendering, in a single page, of the relational structures of the discrete familial and professional groupings of the play’s characters. The page throws the achievements and inadequacies of Beale’s house into relief. It places the three Pennyboys at the head of the list, but the layout of the triad is messy and the pattern of punctuation and capitalization is carelessly irregular, slightly obscuring the parallel design. The Jeerers come next, typographically more orderly, although a missing period after ‘Almanach’ disrupts the achievement. Before the next recognizable group, the staff of the Staple of News, come two figures who seem to be out of order: first Picklock, on the staff of the Staple, then Piedmantle, not a Jeerer, but a leading figure in the sequence of scenes in Act 4 in which the Jeerers figure most prominently. It may be that Jonson wanted to separate the lawyer Picklock from the other members of the Staple staff, since his function as the play’s chief villain gives him considerable singularity: whatever the reason for his disorderly place, the disruption is surely traceable to copy and not to Beale’s house. Yet Broker is set off typographically from Pecunia’s train and Fashioner from the group of tradesmen who dress Pennyboy Jr. in Act 1, and in both cases we might expect Beale’s men to have remedied the incoherence. We might equally have expected a more orderly use of italics and roman fonts in the bottom half of the page, although it must again be emphasized that Beale’s men may simply have been reproducing irregularities in their copy.

If the dearth of stop-press correction seems to corroborate Jonson’s dismissive remarks on Beale’s professionalism, the nature of the corrections that were made deserves comment. Someone caught an obvious error, ‘Aaginst’, on I4v, but when Beale’s men made the correction, they also changed ‘baile, or mainprise’ on the same page to ‘baile, or mainprise’, a startlingly fussy correction. The same vigilance was brought to bear on F4, for a comma has been added and ‘moyetie’ in roman type has been replaced by italic ‘moyety’. And a similarly fastidious correction was made on the other side of the same sheet: while the furniture was loosened to correct a marginal gloss on F1 (from ‘A she An- | baptist’ to ‘A she Ana- | baptist’), the perfectly acceptable ‘tyssues’ on F4v was changed to ‘tissues’.

Certainty is impossible in such matters, but it seems unlikely that Beale’s men, who allow errors in the numbering of scenes, in pagination, and in signing to pass uncorrected, would have troubled themselves to make these changes of their own volition. Such small adjustments strongly suggest themselves as having been made at Jonson’s request, to preserve his idiosyncratic preferences in the handling of italics and to restore the spelling, ‘tissues’, employed in all other instances in which it appears in Jonson’s works. These few revisions, localized as they are, exactly resemble the sort of interventions noted in the text of Bartholomew Fair; we may infer that they are the particular fruits of one or two visits to Beale’s house by the infirm author himself or, less likely, of very fitful authorial attention to proofs sent to Jonson at home.

The general policy of the CWBJ is to shift from the rhetorical pointing of the Stuart printing-house to modern syntactic pointing, and this has led me to lighten punctuation substantially. Comparison with the folio will show that this has most consistently entailed eliminating medial commas and reducing the thicket of exclamation points that tangles the original printed text. Medial comma is most likely a classicizing touch, and meant to mark caesurae, but because it could lead the modern reader to suppose that the characters here (and in most other of Jonson's plays) speak with obsessive shortwindedness, it has been largely suppressed. An actor with an ear for verse will know to exploit the fulcrum of the mid-line occasionally and will not need a comma to bind his or her attention. Also, and again in accord with the general policy of the edition, I have reduced the density of insistent points of interrogation and exclamation that the folio introduces in the middle of sentences. When Jonson’s characters are aroused, the folio text bristles with such punctuation. I hope that my rendering of 2.3.25-29 –

Yonder is venison sent me, fowl, and fish,
In such abundance I am sick to see it!
I wonder what they mean – I ha’ told ’em of it –
To burden a weak stomach and provoke
A dying appetite!

– captures the spirit of the folio’s –

Yonder is venison sent mee! Fowle! And fish!
In such abundance! I am sicke to see it!
I wonder what they meane! I ha told’hem of it!
To burthen a weake stomacke! And provoke
A dying appetite!

It will be noted that thinning the exclamation points obliges an editor to impose on Pennyboy Senior’s rant here a more determined syntax than the folio offers, yet to leave the perhaps attractively non-analytic original punctuation as it stood in 1631 would be to present a page so far out of the modern norm as to confirm the elder Pennyboy as pathological rather than merely splenetic. Selecting a syntax seems a lesser evil than settling a psychological assessment (or a moral judgement) that, this editor feels, is best left unsettled.

By far the most delicate and debatable set of transformations entailed in modernizing the text involves decisions concerning the use of upper- and lower-case. Like most early modern books, the folio text prints substantives with initial capitals far more frequently than modern books do. It would be easy to adopt the modern convention of general lower-casing for all but personal proper nouns, place names, the names of certain institutions, and line and sentence onsets. Applying even these conventions could occasionally be difficult: I have tended to treat ‘the Staple’ as naming a fictive localized institution analogous to ‘the [Royal] Exchange,’ but since it is a new institution, it could be argued that ‘the staple’ is only a staple, meriting no upper-casing, however much its founder might dream of its swift rise to generally recognized institutional status. I have often retained the initial upper-case renderings of my copy to capture the characters’ aggrandizing habits of mind, allowing them to speak glowingly of ‘the Office’; I regret that I may have muted the pride they take in entering ‘News’ in ‘the Register’.

Opening as it does, with a Prologue in which Mirth and Expectation speak, Staple announces itself as operating in an allegorical register, and, fortunately, modern typographical convention allows for upper-casing of allegorical names. Plainly, characters like Censure and Statute should be denoted with initial capitals, but it is less certain whether the mistress of Mortgage and Wax should be designated ‘the infanta’ or ‘the Infanta’, the latter form entailing deference to her potency in the kingdom of the worldly imagination (which might still have been called, in Jonson’s day, ‘the Mundus’). A related editorial difficulty dogs the capitalization of nouns that could be merely descriptive or could serve as generic names: when Pennyboy Jr is spoken of as ‘the prodigal’, it is difficult to determine whether we are being invited to recognize him as a manifestation or incarnation of an ideal type and, therefore, whether an editor shouldn't designate him ‘the Prodigal’. Even the list of Dramatis Personae presents difficulties, and I have been reluctant to depart from the folio descriptions of Pennyboy Junior, Pennyboy Canter, and Pennyboy Senior as, respectively, ‘the Son’, ‘the Father’, and ‘the Uncle’, where the pattern of capitalization in the original seems to insist typographically upon the typicality of this drama of self-centred majority, paternal wariness, and family reconciliation. A theatrically-oriented critic might insist that the fine points of capitalization would largely be effaced in the oral-aural world of performance, but The Staple of News had failed on stage and its printed text at once apologizes for that failure and sets the artistic record straight by its self-conscious address to more judicious readers – or, perhaps more appositely, ‘Readers’. The problem of appropriate capitalization is real and, in this particular matter, the output of Beale’s house cannot be wisely reduced to regularity.

The early editions of The Staple of News respond with some care to the deficiencies in the first edition. The folio of 1692 makes a number of basic corrections of printer’s errors and adjusts the punctuation in largely useful ways. Explicitly in their attention to Jonson’s complaints about Beale’s work, Whalley and Gifford give detailed accounts of the first edition and defer, sometimes too uncritically, to the 1692 version.

The Staple of News received much more serious editorial treatment during the twentieth century, during which it was edited four times. De Winter’s edition of 1905 for Yale Studies in English is very careful. Like Herford and Simpson after him, Winter concerns himself especially with Jonson's classicism, tracking borrowings from Aristophanes quite closely. He also gives a detailed account of Jonson’s debts to The London Prodigal, a play first published in 1605 and attributed to Shakespeare on its title page. Winter does an excellent job of excavating the culture of early seventeenth-century news publication. His text, a type-facsimile, is resolutely conservative, reproducing not only all font variations, but all details of Beale’s spelling, even ligatures and long-s. He departs from the format of Beale’s edition only to follow the edition of 1716-17 in relocating the play’s marginal glosses in order to anchor them more closely to the relevant portion of the main text.

The Oxford edition of Herford and Simpson has been given substantial treatment elsewhere in the present edition. Their annotations are perhaps lighter than those for other plays, but their handling of the text is consistent with that of other texts in the Oxford Jonson. They unearth many of the details of the wrangling over rights to the second folio, details that would be importantly supplemented by W. P. Williams in 1977. In preparing their edition, H&S appear to have collated 12 copies of the play.

Devra Rowland Kifer’s edition for the Regents Renaissance Drama Series appeared in 1975. In accord with the norms of this series, Kifer’s Staple is presented with modernized spelling and with the texture of its punctuation substantially lightened. Kifer regularizes the contracted forms that Jonson employs so freely and variously. Her introduction and commentary, which evidences the distinct influence of the work of C. L. Barber, focuses on themes of festivity and on the morality play residue although she pays little attention to the play's self-consciousness about its own morality inheritance, its distance from its formal roots. Her textual work relies heavily on Herford and Simpson and Winter: her collation of three copies uncovers no new textual data. Having decided, late in her editorial work, that the character of Pennyboy Sr. is a caricature of Sir Edward Coke, Kifer proposed that 5.6.42-48 was a late addition to the play, composed after its stage performance.

Staple was quite brilliantly edited for the Revels Plays by Tony Parr in 1988, in an edition that expands on his 1984 doctoral thesis. Like the Cambridge edition, the Revels series offers a modernized text, but Parr bases that text on scrupulous analysis of the bibliographical data, collating 13 copies specifically chosen to minimize overlap with the Herford and Simpson collations. (Broadening the collational base enabled Parr to dismiss a few of the supposed variants in H&S as instances of merely careless inking.) He gives a full account of the deficiencies of Beale’s printing and reflects in very sensitive fashion on the difficulties that modernization presents to the editor who seeks to represent the rhetorical and rhythmic nuances of Jonson's lines.

One of Parr's two great achievements is substantially to develop and enrich Winter's ground-breaking work on the news-trade; the other is to offer a more sustained and carefully articulated speculation on how the play would have been realized on stage, and why its staging might have disappointed, than any earlier edition had attempted. Parr's theatrical orientation is felt not only in the introduction but in the presentation of the text proper: he supplements Jonson's stage directions, replacing Jonson's massed entries with appropriately located and individualized entrances, supplying exits as well, and prescribing not only crucial stage business, but also gestures and attitudes. Moreover he suppresses a number of marginal glosses, relegating to his collational notes both those glosses pertaining to staging that he finds unhelpful and those untheatrical glosses that summarize the action or render explicit the theme of a given dramatic moment. Which is to say that he gives the reader an excellent script and not a corrected version of the slightly incoherent document that Jonson conveyed to Beale, neither entirely an acting text nor entirely a reading text.

Collation of Variants in F2

2B2:3 (inner)		State 1	State 2
2B2v
	third gloss, 2	tr	to

State 1: 18

State 2: the rest

F1:4 (outer)		State 1	State 2	State 3
F1
	third gloss,	A she An-	A she Ana-	A she
	2-3	baptist	baptist	baptist
F4v
	9	tyssues	tissues	---

State 1: 3, 16, 24, 33

State 2: 10, 15, 18

State 3: the rest

F1:4 (inner)
F1v
	1	miracles	---	[type drift]
F4
	29	moyetie	moyety	---
	34	paths	paths,	---

State 1: 24, 37, 45, 51

State 2: 27, 28, 41

State 3: the rest

F2:3 (outer)		State 1	State 2
F2
	signature	F3	F2

State 1: the rest

State 2: 2, 12, 14, 15, 21, 27, 35, 36, 45, 46, 51

I1:6 (inner)
I6
	32	[no rules]	[line set between rules]

State 1: 1, 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 20, 24, 30, 33, 35, 36, 41, 44, 51

State 2: the rest

I3:4 (outer)
I4v
	8	Aaginst	Against
	24	baile, or mainprise	baile, or mainprise

State 1: 11

State 2: the rest

Copies Collated

1. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14754, Copy 1

2. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14754, Copy 2

3. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14754, Copy 4

4. University College London, Ogden A298

5. University College London, Ogden A299

6. University College London, Strong Room B Quarto 1640.J61

7. Houghton Library, Harvard University, STC 14754.2.7 (Kittredge copy)

8. Houghton Library, Harvard University, HEW 6.10.10 v.

9. Houghton Library, Harvard University, STC 14753.5 (same as “Bridgewater” or “Brackley” = Bell-Howard)

10. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 519

11. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, RC PR2620 A1 1631

12. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, Pforz. 560

13. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin , Wh J738 +B641

14. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, Ah J738 +B616ab

15. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, q PR2600 1631 c.1

16. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, q PR2600 1631.c.2

17. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2.c.1

18. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2 c.2

19. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2 c.3

20. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2 c.4

21. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2 c.5

22. Harry Ransom Library, University of Texas at Austin, PR2600 1640 v.2 c.6

23. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.61.20

24. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.15

25. Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.14

26. Trinity College, Cambridge, Capell F.8 [cut for performance]

27. Cambridge University Library, Keynes D.6.23

28. Newnham College, Cambridge, Young 381b

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

30. Newberry Library, Chicago, Case fY 135 .J735 v.2

31. British Library, 79.L.4

32. British Library, C.39.K.9*

Copies checked but not fully collated

33. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 14754, Copy 3

34. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 14754, Copy 5

35. Folger Shakespeare Library STC 14754, Copy 6

36. Huntington Library, CSmH 600688 (checked by David Gants)

37. Huntington Library, CsmH 495468 (checked by David Gants)

38. Huntington Library, CSmH 62100 v.2 (checked by David Gants)

39. Huntington Library, CSmH 62101 v.2 (checked by David Gants)

40. Huntington Library, CSmH 62103 (checked by David Gants)

41. British Library, 642.1.29

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

43. Houghton Library, Harvard University, f *AC9.H7375.Zz640j v. 2/3 (Holmes Collection)

44. Houghton Library, Harvard University, fSTC 14751 vol. 2(-3)

45. Houghton Library, Harvard University, fSTC 14753 (B) vol. 2(-3)

46. Houghton Library, Harvard University, STC 14752 (B) vol. 2(-3)

47. Oxford University, English Faculty Library, Rare Bks. K1

48. All Souls College, Oxford, pp.4.10

49. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Vet.A2.d.73

50. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce I.303

51. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 518

52. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Don.d.66

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Joseph Loewenstein