‘To present what is doubtful as certain is to remain further from the goal than if one were to confess one’s doubt.’ (Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, 1958, 17)
The textual problems surrounding Jonson’s poems are great, and many of them are insoluble. The largest problem is that the problems are all so different. So: there are four main printed witnesses of Jonson’s poems, each of which presents quite distinct editorial problems. At the easy end of the spectrum there are the texts of the Epigrams and The Forest in the folio of 1616 . Here an editor of a modernized edition can feel as happy as an editor of a modernized edition ever can feel in printing modernized versions of the printed text: Jonson clearly oversaw the production of this volume (although evidence from press variants suggests that his keenness for proofing had declined a little by this stage of the project), and it is clear too that he revised a number of poems for print. The Underwood, however, presents an entirely different kind of text. It first appeared in the folio of 1640 , about three years after Jonson’s death. We do not know the nature of the copy from which the volume was set. Several poems which appeared in that collection were also printed by John Benson in two volumes, one a quarto , the other a duodecimo , which also appeared in 1640. Again we do not know exactly what kind of manuscripts Benson had obtained.
Then there are the manuscripts, which include more than six hundred versions of individual poems by Jonson, of which only nine are in his own hand. The remainder are for the most part casual copies in common-place books, which circulated among friends and groups of enthusiasts. The interrelationships between these volumes are so complex that they probably cannot be reconstructed with any level of certainty, given that we have lost many of the intermediate stages between manuscripts which survive, and given that some at least of the manuscript versions reflect oral or memorial transmission. Jonson revised many of his poems, and may well on some occasions have subsequently thought better of his revisions; scribes transcribed and mistranscribed scores of poems. On many occasions it is impossible to distinguish what may be authorial revision from scribal corruption. Several late manuscript witnesses in poetic miscellanies from the 1640s (and indeed after) record what are likely to be early versions of poems, but these late witnesses to ‘early versions’ are in many cases also in part the products of a chain of scribal copying and miscopying.
Given this diverse range of problems perhaps only one thing is certain: that consistency of editorial method is likely to result in inconsistency of output. An editor of Jonson’s poems must respond carefully to the individual histories of individual poems, and pragmatically adapt editorial principles to suit those histories. The Epigrams and The Forest do not present acute difficulties. For these poems I have produced modernized versions of the folio texts. Where early versions are known to exist in manuscript I have collated them, and on a few occasions I have printed them (where it would be hard for readers to reconstruct them from the collation) as separate poems in an appendix. With poems printed in The Underwood, however, it is appropriate to adopt a more flexible approach which takes account of the diverse textual histories of individual poems within the collection. For reasons which are laid out in detail below, I believe that the manuscript copy for this collection was probably not a carefully arranged sequence in Jonson’s hand, but rather a gathering of poems, which may have been put in order by Jonson, which may have contained some autograph copies of poems, and which in many cases probably reflected his latest versions of the poems they include, but which was on the whole poorly typeset. For the print edition I have followed the order of poems in The Underwood on the assumption that it may at least in part reflect a way Jonson might have wished the poems it includes to see print. I have adopted the readings of the folio of 1640 for individual poems within The Underwood in cases where they have seemed likely to represent Jonson’s last thoughts. I have done so in several cases even when the readings of F2 conflict with readings in his autograph manuscripts, on the grounds that Jonson was a systematic and careful reviser of his poems, and that there is good evidence that in a number of places the text of The Underwood reflects his latest known revisions. However, given the equally strong evidence that the text of The Underwood was poorly typeset, and the suspicion that the manuscript from which it was set was not entirely in Jonson’s hand, I have in a few cases, where a manuscript exists of good provenance which avoids manifest errors in the text of The Underwood, based my text primarily on that manuscript.
There is room for argument about every aspect of this procedure, since it is likely that we will never know with certainty the nature of the copy from which The Underwood was set. There might be a case for a more radical departure from the text of F2, and greater reliance on manuscripts. I have not followed this course for two reasons. The first is that the provenance of many manuscript versions of Jonson’s poems is murky. For many poems it is not possible to establish firm criteria for deriving a modernized text from one manuscript rather than another, since in a manuscript tradition in which individual poems circulate frequently on their own within miscellanies it is virtually impossible to create a stemma of transmission (Jonson’s poems do not appear to have circulated, as Donne’s did, in large collections; the very few exceptions to this are discussed below). Furthermore a manuscript-based approach could not be adopted consistently: for a significant number of poems in The Underwood no manuscripts are known, hence the text of 1640 would have to be adopted for these poems. There might be a further argument that the text I have printed is a hybrid of manuscript and print versions of The Underwood, which reflects the specific properties of neither medium in which Jonson’s poems were circulated. The only response to this is to say that it is true, but that most readers would rather read a text of Und. 13 which contains a couplet which the compositor of F2 in all probability omitted, than a text which follows the errors of F2, and that, further, a reader who wishes to read The Underwood exactly as it appeared in 1640 may do so in the electronic edition. Editors have to adopt a single text, and they have to do so on a balance of probabilities. Editors of a poet such as Jonson, who showed a keen interest in selective manuscript circulation in the later stages of his career in particular, must also be conscious that it is impossible in a printed book to preserve features of poems which are intrinsically alien to the form of a printed book. They also have to bear in mind what a reader will find most useful. I have proceeded on the assumption that a reader of a modernized text of The Underwood will find it most useful to encounter texts which as far as possible represent what are likely to have been Jonson’s latest thoughts. This means that I have sometimes edited texts from manuscript copies, but have in general followed F1 and F2, taking a more robust approach towards emending the latter.
Jonson’s Autographs and Manuscript Circulation
Jonson does envisage, and with satisfaction, the proliferation of manuscript copies of his poems. In Und. 78.25-32 he imagines Lady Venetia Digby passing copies of his poems to her husband Sir Kenelm, who would then pass them on to Lord Treasurer Weston:
O! What a fame ’twill be?
What reputation to my lines and me,
When he shall read them at the Treasurer’s board?
The knowing Weston, and that learnèd lord
Allows them? Then what copies shall be had,
What transcripts begged? How cried up, and how glad,
Wilt thou be, muse, when this shall them befall?
Being sent to one, they will be read of all.
The relish for manuscript circulation expressed here may well be reflected in the relatively high number (around a hundred) of manuscript copies of poems relating to the Digbys and to Lord Treasurer Weston. But it is important to be clear about what Jonson is and is not saying here. He is nudging an influential woman for whom he wrote poems, which (to judge by the number of surviving copies) were phenomenally successful, to pass his verse on to her husband, who in the early 1630s was in almost daily contact with one of the richest men in England. He is not rejoicing at the thought of copies being multiplied by manuscript miscellanists such as Margaret Bellasys (the one-time owner of British Library Add. MS 10309), W. Allen (the one-time owner of British Library Egerton MS 923), the Bury St Edmonds antiquarian James Cobbes (the compiler of Bodleian Rawl. poet. 166; on whom see Beadle, 2004), or any one of the hundreds of unnameable miscellanists who have left behind transcriptions of Jonson’s poems. Rather he is envisaging manuscript circulation as a means of access to an elite circle. He would probably have accepted that that circle would have leaked material to the not quite so elite circles of Oxford, Cambridge, and Inns of Court miscellanists, but it is unlikely that he sought circulation in these forms. The surviving manuscripts which originated from Jonson or from very close to Jonson strongly suggest that he regarded manuscript circulation as a highly targeted activity.
The poems which survive in autograph are all in some sense ‘presentation’ copies. The autograph version of Epigram 91 (to Sir Horatio Vere; JnB 512 [BL Add. MS 23229, fol. 87]) is a case in point. It is badly faded, on the outer recto of a single water-stained bifolium, which has been folded twice horizontally as though for enclosure with a letter, and has worn through at several points in the folds. The sheet has no watermark. It is found among the Conway papers. This fact, combined with the fold-marks, suggests that it may have been sent to Sir Horatio Vere while he was Governor of Brill from 18 October 1609, and that it passed into the papers of his brother-in-law Edward, Viscount Conway, who was Lieutenant Governor of Brill under Vere’s brother Francis from 1598 (Markham, 1888 , 253; on the dispersal of the Conway papers, see Knowles, 1999b, 117-18 ). It is representative of the surviving autograph manuscripts of Jonson’s poems, all of which are on single sheets, the majority of which show fold marks as though they were enclosed with letters, and most of which show clear signs of having been sent or given to a specific recipient. The term ‘presentation manuscript’ is a tempting one to apply to such artefacts; however it is too grandiose a term for copies which were sent to particular addressees, probably to mark particular occasions in the life of the addressee or in the relationship between poet and patron. They are not ‘presentation manuscripts’ in the sense of being finely transcribed or bound copies. It might be preferable to term them ‘epistolary manuscripts’.
It is a highly significant fact that there are usually variants between the autograph texts which survive and the printed versions. In several cases variants between autograph and printed versions suggest that Jonson regarded epistolary manuscripts which he wrote for and sent or presented to his patrons as a different form of social performance from printed poems. The minor variants, for instance, between the text in F1 of Epigr. 43 to Robert Cecil and the autograph manuscript (JnB 505; Hatfield House Cecil Papers 144/266) strongly suggest that Jonson lightly retouched the poem some time before 1616 to make it fit both the medium of print and the concerns of the collection in which he was to embed the poem. The manuscript’s ‘verse’ is altered to ‘book’ for the printed volume, and the honorific title ‘Sarum’ is altered to ‘Cecil’, presumably in order to adapt the poem to a collection which is much concerned with the way in which people must earn their titles. This autograph poem is folded as though for enclosure within a letter, and is on a single sheet of high quality Venetian paper measuring 25.5x18cm with a double pennant and ‘G3’ initial watermark. This paper Jonson used for presentation copies in the earlier years of the seventeenth century (it is used for the autograph copy of Queens (1609), BL Royal MS. 18. A. xlv; JnB 685; see Bland, 1998a , 162). The presence of the autograph poem in the Cecil papers makes it beyond dispute that it was presented, or, more probably, sent to Cecil. For an editor to print a version of the autograph text within an edition of the Epigrams would be misleading: it would involve a category confusion between the poem as a presented manuscript work and the poem as it was refashioned to suit a sequence of printed poems which dwell on the question of what it is to deserve a title. Jonson revised the poem to make it a printed poem; an editor of a printed edition must respect those revisions.
It is not easy, and perhaps not entirely safe, to extrapolate from Jonson’s apparent practice in revising one of the Epigrams for print to his practice in The Underwood, given the uncertainties about the copy from which that volume was set. But later in Jonson’s career as a poet we have strong evidence that he continued to present poems on single sheets to addressees whose interests he knew well, and there is conclusive evidence that he revised his poems after having presented them. There is also evidence that he probably undertook such revision with a view to printing them. In January 1619 he sent to Drummond of Hawthornden an autograph letter which included the text of two poems, Und. 8 (‘The Hourglass’, JnB 270) and Und. 9 (‘My Picture Left in Scotland’, JnB 352). The printed version of the latter in F2 reads ‘seven and fortie yeares’ (Und. 9.15), rather than the autograph version’s ‘sixe, and forty’. In all probability this indicates that Jonson revised the poem as he grew older (as he may also have done with Und. 20, turning ‘fourty yeeres and more’ of the text recorded in Meisei University Tokyo ‘Crewe MS’ (JnB 428.5), pp. 27-8 into ‘fifty years, almost’ as he aged). The manuscript and print traces provide us with certain evidence of mobility in Jonson’s texts; and indeed they suggest that he was aware of the ephemerality of the written word in a manner which is quite at odds with the traditional picture of Jonson as a writer who sought fixity and authority through the medium of print.
These revisions also suggest that the existence of an autograph version of a poem does not mean that it should be followed as the best indicator of Jonson’s latest view of how the poem should appear in print. The Lowell autograph of Jonson’s epitaph on Cecilia Bulstrode in the Houghton Library (JnB 102) is a case in point: it is again on a single sheet, once more folded as a letter, and it is on the same sheet as a letter to George Garrard, which explains that the poem was composed while Garrard’s man was waiting for a reply. This is again not a ‘presentation’ manuscript in the sense of an elegantly presented fair copy; it is rather an epistolary manuscript directed to a particular addressee and deriving from a specific occasion. It also further illustrates the lack of fixity in Jonson’s autograph copies: he has underlined ‘here’ at line 13, and inserted ‘it’ in the margin. The emendation was evidently done in the heat, and is not reflected in any other known manuscript copies of the poem. Did Jonson think better of ‘it’? In this case there is no early printed version of the poem, and no other manuscript which could firmly be said to be of good provenance, so the version reproduced here follows the autograph, as emended by Jonson. The possibility that other manuscript versions record further afterthoughts cannot be excluded, however, and in this case readers should consider the collation closely for possible evidence of Jonson’s further revisions.
It is likely that we have lost a large number of autograph poems on single sheets which were treated by their recipients as ephemera. It is only chance that Henry Cavendish or someone associated with him pasted into a copy of F2 now in the British Library an autograph copy of Jonson’s poem on the marriage of the Earl of Somerset to Frances Howard (JnB 529). This autograph version is the only seventeenth-century copy of the poem to survive; it, like so many of Jonson’s autographs, is folded as if for inclusion in a letter, and it is reasonable to suppose that it was sent or presented to Somerset very shortly before, or on the day of, his marriage. How it came back into the hands of Jonson’s patrons in the Cavendish family is not known. It suggests that only a few noblemen regarded Jonson’s autographs as sufficiently valuable to be worth preserving.
There remain two autograph manuscripts which are less clear in their relations to versions which were subsequently printed. ‘An Ode to James, Earl of Desmond, writ in Queen Elizabeth’s Time; Since Lost and Recovered’ (Und. 25) is found in Christ Church MS 184 on a single sheet, bound, probably in the 1620s, with a group of other items in a manuscript which once belonged to Sir John Salusbury (JnB 386). Salusbury transcribed poems of his own on the conjugate leaf. The watermark is a single-handed pot approximately 70mm high with the initials ‘AV’, which Bland (2000) , 46 has suggested implies a date for the leaf of approximately 1600. It shows no signs of having been folded. Bland has argued that this autograph should be the basis for any edition of the poem on the grounds that the variants between it and the text in The Underwood are the result of self-censorship, as Jonson (Bland argues) sought to eliminate traces of an earlier and ill-timed dedication of the poem to the Earl of Essex. I do not accept Bland’s argument that the poem was originally about the fate of, and intended to be sent to, the Earl of Essex, for reasons which are set out in the headnote and notes to Und. 25. The majority of the variants between printed and manuscript version—shifts in pronouns from singular to plural, careful modification of epithets—are entirely consonant with Jonson’s practice as a reviser elsewhere, and are similar to the revisions which Jonson made to Forest 11, another poem which was presented to Sir John Salusbury in a manuscript version with first person singular pronouns (JnB 424) and then printed with first person plural pronouns, and which was composed at roughly the same very early date as the Desmond Ode. Although the autograph copy of the Desmond Ode can give valuable guidance over punctuation, which in the text of the poem in The Underwood is occasionally wayward, it almost certainly bears witness to a version of the poem which Jonson subsequently rethought. In this case I have printed a text based on F2, having emended its aberrant punctuation by reference to the autograph.
Jonson’s autograph version of Martial’s epigram 10.47, which is found among the Alleyn papers in Dulwich College (JnB 319), is also a highly unusual case. The edges of the sheet have been gilded, which may suggest again that it was a presentation copy. The watermark is once more of the G 3 and draped flag kind (I am grateful to Henry Woudhuysen for these observations). The sheet also contains the text of ‘Wotton’s Character of a Happy Life’, which is generally dated 1612-13 (see Main, 1955 and Pebworth, 1978 ; the date is also discussed in Smith, 1907, 2.415 and 1.129-30), which would make this poem rather later than the other works which Jonson transcribed onto this stock of paper. The combination of the two poems on a single sheet may indicate that it was compiled to mark a particular occasion: it is known that Alleyn retired from the theatre some time before 1612 (Heywood, Apology, sig. E2v), which might indicate that Jonson chose this combination of poems to mark the occasion of Alleyn’s retirement. This autograph manuscript, however, is of vital significance, since it provides evidence that Jonson could copy, unascribed, versions of poems by friends on similar themes to poems by his own hand. This may explain how poems by Donne, Wotton, and Godolphin found their way into The Underwood. In the case of the Martial translation there is no other manuscript or printed version, and so here any edition must be based on the autograph. H&S decided to print the poem as Und. 90. There is no basis for doing this, since the poem does not appear in F2; it is best regarded as a free-standing work which Jonson sent to a friend, and then forgot or lost. Here, as in the other cases already discussed, the social framework within which Jonson constructed and presented his autographs plays a crucial part in determining the versions which they contain. These social determinants make the autograph poems different kinds of performance from the printed versions, many of which show revision for print. For this reason it is rarely appropriate to edit Jonson’s poems from the surviving autographs.
Bodleian, Rawl. Poet. 31 and British Library, Harley MS 4064
Apart from the autographs, the other most significant manuscript witnesses to Jonson’s practices in circulating poems in manuscript early in his career are a closely related pair, Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 31 and BL Harley MS 4064. The former is a small folio poetical miscellany of 50 leaves. It was compiled by the professional scribe or scrivener known as ‘the feathery scribe’ (on whom see Beal, 1998 , 58-108 and Woudhuysen, 1996 , 185-9), the majority of whose output consists of political and other tracts, rather than poems. The manuscript, which probably dates from the 1630s, is on paper with a grapes watermark, and has been erroneously docketed ‘Sir John Haringtons Poems Written in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth’. Poems by a variety of hands, including Sir Henry Wotton, Thomas Campion, Donne, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Sir John Roe, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Benjamin Rudyard, and others, are transcribed with some care in the scribe’s characteristically elegant hand, and are displayed within ruled margins. None of the poems in the volume is ascribed. It contains the following indisputably Jonsonian poems: Forest 3 (c. 1606), Forest 5 (c. 1605), Forest 6 (c. 1605), Forest 8, Forest 12 (Jan. 1600), Und. 23, Und. 85 ‘Bulstrode’ (1609), ‘Ode (LM)’ (c. 1601). Several of these texts, particularly poems from The Forest, represent early versions, some of which must date from the very early seventeenth century. It also contains a number of poems which because of their extensive and precise echoes of Jonson’s known works can be accepted as his (‘Lucan’, ‘Censure not’, ‘Ode (‘If men’)’), and one (‘Scorn’) which is highly likely to be his work because of its provenance, language, and preoccupations, but which in the absence of an ascription or precise verbal echoes of reliably ascribed works must remain among Jonson’s Dubia, albeit on the least dubious inner fringe of the Dubia (see Briggs, 1915b ). This manuscript also contains one other poem which on grounds of style, idiom, and preoccupations has a claim to be regarded as Jonson’s (although given the lack of a manuscript ascription it must remain among the Dubia of genuinely uncertain authorship). This is a close translation, in the manner of Und. 85, of a section of Horace, Epistles, 1.18, a poem which underlies much of Jonson’s thinking and writing about patronage, praise, and the value of retreating from a wider world. This work has never been printed, but is reproduced here among the Dubia. It may be by Jonson, or, for reasons outlined in the headnote, may possibly be by his friend Sir John Roe.
Harley MS 4064 contains a similar collection of Jonson poems: Forest 3, Forest 8, Forest 12, Und. 23, Und. 41, Und. 85, ‘Ode (‘If men’)’, ‘Lucan’, ‘Bulstrode’, ‘Scorn’ (it does not include ‘Censure not’, Forest 5 or Forest 6). The Jonson poems which it contains are in the same order as their equivalents in Rawl. Poet. 31, and are found in largely the same company. The texts of the poems in the two manuscripts are sufficiently close to each other for it to be unlikely that the variants between them are the result of an extended chain of transmission. Harley 4064 follows the group of poems reproduced in Bodleian Rawl. Poet. 31 with a substantial number of poems by John Donne which are not in the Rawlinson manuscript. Little is known of the provenance of Harley 4064: it was purchased for Edward Harley by Nathaniel Noel on 12 Sept. 1722 (Wright, 1972 , 254). The poetical miscellany section of this composite quarto volume occupies fols. 230-99, but appears originally to have been a separate volume. The majority of poems are entered in two hands, both of which are regular and probably scribal. Both hands are typical of the early seventeenth century, and are compatible with a date roughly contemporary with the Rawlinson MS. A third hand, possibly that of a junior (and certainly less accurate) scribe transcribed the first section of the translation of Horace’s Epistle, 1.18 on fol. 242. The poems are numbered sequentially, and the hands show little signs of development or variation in inks or nibs. These features suggest seriatim transcription probably from a single source. Although the manuscript is not lavishly presented (there are no ruled margins or other signs of extravagance, and the unwatermarked paper is not of high quality) it appears from the regularity of the hand and the consistency of the workmanship to be a professional transcription rather than an amateur collector’s commonplace book.
Perhaps the oddest feature of the relationship between these two manuscripts is that although they contain many of the same poems in the same order, they do not overlap entirely in their contents. At various points each one substitutes one poem for an equivalent in the other collection, and at other points each one includes a group of poems which is not in the other manuscript, before resuming with the same sequence (Rawl. Poet. 31, for instance, contains a number of poems of a more erotic character than those in Harley 4064, and at the point in the sequence where Rawl. Poet. 31 includes texts of For. 5 and 6, Harley 4064 has a text of Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’). The fact that these two manuscripts contain poems in the same order and reproduce very similar texts strongly suggests that they derive from a common exemplar, either directly or indirectly. It is likely that at some point—and this may have occurred during the production of these manuscripts or possibly at an earlier stage—a scribe customized the copy from that exemplar in order to appeal to (or perhaps to reflect) a slightly different taste, and did so by including or omitting particular poems. If the contents of the two manuscripts were combined, they would contain a significant number of poems by Sir Edward Herbert, Jonson, Donne, Roe, and Lucy Countess of Bedford. Any hypothesis about the way in which Jonson’s poems came to be included in these manuscripts must be speculative; but their contents may suggest that the roots of the common archetype lay in manuscripts associated with the Herbert family and/or with Lucy Countess of Bedford. The Jonson poems in these manuscripts represent versions composed before F1. This may suggest that at some point in the first decade of the seventeenth century Jonson sent to one or more of his earlier aristocratic patrons an early version of a collection of classically inspired poems similar to The Forest. At this stage Jonson’s output included several Odes, and perhaps an Horatian epistle, if he is indeed the author of the translation of Epistles, 1.18. Whatever the precise origins of these manuscripts, the fact that the Jonson poems which they contain are separated from each other by the works of different authors implies that Jonson throughout his career tended to present small groups of poems to his patrons rather than to fashion them into collections as he did in the medium of print. Equally, however, the fact that so many of the poems in these manuscripts are classically derived, and that a significant number of them were revised for The Forest, may give hints as to the early genesis of what was to become Jonson’s second major collection of verse. Whatever their precise origins, these two manuscripts are vital witnesses to unique early versions of Jonson’s poems, and to poems by Jonson which would not otherwise be known.
The Newcastle Manuscript
The most significant single manuscript witness to Jonson’s later verse is the ‘Newcastle Manuscript’ (BL Harley MS 4955; I am indebted to the account in Kelliher, 1993). This is a carefully presented scribal folio manuscript, consisting of 208 numbered leaves, plus three unnumbered, which measure approximately 22.5cm x 35.3 cm. The same stock of paper is used throughout, of which the watermark is the arms of Orange-Nassau with the letters GRD and ‘1610’ (although fol. 39 is a separate sheet of pot, pasted in). The volume has been rebound, each gathering now being mounted on stubs. Each leaf has ruled margins, the style of which develops during the course of the compilation from a quite simple rule at top and one side of the page, to a more sophisticated double rule with frame for the running-titles. Kelliher argues that it is throughout in the hand of the Earl of Newcastle’s secretary, John Rolleston, whose hand and style of presentation developed during the compilation of the manuscript (H&S were of the view that it was in two hands; this does not appear to be the case). It was prepared for the Earl of Newcastle, probably over the period c. 1630-4, and contains texts of twenty-eight poems by Jonson, as well as texts of several of his letters and entertainments. Several of the poems it includes preserve early versions. The manuscript also includes poems by Richard Andrewes (a close friend of Jonson’s friend Thomas Farnaby), and Donne, Lucius Cary, and others. It is the sole source of six Jonson poems, three of which were composed for the Cavendish family (‘Cavendish inscrip.’, ‘Jane Ogle’ and ‘Katherine Ogle’), two of which were probably composed for an entertainment at one of their houses (‘Fresh as the day’, ‘Moon’), and one of which (‘Walk’) is of uncertain origin (and which, from its position in the manuscript, squeezed rather awkwardly into the foot of fol. 47, might derive from a different source from the text of Und. 9 which is immediately above it). The manuscript also preserves significant and on the whole carefully transcribed texts of eighteen poems from The Underwood, as well as preserving what are in the main the most reliable versions of Jonson’s satires on Inigo Jones. Its contents are as follows:
| Fols. | Title (in MS) | Abbreviation | Approx. Date |
| [fol. 1 | Verses made by king James | Aug. 1621] | |
| [fol. 2-30 | The Prologue at Windsor | Aug. 1621] | |
| fols. 31-4 | To a Freind | Und. 15 | Mar.-July 1620 |
| fols. 34v-5 | ‘Of your trouble, Ben, to Ease me’ | Und. 2.9 | 1622? |
| fol. 35v | ‘Sitting? and readie to be drawne?’ | Und. 84.3 | 1632-3? |
| fols. 36-7 | The Mind | Und. 84.4 | 1632-3? |
| fols.37v-8v | The praises of a Cuntry Life | Und. 85 | |
| fol. 39 [pasted in] | To the Right Honourable Earl of Newcastle &c | Und. 59 | After 1628 |
| fol. 40 | To the Right Honourable William Viscount Mansfield: on his Horsemanship and Stable | Und. 53 | 1625-8 |
| [fols. 40v-1v | Phantasy's speeches in The Vision of Delight (beginning 'Bright Night, I obey ye')] | Jan. 1617 | |
| fol. 41v | The Paynter to ye Poet | Und. 52a | |
| fol. 42 | The Poet to ye Paynter | Und. 52b | |
| fol. 42v | ‘you wan not verses, Madame, you wann me’ | Und. 56 | |
| fols. 43-6 | An Execration on vulcan | Und. 43 | 1623 |
| [fols. 46r-7 | 'Now God preserve' | (Song from Christmas)] | 1616 |
| fol. 47v | ‘I nowe thinke love is rather deafe then blynde’ | Und. 9 | Jan. 1619 |
| fol. 47v | To Mr Ben: Johnson in his Jorney by Mr Crauen | 1619 | |
| fol. 47v | This was Mr Ben: Johnsons Answer of ye suddayne | ‘Walk’ | 1619 |
| [fol. 48-52v | Entertainment at Blackfriars] | Cavendish Ent. | 1620 |
| fol. 52v | 'Fresh as the Day, and new as are ye Howres’ | ‘Fresh as the’ | ?May 1633 |
| fols. 53r-v | 'To ye wonders of ye peake' | ‘Moon’ | ? May 1633 |
| fol. 54 | 'To ye memorye of that most honoured Ladie Jane, eldest daughter to Cuthbert Lord Ogle; and Countess of Shrewsbury | ‘Jane Ogle’ | 1625 |
| fol.54v | Charles Cavendish to his posteritie | ‘Cavendish insc.’ | 1618 |
| fols. 55-55v | 'Tis a Record in heauen. you that were' | ‘Katherine Ogle’ | 1629 |
| [fols. 56-56v | George Holmes’ epitaph on Katherine Ogle] | 1629 | |
| [fols. 57-172 | Poems by Andrewes and Donne] | ||
| fol. 173 | To the Right Honoble my Lo: Weston L: Thresrer: An Epigramme | Und. 77 | 1631/2 |
| fol. 173v | Epigramme To my kind freind Mr Ben: Johnson upon his Epigram to the Lo: Tresurer | ||
| fol. 173v | To my Detractor | ‘Detractor’ | 1631/2 |
| fol. 174 | To my Lord Weston, Lo: Tresurer. A Letter. | Und. 71 | 1631 |
| fols. 174v-5v | An Expostulation, wth Inigo Jones | Expost. | 1631 |
| fol. 176 | To Inigo Marquesse would-bee. A corollarie | Inigo Marq. | 1631 |
| fol. 176 | To a freind, an Epigram of him | 1631 | |
| fols. 176v-9v | Epithalamion, or A Song celebrating The Nuptialls of that Noble Gentleman Mr Hierome Weston, Sonne & heire of the Lord Weston, Lo: high Thresurer of England, with the Ladie Francis Stuart daughter of Esme, D. of Lennox, deceased, and Sister of the suruiueing D: of that Name | Und. 75 | June 1632 |
| fols. 180-1v | To Sr Lucius Carey, on the death of his Brother Morison: Ode | Und. 70 | 1629-30 |
| [fols. 182-190 | Miscellaneous poems and letters by various hands | ] | |
| [fol. 192 | 'Come noble nymphs' | (Song from Fortunate Isles) | 1625] |
| fol. 192v | To the great and Gracious King Charles On the Vniversary [sic] day of his Raigne 1629 | Und. 64 | 1629 |
| fol. 193 | Epigramme On the Princes Birth | Und. 65 | 1630 |
| fol. 193 | An Epigramme To the Queene’s Health | Und. 66 | 1630 |
| [fols. 194-8v | King's Entertainment at Welbeck | May 1633] | |
| [fols. 199-202 | The King and Queene’s Entertainment at Boulsover | July 1634] | |
| fols. 202v-204 | Letters by Jonson | ||
| fols. 205-207v | Poems by Carew, Feltham, and others, mostly connected with Jonson (Beal erroneously records a copy of ‘Come leave’ on fol. 207; in fact this is Feltham’s ‘Come leaue this sawcy way’) |
It is a reasonable inference from the disposition of material in the manuscript that Rolleston worked chiefly from what were probably autograph manuscripts sent in sundry groups by Jonson to the Earl. As the table above illustrates, the poems are found in two main sections: those on fols. 31-47v date from between 1616 and 1633 (cf. Kelliher, 1993 , 142), while the group on fols. 173-182r is drawn from a narrower and on the whole later period of Jonson’s output: c. 1631-July 1634. This indicates that Rolleston did not receive work from a copy of Jonson’s poems in one continuous manuscript. Indeed the Newcastle manuscript shows some signs that Jonson continued into the 1630s his earlier practice of presenting to his patrons single poems or small groups of poems, perhaps on single sheets or bifolia. Und. 59, for instance, was pasted into the manuscript as a single sheet, to pair it with the presumably earlier Und. 53. The table above also shows that in many cases the poems occupy a run of leaves before their sequence is interrupted by texts from entertainments or other sources (notably at fols. 40v, 47-8, 182-92). This could of course indicate that Jonson did not attach weight to the generic divide between poems and other works, and that he combined these materials in the manuscripts from which Rolleston worked, but is more likely to indicate that Rolleston received clusters of poems, which he interspersed with other materials as they came to hand. This would explain why the manuscript does not reproduce poems in chronological order, but contains groups of a few roughly contemporaneous or otherwise connected poems. The later section of the manuscript contains several such clusters: the Weston poems (Und. 77, ‘Detractor’, Und. 71), the Inigo Jones satires, and the Cary/Morison Ode (Und. 70), which are separated from the royal panegyrics which occupy fols. 192v-193. The members of this latter group were probably composed before the earlier section of the manuscript was compiled (1629-30). This detail may indicate two things: first, that Jonson grouped his poems as much by topic and other affinities between them as by date, and that therefore the position of a poem in the Newcastle manuscript cannot be used as a reliable guide to its date of composition. The second is that the initial impression created by the Newcastle manuscript – that late in his career Jonson began to produce large manuscript collections of poems – is an illusion. It is much more likely that this manuscript derives, like John Benson’s printed collections of 1640, from a variety of disparate small gatherings of poems. The difference between it and Benson’s volumes (which are discussed in detail below) is that in the case of the Newcastle manuscript we can be confident, given Newcastle’s patronage of Jonson, that it was transcribed from copies which were either in Jonson’s hand, or very close to Jonson’s autographs. Its provenance means that ‘the value of the manuscript as a witness to the text and canon of Jonson’s work would be hard to exaggerate’ (Kelliher, 1993 , 154).
Jonson in Print: The Epigrams and The Forest
The Epigrams and The Forest were first printed in F1 in 1616, and are likely to have been printed from an autograph or very good scribal copy of an autograph. The Epigrams had first been entered in the Stationers’ Register by John Stepneth on 15 May 1612: ‘John Stepneth. Entred for his Copy under th’andes of master Nydd and Thwardens, A Booke called, Ben Johnson his Epigrams’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 3.485). If Stepneth printed a volume in that year it does not survive. Since this is his last entry in the register it is likely that he died before the volume was printed. Drummond referred to ‘Ben Jhonsons epigrams’ among ‘bookes red be me anno 1612’ (H&S, 8.16 ). This might conceivably be a manuscript copy, since Drummond was in London in 1610 (see Donaldson, 2001b ); but if so it must have been a private transcript, since there is no sign in the surviving evidence that any extended collections of Jonson’s epigrams were in circulation by this date. R. C.’s Times’ Whistle may conceivably record criticism of Jonson’s epigrams which precede the publication of the folio in 1616, and may therefore indicate prior circulation of the poems as a volume, and perhaps their publication in print; the date of R. C.’s volume itself is, however, uncertain (see R. C., 1871 , 132). The Epigrams occupy pp. 765-818 (sigs. Sss5r-Zzz1v) of F1, and The Forest pp. 819-40 (sigs. Zzz2r-Aaaa6v) of F1. The poems are placed after the plays (Catiline precedes them) and before the entertainments and masques. The very few press variants are tabulated below. The list of copies collated is given in the appendix at the end of this essay:
F1
| 3T1:6 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 | |
| 3T1 (769) | 4 | booke | Booke | |
| 5 | vnderſtand | underſtand | ||
| 6 | II. | ~! | ||
| 8 | for, booke | ~ ^ Booke | ||
| 14 | Deceiue | Deceive | ||
| 16 | couetous ... ſelfe ^ fame | covetous ... ſelfe-fame | ||
| 17 | ſhame: | ~. | ||
| 18 | leſſe ^ | ~, | ||
| 26 | giue ... leaue ... craue | give ... leave ... crave | ||
| 27 | fauour haue | favour have | ||
| 3T6v (780) | 1 | GILES | GILES | |
| 3 | ſhee | ſhe | ||
| 5 | be : | bee: | ||
| 8 | of | OF | ||
| 9 | Muſe ? | Muſe | ||
| 10 | themſelues | themſelves | ||
| 11 | Loue | love | ||
| 14 | Couetous | covetous | ||
| 15 | not, ... thought, leſt | ~ ^ ... ~ ^ leaſt | ||
| 17 | booke ... CECILL’S | booke ... CECIL’S | ||
| 19 | ſeruile ... Poets | ſervile ... Poet’s | ||
| 20 | Cleere | Cleare | ||
| 22 | BANCKS | BANKS | ||
| 26 | Blacks | blackes | ||
| 32 | Ioy | joy | ||
| 33 | lou’d | lov’d | ||
| 34 | Seuen yeeres | Seven yeares | ||
| 35 | fate, ... iuſt | ~ ^ ... juſt | ||
| 36 | looſe | loſe | ||
| 37 | Enuie | envie | ||
| 38 | Haue | have | ||
| Copies | All except 19, 28 | 19, 28 | ||
| 3T1:6 (i) | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 | |
| 3T1v (770) | 1 | lye vpon | --- | lie upon |
| 3 | Haue | --- | have | |
| 4 | ſticks, aduanced | --- | ſtickes, advanced | |
| 5 | clarke-like ſeruing-man | --- | clerk-like ſerving-man | |
| 6 | ſcarſe | --- | ſcarce | |
| 11 | do’ſt ... ſcepter | --- | doſt ... Scepter | |
| 12 | do’ſt | --- | doſt | |
| 13 | things, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 14 | Gaue | --- | gave | |
| 16 | t’haue | --- | t’have | |
| 17 | Wee | --- | we | |
| 23 | Driuen | --- | driven | |
| 25 | King | --- | King | |
| 28 | ON | TO | --- | |
| 30 | pouertie liues | --- | poverty lives | |
| 32 | new | --- | NEVV | |
| 33 | harbour’d | --- | harbourd | |
| 34 | Vpon | --- | upon | |
| 35 | So | --- | ſo | |
| 36 | Synonima | --- | Synonyma | |
| 3T6r (779) | 3 | Marble | Marble | --- |
| 3 | doſt couer | --- | do’ſt cover | |
| 4 | vnder- | --- | under- | |
| 5 | Rich, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 6 | Remoue | --- | remove | |
| 8 | Heauens | --- | heavens | |
| 11 | Rare, ... wonder, | --- | ~ ^ ... ~ ^ | |
| 12 | Euer | --- | ever | |
| 15 | Life, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 16 | times. Few ſo haue ru’de | --- | ~ ^ few ſo have ru’d | |
| 17 | Fate, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 23 | gold, ... colledge | --- | ~ ^ ... Colledge | |
| 24 | quaint practiſe | --- | qnaint practice | |
| 25 | ſhee gaue ... ſhee | --- | ſhe gave ... ſhe | |
| 29 | obſeruing | --- | obſerving | |
| 30 | Euer | --- | ever | |
| 31 | Neuer | --- | never | |
| 32 | free ^ will | --- | free-will | |
| 34 | Hauing | --- | having | |
| 35 | home, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 36 | times, | --- | ~ ^ | |
| 38 | long ^ yearn’d | --- | long-yearn’d | |
| 39 | ſpun. | --- | ~ ^ | |
| Copies | 15, 41, 58 | the rest | 19, 28 | |
| 3T3:4 (i) | Line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 3T4r (775) | 7 | With | Wits |
| 16 | Nere | ne’re | |
| 33 | ROE: | ~. | |
| Copies | 13, 14 | All other copies |
Note: Copy 10 shows broken type on 3T4 33 which could be a colon. Otherwise it is as state 2.
|
3X2:5 (i) |
|||
| 3X2v (796) | 17 | Then, they | They, then |
| Copies | All other copies |
As the table indicates, a number of pages were reset, possibly from F2, in order to make up imperfect copies at some date considerably after 1616. These are no more than bibliographical curiosities. Otherwise the table shows that there were very few corrections during the setting of F1. This may indicate that the copy for the poems was extremely good and that it was well set, but it is more likely to be a sign that by this stage in the setting of F1 Jonson was becoming tired of being painstaking. Very minor errors escaped the proofing process (the mysterious ‘neadd squires’ in 97.14, ‘be’ for ‘the’ in 102.3, ‘own’ for ‘one’ in 104.10; ‘lend’ for ‘lent’ in Forest 3.46, ‘thy’ for ‘they’ Forest 6.20, ‘to’ for ‘the’ Forest 12.77).
F2 reprints the text of the poems which had appeared in F1 and consequently has no independent authority for the Epigrams or The Forest, although it contains several plausible emendations of punctuation. The one addition to the Epigrams in F2 is the inclusion, as epigram 129, of the poem ‘To Edward Filmer, on his Musicall Work, dedicated to the Queen. Anno 1619’. It is likely that the fame of the addressee is what prompted the addition of this epigram, and that Jonson had nothing to do with its insertion. It is printed in this edition in its chronological sequence rather than as part of the Epigrams. It would be perverse to depart from the readings of F1 except on occasions where there are grounds for suspecting a compositorial lapse.
Several of the Epigrams became favourites among manuscript miscellanists: Epigr. 5 (‘On the Union’) is known to survive in fifteen copies, and ‘On Giles and Joan’ in five. The twenty versions of the epitaph on ‘Elizabeth, L.H.’ (Epigr. 124) indicate how that poem suited the taste for short, gently barbed, epitaphs in the early part of the seventeenth century, and the variations in the titles of the manuscript copies also indicate that the anonymity of its subject prompted scribes to speculate about the identity of ‘L. H.’. Short epigrams of this kind might be recalled (and rewritten) from memory, and the variants in the cases considered so far are likely to be scribal rather than authorial. Of more note are the light but careful revisions to Epigr. 43 between the autograph and the printed versions (discussed above). There are also signs of fairly extensive reworking of Epigr. 101 and of the epitaph on Solomon Pavy (Epigr. 120) for the printed edition. The survival of early versions (in one case from very late in the seventeenth century) shows that Jonson substituted the exotic ‘Knat, raile, and ruffe’ (Epigr. 101. 20) for the native ‘duck and mallard’ in his original bill of fare, and brought a final allusion to heaven in to the classical after-world he had previously imagined for Solomon Pavy in Epigr. 120. Preparing his poems for publication brought with it some painstaking revision.
The relative lack of manuscript versions of most of the Epigrams is noteworthy: it may indicate that earlier in Jonson’s career he was sparing of manuscript circulation, or it could reflect his relative lack of high social connections at this period of his career. Alternatively it could indicate that some of the undatable satirical epigrams were composed with print in mind, and perhaps close to the date at which Jonson passed copy for F1 to the printer. One of the aspects of Martial’s epigram books that most appealed to Jonson was the Roman poet’s concern with surreptitious copying and plagiarism; it may be that Jonson himself, while adopting the themes of his Roman model, sought to avoid making himself the victim of these practices by retaining a close control over manuscript versions early in his career.
The Forest shows much more evidence of authorial revision because of the survival of a greater number of manuscripts of significant textual worth. Early versions of the poems to Sir Robert Wroth and to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, (Forest 3 and 12) are found in the pair of manuscripts already discussed in detail above (British Library Harley MS 4064 and Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 31). These indicate that Jonson could feign to have lost a portion of a poem which was no longer appropriate (as he does with the cancelled ending to Forest 12), and that he could shift epithets and the order of lines in the process of revising a poem for print (as he did with Forest 3). Similar signs of acute care in refashioning his material, which could extend to systematic though apparently slight changes to personal pronouns, are found in versions of Forest 10 and 11 in the papers of Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni (National Library of Wales, NLW. MS 5390D). Salusbury was among a very select group of recipients of manuscript copies of Jonson poems at this early point in the poet’s career: he was also the recipient of the autograph of the Desmond Ode (Und. 25) discussed under ‘Autographs’ above. The variant version of Forest 10 is reproduced in the printed edition after the main sequence of The Forest to enable readers to examine Jonson’s transformation of this poem more closely.
The Underwood
Jonson’s The Underwood is one of the world’s great uneditable texts. What does a responsible editor do with a posthumously printed volume, prepared probably from Jonson’s papers? How probably is probably? And what does ‘prepared’ mean? Recopied? Bundled together? Carefully edited? These questions would be relatively easy to answer if there were not approximately three hundred and forty known seventeenth-century manuscript versions of poems from this collection. A mere three of these are autographs. The rest include a wide variety of types of manuscript. There are individual copies of poems by careful and by careless and by thoughtful and by thoughtless scribes. There are also careful copies by professionals. Some of the more thoughtful even hazard emendations, and sometimes convincing ones, of the texts they are transcribing, as the Bury St Edmunds antiquarian James Cobbes does in Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 166 (JnB 372) (I am grateful to Richard Beadle for information about Cobbes, on whom see Beadle, 2004 ). Cobbes was unusually concerned by the quality of the copies which he had obtained, and the comment which follows his transcription is of interest because it runs counter to the frequently-voiced opinion that early-modern scribes felt free to adapt and modify the poems they transcribed:
The reader must note yt we haue followed a very corrupt copy in this transcription, wherefore if some places thereof giue not satisfaction, hee muste not bee offended, but know yt or selues allso haue beene but meanely satisfyed. Nor durst wee in ye worke of so greate a manne, presume to mende or correct what was thought required; especially beeing utterly unfurnished of finere Copies. farewelle. (Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 166, p. 89)
Cobbes was, however, in a minority. Many seventeenth-century manuscript copies of poems from The Underwood are heedless and messy transcripts by poor scribes from bad copies: the most comically bad of these is the scribe of Folger MS V. a. 97 (JnB 241) who manages by dint of a series of misreadings of his text of Und. 43 to include among the works of Ben Jonson destroyed in the fire of 1623 a panegyric to the hero of Protestantism Edward VI, and to transform Jonson’s beloved Horace into Lucretius. Some scribes do Jonson favours, such as the compiler of Bodleian MS Eng. poet. e. 97 (JnB 233) who subscribes his copy of ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’ ‘Ben: Johnson. Regis Professor’, which takes the poet’s claim to ‘search and mastery in the arts’ higher up the academic ladder than Ben would have ever aspired. There are no fewer than thirty-eight manuscript copies of ‘The Hourglass’ (Und. 8), many of which are copies of copies of copies, and sometimes, one suspects, copies of memories of copies. There are enough versions of ‘The Body’ and ‘The Mind’ (Und. 84.3 and 84.4) to make even the most dedicated collator of variants restive (seventy-seven versions are presently locatable and have been collated). Around thirty more or less casual copies of ‘Have you seen but a bright lily grow’ (Und. 2.4.21-30) are known, many of which are in or derived from musical settings, several of which are copied along with parodies, and several versions of which augment the original by the extra stanzas which the marvellous malleability of the ‘Have you seen … Have you smelt … Have you felt’ form invites. There are rewritings of ‘Knew I this woman’ (Und. 20.15-24), probably by Lord Buckhurst (see Beal, 1978 ), and there is one version of the same poem (Meisei University, Tokyo, ‘Crewe MS’, pp. 27-8; JnB 428.5) which fuses it with sections of the ‘Speech According to Horace’ (Und. 20). In this case the manuscript may either reflect a very clever scribe playing collage with Ben Jonson or else (and more probably) Jonson’s own early experiments towards the poem (see Und. 20 headnote for detailed discussion).
The vast majority of these copies have been brought to my attention by the invaluable work of Peter Beal (see Beal, 1980 ; for discussion of the culture from which they arose, see the valuable discussions in Woudhuysen, 1996 and Hobbs, 1992 ). Many of them have never been collated before, and it should be said that a significant number of them show little more than scribes, musicians, imitators, and casual admirers of verse tweaking accidental features of Jonson’s poems in ways that suited their own lexical mannerisms. Many copies simply bear witness to variants already recorded by Herford and Simpson. Variants of ‘That’ for ‘Which’ and vice versa are frequent, as are similar casual modifications of accidentals. Omitted lines, scrambled phrases, and even moments where Jonson’s poems seem to blend into an anonymous lyrical amalgam are quite frequent. In Rosenbach MS 240/2 (Robert Berkeley’s commonplace book), p. 82 (JnB 44), for instance, a copy of Und. 2.7 is fused with part of a poem by Campion and another unidentified Petrarchan lyric in a manner that shows scant regard for the textual integrity which Jonson is so frequently said to have sought in print. Such copies have historical and cultural interest, but they are not of great assistance to an editor who is interested primarily in what Jonson probably wrote and what he probably would have wished to see printed. The merry echo-chamber which is scribal culture in the early years of the seventeenth century, in which groups of (mostly) men swapped poems in and around the Inns of Court and (particularly) Christ Church, Oxford, as well as in the wilds of Norfolk and in the luxurious surroundings of the Earl of Newcastle’s houses at Welbeck and Bolsover in Derbyshire, could produce both exciting transformations of Jonson’s texts and disastrous entropy.
From an editor’s point of view this highly complex manuscript tradition raises clear questions about priorities, and could be treated in at least three different ways, each of which would produce a fractionally different kind of Jonson. The first would be a Jonson as far removed as possible from the traditional vision of him as a textual martinet who scrutinized every colon in his printed texts. This would start from the premise that Jonson’s poems manifestly had a massive and textually complex history in manuscript culture, and would treat them as cultural artefacts with no final shape. In theory such an edition would be alluringly post-modern, but in practice would test the versatility of even digital media up to or even beyond their feasible limits. Editors in print, and even editors in digital forms, have to edit even if they produce diversity, and editing which is not to tax the patience of readers to extremes involves giving out one or at most two texts of a poem. A textually plural Jonson is registered in the collation to this edition. Readers who delve into the collation should be aware that they are entering in many cases a zone where Jonson is not quite Jonson any more, but has become public property, dispersed among the needs and interests of many scribes. They might also perhaps reflect that the plurality which they witness in the collation does not actually reflect how Jonson’s poems were experienced in the seventeenth century, but is a distinctly twenty-first century phenomenon. A few copyists recorded two versions of a single poem in one manuscript (the owner of Trinity College, Dublin, MS 877 transcribed two copies of ‘The Body’, and Walton Poole’s ‘On Black Hair’ circulated so widely that several miscellanists recorded two copies of it, in some cases clearly from different sources). Double or triple copying of variant versions would probably only occur when a copyist had forgotten, in the excitement of having obtained a new source to transcribe, that he or she had already written out the poem. Most miscellanists had one copy of any given poem, and most had only one copy of one or two of a small list of usual suspects (‘The Mind’, ‘Have you seen’). The textually dispersed Jonson presented in the collation to this edition is the product of research leave, indices, doggedness, and libraries, rather than of seventeenth-century scribal culture.
The second kind of Jonson would be quite different. This would be founded on careful recension of the manuscript and a thorough study of provenance, and would seek to present texts edited from manuscript sources which most closely reflected what Jonson wrote and what Jonson would have wished to have printed. The outer extreme of this kind of edition of Jonson’s poems would argue that an autograph manuscript is clearly the most authoritative form of textual witness that one could hope for, and that any edition of any of the poems which did not base itself on the autograph copies would be a scandal. This position is in practice untenable: as we have seen, Jonson’s autographs frequently serve specific needs, and a significant proportion of the few poems which survive in autograph were subsequently revised for print. The interrelationships between manuscript miscellanies are so complicated as to be for the most part unreconstructable, and they are blurred at every stage by the very high incidence of accidental variations in the texts they contain. On rare occasions one can identify cases in which a scribe has copied from another miscellany; more often one can discern a common archetype behind variant versions. This enables one to produce loosely aligned groups of readings rather than firm stemmatic trees; and the final stage of selecting readings from a particular group would depend at best on inference from Jonson’s practice elsewhere and at worst on unreliable judgements of relative quality. The paucity of autograph versions of Jonson’s poems is perhaps a death-blow to this editorial approach to Jonson’s poems; but perhaps the more deadly fact is that Jonson revised. Later printed versions can testify to author’s second thoughts, and to the forms in which an author felt his poems would adapt most closely to the needs of print. An edition founded on an ideal of printing texts which displayed maximal proximity to Jonson’s manuscripts would founder on the incompatibility of two rival conceptions of proximity: should one seek a proximity to the chronological origins of a text, or proximity to the poet’s later thoughts, which may take account of the medium of print as he worked to revise his earlier efforts?
The modernized texts in this edition of The Underwood are in general based on the second folio of 1640. There are very strong grounds for believing that the version of ‘An Execration upon Vulcan’ (Und. 43) in F2 is one of several in F2 which is later than that printed by John Benson in 1640, and that the revised version did not enjoy a wide circulation. The conclusion that F2 therefore represents Jonson’s latest work on the poem is therefore irresistible. Among the many refinements (the manuscript version of 53, ‘Clothe spices or guard sweete meates from the flyes’, becomes in F2 ‘Sindge Capons, or poore Pigges, dropping their eyes’, and a slightly clumsy passage on the aid given to Jonson by his friends was refined for the F2 text), one detail may illustrate the point: the identification of Jonson with his works is a much stronger element in the F2 version than in manuscript texts, and this shows the development of a preoccupation with the burning of poems that begins in Jonson’s very early work. The pronoun ‘me’ is emphasised and amplified as Jonson revised the poem as though he is beginning to feel the pain of the fire on his flesh as he writes: in F2 he is materially identified with his works in lines 51, 54 and 55 (‘Thou mightst have had me perish, piece, by piece’ and ‘Condemned me to the ovens with the pies; / And so have kept me dying a whole age’), whereas manuscript versions refer to his burnt works as ‘them’. Benson’s texts appear to represent an intermediate stage between the majority of the manuscript versions and the text of F2 here and at several other points: they refer to the works as ‘me’ in lines 51 and 55, but as ‘them’ at line 54. Benson’s text probably derives from a manuscript copy which reflects the latter end of the period of composition; it evidently post-dates the text from which the Newcastle manuscript derives, while predating the text from which F2 was set.
F2, however, cannot simply be relied upon as a witness to Jonson’s latest revisions to all poems in The Underwood. It includes two poems which are found elsewhere as dedicatory verses to volumes by other authors (‘An Epistle to Master John Selden’, Und. 14 and the poem on Ralegh’s History of the World, Und. 24), which illustrate the limitations of the type-setting of F2. These poems show some variation from the previously printed versions: in the case of the poem originally (and anonymously) prefixed to Ralegh’s History of the World there are a number of straightforward errors in F2 (‘mete’ is misunderstood as ‘meet’, and ‘razing’ as ‘raising’, for example), which show clear signs of carelessness which is probably compositorial. Alongside these errors are also some signs of revision, as there are also in the Selden poem (e.g. at lines 4 and 17). The Underwood was not carefully seen through the press in the same manner as the Epigrams and The Forest were, although the text in many cases shows signs of revision. Hence for an edition which follows F2, manuscript and earlier printed witnesses provide an invaluable, but by no means always simply dependable, aid in attempting to separate Jonson’s revisions from compositorial and scribal errors.
There are other less clear indications that F2 at times preserves later, and at times also less ‘public’, material than the manuscripts which are known at present. The poems on the death of Venetia Digby enjoy in this respect a special status, since, as we shall see, Digby was clearly involved at least in negotiations for the sale of the copy of The Underwood, and may possibly have executed some more ‘editorial’ function in the arrangement or disposition of material within the volume. Several of the Eupheme poems are not otherwise found in manuscript (84.1, 84.2, 84.8 [the one MS of this seems likely to derive from F2]), and this fact alone, given the phenomenal success of other poems in the group among manuscript miscellanists, gives grounds for presuming that these poems were quite closely restricted to Digby’s immediate circle (see headnote to Und. 84). It is noteworthy that the accidentals (notably italicization and the frequency, although not always the positioning, of exclamation marks) of 84.9 are similar to those found in the scribal fair copy of elegies for Venetia Digby in British Library, Add. MS 30259, ff. 8-10v. It is quite possible that the Eupheme poems in F2 derive from manuscript copies close to Digby. In this case the many, but mostly minute, verbal variants between the text printed in F2 and the versions of ‘The Mind’ and ‘The Body’ which did circulate widely in manuscript may indicate that F2 preserves a later version of those poems, as well as of the others in the group, perhaps with some scribal intrusions. Here again the general carelessness in the setting of F2 must qualify any certainty that what that volume contains is in any simple sense the most reliable witness to Jonson’s latest versions of the Eupheme poems. And in this case too there may be grounds for suspecting that the copy from which F2 was set may have been in several hands.
One thing about the copy from which F2 was set is certain: it was very uneven in quality. There are local variations in preferences over punctuation, some of which may be linked to generic pressures or different compositorial preferences, but others of which may suggest that the copy derived from a number of hands: it is notable, for instance, that exclamation marks and italicizations are frequent in the formal elegies late in the volume (Und. 84.9 and Und. 83). This is difficult evidence to interpret, since it is possible that one tendency within Jonson’s late style was a move towards an ejaculatory manner, especially in poems which touch on religious themes; but the elegies to Jane Paulet and the ‘Apotheosis’ of Venetia Digby are rich in exclamation marks and italic emphases in a way that may indicate that the copy from which they were set was the work of a professional scribe. This might be expected in the case of such pieces, which might be formally copied for presentation to the family of the deceased. Evidence from press-variants (tabulated below) suggests that the printers read the volume largely for evident errors of punctuation and sense, as well as with an eye for typographical irregularities; but there is little to no evidence of critical reading of the printed copy against the manuscript.
These are grounds for taking a reasonably robust approach to emending the text of F2 in the light of manuscript evidence. There are occasions where it is desirable to do more than this. The strongest examples of this is the Elegy on Vincent Corbett (Und. 12). The discovery of the original vellum funeral placard (Yale, Osborn MS fb.230) has resolved a number of perplexing and at times unmetrical moments in the poem—which are concentrated particularly in the four-line epilogue to the group of elegies of which it was originally a part. To follow the text of F2 after the discovery of such a document—which is in itself one of the most beautiful artefacts to preserve a text of Jonson, surpassing even the Burghley House plate or the restrained elegance of the brass plaque commemorating the death of Elizabeth Chute—would be folly. And yet to follow the manuscript in a printed edition is necessarily also a source of regret, since the physical form of this particular manuscript is part of the illocutionary force of the poem. The larger social meanings of the poem, as well as several of its specific allusions, depend on the fact that it speaks after and to the work of Corbett’s son Richard and his friend Selden. This interrelationship between the poems on the placard can only be fully appreciated by examining the original document. The Corbett memorial is similar in its effect to the illustration of what was presumably a design for a similar funeral placard which surrounds Jonson’s epitaph on Katherine Ogle in the Newcastle MS (see ‘Katherine Ogle’ headnote): both poems need to be thought of in their manuscript settings. ‘Katherine Ogle’ (which was not printed in F2) in particular does seem to allude to the physical medium of the vellum placard on which the poem was probably originally recorded (line 8 n.).
There are several other examples of occasions on which manuscripts preserve fuller and clearer texts than those in F2. The sole known manuscript of Jonson’s epistle to Sackville (Und. 13; University of Nottingham, Portland MS Pw V 37, pp. 232-6) is such a case. The provenance of this manuscript—it is found among the papers of Jonson’s patron in later life, the Earl of Newcastle—makes it likely to derive from sources very close to the poet. Its text, which resolves a number of cruces in the printed version with which editors since Whalley have wrestled, contains two additional lines which have not previously been printed. Its careful use of italic to mark speech also resolves an awkward crux in lines 57-8. The modernized text in this edition is edited (for the first time) from that manuscript, which was not known to previous editors. It is a reasonable assumption that either the manuscript from which F2 was set was here poorly set by a compositor, or (and/or) it was a poor, derivative copy.
The evidence assessed so far suggests that The Underwood was probably not set from an authorial fair copy, or that if it was it was set with a degree of inaccuracy which would be remarkable given the great clarity of Jonson’s hand. The variations in styles of punctuation, and the fluctuations in the quality of the texts, both imply that it is likely the collection was set from manuscript sources by several hands. A further apparent piece of evidence that Jonson did not himself prepare the copy for the volume is less unambiguous than it may seem: this is the presence in the collection of three poems which are almost certainly not by Jonson. The headnotes to each of Und. 39, 80 and 81 (collected here among the Dubia, although they are not in fact even dubiously by Jonson) discuss the attribution of those poems in detail: here it is sufficient to say that their presence in the collection cannot be used as evidence that, say, manuscript materials in Jonson’s study were shuffled indiscriminately together after his death and bundled into a volume of poems called The Underwood. Jonson did transcribe poems by other hands on the same sheet as poems by himself, as is indicated by his autograph of ‘Happier Life’ (Dulwich College, Alleyn Papers, Vol. I, No. 135. fol. 259; JnB 319), which follows his own poem by a piece composed by Wotton. That Wotton is the author of Und. 80 strongly suggests that it was copied, possibly by Jonson, on the same leaf as Und. 82, which deals with a similar theme. Gifford (8.292) was particularly censorious about The Underwood: ‘there appears to be some rude attempt to arrange them, with reference to dates; but the disposition of them, in general, is very incomplete, and marks of carelessness and ignorance are visible in every page.’ More recent critics (notably Patterson, 1984 ) have been more prone to see signs of artifice in the sequence of poems in the volume. The truth may well lie somewhere in between these two extremes: the way that the long, multi-poem gathering of ‘A Celebration of Charis’ is answered at the end of the volume by the Eupheme poems does suggest artifice. There are also some signs of a desire to arrange some of the poems in a roughly chronological order, and there are certain signs of a wish to end with a group of classical paraphrases. These features cannot have been produced simply by random shuffling. They could have been produced by arranging a collection of ‘separates’ of a kind from which, it is argued above, the Newcastle Manuscript may well have been compiled. But was the ordering of poems in The Underwood produced by Jonson—who had, after all, gathered his earlier poems in volumes which were arranged with singular artifice?
There can be no certain answer to this question, since arguments for the disorganization of the volume can usually be answered by counter-arguments. So the two poems to the Earl of Newcastle, on his stable and on his art of fencing (Und. 53 and 59), are separated by five poems in a manner that seems perverse. The poems which separate these two pieces to Jonson’s patron, however, are all concerned with the difficulty of obtaining money. Is this an artful nod at a wider audience, who might infer that glorious patrons, obsessed by horses, could be slow to stump up for poems? Or is it just a compositorial or editorial quirk? Certainly errors in the ordering of poems could occur in the print-shops of the 1640s, as the wonderfully candid note prefixed to Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple (1646) reveals: ‘Reader, there was a sudden mistake (’tis too late to recover it) thou wilt quickly find it out, and I hope as soone passe it over, some of the humane Poems are misplaced amongst the divine’ (sig. A6v). A more detailed analysis of the external evidence surrounding the printing history of F2 may at least sharpen our sense of what is at stake in some of these questions, even if it cannot finally answer them.
F2 and The Underwood
External evidence indicates that the text of The Underwood in F2 ultimately derives from manuscripts passed from Jonson to his friend Sir Kenelm Digby shortly before the poet’s death in 1637. Humphrey Moseley revealed that Digby played a role in the publication of Jonson’s papers in his preface ‘To the Reader’ in Sir John Suckling’s Last Remains (1659): defending the publication of posthumous and fragmentary works, he wrote ‘Nor are we without a sufficient President in Works of this nature, and relating to an Author who confessedly is reputed the Glory of the English Stage (whereby you’ll know I mean Ben: Johnson) and in a Play also of a somewhat resembling name, The Sad Shepherd, extant in his third volume; which though it wants two entire Acts, was nevertheless judg’d a piece of too much worth to be laid aside, by the Learned and Honorable Sir Kenelme Digby, who published that Volume’ (Reed, 1930 , 100). Since Moseley had recently bought the copyright to the volume from Walkley, the printer of F2, this information is at least from the stable lad, if not from the horse’s mouth. Digby had written shortly after Jonson’s death to Bryan Duppa, the editor of Jonsonus Virbius, that he would share with the world ‘those excellent pieces (alas that many of them are but pieces!) which he hath left behind him and that I keepe religiously by me to that end’ (BL Harley MS 4153, fol. 20). Digby’s role in the process of publishing The Underwood is unlikely to have involved anything which resembled editorial intervention: ‘The editing cannot have extended to any close supervision of the printing, and may not have amounted to more than handing over such papers as seemed suitable for publication. Indeed, according to Walkley, it was Jonson himself who selected them before his death and all that Digby did was to sell them for forty pounds’ (Greg, 1939-59 , 3.1080). It is, however, entirely possible that Digby sold a copy of the manuscript(s) rather than the originals which he had received from Jonson, as Bland (2000) , 57 surmises; it is also possible that he may have had copies made of some poems which he particularly valued and wished to retain (such as the poems to his wife), and passed copies of these along with a mixture of autograph and scribal copies of the rest. We do not know. But the degree of reverence expressed in his letter to Duppa implies that he might well have paid for a copy to be taken of the ‘excellent pieces’ to which he was ‘religiously’ devoted.
Whatever the precise kind of manuscript it was that Digby sold, however, it derived from sources very close to Jonson. Having obtained a manuscript of good provenance, Thomas Walkley set about printing The Underwood probably some time in 1640. We know this because Walkley became involved in a lengthy dispute with John Benson over the right to print Jonson’s poems (the relevant document is printed in Marcham, 1931, discussed in Greg, 1931b, and is reproduced in H&S, 9.96-101). The chronology of the dispute is hard to reconstruct exactly, but what happened is roughly as follows. From November 1639 Benson began gathering manuscript separates of Jonson’s poems, and had them entered in the Stationers’ Register. By February 1640 he had entered Und. 84.3 and Und. 84.4, Und. 43, Jonson’s translation of Horace, and Gypsies. In December 1639 he printed a quarto volume of Jonson’s poems (details of which are given below) and in February 1640 he produced a duodecimo, which reprinted all the material in the quarto with the addition of the Ars Poetica translation and Gypsies. Meanwhile (we do not know exactly when) Walkley had paid Digby for the manuscript of The Underwood, but had not made an entry in the Stationers’ Register. So far as the Stationers’ Company was concerned Benson was therefore the legal holder of the right to print those poems which he had paid to enter in the Register. At some point (and here the chronology becomes uncertain) Benson became indebted to a Stationer named John Parker. Parker learnt that Walkley had printed some of Jonson’s poems. He then entered an action to enable him to seize the pages which Walkley had printed in order to pay the debt owed to him by Benson. The justification for this was presumably that Benson owned the copy which Walkley had printed. Walkley felt aggrieved; but he was placed in an extremely awkward position. Although he had bought a manuscript from a friend of a dead author, he did not own the copy so far as the Stationers’ Company was concerned, and, to add to the awkwardness of his position, a creditor of his rival had seized the fruits of his investment in paper and labour. In a document dated 20 January 1640 he brought a bill in Chancery which sought the return of the sheets which Parker had seized. He records that he had received the manuscript from Digby, and complains that Benson and a publisher unfortunately named Crooke had ‘obtayned by some casuall or other indirect meanes false & imperfect Copies of the same works did make an Entry in the Hall of the Company of Stationers of London’ (H&S, 9.98 ). That he mentions Crooke’s name as well as Benson’s is highly significant. Crooke had entered a group of masques (Augurs, Time Vind., Neptune’s Triumph, and Pan’s Ann. ‘with sundry Elegies and other Poems by Beniamin: Johnson’) on 20 March 1639 (i.e. 1640 new style). Walkley’s petition must have post-dated that entry. Therefore his Chancery bill dated 20 January 1640 must be dated old style, and must have been presented in January 1641 (new style). This would tally with the fact that some of the individual components in the section of F2 for which he was responsible are dated 1641: evidently he won possession of the sheets he had already printed early in 1641 (new style).
The view of this dispute taken by Herford and Simpson is that Benson was unscrupulous, and that Crooke lived up to his name. This view of it has already been questioned in Bennett (1968) , who shows that Benson was by no means as black as he has been painted by early editors of Shakespeare. But if the dispute between the two printers flared up in late 1640 and early 1641, rather than the year before, as has been usually supposed, then Benson had already printed his quarto and his duodecimo edition of Jonson’s poems before Walkley presented his Chancery bill, and possibly before Walkley began to print the poems. If this is so then Walkley was using the extreme measure of an appeal to Chancery to try to over-ride Benson’s legitimate claim to ownership of the copy of the poems. It is likely that a publisher whose output was as modest as Benson’s could not afford to counter a bill in Chancery, and it appears that Walkley won the case. He won it in a manner which meant that in 1648 he had to petition the new licensers of books to grant the copy to him. Eventually on 17 September 1658 the ‘third volume’ of Jonson’s works was entered to his name, which included ‘ffifteene masques at court and elsewhere. Horace his art of Poetry Englished. English Grammar. Timber or Discoveries. Underwoods consisting of divers poems. The Magnetic Lady. A Tale of a Tub. The sad shephard or a tale of Robin Hood. The Devill is an asse. Salvo iure cuiuscunque.’ (Plomer, 2.196). The final phrase (roughly translated as ‘provided no-one’s right is infringed’) presumably indicates that there had been some dispute over the ownership of the copy.
The fact that Walkley was not simply in the right during his dispute with Benson means that his Chancery bill, which contains vital information about the origins of the copy for F2, should be interpreted with some care. Herford and Simpson, who present Walkley as the wronged victim of Benson’s piracy, state on the basis of Walkley’s petition that ‘It is supremely important to know on trustworthy evidence that this new text was set up from the poet’s autograph’ (H&S, 9.101). This is not a safe inference from the evidence. What Walkley actually claimed was that ‘seuerall of the writings and workes of Beniamin Johnson late deceased and not before printed were some shorte tyme before his decease presented vnto & given by the said Beniamin to Sr Kenelme Digby to dispose thereof at his will and pleasure. To whose care & trust the said Beniamin left the publishing and printing of them and delivered him true & perfect Copies for his better & more effectual dooing thereof, And the said Beniamin shortly after dyeing, the said Sr Kenelme Digbye in pursuance of the said truste reposed in him deliuered the same Copies to yor Orator [i.e. Walkley] to haue them published and printed according to the intencon of the said Beniamin Johnson’ (H&S, 9.98 ). When Walkley insists he was given ‘true & perfect Copies’ he is adopting the standard phrase for insisting that the copy he possessed was better than those which other printers had obtained. Those words need not mean that he had obtained an autograph or a copy of an autograph: all they certainly imply is that he had bought a manuscript or collection of manuscripts from Digby for £40, which he believed (or wished to claim in order to bolster his case) derived from or were identical with the manuscript or manuscripts which Digby had received from Jonson. This is reasonably strong evidence that Jonson wanted the poems in The Underwood printed, and that the versions represented in F2 are likely to correspond to something close to the versions of the poems he was disseminating close to his death. But it is by no means conclusive evidence that the text in F2 has the authority of an autograph copy behind it.
Furthermore, the text of The Underwood in F2 was printed with reasonable but by no means excessive care, as we have seen. Press variants show that proof sheets were read with a printer’s eye, rather than with careful reference back to the copy. So, on sig. 2H2v the printer noticed that he had omitted the marginal date ‘1629’; he corrected it (as a copy in Trinity College, Cambridge, reveals), and then noticed that the date was in larger type than the marginal dates which had been successfully set straight away, and so corrected it again in smaller type. This is a sign of reasonably careful craftsmanship; but the press variants tabulated below show little evidence of references back to the copy from which F2 was set, most of them being corrections of evident typographical errors.
COPIES COLLATED
| 1 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Don.d.66 [H&S 'B2'] |
| 2 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Gibson 520 |
| 3 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Gibson 518 |
| 4 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Douce I 303 |
| 5 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Vet. A2 d.73 |
| 6 | British Library, C.39.k.9 [H&S 'M1'] |
| 7 | British Library, C.28.m.12 [H&S 'M2'] |
| 8 | British Library, 79.1.4 [H&S 'M3'] |
| 9 | British Library, fol. 1482.d.15 [H&S 'M5'] |
| 10 | Cambridge University Library, Brett-Smith.a.7 |
| 11 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.61.20 [missing 2E3-2E3v and S3-S3v] |
| 12 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.14 [H&S 'S1'] |
| 13 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.15 [H&S 'S2'] |
| 14 | Cambridge University Library, Keynes.D.6.23 |
| 15 | Christ’s College, Cambridge, Rouse 8.11 |
| 16 | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, L.34.3 |
| 17 | King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes C.5.14 [large paper copy] |
| 18 | King’s College, Cambridge, C.10.6 |
| 19 | Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.140 |
| 20 | Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.180 |
| 21 | Trinity College, Cambridge, VI.12.11 |
| 22 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.12 [2E3-2E3v and S3-S3v only] |
| 23 | Clark Library, LA, *f PR2600 1640c |
| 24 | Copy in the possession of Dave Gants |
| 25 | Huntington Library, 62101, volume 2 [large paper copy] |
| 26 | Huntington Library, 62103 |
| 27 | Huntington Library, 606598 |
| 28 29 |
All Souls College, Oxford, pp.4. 17,18 Columbia University Library, PR2600 1616 (as reproduced in Epigrams, The Forest, Underwoods, ed. Hoyt Hudson, Columbia University Press, 1936) |
Press Variants
| Z1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| Z4 | 10 | [line inset 1mm] | [line brought into line with others] |
| Z4 | 17 | [line inset 1mm] | [line brought into line with others] |
| Z4 | 18 | [line inset 1mm] | [line brought into line with others] |
| Copies | 2, 5, 10, 11, 13, 19 | 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 | |
| 2A2:3 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2A2 | 30 | woman, Gop...me. | woman God...me, |
| 2A3v | 5 | Tares | Teares |
| Copies | 6, 12 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2C1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2C4 | 22 | An...them, | And...them |
| 37 | grievd | griev’d | |
| Copies | 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 | 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 20, 21, 23 |
| 2D1:4 (o) | line | State 2 | State 2 |
| 2D1 | 39 | fight | ſight |
| Copies | 1, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 24, 28 | 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27 |
Note: In some copies it appears that an 'i' may have been replaced because it was contaminating the 's' to make it appear to read 'f'; B1, C3, C5, and C10 , however, clearly show an fi ligature was originally used.
| 2D2:3 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2D2v | cw | Fasting | Fastning |
| 2D3 | 1 | Fasting | Fastning |
| Copies | 7, 26 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28 |
| 2E1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2E1 | Rt | Vnder-woods | The Vnder-wood |
| 12 | ſtill'd | ſtil'd | |
| 2E4v | Rt | Vnder-woods | The Vnder-wood |
| 48 | that, | that | |
| 49 | And Officer | An O fficer | |
| Copies | 2, 5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 21, 23, 29 | 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 |
| 2E2:3 (o) | Line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2E2 | 43 | Weather | ~ |
| 44 | ſtorme, | ſtorme | |
| 2E3v | 29 | made, | made; |
| Copies | 2, 13 | 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 [wants 2E3], 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2E2:3 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| 2E2v | 6 | Steight | Streight | ~ |
| 12 | Apply | apply; | ~ | |
| 29 | Fivers...doth | ~ | Fibres...doe | |
| 33 | away | away; | ~ | |
| 2E3 | 9 | othes | Oaths | ~ |
| 23 | back | back, | ~ | |
| 24 | ſtreames | ſtreames: | ~ | |
| 38 | infamie | infamie; | ~ | |
| Copies | 2, 29 | 13 | 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 |
| 2F1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| 2F1 | 26 | roiots | ~ | Riots |
| 36 | This | ~ | this, | |
| 2F4v | 19 | friendship, | friendship | ~ |
| 23 | Ends | ~ | ends, | |
| 41 | Hhe | ~ | He | |
| Copies | 8, 10, 11, 13 | 5 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2F1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2F4 | 11m | Wa | Waller. |
| Copies | 11, 13 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 |
| 2F2:3 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2F2 | 15 | Medle | Meddle |
| 19 | Poules | Pauls | |
| 50 | none. | None | |
| 2F3v | 9 | ’T have | T'have |
| 35 | Brill | Brill | |
| Copies | 11, 18 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2F2:3 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2F3 | 34 | Loſſe | Loſſe, |
| 35 | Forge, | Forge | |
| Copies | 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 26 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2G1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| 2G1 | 3 | Man | ~ | mans |
| 27 | them, not | ~ | them not, | |
| 2G4v | 19 | when heard...shee concluded | when shee heard...concluded | ~ |
| copies | 10 | 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20,25, 26, 27 |
1, 2, 8, 9, 12, 16, 19, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29 |
| 2G1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2G4 | 17 | like[inked quad]me | like me |
| 21 | Put | Put, | |
| 36 | Perſeus, | Perſeus | |
| copies | 15 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
Note: 2G4 21 illustrates that the copy was read for irregularities in punctuation as much as, or even rather than, for sense.
| 2G2:3 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2G2 | 23 | beginst | begin’st |
| copies | 4 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29 |
| 2H1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| 2H1 | 23 | ſtoole, | ~ | ſtoole |
| 24 | afternoones, | ~ | afternoons | |
| 2H4v | 6 | teirce | ~ | Teirce |
| 22 | flattrer, | ~ | flatt’rer | |
| 30 | ſubtles | ſubtle | ~ | |
| copies | 6, 12, 27, 28 | 7, 14, 18, 26 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 29 |
| 2H2:3 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2H2 | 41 | heare, | heare |
| copies | 6, 12 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2H2:3 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| 2H2v | 16m | [omit] | 1629 [larger type] | 1629. |
| 29 | wiſh, | wiſh | ~ | |
| 33m | [omit] | 1629 [larger type] | 1629. | |
| 2H3 | 9m | [omit] | 1629 [larger type] | 1629. |
| 15 | majestie | Majestie | ~ | |
| 22 | life’sa | life’s a | ~ | |
| 26 | Surfet,...ease | Surfet...ease, | ~ | |
| 33 | birth | birth. | ~ | |
| 33m | [omit] | 1630 [larger type] | 1630. | |
| copies | 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18 | 20 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2I1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2I1v | 43 | Johnson: | Johnson, |
| 2I4r | 22 | day! | day |
| copies | 4 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29 | |
| 2I1:4 (o) | |||
| 2I4v | 44 | ſtay | ſtay! |
| copies | 4 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29 |
| 2L1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2L4v | 21 | expreſſe Mind | expreſſe a Mind |
| copies | 2, 3, 15, 26, 29 | 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28 |
| 2M1:4 (i) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| 2M1v | 8 | illustrious | Illustrious |
| copies | 7, 12, 14, 26 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 |
| 2M2:3 (o) | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 | |
| 2M2 | 2 | ty’d | dy’d | ~ |
| 3 | dy’d | ſey’d | ſay’d | |
| 12 | faite | Faire | ~ | |
| 28 | one, | one : | ~ | |
| 47 | ſheepe | Sheepe | ~ | |
| 2M3v | 13 | nobilitie | Nobilitie | ~ |
| 49 | Infirmer | Infirmery | ~ | |
| Copies | 6, 19 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 28, 29 |
18 [14 may also record this state; what appears to be an ‘a’ in ‘ſay’d’ has been |
|
| 2M2:3 (i) | ||||
| 2M3 | 6 | heaven Empyre | heav’n Empire | |
| Copies | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 28, 29 |
| 2N2:3 (o) | State 1 | State 2 | |
| 2N2 | 37 | Swans, | Swans |
| Copies | 2, 3, 4, 20, 29 | 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 |
There are manifest errors in the setting of F2 which remained uncorrected (a sprinkling of the many examples will illustrate the point: ‘Unitie’ for ‘union’ in Und. 1.1.34, ‘n’re’ for ‘ne’er’ in Und. 10.3, ‘lock’d’ for ‘rak’d’ at Und. 43.142). There are some apparent compositorial or scribal intrusions (‘t’ awake’ for ‘awake’ at Und. 11.6), and frequent mistakes in punctuation, many of which adversely influence the sense. Taken together these errors suggest either that the copy from which the compositors of F2 worked contained errors or scribal confusions, or that the compositors were less careful than those responsible for F1, or a combination of the two.
The evidence about the nature of F2 outlined above suggests the following principles, which have been adopted in this edition:
BensonQ and Benson12mo.
In some cases it is possible to correct errors in F2 by reference to manuscripts. At other points it is possible to correct them by referring to the two volumes of Jonson’s verse printed by John Benson in 1640. As we have seen, it is likely that it was shortly before the folio text of The Underwood was in press that John Benson printed a quarto volume of poems by Jonson. The title-page is as follows:
[Within an ornamental border] Ben: Ionson’s Exe- | cration against | VVLCAN. | [rule] | VVith divers Epigrams by | the ſame Author to ſeverall | Noble Personages in | this Kingdome. | [rule] | Never Published before. | [rule] | [ornament] | [rule] | LONDON: | Printed by J. O. for John Benson, and | are to be ſold at his ſhop at St. Dunstans | Church-yard in Fleet-ſtreete. 1640.
On Sig. A4v is the following: ‘Imprimatur Matth. Clay. Decemb. 14. 1639.’ The volume collates as follows: 4o in 4s: A-F4; f2, G4. The catchword ‘Ben:’ on sig. F4v indicates that the gathering ‘f’ is an afterthought, and that ‘An Epigram to the Queens Health’ and ‘ODE To himſelfe.’ were inserted after sigs. A-G were set; they divide ‘Sir WILLIAM BVRLASE The Painter, to the Poet’ from its answer ‘BEN: JONSON The Poet, to the Painter’. There are two possible explanations for this: the first and most probable is that the ‘Epigram’ was accidentally omitted by the printer, and the ‘Ode’ was shifted from its planned position at the end of the volume (where it appears in Benson12mo.) to fill out the gathering. The second (favoured by Briggs, 1914d , 115) is that Benson obtained the copy of the ‘Epigram’ late in the process of printing the volume, and paired it with the ‘Ode’ to pad it out to fill a single fold. This is not impossible, since the Stationers’ Register entries make it clear that Benson gathered his material piecemeal, and copies of the Ode are sometimes found independently of Jonson’s other poems. However, the fact that the ‘Epigram to the Queens Health’ so clearly belongs with the other royal panegyrics, and is found with them in Benson12mo., makes it much more probable that this poem was initially just overlooked.
Benson had been collecting manuscript versions of Jonson’s poems since late 1639. By 4 November of that year he had obtained texts of Und. 84.3 and 84.4, the two Jonson poems which circulated most widely in manuscript, and entered them in the Stationers’ Register: ‘John Benson. Entred for his Copie under the hands of doctor Wykes and Master ffetherston warden An Addicion of some excellent Poems to Shakespeares Poems by other gentlemen vizt. His mistris drawne. and her mind by Beniamin: Johnson.’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.487). It is possible that at this stage he was contemplating nothing more than a set of additions to the collection of Shakespeare’s verse which he printed in 1640 (this volume includes a number of works by hands other than Shakespeare’s). Over the next months he evidently found a source of manuscript versions of poems by Jonson, many of which were good copies of versions earlier than those which were subsequently printed in F2. On 16 December he entered ‘a booke called Ben Johnsons Execration against Vulcan with other his smaller Epigrams’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.493), and then on 8 February 1640, he entered ‘a booke called Quintus Horatius Fflaccus his booke of the ‘the Art of Poetry’ to the Piso’s. translated into English by Beniamin: Johnson’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.498). Finally on 20 February 1640 he entered Jonson’s Masque of the Gypsies (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.500). Since he had to pay a fee of 6d for each of these entries it is likely that he obtained the copy for each work separately. All of these pieces appeared in the duodecimo of 1640 printed by J. Okes for John Benson.
Q. Horatius | Flaccus : | His Art of Poetry. | [ornamental rule] | ENGLISHED By | Ben: Jonson. | [ornamental rule] | With other Workes of the | Author, never Printed | before. | [ornamental rule] | LONDON : | Printed by J. Okes, for John | Benson. 1640.
Sig. A2v contains the following: ‘Imprimatur : | Mat. Clay. | And by other Au-| thority. Febr. 21. | 1639.’ The date is one day after Benson’s entry of Gypsies, which suggests that he was keen to produce the volume swiftly once he had accumulated sufficient copy to complete it.
In the duodecimo volume Benson was attempting a more attractive production than his rather cramped quarto of earlier in the year. Each major section of the volume has a separate title page, although the materials in the volume are signed consecutively, and its sections were therefore not intended to be sold separately. As well as Jonson’s translation of Horace, Benson had, since the publication of his Quarto volume, obtained copy of The Masque of the Gypsies. Problems in the text of this work caused major difficulties in the setting of the whole. The corrected state of the volume has a collation A-C12, D5, d14, E4, e12, F-G12. F4 is mis-signed ‘F2’. A copy in the Cambridge University Library (Syn.8.64.13) with a number of leaves slashed for cancellation reveals that this physical structure was the result of substantial resetting of Gypsies: it collates A-B12, C4, D12, E8, F-G12. Sigs. D6, D7, D8, D9, D10, E5, E6, and E7 are slashed for cancellation. A full discussion of the reasons for these cancellations and consequent resettings will be found in the Textual Introduction to Gypsies: briefly put, Benson had obtained a fuller text of the masque and decided to reset the pages accordingly. The poems were unaffected by these resettings, but the efforts Benson took over the text of Gypsies do indicate that he was not afraid to make expensive changes to a book in production if he thought that it would enable him to print a more accurate text.
Benson had gathered dedicatory verses for this volume which were not in the quarto. A new prose dedication to the patron of the quarto, Thomas, Lord Windsor, on sigs. A5r-A6v describes Jonson’s translation as one of his ‘Strenuous and Sinewy Labours’ (sig. A5v). Sig. A7r contains dedicatory verses by Sir Edward Herbert which praise Jonson as ‘the Horace of our times’. Sigs. A7v-A9v contain Barton Holiday’s ‘Epode’ on Jonson; sig. 10r reprints the commendatory poem by Zouch Tounley which had appeared at the end of BensonQ (sig. G3v); sigs. A10v-A12v contain ‘I.C.’s ‘Ode to Ben Jonson upon his Ode to himself’. The pagination of the volume begins on sig. B1r, although sigs. A7-12 have empty parentheses at the head of each page, as though for page numbers. The resetting of Gypsies has the consequence that sigs. after d14v are mispaginated.
The following table presents the contents of BensonQ side by side with those of Benson12mo. for ease of comparison. Signatures refer to the corrected issue of Benson12mo.
| Title | Abbreviation | Sigs. in BensonQ | Sigs. in Benson12mo. |
| Dedication ‘To the Right Honourable Thomas Lord Windsor,&c.’ | A3r-A4r: | A5r-A6v | |
| ‘Imprimatur Matth. Clay. Decemb. 14. 1639.’ | A4v: | A2v | |
| Engraved Title-page | A3v | ||
| Title-page | A2r | A4r | |
| ‘Sir Edward Herbert Knight of the Bath, Ordinary Embassadour for His Majesty of Great Brittaine with the French King. Upon his Friend Mr. Ben: Ionson, and his Translation.’ | A7r | ||
| ‘Barton Holyday, to Ben Jonson. EPODE.’ | A7v-A9v | ||
| ‘ODE. To Ben Jonson Upon his Ode to himselfe.’ | A10v-A12v | ||
| ‘Quintus Horatius Flaccus his Book of the Art of Poetry to the PISO’S.’ | Horace1 | B1r-C2r | |
| Title-page for ‘Ben: Ionson’s Execration Against VVLCAN.’ | C3r | ||
| ‘Ben: Ionson’s Execration against Vulcan’ (with the title as running-title) | Und. 43 | B1r-C1r | C4r-C8v |
| Title-page for ‘The Masque of the Gypsies’ | C10r | ||
| ‘The Masque of THE GYPSIES’ | Gypsies | C11r-e12v | |
| Title-page for ‘EPIGRAMS to Severall Noble Personages in this Kingdome’ | F1r | ||
| ‘Upon King Charles his Birth-day.’ (with ‘Epigrams.’ as running title) | Und. 72 | C1v: | F2r-v |
| ‘To the Queene on her Birth-day.’ | Und. 67 | C2r-C3r | F3r-F4r |
| ‘On the Princes Birth-day. An Epigram.’ | Und. 65 | C3r | F4v |
| ‘Another on the Birth of the Prince.’ | Prince | C3v-C4r | F5r-v |
| ‘A Paralell of the Prince to the King.’ | C4r-v | F5v-F6r | |
| ‘An Elegy on the Lady Jane Paulet, Marchionesse of Winchester.’ | Und. 83 | C4v-D2v | F6r-F8r |
| ‘ODE PINDARICK On the Death of Sir Hen. Morison.’ | Und. 70 | D2v-E1v | F8v-F11v |
| ‘To Hierome Lord Weston vpon his returue [sic] from his Embassy.’ | Und. 74 | E2r-v | F12r-v |
| ‘To the right Honourable the L. Treasurer. An Epigram.’ | Und. 77 | E2v-E3r | G1r-v |
| ‘To Mr. Ionson upon these Verses.’ | E3v | G1v | |
| ‘To my Detractor’ | ‘Detractor’ | E3v-E4r | G2r |
| ‘To William Earle of New-Castle on the Backing of his Horse.’ | Und. 53 | E4r-v | G2v-G3r |
| ‘To William Earle of New-Castle. An Epigram on his Fencing.’ | Und. 59 | E4v | G3r-v |
| ‘To Sir Kenelme Digby. An Epigram.’ | Und. 78 | F1r-v | G3v-G4r |
| ‘His Mistresse Drawne.’ | Und. 84.3 | F2r-v | G4v-G5r |
| ‘Her Minde.’ | Und. 84.4 | F2v-F4r | G5v-G7v |
| ‘Sir WILLIAM BVRLASE The Painter, to the Poet.’ | F4v | G7v-G8r | |
| ‘An Epigram to the Queens Health.’ | Und. 66 | f1r | F4r-v |
| ‘ODE To himselfe’ | ‘Come, leave’ | f1v-f2v | G10r-G11v |
| ‘BEN: JONSON The Poet, to the Painter.’ | Und. 52 | G1r-v | G8r-v |
| ‘Upon my Picture left in Scotland.’ | Und. 9 | G1v-G2r | G8v-G9r |
| ‘On a Gentlewoman, working by an Houre-Glasse.’ | Und. 8 | G2r | G9r-v |
| ‘To the Ladies of the Court. An Ode.’ | Fort. Is., 586 ff. | G2v-G3r | G9v-G10r |
| ‘A Sonnet.’ [‘Though I am young’] | Sad Shep., 1.5.65-80 | G3r | G11v |
| ‘To Mr. Jonson.’ [Zouche Tounley] | G3v | A10r | |
| Faults escaped | G4r |
The engraved title-page in the duodecimo volume suggests that Benson sought to compensate his readers for its smaller size by increasing its visible expense: the engraving shows a bust of Jonson crowned with laurel, which is based on Robert Vaughan’s portrait in F2. Benson’s later volume also corrected errors in the disposition of materials in the earlier text, as well as a number of typographical errors in BensonQ, although it introduces a few of its own. The printed text of Und. 84.4 in Benson12mo. differs at a number of points from that of BensonQ, and is significantly closer to the text in F2. Benson appears to have referred back either to the original copy from which the earlier volume was set, or (more probably) to another text which was closer to that which came to be printed in F2 (see variants in lines 11, 13, 15, 27, 33, 56, 61, 69, 72). It would be unusual if Benson had retained the manuscript from which his earlier edition was set, since printers’ copy was usually disposed of after printing. His earliest entry of Jonson material in the Stationers’ Register includes ‘His mistris drawne. and her mind by Beniamin: Johnson.’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.487), and this may indicate that he had two closely related manuscript versions of these poems, which enjoyed the widest manuscript circulation of any verse by Jonson, and that he checked his first printed version against the second of his two manuscript versions when he printed Benson12mo. This suggests that the traditional view of Benson as an unscrupulous pirate who botched together volumes with no concern except for profit—a view which has in any case been extensively revised over the past forty years—is entirely unjustified.
What sort of copy had Benson obtained? He was in a position to acquire manuscripts of a reasonably good provenance. He had originally been bound apprentice to Thomas Lownes in 1624 (McKenzie, 1961 , 95), and was then in 1627 turned over to Robert Allot, who was during the latter stages of Benson’s apprenticeship to have published Bartholomew Fair in 1631. Allot’s list contained a relatively high proportion of play texts and poems, and working for him would have provided at least some experience in dealing with verse, and perhaps also some contacts who could provide manuscripts of poems. Allot, as the publisher of the group of three plays (Bart. Fair, Devil, and Staple) which were printed in 1631 and which subsequently formed the ‘second volume’ of F2, had close (though strained) links with Jonson. Benson’s reputation has suffered from his having printed, also in 1640, a version of Shakespeare’s sonnets which radically reordered the poems and combined several of them together in single pieces. He added titles, and occasionally turned the master mistress of Shakespeare’s passion into a she, as well as augmenting the volume with poems by other hands. This was not an act of piracy, since after the death of Thomas Thorpe the ownership of the copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets had reverted to the Stationers’ Company. Benson’s volume was probably an attempt to update the rather antiquated genre of the sonnet sequence to suit the tastes of a Caroline readership (see Bennett, 1968 , and for a more general reappraisal De Grazia, 1991 , 163-73). He was, however, a bookseller who bumped along at the bottom of his profession, receiving a charitable disbursement of £50 from the Stationers’ Company on 28 October 1633 and another of the same sum on 7 August 1637. He was also granted permission to print several works of which the copyright had reverted to the Stationers’ company as a result of the deaths of the copy holders. 1640 was the peak of his career: he appears to have briefly had two apprentices bound to him in that year (McKenzie, 1961 , 42), and his usually modest production of volumes soared to five (in the previous year he had had only one work printed for him, despite having been granted permission to print The tragedy of Albovine).
Although we can infer that the source of Benson’s copy may have been close to Jonson, we do not know precisely the status of the manuscripts he obtained. They must in some sense be inferior to the copy received by Walkley from Digby at some point c. 1640 (and were in several cases manifestly anterior, since in many cases they did not take account of revisions which are registered in the text of F2). It is probably correct to talk of ‘sources’ rather than of a ‘source’ firstly because of his three-fold entry in the Stationers’ Register, and secondly because no known manuscript preserves a text of the Ars translation along with shorter pieces by Jonson, and thirdly because it is relatively rare for the particular group of poems which Benson obtained to be found in the same manuscript miscellany as the ‘Execration upon Vulcan’. In the case of Und. 43 his text is likely to have derived from quite late stage in the composition of the poem; it is often closer to the text of F2 than manuscript versions, and appears to represent a distinct transitional state in the composition of that poem.
Benson’s collection contains two poems which are probably not by Jonson, ‘Another [Epigram] on the Birth of the Prince’ and ‘A Paralell of the Prince, to the King’. These are located at the end of the group of epigrams to members of the royal family, which strongly suggests that they came to be ascribed to Jonson as a result of having been included in a manuscript of royal panegyrics. They are also ascribed to Jonson in British Library, Harley MS 6057, a manuscript which includes copies of several of the poems printed by Benson, and which may resemble one of the sources which Benson had acquired. It is likely that Benson’s copy did not differentiate between poems by Jonson and those by Thomas Freeman, or that it was a manuscript which ascribed Freeman’s poems explicitly to Jonson. There is no reason to suppose that Benson’s texts were not fairly accurate representations of particular states of Jonson poems. The reason for not following Benson’s text for any particular poem is not that his collections were pirated or that they are based on manuscript sources inferior to F2; the reason is chiefly that the texts printed in F2 do in general appear to represent later versions than those in Benson.
Horace, Of the Art of Poetry
One poem which Benson preserved is of particular value. This is the early version of Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica. Jonson’s translation of the Ars Poetica exists in two versions, the differences between which are discussed in the general introduction to the work.
The version of the poem in F2 has a separate title-page:
HORACE, | HIS ART | OF | POETRIE. | [rule] | MADE ENGLISH | BY | BEN. IOHNSON. | [rule] | Printed M.DC.XL.
Pagination and signatures begin afresh, but continue on through Grammar and Discoveries. The Horace translation is separately paginated, with title-page numbered, and is separately signed. The collation of this part of the volume is 2o in 4’s A-D4. D4v is blank. The Latin text is set in italic on the verso of each opening, and it faces the English, which is in roman type. Because it comprises a separate element within F2 it is not always bound into the volume at the same point in all copies. It is usually found after Mortimer His Fall; however, in some copies it is bound after The Sad Shepherd, and in others it is located after Chloridia.
There are a number of errors in the Latin text which are distinctive to F2, several of which suggest that the compositor and proof-reader had a scant grasp on Latin grammar (see collation to lines 188, 193, 245, 290, 339, 400, 443, 453). Line 146 is omitted. It is notable that all the press variants in the Latin of F2 are corrections to punctuation and to typography rather than corrections of substantive errors. Thomas Walkley, the publisher of the volume, had not been involved in the printing of a Latin text since Robert Aytoun’s Lessus in funere Raphaelis Thorii in 1625, although since that date he had played a part in the publication of translations of Sallust, Virgil, and Martial. The printer, John Dawson, is not known to have printed any Latin text (although in the time of his great uncle Thomas the business which he inherited had printed Latin primers and grammars). The errors which resulted from his inexperience in this area are tabulated below. The Latin text has been modernized in the print edition, and it has been emended on the occasions when F2 clearly does not reflect the text which Jonson translated. The English text was set with some care, although the glaring error ‘Orpheus and priest, a’ for ‘Orpheus, a priest and’ on sig. C3 was evidently not caught until late in the run, and it is tempting to attribute to poor type-setting apparent new errors in the translation, such as that at line 536. It is likely that the proof sheets of the English text were, like the Latin, read more for visible errors of presentation, spelling, and punctuation than for failures of sense or for accuracy in reflecting the copy.
The earlier version of the translation was printed in Benson12mo. (STC 13798). The poem was, as shown above, given pride of place on the title-page, and Benson gathered dedicatory verses for the duodecimo volume which were not in the quarto. Benson evidently wished to set forth Jonson’s translation handsomely. The text of the Ars (no Latin version is given) occupies sigs. B1r-C2r. The previous section gives details of the other poems in the volume, and a fuller account of Benson’s career.
Benson had clearly obtained a reasonably accurate manuscript of an early version of the poem. There are some careless mistakes which are likely to reflect compositorial errors rather than flaws in the manuscript (the mis-setting of a rhyme word in line 436, and slips at lines 75, 76, 116, 431, 461, 485, 499, 578, 619). It is probable that the Horace manuscript was obtained separately from the other works included in the volume, since it was separately registered on 8 February 1640 (Arber, 1875-94 , 4.498). This could of course indicate nothing more than that Benson was being careful to establish his ownership of the copy of Jonson’s works individually by name in some awareness of Walkley’s intention to print a volume of verse. But it is very likely that Jonson’s Horace did not circulate widely in manuscript, and that if it did so it circulated on its own. The three known manuscript copies of sections of the work (lines 229-36 in St Paul’s Cathedral MS, a transcription of a miscellany of lines from F2 in Bodleian, MS Don. e. 6, f. 18v, and Thomas Hearn’s transcript of the folio version of lines 1-334 in Bodleian, MS Rawl. D. 261, pp. 104-15) are all of no independent authority. The first two of these were evidently transcribed from F2. Hearn’s transcription is very likely to have been made from the popular variorum edition of translations of Horace compiled by Alexander Brome, which appeared in 1666 and was reprinted in 1671 and 1680: both texts read ‘simply’ in line 32 and ‘parts’ in line 276. Minor variants found in Hearn’s transcription are given in the collation, but have no connection with Jonson. The surviving manuscript evidence implies, then, that the Ars translation probably did not circulate along with other poems by Jonson. It is therefore probable that Benson obtained a copy of the early version from somewhere very close to the poet, and that he obtained it independently of the poems which he printed in his Quarto.
Press variants in the F2 text of the Ars translation are tabulated below:
Copies Collated
| 1 B1 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Don.d.66 [H&S 'B2'] |
| 2B2 | Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Gibson 520 |
| 3BL1 | British Library, C.39.k.9 [H&S 'M1'] |
| 6BL4 | British Library, fol. 1482.d.15 [H&S 'M5'] |
| 8C2 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.61.20 [missing 2E3-2E3v and S3-S3v] |
| 9C3 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.14 [H&S 'S1'] |
| 10C4 | Cambridge University Library, Syn.4.64.15 [H&S 'S2'] |
| 12C6 | Christ’s College, Cambridge, Rouse 8.11 |
| 13C7 | Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, STC 14754 |
| 15C9 | King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes C.5.14 [large paper copy] |
| 17C11 | Newnham College, Cambridge, Young 205b |
| 18C12 | Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.140 |
| 19C13 | Trinity College, Cambridge, Grylls 32.180 |
| 20C14 | Trinity College, Cambridge, VI.12.11 |
Variants
| B1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 | State 3 |
| B1 | 42 | so’ above | ~ ~ | so ’bove |
| B4v | 10 | Davus ne | ~ ~ | Davusne |
| 31 | similis: sibi | similis sibi: | ~ ~ | |
| Copies | 5 | 1, 8, 14, 16 | 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 18, 19, 20 |
| B2:3 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| B3v | 36 | Ne; | Ne, |
| Copies | 4, 6,7, 10, 18 | 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 19, 20 |
| C1:4 (o) | line | State 1 | State 2 |
| C1 | 23 | beware. | beware, |
| Copies | 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 14, 18 | 2, 5, 6, 8, 25, 16, 19, 20 |
Note: The ‘first state’ may in fact be an illusion created by weak or broken type: the comma is very unclear in copies 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 15, and 16, though very clear in 19 and 20. No copy in the ‘first state’ has a clear full stop, and it is not possible in any copy I have seen to be sure that it is a stop rather than a badly worn comma.
| C2:3 (i) | Line | State 1 | State 2 |
| C3 | 39 | ownce | Ounce |
| 47 | and priest, a | a priest, and | |
| Copies | 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 18, 20 | 1, 3, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19 |
| C1:C4 (i) | Line | State 1 | State 2 |
| C4 | 5 | profaane to seperate | profane to separate |
| 8 | crave | Carve | |
| Copies | 6, 10, 18 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11, 12, 15, 16, 19, 20 |
Uncollected Verse
No satisfactory general remarks can be made about the texts of the poems which did not appear gathered together in a collected edition in the seventeenth century, since each poem has a separate history. Dedicatory poems are modernized from the first edition of the works to which they are prefixed (collated with subsequent editions), unless otherwise indicated. Usually these were printed with some care, although there are occasionally manuscript corrigenda, as in the case of Jonson’s dedicatory verses to Chapman’s Hesiod (I am grateful to Henry Woudhuysen for this observation). The three poems in this group which survive in Jonson’s autograph (‘Happier Life’, ‘Bulstrode’, and ‘Somerset Verses’) have been discussed under ‘Autographs’ above, and other poems which circulated in manuscript are discussed below.
A significant proportion of Jonson’s poetic output was occasional, and many of the poems he wrote for particular occasions he came to regard as suitable (sometimes after revision) to be printed in his major collections of verse. Only one of the pieces printed among the miscellaneous verse in chronological sequence in this edition figured in any of these collections at any point: for some reason those responsible for the second folio of 1640 inserted the commendatory poem to Sir Edward Filmer (6.318) after Epigr. 108. Otherwise Jonson and those who printed his papers after his death did not think fit to gather, organise, or reprint any of this group of poems. The probable reasons for this are as various as the poems themselves. At one extreme is the first poem in the chronological sequence, which figures in the carefully prepared manuscript of Thomas Palmer’s ‘Sprite of Trees and Herbs’ (1.229). This is an early unfinished rhapsody rather in the manner of George Chapman, with whom Jonson collaborated over the sequence of dedicatory poems appended to Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr in 1601. Jonson may have lost the poem or have come to outgrow it quite rapidly, or may have become uneasy about the poem as a result of its apparent references to the persecution of Palmer as a result of his Catholicism. At the other end of the scale are the dedicatory poems for Shakespeare’s first folio of 1623 (5.635-40), which weigh each word of praise to the finest scruple. Presumably these poems, along with slightly more barbed but still tonally canny dedicatory pieces to Michael Drayton (6.161) and to Jonson’s former servant Richard Brome (6.389), were felt to belong so intimately to the books in which they first appeared that they would not bear reprinting. This is certainly the case with the mock encomia to Thomas Coryate (4.186-95), in which Jonson and a large number of other poets and poetasters joined forces to attempt to make their praises more comic than and almost as voluminous as Coryate’s own accounts of his travels. Simple oversight may explain the absence from The Underwood of several of the poems printed in this edition, since that collection had included the dedicatory piece to Ralegh’s History of the World (Und. 24), which scarcely makes sense without the ornamental title-page to which it alludes so closely. But the fact that so many of the poems which were left ungathered speak in their richest tones only within the circumstances of their first publication is likely to be the main reason why none of them were subsequently incorporated into a collection by their author. Jonson’s dedicatory verses are very often placed last among the groups of commendatory poems in the volumes in which they appear, and several of them seek to have the final word on the works to which they are attached. Jonson was almost always eager to display the fact that he had read the books which he commended: the language and concerns of his dedicatory verses frequently draw on the preoccupations of the works to which they are prefixed. His art of aptly commending (and of intimating unspoken reservations) is shown just as much in his dedicatory poems as it is in his carefully judged panegyrics to noble men and women in his major verse collections. Those effects are dependant upon reading the poems in relation to the volumes in which they first appeared.
Another significant group of poems included in this edition were also embedded too deeply in their original milieux to operate comfortably within collections of verse. The poems on the deaths of members of the families of Jonson’s patron the Earl of Newcastle were carefully gathered in the Newcastle manuscript (BL Harley 4955), as relics of the family. Here too there are strong reasons against printing the poems: the epitaph on Katherine Ogle (6.315) can only be fully appreciated in its setting in that family manuscript, where its central section is physically depicted as ‘a record in heaven’, since it is represented as having been written on a scroll held up by cherubs. The poem was evidently intended to form part of a funeral design (the version in the Newcastle manuscript may well represent a copy of a vellum placard similar to that on which Jonson’s poem on the death of Vincent Corbett, Und. 12, appeared). Also from the Newcastle manuscript comes Jonson’s exchange with Mr Craven (5.349), a slight piece which anticipates the many apocryphal tales of Jonson’s extempore wit which were later to appear in jest books and the similarly unreliable witnesses gathered among the Dubia in the electronic edition. This poem, given its presence in the Newcastle manuscript, bears strong witness to the fact that Jonson’s art could move from occasionality to ephemerality. Jonson’s ‘Grace’, of which three versions are reproduced in this edition, suggests that he may have had in his repertoire at least one poem which could be slightly adapted to suit different audiences and occasions, and not necessarily always by its author—if indeed manuscript ascriptions of this poem to Jonson are reliable.
The other verse which remained unprinted in Jonson’s lifetime requires some individual discussion. This very diverse group of poems shows the different modes of manuscript circulation in which Jonson engaged at different periods in his career, and indicates his sensitivity to the differing political significance of manuscript and print media. His elegy to Nashe, which also survives in only one manuscript (Berkeley Castle Muniments General Series Miscellaneous Papers 31/10), reinforces the impression that c. 1600 he was prepared to write for very specific audiences which did not choose to circulate manuscript works more widely. Duncan-Jones (1996) has shown that the Nashe poem was targeted precisely at one of Nashe’s former patrons, Elizabeth Carey, through her secretary Henry Stanford. Jonson’s failure to reprint this work may show his political prudence: Nashe’s death was preceded by a harsh order from Bishops Bancroft and Whitgift that ‘all Nashe’s books and Dr Harvey’s books be taken wheresoever they may be found and that none of their books be ever printed hereafter’ (Arber, 1875-94 , 3.677). Similar pressures may have led Jonson to omit his poem on the marriage of the Earl of Somerset in 1613 (4.222) from his gathered collections of verse. The poem is known only from an autograph manuscript (discussed under ‘Autographs’ above), which may well have been presented at the wedding itself. It is possible that Jonson failed to retain a copy of the poem after he sent it to his patron, but it is more likely that within months of the poem’s composition the scandal which surrounded the marriage became so public and so sordid that Jonson quietly forgot that he had ever written what is in any case one of his less distinguished poems.
Manuscript circulation, even to very small groups of readers, did not always prevent materials from reaching a wider audience. The readings of the fragments printed in England’s Parnassus may indicate that occasionally those apparently closed circles of manuscript recipients were not always entirely disconnected from the medium of print: variants in some passages of Jonson reproduced in this work strongly suggest that the compiler of the England’s Parnassus, John Allot, had access to versions of poems similar to those given by Jonson to Sir John Salusbury. The fact that only the two very closely related manuscripts discussed above (Bodleian Rawl. Poet. 31 and BL Harley MS 4064) record early versions of ‘Censure not’ and ‘Lucan’ strongly suggests that up to c. 1605 Jonson was careful to whom he sent copies, and that copyists had not begun to attach great value to the fact that he was the author of poems in their possession.
Jonson’s later career as a circulator of manuscripts appears to have differed in significant respects from his earlier practice. By 1631, the probable date of the satires on Inigo Jones, there are some signs that he may have engaged in a form of manuscript circulation which went beyond the targeted presentation of carefully chosen poems to particular aristocratic recipients, and which approached a form of scribal publication (on which, see Love, 1993 ) The survival of a very early text of the poems on a single bifolium (Folger MS X. d. 245(a)) suggests that there may be some truth in the suggestion made by James Howell (1647), 5-6, that Jonson had been circulating the poems in manuscript in something which approached a concerted campaign. These satires are the perfect length to occupy a single folded manuscript leaf, and may indeed have been designed to be effectively published in that form. Their subject-matter would have ensured a wide-readership in courtly and literary circles. But if Jonson did solicit and circulate manuscripts of these poems quite widely as an alternative to print publication it does not seem to have been an experiment which he repeated. The highly unsatisfactory state of the surviving texts of ‘An Answer to Alexander Gill’ (details are in the headnote to the poem) suggests that in other cases Jonson was not so free with the circulation of satirical materials. Since Gill, the object of this poem’s attack, was significantly less well-known than Inigo Jones it may be that copies of this particularly vicious attack were simply not in great demand. Given that the poem was probably composed a year after the Inigo Jones satires it is also possible that Jonson had finally decided that it was desirable to restrict rather than widely circulate satirical attacks on named individuals.
Later Editions
Editions of Jonson’s poems since the seventeenth century have in various ways and with varying success expanded the canon of his verse. They have also tended to form something of an autonomous tradition, which has in general failed to recognise the value of manuscript evidence for the study of Jonson’s work.
Peter Whalley’s edition of the poems in 1756, which straddles the sixth and seventh volumes of his collected Works of Ben. Jonson, prints the three major collections of verse from the first and second folios. Whalley makes a number of conjectural emendations (several of which have subsequently been corroborated by manuscript sources, and most of which are plausible), as well as modernizing Jonson’s spelling. In general he follows the punctuation of the folio texts, but is willing to make unacknowledged emendations to it this assists the sense. Notes are relatively infrequent and most concern textual emendations or biographical information about figures mentioned in the verse. Whalley regarded Jonson principally as the author of printed collections of verse, and as a result was uncertain how to incorporate the other, uncollected, poems into the canon. He printed directly after the end of the Epigrams (without any formal indication of a division) nine poems which Jonson had not gathered in any of the printed collections included in F1 and F2. This group included some poems from manuscript materials: the three satires on Inigo Jones are printed from a manuscript belonging to the antiquary George Vertue (Vertue’s transcription of this manuscript is British Library, Add. MS 23070). Whalley also gathered together in this group Jonson’s dedicatory poems to Beaumont, Fletcher, Drayton and Shakespeare. He tentatively ascribed to Jonson the epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke (‘Underneath this marble hearse’) and the epitaph on Drayton (‘Do, pious marble, let thy readers know’). These are now generally accepted as the work of William Browne and Francis Quarles respectively, but continued to be printed in editions of Jonson well into the twentieth century.
As one might expect from the author of On the Learning of Shakespeare (1748) (which argues for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the classics), Whalley identified a number of Jonson’s sources, including the neo-Latin original of ‘On an Hourglass’ (6. 350) . His Jonson was no kind of reviser or manuscript poet, however. Whalley selectively records variants, such as those between the version of Und. 39 printed in 1640 and that in the 1669 edition of Donne’s poems, and he evidently had access to a copy of Benson 12mo. This he regarded as a text which might be used to emend that of F2, rather than as a record of distinct versions of the poems it includes. Like most editors of vernacular texts in his age, for whom editions of classical texts provided the dominant model of editorial method, Whalley seems implicitly to have assumed that a single common archetype underlay the different printed versions of a poem. His Jonson was substantively that which came to dominate the critical tradition: a print poet who produced single versions of his works, which might subsequently be contaminated by scribes and printers.
Whalley’s edition played a significant part in ensuring that Jonson’s poems became a recognized part of the canon of English verse. Unannotated texts of Jonson’s poems were included in Robert Anderson’s Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (1792-5), 4.51-618 and in Alexander Chalmers Works of the English Poets (1810) , 5.459-549. Chalmers was not overflowing with praise for the poems (‘in general he was led into glittering and fanciful thoughts, and is so frequently captivated with these as to neglect his versification’ (5.457)), which he presents in unmodernized and largely unannotated form, nor can his decision to print The Underwood before the Epigrams and The Forest seem anything other than eccentric; but he provides, as was later to become fashionable, a final group of ungathered dedicatory verse, and a selection of lyrics from the plays.
William Gifford in 1816 , however, made the next significant contribution to the editorial tradition. Gifford followed the main outlines of the editorial principles established by Whalley, although, in that charming way of editors, he is keen to pour scorn on his predecessor. He mocks Whalley’s taste for conjectural emendation, and shows no reluctance to cite his predecessor’s errors in his own notes so that he can correct them (a triumphant note on Und. 13, numbered 30 in Gifford’s text, quotes Whalley’s note on Sackville and then declares ‘We have here a cluster of mistakes’). Gifford printed The Epigrams and The Forest from F1, and The Underwood from F2. In the main he treats the texts conservatively in the manner of Whalley, modernizing spelling and occasionally emending punctuation as well as the text. Like Whalley, he significantly expanded the canon of Jonson’s verse and, like Whalley, did not quite know how to fit the poems he had discovered into the printed collections. He augmented the miscellaneous pieces which Whalley had incorporated at the end of the Epigrams, and successfully unearthed much of the dedicatory verse which Jonson had written for vernacular printed books. He follows Whalley in ascribing to Jonson ‘Underneath this sable [or ‘marble’ in some texts] hearse’ and the epitaph on Michael Drayton. The majority of this material is inserted between Und. 12 and Und. 13. There is little justification for this positioning beyond Gifford’s belief that the arrangement of The Underwood was not Jonson’s and so open to subsequent modification—although Lockwood (2005) , 102-5 has persuasively argued that Gifford positioned these dedicatory and occasional poems at this point in the sequence, between the poem to Corbett and the poem to Sackville, in order to emphasise Jonson’s conviviality. Gifford also inserts ‘Leges Conviviales’ after Und. 85, and then begins a new section of ‘Translations from the Latin’, which includes ‘Horace of the Art of Poetry’ and the remaining poems from The Underwood. He did all this despite his having poured scorn on Whalley for having printed his group of miscellaneous and dedicatory verse between the Epigrams and The Forest.
There were limits to Gifford’s willingness to expand the canon. He clearly thought that poems which had been printed were of greater authority and value than those which had remained in manuscript. He was alerted to the existence of the Newcastle manuscript by Isaac D’Israeli only very late in 1815, and therefore was able to cite poems from it only in the notes to his edition, and could make no attempt to collate variants from it (Lockwood, 2005 , 106-7). ‘Charles Cavendish to his Posterity’, ‘Epitaph on Lady Katherine Ogle’, part of the Epitaph on Jane Ogle and ‘Fresh as the Day’ are reproduced in a note on Und. 58 (which in Gifford’s numbering is 89). The satires on Inigo Jones, however, presented Gifford with a particular problem. He was keen to exculpate Jonson from the charges of envy and spite which had frequently been levelled at him by eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare. For this reason the Jones satires, which are hard to reconcile with an entirely affable view of the poet, do not appear among the poems which Gifford inserts into The Underwood, but as an appendix to Chloridia (8.116-22 ). Gifford clearly regretted the preservation of these poems in Vertue’s manuscript (‘there is in some minds a perverse passion for perpetuating the memory of enmities, which no sense of propriety can subdue. A copy, most probably secreted by a person of this description, fell into the hands of Mr Vertue’, 8.115), and does not appear to have noticed that they are also found in the Newcastle manuscript.
The low value which Gifford attached to manuscript sources and his reluctance to countenance the possibility that Jonson revised his poems is well illustrated by his comments on ‘Horace of the Art of Poetry’: ‘Many transcripts of this version got abroad; these differed considerably from one another, and all, perhaps from the original copy. In the three which have reached us, though all were published nearly at the same time, variations occur in almost every line. To notice them would be both tedious and unprofitable’ (9.90). Gifford’s lack of interest in manuscript variants derives from the assumption (which he shares with Whalley) that one ‘original copy’ underlies all printed versions. This assumption is seldom rattled. Like Whalley he records in the notes to ‘The Hourglass’ (Und. 8) the Benson version of that poem, but even here Gifford believes that a single lost archetype underlies all versions: ‘It matters little which we take: the version in Drummond’s folio is the worst, but all are imperfect.’
Gifford’s edition, which was reprinted in a variety of different forms for a variety of different audiences, mopped up much of the market for Jonson in the nineteenth century. It was augmented by Francis Cunningham in 1875 to include a section of ‘Miscellaneous Pieces’ (9.323-62), the majority of which were verse. This to some extent regularized the position of the uncollected poems, and gave greater prominence to the poems from the Newcastle manuscript. Cunningham included the full texts of the Cavendish epitaphs, which Gifford had buried away in his notes, as well as ‘Moon’ and ‘Fresh as the Day’. The majority of poems which he adds to the canon had appeared in print before: ‘Somerset Verses’, for instance, had first been noticed in Notes and Queries 1st Series 5 (1852), 193-4 and had been printed by Bell in 1856 , while Collier’s discovery of Jonson’s autograph of ‘Happier Life’ (first printed in Collier, 1841 Bib. # 4542], 54) enabled Cunningham to offer that poem for the first time in a collected edition. He also gathered up many of the remaining dedicatory pieces: ‘Dover’, the dedicatory verse to Farnaby’s Juvenal, ‘Ode (Pancharis)’, and ‘Mabbe’ all appear in Cunningham for the first time. He was not always the most alert of editors: he prints ‘Stephens’ among his miscellany, despite the fact that the poem has already appeared earlier in his reprint of Gifford’s edition (8.332). He also augments the canon with dubia. ‘Master Johnson’s Answer to Master Wither’ is accepted as Jonson’s, while ‘The Ghyrlond of the Blessed Virgin Marie’ receives a more cautious welcome into the canon. Elsewhere Cunningham’s enthusiasm gets the better of him. He mistakes a marginal acknowledgement of a borrowing from Jonson in Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1627) as a sign of authorship, and correspondingly prints ‘I sing the adventures of nine worthy knights’ as Jonson’s own. His avid reading in Notes and Queries leads him to print the notably spurious ‘Fragment of one of the Lost Quaternions of Eupheme’ (which includes the deathless address to the worms who might eat Venetia Digby ‘But, if you must (as what worm can abstain?) / Taste of her tender body, yet refrain, / With your disordered eatings, to deface her’) which ‘H.A.B[right]’ claims to have found in a ‘genuine autograph’ in his possession in Notes and Queries 1st Series 3 (1851), 367. This poem is in fact a fragment of ‘An Elegy on Lady Markham’, usually ascribed to Beaumont (Briggs, 1915b , 216).
Meanwhile the first free-standing annotated edition of Jonson’s Poetical Works had appeared, edited by Robert Bell in 1856 . Although Bell’s publication of the poems as a separate volume implicitly claims that they were a significant part of Jonson’s output, he repeatedly attaches the word ‘minor’ to them, and values them principally for the insights they provide into Jonson’s nature: ‘It is in his minor poems we must look for him as he lived, felt, and thought’ (p. 23). The edition is modernized in spelling and punctuation, and contains often quite lengthy notes, which frequently revise or qualify Gifford, from whom Bell proudly proclaims his independence: Gifford’s text is ‘in many instances inaccurate’ (p. 25). Unfortunately Bell then goes on to print Gifford’s version of The Underwood, with all of its inserted miscellaneous poems, ‘for the sake of uniformity’ (p. 141). He is not Gifford’s slave, however: he notes that ‘Underneath this sable hearse’ is ascribed to Browne in the Lansdowne MS, and expresses scepticism over the authorship of the Drayton epitaph. He silently omits all of the poems which Gifford had included in his section of ‘Translations from the Latin’, so there is no room in his edition for the translation of the Ars Poetica or the final poems of The Underwood, which as a result ends in his edition with the ‘Eupheme’ poems. He then tacks on ‘Somerset Verses’, which had been brought to public attention in Notes and Queries in 1852, and ends the whole with ‘Leges Conviviales’. There is no sign that Bell undertook any work on manuscript materials.
The major developments in the editorial tradition of the poems had to wait until the twentieth century. In 1936, while Simpson and Simpson (Herford had died in 1931) were at work on the Oxford edition, Bernard Newdigate produced for the Shakespeare Head Press a free-standing edition of the poems in a print run restricted to seven hundred and fifty copies. This was prefixed by the bold claim, which echoes Bell, that ‘In his poetry, then, rather than his plays we should seek the essential Ben’ (pp. vi-vii) . Newdigate investigated manuscript materials only to a limited degree (his scope was almost entirely restricted to manuscripts in Oxford and in the British Library). His texts of the major collections followed F1 and F2 with the usage of i/j and u/v modernized, but with spelling and punctuation otherwise unmodified. Newdigate’s principal contribution was to extend the canon of Jonson’s verse. He presented under the whimsical title of ‘Drift-wood’ (to match The Forest and Underwood) all the dedicatory poems then known to be by Jonson, as well as some manuscript poems which had been recognized as Jonson’s by W. D. Briggs. His collection includes several poems which can now with some certainty be said not to be by Jonson, such as ‘The Goodwife’s Ale’ (which is plausibly ascribed to Thomas Jay in manuscript) and ‘Be silent you still music of the spheres’ (which is by William Strode), as well as the old favourites ‘Underneath this marble hearse’ and ‘Do, pious marble’, both of which are marked as dubia. He also includes several poems identified as Jonson’s by Briggs which had not been printed before in an edition, such as ‘Ode (‘If men’)’, as well as several poems tracked down by Percy Simpson, such as ‘Bulstrode’ and ‘Palmer’. Newdigate also gathered under the title ‘Farrago’ ‘a number of those merry jests and witty repartees of which Ben was so often either the author or the butt’ (p. xiii). He confesses ‘In these I have made no attempt to winnow what good grain they contain from chaff’ (p. xiii). His edition concludes with ‘Frondes Quaedam Latinae’, which includes Jonson’s poems to Farnaby (although the poem on his Persius is omitted) as well as several Latin poems of doubtful authorship and provenance.
The volume containing the poems in Herford, Simpson and Simpson’s edition appeared in 1947. It significantly extended the canon of Jonson’s verse in its section of ‘Ungathered Verse’, which consisted of works in print and manuscript which Jonson never gathered for the press. The text is unmodernized, and is scrupulous in reproducing the punctuation of the early edition and manuscript sources. They were first editors to make a formal distinction between what they called ‘Ungathered Verse’ and dubia, or ‘Poems Ascribed to Jonson’. The former group was arranged in chronological order, and consolidated all previous editors’ work, with the addition of works noted by Briggs but not included by Newdigate, such as ‘Censure not’ and ‘Lucan’. Herford and Simpson followed the order, and usually the text, of the Underwood as it appeared in the 1640 folio. A ghost of Gifford’s section of ‘Translations from the Latin’ may survive into their treatment of this collection, since they chose to add Jonson’s translation of Martial’s epigram 10.47 (‘Happier Life’) to the end of the Underwood on the dubious grounds of its resemblance to the poems grouped in that section of the volume. They also printed a section of ‘Poems Ascribed to Jonson’, which is considerably less distended than Newdigate’s and makes discriminating use of manuscript evidence. The canon of poems accepted by Herford and Simpson, as well as the poems they considered to be dubia, was substantially that set out in the series of seminal articles by Briggs, and, although they carefully examined a very large volume of manuscript materials, chiefly in the Bodleian and British Libraries, they were reluctant to expand the canon beyond those limits. Their work was interrupted by the war, and the editors apologise for having been unable to check collations of manuscript materials in the British Library (H&S 8.xv-xvi) . Although not free from error, their collations are as accurate as it is reasonable to expect given the difficulty of the task with which they were presented, and their annotation of sources, dates, and historical allusions in the poems have provided the foundation of almost all work on Jonson’s poems ever since.
The weaknesses of the edition derive not from its scholarship so much as its commitment to a number of assumptions about Jonson (see Bland 2004). The Simpsons were not sensitive to the political intelligence of the later works, and were reluctant to see Jonson as a poet who conducted an amphibious existence in both manuscript and print. There is, as a result, a curious discrepancy in this great edition between the manuscript evidence presented in the collation—which often shows Jonson’s work as a reviser—and the edition’s general commitment to the idea that print was the medium to which Jonson aspired. The textual introduction to the poems discusses what the editors generally call ‘first drafts’ in manuscript, and states that ‘To penetrate into Jonson’s workshop, to stand behind him, as it were, and peep over his shoulder, throws a flood of light on his working methods’ (8.15). Critics, perhaps deterred by the complexity of the collations in H&S, or perhaps misled by the editors’ presentation of Jonson as a print author, have nonetheless consistently shrunk from engaging with Jonson’s processes of composition. The disposition of material in Volume 8 of H&S further contributes to the separation of Jonson’s poetic activity from his work as a dramatist and as a writer of masques: the poems are all included in that one volume, along with the English Grammar and Discoveries.
Herford and Simpson’s work prompted a string of free-standing volumes of the poems which relied heavily on the Oxford edition for both annotation and editorial principles. The majority of these were intended for a wider market than the weighty and expensive volumes of Herford and Simpson, and almost inevitably these editions excluded collations of manuscript variants. Most offered new findings, but most could not unjustly be described as effectively editions of Herford and Simpson for a wider audience, rather than as editions of Jonson. Several of the later twentieth century editions of the poems give discerning critical accounts of the poems they include, and often provide lexical and historical glosses which extend or significantly correct Herford and Simpson, but it is true to say that the text of Jonson’s poems has not been seriously reconsidered since 1947, and no editor since that date has given any significant consideration to manuscript materials. George Burke Johnston’s Muses Library edition of 1954 acknowledges its debt to Herford and Simpson’s edition, ‘this great monument of scholarship, more lasting than bronze’ (p. xx) . It includes a number of miscellaneous pieces from plays and masques, and does not follow Herford and Simpson’s strange decision to print the Martial epigram as Underwood 90, but its notes are usually abbreviated versions of those found in earlier editions. It splices the ending of the manuscript version onto the folio text of Forest 12, and cites Herford and Simpson as its source for that ending. It is otherwise innocent of manuscript material. William B. Hunter’s edition of The Complete Poetry (1963) in the Stuart Editions series contains a number of helpful glosses, but again it often follows Herford and Simpson’s canon and their emendations to the text, and frequently draws on their work in its annotations. Hunter sometimes makes independent judgements about his texts (he prints both versions of Jonson’s translations of the Ars Poetica in parallel, rearranging the folio text so that its lines correspond to the order in the Benson version), but there is no sign that he engaged extensively with manuscript materials. The majority of variants he lists in his selected collation are from Benson or other printed sources.
All of these twentieth century editions, under the influence of Herford and Simpson’s insistence on Jonson’s direct involvement in the printing of F1, presented unmodernized texts. The first edition of Jonson’s poems to take the risk of modernizing spelling and punctuation for a twentieth century audience was Ian Donaldson’s Oxford Standard Authors edition of 1975—although it should be noted that Whalley, Gifford, and Bell had all been willing to modernize according to the conventions of their times. Donaldson’s modernized punctuation is often of great help in interpreting the poems, although his decision to alter pointing which is regularly claimed to be Jonson’s own has not been without its critics. Donaldson’s notes quite frequently correct or augment the findings of Herford and Simpson, but its text is ‘a modernized version of that established in Herford and Simpson’s major Oxford edition’ (p. xviii) . This edition was reprinted with corrections and additions in 1985 in the Oxford Authors series , and was again augmented and revised in 1995 to form part of the Oxford Poetry Library . It does not include Jonson’s translation of Horace, but does contain a collection of songs and poems from plays and masques, as well as a small group of Dubia drawn selectively from Herford and Simpson. The alternative ending of Forest 12 and the manuscript version of Forest 10 are reproduced, as they are in Herford and Simpson, after the printed versions. Donaldson’s notes are extremely helpful on lexical and historical questions, but rarely draw attention to Jonson’s revisions and are not the result of extensive immersion in manuscript sources.
Much the same can be said of the equally useful Penguin edition of the poems which appeared in the same year as Donaldson OSA. George Parfitt states that ‘Collecting and editing Ben Jonson’s poetry is, in some respects, a fairly straightforward task’ (p. 19) —would that it were so—and modernizes spelling whilst keeping as close as modern usage allows to Jonson’s punctuation. He includes no dubia, but does select a number of poems from plays and masques to mingle among its category of miscellaneous poems. Unlike Donaldson’s edition, Parfitt’s does include the translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, which has otherwise tended to be pushed to the margins of the canon.
It will be clear from this brief account of prior editions in what respects the present work departs from the tradition on which it draws. In offering a modernized text it is clearly in the line of Bell and Donaldson, and before them of Whalley and Gifford. The presentation of Dubia and some of the poetic sorties ascribed to Jonson in seventeenth-century jest books in the electronic edition owes something to Newdigate. There are two respects in which this edition departs from its predecessors, however. The first is the decision to present the poems which were not printed in the major collections of Jonson’s verse in the appropriate position in the chronology of Jonson’s work as a whole. This encourages readers to think about the poems in close relationship to the rest of Jonson’s output. The second is its emphasis in the notes and collations on the significance of manuscript variants and Jonson’s revisions. Both of these features of the edition are intended to encourage scepticism about the myth of Jonson as the poet of the book, and both features, it is hoped, will stimulate a critical reappraisal of the poems—both in their relationships to the other works, and in relation to their own earlier and manuscript versions.
Appendix: List of F1 copies collated
(Copies 1-15 collated by Colin Burrow, copies 16-58 collated by David L. Gants)
1. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce.I.302
2. Bodleian Library, Oxford, AA 83 Art (reclassified as
Arch. A d. 28)
3. University of Cambridge Library, Syn.4.61.19
4. University of Cambridge Library, Keynes D.6.21
5. King’s College, Cambridge, N.12.9
6. King’s College, Cambridge, Keynes C.10.3
7. Pembroke College, Cambridge, LC.I.29
8. St John’s College, Cambridge, Aa.I.26
9. Trinity College, Cambridge, Capel:G:1
10. Trinity College, Cambridge, VI.6.116
11. British Library, C.39.k.9
12. British Library, G.11630 (large paper copy)
13. Huntington Library, 499967
14. Huntington Library, 499971
15. Huntington Library, 62105
16. Huntington Library, 62100
17. Huntington Library, 62101
18. Huntington Library, 62104
19. Huntington Library, 495467 (Ford Copy ‘A’)
20. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 1
21. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 2
22. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 3
23. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 4
24. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 5
25. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 6
26. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 1
27. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 2
28. Library of Congress, Yorke W.4.4
29. Gants Personal Copy, Fenton bookplate
30. Gants Personal Copy, Everard Home bookplate
31.Boston Public Library, XfG .3811 .5
32. Boston University, YPR 2600 .C16
33. Wellesley College, qx - English Poetry
34. Huntington Library, 499968
35. Huntington Library, 606199
36. Huntington Library, 606202
37. Huntington Library, 606200
38. Huntington Library, 606574
39. Huntington Library, 606576
40. Huntington Library, 606599
41. Huntington Library, 606579
42. Huntington Library, 606582
43. Huntington Library, 606583
44. Brown University, Providence, PR 2600 - 1616
45. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Lewis PR2600 1616
46. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616a
47. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ab
48. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ad
49. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616af
50. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ah
51. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ak
52. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616am
53. University of Texas, Austin, AH/ J738/ +B616an
54. University of Texas, Austin, Wh/ J738/ +B616a
55. University of Texas, Austin, Pforz. 559
56. University of Texas, Austin, Woodward-Ruth 181
57. University of Texas, Austin, Stark 6431
58. University of Virginia, E 1616 .J64