For the Honour of Wales was printed in the masque section of the second folio , where it occupies sigs. E3v-F3v, paginated 30-8, between Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue and News from the New World. It seems likely that the text was set up directly from an authorial manuscript, for the stage directions are very abrupt and are indeed partially incomplete. The opening direction as it appears in F2 is manifestly provisional:
Enter Gentlemen.
Griffith, Jenkin, Evan, a Welsh Atturney.
Although something could have dropped out in the printing, it looks more that Jonson was undecided about how many gentlemen he needed to introduce, and never turned back in the manuscript to complete the direction; and the last three words are awkwardly attached, leaving a reader wondering at first whether ‘a Welsh Atturney’ is another character or an adjectival phrase. Additionally, the brief description of the scene that precedes this direction reads like a shorthand note from the author to himself. The phrase ‘now the name [of the mountain] changed from ATLAS, to CRAIG-ERIRI’ presents information which emerges in the course of the dialogue but was not intended to be visually evident on the set itself. Subsequently, the second and third directions lack the word ‘Enter’ and forget to mention the boy Hillyn, while the curt statements ‘Here a Dance of men’ and ‘Here the dance of Goates’ are very abbreviated and in the hands of a copyist might well have been elaborated. In a version produced for reading or publication, such signs of authorial haste would have been prime candidates for scribal ‘improvement’.
At two points the compositor seems to have had difficulty with Jonson’s English text. The first is at 106, where F2 prints a long dash in the middle of a phrase:
HOVV. What?----you meane (hough) to make us so long tarrie here, ha?
A sort of sense can be made of this speech by repunctuating, but it seems likely that the compositor used the dash to signal that there was a lacuna or omission in his copy. This was a problem that had occurred twice in the printing of Pleasure Rec. (248, 271; and see Textual Essay), and once with Augurs. The Cambridge text inserts the word ‘do’ which, speculatively, may be the missing word. The other instance is the treatment of the ballad on the virtues of Wales, each stanza of which carries a header, ‘1 Song’, ‘2 Song’ and so forth. This cannot be correct, for the ballad is clearly continuous, and it produces a particularly awkward clash at the beginning:
Song.
EVAN. 1 Song.
I’Is not come here to tauke of Brut,
It is difficult to suppose that Jonson, had he prepared the masque for publication, intended the song to be printed like this. Perhaps the stanzas were numbered in the manuscript and the numbers were incorrectly expanded by the printer; or possibly the song was written on a separate sheet and its conventions were not clearly integrated with those of the main text. There is a parallel mistake at the end of the song, when the opening word of the immediately ensuing dialogue (‘Speake’, at the head of F2v) is printed with a large-capital ‘S’ and small-capital ‘P’, as if the text were continuing the decorative capitals that had been used on F1v-2 to mark each new stanza of the song.
Great difficulties arise from the masque’s use of Welsh or Welsh-inflected English, which presents editors with severe problems. F2’s Welsh-language passages need considerable correction, partly because of changes of orthography between seventeenth-century and modern Welsh, but also because of errors or confusions in the spellings, many of which must have been made by the printer, but some possibly coming from Jonson himself. So, for example, F2’s first Welsh lines read:
Taw, d yn ynbhyd, y, dhwyti-n abl i anabhy, pob peth oth folineb, ag y tyny gwatwar
ar dy wlac.
Gad vynlLonyth.
The Oxford editors reproduce this as follows, correcting two misprints (apparently by the compositor) and adjusting the text where possible to what seems to have been the intended orthography (the changes to misprints are indicated here with underlines):
Taw, dyn ynbhyd, ydhwyt yn abl i anabhy pob peth oth folineb, ag y tyny gwatwar ar
dy wla d.
Gad vyn llonyth.
In their commentary, the orthography is presented in a fully modernized form:
Taw, dyn ynfyd! Ydwyt yn abl i anafu pob peth o’th ffolineb, ag i dynnu gwatwar ar dy wlad.
G d fi’n llonydd.
This constitutes an acceptable modern-spelling version of the speeches, though with the exceptions that one would now print ‘Ydd wyt’ for ‘Ydwyt’, ‘ac’ for ‘ag’ and ‘Gad’ for ‘G d’.
In the spirit of a modernized edition, the Cambridge edition prints the Welsh speeches in modern spelling, based on the versions in the Oxford commentary. However, with the advice of Dr Nerys Ann Jones and Dr Jerry Hunter, some details of H&S’s orthography have been adjusted, and some of their conjectural corrections to F2’s spellings are emended. These refinements are noted in the collation at 10, 15, 78, 171, and 259.
A special difficulty is presented by the Welsh place-names, many of which Jonson either checked in, or carried across from, Camden’s Britannia. As a consequence, when Camden erred, so did Jonson; hence the Welshmen speak of ‘Talgar’ rather than ‘Talgarth’, and ‘Aberhodney’ rather than ‘Aberhonddu’. It has been felt inappropriate to correct these aspects of Jonson’s text, since, in important if unconscious ways, Jonson wished the names to follow the authority of his source. Moreover, if one gives modern equivalents of the place-names – as would normally be the case in a modern-spelling text – some of the masque’s verbal games with etymology and Welshness are lost; as most of the names are supplied by Jonson in anglicized forms. At the risk of inconsistency, then, the names are only conservatively modernized. Semantically insignificant aspects of the orthography have been adjusted (such as variations in spelling the Welsh name for Snowdon, which appears as both ‘Craig Eryri’ and ‘Craig Eriri’) and printer’s errors are corrected (as at 144, ‘Abes hodney’ for ‘Aber hodney’), but the evidence of Jonson’s own errors, preferences, and indebtedness is allowed to stand.
No less problematic are the speeches which represent English spoken with a Welsh emphasis. Jonson’s characters use a word-order that is idiomatic in Welsh but sounds non-standard to English ears. They substitute the pronouns ‘it’ for ‘his’ and ‘him’ for ‘it’, use plural forms for singular nouns, and add the suffix ‘-ly’ to adjectives. And they use characteristic dialect pronunciations, substituting ‘p’ for ‘b’, ‘t’ for ‘d’, ‘g’ for ‘k’, ‘-ow’ for ‘-ou’, ‘-au-’ for ‘-a-’ or ‘-al-’, ‘-i-’ or ‘-y-’ for ‘-u-’, ‘sh-’ for ‘s-’, and ‘s-’ for ‘sh-’: examples include ‘Pritain’, ‘gread’, ‘loog’, ‘yow’, ‘tauk’, ‘pyt’, and ‘s’eep’. However, although this dialect speech predominates, it is not comprehensively carried through in the text, and many inconsistencies exist, particularly in marking pronunciation. For some frequently repeated words, the dialect pronunciation is regularly used: for example, ‘s’all’ (twenty-one instances), ‘tauk’ (ten instances), and ‘liddle’ (five instances) are consistently used in place of ‘shall’, ‘talk’ and ‘little’. With ‘aull’ and ‘caull’, the Welsh pronunciation is again strongly predominant: there are thirty-four instances of ‘aull’ against only three of ‘all’, and nine instances of ‘caull’ to two of ‘call’ (plus five appearances of ‘haull’ but none of ‘hall’). These are the strongest markers of Welsh pronunciation. But with other words, the count is more ambiguous. The similar words ‘cyme’ or ‘cympany’ are used seven times, but ‘come’ and ‘company’ occur in seventeen instances; ‘Got’ appears thirteen times, but becomes ‘God’ on eight occasions; ‘pyt’ has seven occurrences, but ‘put’ has four; ‘gread’ has four and ‘great’ six; ‘Priton’ appears five times but ‘Briton’ or ‘British’ also occurs five times (and ‘Brut’ once); and there are two occurrences each of ‘oord’ and ‘word’ and ‘marg’ and ‘mark’, and four each of ‘loog’ and ‘look’. Perhaps most striking of all, the distinctive word ‘yow’ is used thirty-four times, but ‘you’ appears in thirty-nine further instances. There is also some inconsistency in the marking of elisions: for example, ‘ursip’ appears three times with an apostrophe and ten times without.
It is difficult to know how consistent Jonson himself was in marking the Welsh speech. Possibly many of the variations were produced by the compositors, who may have failed to follow the precise spellings of the manuscript, but some of the variations are manifestly not the result of compositorial preference: for example, alternations between ‘you’ and ‘yow’ not infrequently occur side by side in the same speech. It is equally possible that some of the shortfall was due to Jonson himself – not only because of the uncertainty over ‘Briton/Priton’, which is, of course, one of the text’s most sensitive political terms, but because of the very significant variation between the forms of the most common word ‘you’. Similar inconsistencies are evident in the Scottish and Irish dialect in Bartholomew Fair. Some editors have sought to impose a consistency on the Welshmen which the text lacks. H&S change ‘Britain’ to ‘Pritain’, and alter virtually all occurrences of ‘you’ to ‘yow’ (though deliberately not that at 336, while they accidentally overlook those at 211 and 264). Conversely, the tendency of Orgel’s edition is to allow English pronunciations to recover some of their precedence over Welsh, for ‘taulk’, ‘caull’ and ‘haull’ are standardized to ‘talk’, ‘call’, and ‘hall’, and many of the text’s apostrophes are removed. The view of the Cambridge edition is that the inconsistencies are so entrenched that any attempt to standardize in one direction or the other creates more problems than it solves, and that the text is best served by allowing them to remain and speak for themselves. Accordingly, modernizations of orthography that would be uncontentious in English words have been allowed – thus ‘byssinesse’ becomes ‘bysiness’, ‘ursippe’ becomes ‘ursip’, ‘liddell’ becomes ‘liddle’, and ‘then’ becomes ‘than’ – but all other substituted vowels and consonants that function as markers of Welsh speech are retained as they stand in F2. The edition further assumes that ‘Madestee’ should similarly be modernized to ‘Madesty’, though it is conceivable that the ‘-ee’ ending was intended as another indication of an upward lilt in the Welshmen’s voices.
The manifold spelling inconsistencies throughout the masque make it hard to distinguish between possible compositorial stints. However, the appearance of the unusual capitalized form ‘Ursip’ four times on F2v may tentatively be a sign that a different hand was setting this page than the compositor who had consistently set lower-case ‘ursip’ eight times on E3v, E4, and F1v. Five pages of the text contain variants, which, given the relative paucity of corrections in F2(3), makes this one of the volume’s most carefully proofed texts. Conceivably this was because the Welsh language passages meant the masque was especially difficult to set accurately and needed closer oversight, though, strikingly, no corrections are made to any of the Welsh passages.
| E3v (30) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 5 | before | before, |
state 1: 5, 26
state 2: all other copies
| E4r (31) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 47 | reason in you? | reason in you. |
state 1: 14, 26, 32
state 2: all other copies
| E4v (32) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 33 | ot | to |
state 1: 9, 41, 42
state 2: all other copies
| F1r (33) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 6 | cannow | can now |
| 29 | muisiques | musiques |
state 1: 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 31, 41
state 2: all other copies
| F2v (36) | state 1 | state 2 |
| 5 | ot | of |
state 1: [reported in H&S, in a copy called the ‘press-copy’; not found by this editor]
state 2: all copies inspected
In 1645 the long song was printed in the third edition of Sir John Mennes’s Wit’s Recreation (renamed in that issue Recreation for Ingenious Headpieces), sigs. Y4v-6r, under the title The Welshman’s Praise of Wales. The text is derived from the folio, though the final verse is omitted and the following changes were made to consolidate its supposedly Welsh idiom:
175 Brut] Prut
176 his] hur
178 aull this] full a
183 In which we’ll] For hur will
185 glad] clad
191 goats] Coats
194 Hereford] Herford
194 By Got] Py Cot
198 never] uver
199 e’er] or
206 o’] on
213 hook or] Club, and
218 cab] Cap
235 in s’eere] in the Seer of
238 him] hur
Outside the collected editions, For the Honour of Wales has also appeared in The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of James I, ed. John Nichols (1828) ; Ben Jonson: Masques and Entertainments, ed. Henry Morley (1890) ; Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (1969) ; and Inigo Jones; The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (1973) .
The following copies of F2 have been collated for this edition:
1. Boston Public Library, **G.3811.8 (Sir Lister Holte copy)
2. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Fol 1640 JON
3. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt q JON
4. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 1
5. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 2
6. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 3
7. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 4
8. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 5
9. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 6
10. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 1
11. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 2
12. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62101-v.2
13. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62103
14. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 495468 (Schlatter-Shaver copy)
15. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 600688
16. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 606598
17. Houghton Library, Harvard University, fSTC 14751 v.2 (Norton Perkins copy)
18. Houghton Library, Harvard University, HEW 6.10.10. v.2 (Widener copy)
19. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1616a copy 2 [a copy of F2, notwithstanding the call number]
20. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 2
21. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 3
22. New York Public Library, *KC 1640
23. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Vet.A2 d. 73
24. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 520
25. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Don. d. 66
26. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce I.303
27. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 518
28. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (Furness-Schelling copy)
29. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (RBC copy)
30. University of Pennsylvania, PR2600 C40 v.2 (Edwin Forrest copy)
31. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pforz. 560
32. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600
1640 vol. 1, copy 1, Stark 5433
33. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600
1640 vol. 2, copy 2, Woodward-Ruth 1
34. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Wh J738
+B641
35. Clark Library, Los Angeles, *F PR2600 1640c
36. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 1 (C. W. Bradley copy)
37. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 2
38. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640B (Morris Tyler copy)
39. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1977+424 (John Milton Boardman copy)
40. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1978+47 (Norman Holmes Peason copy)
41. David Gants copy
42. Martin Butler copy