General title-page

[within double rules: 190 x 320mm] THE | WORKS | OF | BEN JONSON, | Which were formerly Printed in Two Volumes, | are now Reprinted in One. | To which is added | A COMEDY, | CALLED THE | NEW INN. | [single rule: 175mm] | With Additions never before Published. | [single rule: 175mm] | –neque, me ut miretur turba laboro: | Contentus paucis lectoribus. | [single rule: 175mm] | [four printer’s ornaments: crowned rose (McKerrow 396, var. ), crowned thistle, crowned fleur-de-lis and crowned harp (McKerrow 398, var. )] | [single rule: 175mm] | LONDON, | Printed by Thomas Hodgkin, for H. Herringman, E. Brewster, | T. Bassett, R. Chiswell, M. Wotton, G. Conyers, M DC XCII.

Collation

Wing J1006

2^o: A⁶ B-2L⁴ 2O-3B⁴ 3C² 3E-5B⁴ 5C ²

[$2 signed (+A3, -G1), missigning R2 as “R”, 4Z1 as “5A”]

366 leaves, paged i-xii, 1-264, 281-380, 393-748, misnumbering 228-29 as 218-19, 369-70 as 371-72, 375-80 as 377-82, 412 as 406, 413 as 403, 540-41 as 538-39, 699 as 669

CONTENTS: A1r: blank; A1v: frontispiece; A2r: general title-page; A2v: blank; A3r: ‘THE | CATALOGUE’; A3v: commendatory verses; A5v: blank; A6r: EMI; E2r: EMO; I3r: Cynthia; N4r: Poet.; R3r: Sej.; X1r: Volp.; 2A3r: Epicene; 2E1r: Alch.; 2H3r: Cat.; 2O1r: Epigr.; 2Q1r: Forest; 2Q4v: King’s Ent.; 2R4v: Panegyre; 2S1v: Althorp; 2S3r: Highgate; 2S4v: Two Kings; 2T1r: Theobalds; 2T2r: Blackness; 2T4r: Beauty; 2U2r: Hym.; 2X2v: Haddington; 2Y1r: Queens; 2Z2r: Barriers; 2Z4r: Oberon; 3A2v: Love Freed; 3A4v: Love Rest.; 3B1v: Challenge; 3B3r: Irish; 3B4r: Merc. Vind.; 3C1v: Gold. Age; 3E1r: Bart. Fair; 3I3r: Staple; 3N1r: Devil; 3Q3r: Mag. Lady; 3T3r: Tub; 3Y3r: Sad Shep.; 4A1r: Und.; 4F1r: Welbeck; 4F3r: Bolsover; 4F4r: Mort.; 4G1v: Christmas; 4G3r: Lovers MM; 4G4v: Vision; 4H2r: Pleasure Rec.; 4H3v: Wales; 4I1v: News NW; 4I3v: Gypsies; 4L2r: Augurs; 4L4v: Time Vind.; 4M3r: Neptune; 4N1v: Pan’s Ann.; 4N3r: Owls; 4N4r: Fort. Isles; 4O3r: Love’s Tr.; 4O4v: Chloridia; 4P2v: Horace 2; 4Q3v: Grammar; 4T2v: Discoveries; 4Z1r: New Inn; 5C1r: Leg. Conv.

ORNAMENTS: McKerrow (1913) notes that 396 (the crowned rose) belonged to ‘a set which included the crowned harp (No.398), a crowned thistle, and a crowned fleur-de-lis’. The set used here is larger than and varies the set illustrated by McKerrow but is clearly descended from it.

Discussion

In May 1692, The Gentleman’s Journal reported that ‘The Works of Ben. Johnson, which were formerly printed in two Volumes, are now reprinted in one; to which is added a Comedy of his, call’d, The New Inn, and some other pieces’ (The Gentleman’s Journal, May 1692, 25; Greg, Bibliography, 3.1082 )^. In the following month, the Trinity Term Catalogue listed Jonson’s Works among those newly ‘REPRINTED’, adding to the text of the advertisement printed in The Gentleman’s Journal that these Works contained ‘other additions never before published’ and the information that this ‘Folio’ was ‘Printed by Tho. Hodgkin; and sold by most Booksellers in London’ (Arber, Term Catalogues, 2.414 ). This publication represented the completion of a project (in their phrase) ‘designed by’ and announced over the names of John Martyn, Henry Herringman, and Richard Mariot, the three publishers in 1679 of Fifty Comedies and Tragedies Written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher:

If our care and endeavours to do our Authors right (in an incorrupt and genuine Edition of their Works) and thereby to gratifie and oblige the Reader, be but requited with a suitable entertainment, we shall be encourag’d to bring Ben. Johnson’s two Volumes into one, and publish them in this form; and also to reprint Old Shakespear:

(Beaumont and Fletcher, 1679; italic/roman reversed)

Of the three publishers behind the 1679 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher only one, Henry Herringman, is in fact is named in the imprint of the third folio edition of Jonson’s Works, printed in London in 1692; Marriot and Martin were both dead (Plomer, 1907, 122, 123).

Henry Herringman had owned the copies in the third volume of Jonson’s works since 19 August 1667, when they were entered to him, as was recorded in the Stationers’ Register, ‘by vertue of an Assingment under the hand and seale of ANN MOSELEY widowe executrix of the last will and Testamt of Humfrey Moseley late Citizen and Stacioner of London’. Transferred to Herringman in that entry were ‘all the estate, right and tytle which shee the said Ann Moseley hath of in and to’ the following of Jonson’s works:

a Booke or copie intituled Ben: Johnsons Workes 3^d Volume. Conteyning 15 Maskes: Horrace Art of Poetry in English; English Grammar; Tymber and discoveries; Underwoods, consisting of poems; The Magnetick Lady; A Tale of a Tubb; The sadd Shepheard, or a Tale of Robyn Hood, with Mortimers Fall; The Divells an Asse, a comedy; The Widow, a comedy[.]    ( SR, 2.380-81 )

The entry, costing the standard ‘vj^d’ established Herringman’s rights to a literary property that had earlier been entered to Thomas Walkley on 17 September 1658, and assigned by Walkley to Humphrey Moseley on 20 November 1658 ( SR 2.196, 206 ). The full history of the rights to copy in Jonson’s works through the seventeenth century has yet to be written, and is in many details still obscure, but it is possible to see Herringman and his syndicate gathering together those texts not included in the 1667 assignment from Ann Moseley (guidance offered by Dawson, 1946 , Belanger, 1975 , Mandelbrote, 1997 ). The means, direct or indirect, by which the rights to Poetaster (for instance) were acquired are not clear: the play was entered to Master James Young on 22 July 1644, but is not mentioned again in the Stationers’ Register following this entry. Neither is it clear how Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News – the other plays from the 1631 folio besides The Devil is an Ass – were transferred to Herringman and his syndicate. When Herringman finally transferred his copies to Jacob Tonson II on 11 September 1707 they included ‘all that second part of the Copy of a Book intituled the Works of Ben: Jonson’ (Bodleian Library MS Charters Surrey c.1 (84)).

It seems likely that alongside the rights to copy in Jonson’s works he acquired in 1667, Herringman also obtained the remaining stock of Walkley’s folio Works of 1640-41 (Giddens, 2003 ), some of which at least had survived the fire of London and were still unsold when they were advertised by him in 1668 and 1679. (Miller, 1948, 301 , notes that Herringman’s shop in the New Exchange in the Strand escaped the fire of 1666.) In 1668, the year after the transfer of Ann Moseley’s copies to Herringman, The Ephesian and Cimmerian Matrons by Walter Charleton carried an advertisement for ‘Some books printed for Henry Herringman’ that included, among others listed under ‘Folio’s’, ‘Ben. Johnson’s second volume’ (Charleton, Matrons, sig. N1v ; The Widow, at that time attributed to Jonson, and which had been transferred to Herringman in 1667, was also listed (sig.N3v)). In 1679, an English translation of Marie Villedieu’s The Unfortunate Heroes advertised ‘Ben. Johnson’s second Volume’ among ‘Books Printed for Henry Herringman’. These advertisements, as well as signalling the continued presence in Herringman’s stock of unsold copies of the 1640/41 Works , suggest a further aspect of their outdated format when seen against the contemporary trends in format and publication developing at this time. Humphrey Moseley had in the 1650s published octavo collections of the plays of Brome, Shirley, Massinger, and Middleton, an innovation that anticipated the turn to octavo collections at the start of the eighteenth century (Kewes, 1995 ). Moseley’s innovation, however, was short-lived, and following the fashion of folio publication taken up again in the 1660s, the page-size of such folio collections grew and grew. By 1679, Jonson’s folio Works of 1640/41 were listed as a ‘Small Folio’, while, for instance, Martyn, Herringman, and Mariot’s Beaumont and Fletcher Fifty Comedies and Tragedies, published in 1679, was listed as a ‘Folio, Large’. This shift in scale, which is further seen clearly in the height of the 1692 Jonson Works, emphasises the extent to which the reprinting of Jonson’s works after his death was as much influenced by the economics and development of the book-trade and its practices as by the changing shifts in literary taste and prominence (Pollard, 1941-2 ).

Who were the members of the syndicate that reprinted Jonson in 1692? Henry Herringman, the first publisher named in the imprint of the 1692 Works, had been a freed member of the Stationers’ Company since August 1652. Forty years later, in 1692, he was one of the major players in the London book-trade, both as a bookseller and publisher (Miller, 1948 ). After 1678, Herringman turned from the publication of contemporary texts to the profitable republication of older texts, rights to whose copy he had acquired, among which were collected editions of Beaumont and Fletcher (1679), Shakespeare (the fourth folio, 1685), and Jonson (Hammond, 2002, 390-1 ). Herringman’s partners in the syndicate behind the third Jonson folio – Edward Brewster, Thomas Bassett, Richard Chiswell, Matthew Wotton, and George Conyers – represented the collaboration of two generations of the London book-trade. Like Herringman, Brewster and Bassett had both been freed from their apprenticeships in the 1650s, Brewster by patrimony in December 1653 and Bassett in March 1657. Bassett’s apprenticeship to Ellen Brewster perhaps suggests a closer connection and acquaintance between the two men than simple business necessity (McKenzie, 1974, pp.111, 20 ). Chiswell, Wotton, and Conyers were younger men. Chiswell had been admitted to the freedom of the company in November 1678, ‘Gratis’; Wotton was freed in March 1685; and Conyers, the most junior of the publishers, had first been bound to James Collins but was turned over to John Wright, on whose death he paid 2s 6d for his freedom in February 1686 (McKenzie, 1974, 2, 72, 35, 185 ). This publishing syndicate, then, located Jonson’s texts in the ongoing business of the London book trades.

Thomas Hodgkin (or Hodgkins), the printer of the 1692 Works, was closer in age to the older members of the syndicate than the younger. Freed as a member of the Stationers’ Company in January 1662, Hodgkin (as ‘Hodkins Tho:’) was listed among about fifty-four other master printers in a document probably drawn up following the reimposition of the Licensing Act on 13 March 1685. He is recorded as working ‘neere ye Dolphin Inn in Smithfeild’, and owning three presses (McKenzie, 1974, 81 ; Treadwell, 1982 ). Greg argued, from the breaks in the register and pagination of volume, that the Works had been printed ‘in three sections simultaneously and that the space required for the first and second was over-estimated’. In fact, though Greg was right about concurrent printing, it is more useful to see that Hodgkin printed the 1692 Works in five concurrent sections rather than Greg’s three, recognising the volume’s prefatory material and the Leges Convivales as independent sections marked out by their format (on the one hand, a folio gathering in six rather than the volume’s predominant folio-in-fours; on the other, a single-sheet bifolium) and also by their content. The volume’s contents (as the collation above indicates) therefore can be sorted as follows: the prefatory material (gathering A⁶); the plays from the 1616 folio (gatherings B-2L⁴); the poems and masques from the 1616 folio (gatherings 2O-3B⁴ 3C²); the plays and masques from the folios of 1631 and 1640-41 , together with The New Inn, reprinted from the 1631 octavo (gatherings 3E-5B⁴); and the Leges Convivales (gathering 5C ², in fact without a publisher named in the imprint). The agreement between the bibliographic units of the 1692 Works and the material they reprint clearly indicates that the elements of the copy for the 1692 Works were never rationalized so that (for instance) a consolidated run of plays would be followed by a consolidated run of masques. Rather than re-present and reorder the canon of Jonson’s works, this volume was intended simply ‘to bring Ben. Johnson’s two Volumes into one’ as its publishers had all along announced.

Printer’s copy for the folio of 1692 was predominantly taken directly from the earlier folio of 1640/1. The copy of The Devil is an Ass used by Hodgkin’s compositors contained uncorrected states of sigs P2^r and P3^v, and the copy of the 1631 octavo New Inn similarly contained an uncorrected inner forme of gathering C, whose readings persist in the text of the third folio. The English Grammar was extensively rewritten by an unknown, modernising hand (see Grammar, Textual Essay). Hodgkin’s major innovation in the presentation of Jonson’s texts was to bring the printed page of his Works into line with those of Shakespeare and of Beaumont and Fletcher, with whom he constituted for Restoration readers the ‘triumvirate of wit’. The third Jonson folio is the first of his printed collections to employ two columns of typography per page, set by Hodgkin’s compositors predominantly in pica roman with a capital height of 3mm and an x-height of 2mm (by Gaskell’s conventions, ‘Body 82. Face 80 x 2.0: 3.0’). This departure from the spacious single-columned format established by the 1616 Workes was made possible partly by the increased size of the paper sheets used by Hodgkin’s printing house. Even trimmed copies of the 1692 Works have pages measuring upwards of 360x225mm, indicating a sheet size in line with Crown paper, commonly 485x370mm (Gaskell, 1995, 74). Hodgkin’s preferred format for folio printing was the folio-in fours: his edition of William Cave, Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Historia Literaria (Wing C1602), printed in two volumes dated 1688 and 1698, consistently adopts this format, as does the folio edition of Paradise Lost he printed for Jacob Tonson in 1695 (Wing M2151, collected in Wing M2163).

The only peculiarity affecting Hodgkin’s work on the 1692 Works is that the single sheets 2Z2.3 and 3C are discoloured in all copies encountered, without apparent explanation. 2Z2.3, the inner sheet of gathering 2Z⁴, contains the complete texts of The Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers, and perhaps, since it represents an entire textual as well as bibliographic unit, might represent a resetting of a (now lost) earlier setting of this entertainment. Sheet 3C, however, which contains the closing speeches of Mercury Vindicated as well as the complete text of The Golden Age Restored, is neither so textually nor so bibliographically detachable. Headline evidence – a broken left-hand head rule on the inner forme of sheet 2Z2.3 (SZ2v) and sheet 3C1.2 (3C1v) – does connect these two discoloured sheets, but the head rule can in fact be seen progressively breaking as it appears between them on the inner and outer formes of sheet 3A1.4 (sigs 3A1v and 3A4v). There is as much typographical evidence to suggest that these gatherings were set seriatim, then, as there is evidence from their paper to suggest that resetting might have taken place. On the other hand, at least two bibliographical units gathered in the Works might have been available for separate purchase. The title-page to the Leges Convivales, naming only ‘Tho. Basset’ as their publisher, may indicate that they were separately available for purchase (and possibly display) as a single bifolium, and Bassett’s shop, ‘at the George near S t . Dunstans Church in Fleet Street’, is certainly named as the location where copies the volume’s frontispiece, an idealized portrait of Jonson by William Elder, were separately for sale. But no separate copies of such a sociable text as the Leges are now known to survive if, in fact, this were the case.