General title-page

THE | WORKS | OF | BEN JONSON, | IN NINE VOLUMES. | WITH NOTES CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY, | AND A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR, | BY W. GIFFORD, ESQ. | [single rule, 20mm] | The Muses’ fairest light in no dark time; | The wonder of a learned age; the line | Which none can pass; the most proportion’d wit, | To nature, the best judge of what was fit; | The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; | The voice most echo’d by consenting men; | THE SOUL WHICH ANSWER’D BEST TO ALL WELL SAID | BY OTHERS, AND WHICH MOST REQUITAL MADE. | CLEVELAND. | [single rule, 20mm] | VOLUME THE FIRST. | CONTAINING | MEMOIRS OF JONSON, &c. | EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR. | LONDON: | [thin-thick double rule, 23mm] | PRINTED FOR G. AND W. NICOL; F. C. AND J. RIVINGTON; CADELL | AND DAVIES; LONGMAN AND CO.; LACKINGTON AND CO. | R. H. EVANS; J. MURRAY; J. MAWMAN; J. CUTHELL; J. BLACK; | BALDWIN AND CO.; RODWELL AND MARTIN; AND R. SAUNDERS; | By W. Bulmer and Co. Cleveland-row, St. James’s. | [single rule, 12mm] | 1816.

Collation by volume

Volume 1

8⁰: π⁴ a-z⁸ B-L⁶

[a-z $1-2 signed (-q2, y2); B-L $1 signed]

266 leaves, paged i-viii, i-ccclxii, 1-162, misnumbering xxxvii as ‘xxxv’, cccxxxi as ‘cccxxx’, and (in some copies only) 50 as ‘60’.

CONTENTS π1^r: general title-page; π1^v: blank; π2^r: dedication; π2^v: blank; a1r: ‘MEMOIRS OF BEN JONSON’; q5r: ‘PROOFS OF BEN JONSON’S MALIGNITY, FROM THE COMMENTATORS ON SHAKSPEARE’; t3r: ‘CHARACTERS OF JONSON’; u3r: ‘ANCIENT COMMENDATORY VERSES ON JONSON’; z3r: ‘PORTRAITS OF JONSON’; z5v: ‘ERRATA’; z6r: EMI.

Volume 2

8⁰: A ² B² C-D⁸ (+D3) E-2N⁸ O²

[$1 signed]

278 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-552.

CONTENTS B1r: EMO; Q2r: Cynthia; 2C7r: Poet.

NOTES +D3 is cancellans with press figure ‘2’ at foot of recto (p.25)

Volume 3

8⁰: A ² B⁶ C-R⁸ (+R3.4) S-2I⁸ K⁴

[$1 signed]

252 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-500.

CONTENTS B1r: Sej.; M2r: Volp.; Z2r: Epicene.

NOTES R3.4 is cancellans bifolium with press figure ‘3’ on both recto leaves.

Volume 4

8⁰: A ⁴ B⁴ C-2A⁸ (-6, +7.8) 2B-2L⁸ (+2L5) 2M⁸ 2N⁴

[$1-2 signed (-D2, I2)]

276 leaves, paged i-viii, 1- 544.

CONTENTS B1r: Alch.; O5r: Cat.; 2A7r: Bart. Fair.

NOTES 2A+7.8 a cancellans bifolium with press-figure ‘4’ on 2A+7r; +2L5 is cancellans (not noted by H&S) again with press-figure ‘4’; the second cancellans can be dated by a reference to Henry Weber’s 1811 edition of John Ford .

Volume 5

8⁰: A ² B-S⁸ (+S7.8) T-2F⁸ 2G⁴

[$1-2 signed]

230 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-456

CONTENTS B1r: Devil; L8r: Staple; X5r: New Inn.

NOTES +S7.8 is an unnumbered cancellans

Volume 6

8⁰: A ² B-T⁸ (+T3) U-2K⁸ L²

[$1-2 signed (-M2, X2, 2H2, 2L2)]

260 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-516.

CONTENTS B1r: Mag. Lady; K1r: Tub; R2r: Sad Shep.; X3r: Mort.; X8r: Case; 2E5r: King’s Ent.; 2G7r: Panegyre; 2H2r: Althorp; 2I3r: Highgate; 2K2r: Two Kings; 2K5r: Theobalds.

NOTES +T3 is cancellans ‘6’; the text of the cancellandum is preserved in a manuscript transcript by F. G. Waldron (see Lockwood (2002), 410 n.47). sig.2E4r has half-title ‘ENTERTAINMENTS’; Althorp is called The Satyr by Gifford (2H2r); Highgate is called The Penates (2I3r)

Volume 7

8⁰: A ² B-C⁸ (+C8) D⁸ (+D6) E-2F⁸

[$1-2 signed (-I2, N2, P2)]

226 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-448.

CONTENTS B2r: Blackness; C4r: Beauty; D7r: Hym.; H7r: Haddington; I1r: Queens; L8r: Barriers; N2r: Oberon; O3r: Love Freed; P2r: Love Rest.; Q1r: Challenge; Q6r: Irish; R3r: Merc. Vind.; S2r: Gold. Age; S8r: Christmas; T8r: Lovers MM; U5r: Vision; X5r: Pleasure Rec.; Y5r: Wales; Z7r: News NW; 2A7r: Gypsies; E5r: Augurs.

NOTES B1r: half-title (‘MASQUES AT COURT’); +C8 is cancellans marked ‘7’; the same press figure is present on +D6 (neither noted by H&S). Haddington is called The Hue and Cry After Cupid (H7r); Lovers MM is called The Masque of Lethe (T8r)

Volume 8

8⁰: A ² B-2G⁸

[$1-2 signed (-K2, R2, 2E2)]

234 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-464.

CONTENTS B1r: Time Vind.; C3r: Neptune; D5r: Pan’s Ann.; E3r: Owls; E8r: Fort. Isles; G4r: Love’s Tr.; H2r: Chloridia; I2v: Expost.; I4v: Sir Inigo; I5r: Inigo Marq.; I6r: Welbeck; K6r: Bolsover; L3r: Epigr.; R5r: Forest; U2r: Und.

Volume 9

8⁰: A ² B-2E⁸ 2F⁴ 2G².

[$1-2 signed]

224 leaves, paged i-iv, 1-444.

CONTENTS B1r: Und. (cont.); G1r: Leges; G5r: Horace; L3r: Disoveries; R7r: Grammar; Z6r: Jonsonus Virbius; 2E3r: ‘GLOSSORIAL INDEX’.

NOTES Horace forms part of Jonson’s ‘TRANSLATIONS FROM THE LATIN POETS’, a category first thus marked by Gifford (sigs G5r-L2r); after Jonson’s translation of the Ars Poetica, the section contains translations of Horace’s Odes 1.4 (‘Venus, again thou mov’st a war’) and 9.3 (‘Whilst, Lydia, I was lov’d of thee’), the ‘Fragment of Petron. Arbiter Translated’ (‘Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short’), and Martial’s Epigram 8.77 (‘Liber, of all thy friends, thou sweetest care’).

Discussion

Two-hundred years after the publication of the first folio, William Gifford’s edition of Jonson’s Works was published in August 1816. The Works as edited by Gifford and printed by William Bulmer looked very different from the Workes as collected by Jonson and printed by William Stansby. Rather than a single folio volume, the 1816 Works occupied nine tall octavo volumes; rather than a text conscious of a classical heritage in its spellings, mise-en-page, and scene division, the 1816 Works presented a text that aggressively modernized spelling, typography, and supporting textual and paratextual apparatus; and rather than include (as Jonson had) a selection of texts marked as much by exclusion as inclusion, the 1816 Works re-ordered existing material and included newly attributed pieces wherever it could. Gifford followed Peter Whalley’s edtion of 1756 in printing Jonson’s texts as grouped by genre rather than by the order inherited by the 1692 folio from the Workes of 1616 and 1640/1 . So too, he printed for the first time many of the poems not collected in Jonson’s lifetime or the posthumous editions, some inserted in the body of The Underwood and others, notably the exchange with Inigo Jones, disposed among the masques. Gifford’s Jonson, hugely influential in its own time, became the Jonson for the nineteenth century. The edition had enormous force in shaping Jonson’s critical and political reputation in the years following its publication, and remained the text from which subsequent complete editions were derived until the appearance of volume 11 of H&S in 1952 . A larger account of the making and reception of Gifford’s edition is offered in Lockwood (2005) , on which the following paragraphs draw and complement with greater bibliographical detail.

A syndicate of thirteen publishing houses, led by the brothers G. and W. Nicol, financed the editing and printing of the 1816 Works. Publication accounts dated 12 August 1816 in the Longman Impression Books (now, along with the firm’s archives, at the University of Reading) show that the syndicate divided the edition into thirty-two shares as follows: ‘Evans 1/8; Cadell 1/8; Nicol 1/8; Mawman 1/8; Rivingtons 1/16; Lackington 1/16; Baldwin 1/16 1/32; Murray 1/32; Rodwell 1/32; Cuthall 1/32; Saunders 1/32; Black 1/32’; the final 1/8 share was Longman’s own (Longman Impression Book 6, lineation and punctuation modernized). M. and T. Longman, earlier partners in the firm of Longman and Co. (as it was in 1816), had formed part of the publication syndicate that had financed Peter Whalley’s 1756 edition of Jonson’s Works. Here, though, as in many other respects for Jonson, the full means by which rights to Jonson’s copies were transmitted through and exchanged among the book trades and the Stationers’ Company, are unknown. The larger mechanisms behind the construction of the 1816 publication syndicate await further study.

The publication accounts show that the edition consisted of 1000 copies printed on demy paper, and 250 on royal paper, at a total cost of £3421. This sum included figures of £1253.6.0 for composition and printing, £1103.9.0 and £394.18.10 respectively for the purchase of demy and royal paper, and a payment of £450 to Gifford (he also was the beneficiary of £1.19.0 spent on ‘Boarding Copies for Editor’, £0.12.0 for ‘Interleaving, single plays’, and presumably some of the £3.0.0 spent on ‘Meetings’). Smaller payments – £4.4.0 to Behnes who drew the portrait of Jonson, for instance, and £31.10.0 to Fittler, who engraved it – fill out the balance of these accounts. Sets of the edition were sold at £6.6.0 on demy paper and at £9.0.0 on royal. Within a decade and a half, sets were available on the second-hand market for a third of this price (one copy, now in the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, Cole Ih J738 B816 1, was bought at Grant & Briton’s in London on ‘Feb^ry. 24 – 1830’ for £2.2.0). Copies of the engraved frontispiece were also sold separately by R. H. Evans. They show a publication date of 9 July 1816, slightly ahead of the volumes they accompany.

The 1816 Works were printed for the syndicate of publishers by William Bulmer, with whose printing house Gifford had himself a long association (Isaac 1993). Bulmer’s printing house produced the volumes of Gifford’s edition across a period of some six years from mid-1810 until August 1816. Gifford supplied the completed copy for each volume in sequence, save for the prefatory material to volume 1 which was the last part of the editorial matter to be completed, and the last part of the edition to be printed. Generally, the standard of Bulmer’s printing and typography was high. Those material mistakes the edition contains have usually been attributed to Gifford, following the blame directed in his direction by Peter Cunningham, who commented in 1875 on some of the confusions that impair the later volumes of the edition. Cunningham wrote that the editor had supplied his printer ‘with materials in the most mangled and confused condition’ (Cunningham, 1875, 9.323) . In fact, Gifford supplied Bulmer with two distinct types of copy: the text of the edition was set up from an annotated copy of Peter Whalley’s 1756 edition, while the editorial matter, particularly for the first volume, was supplied on foolscap manuscript leaves. The few surviving sections of printers’ copy in Gifford’s hand confirm Cunningham’s assessment of material supplied by Gifford to the print-shop in a less-than tidy state. Written in Gifford’s right-slanting scrawl, they are interlined, annotated, and scattered with additional notes. (Two uncatalogued fragments are bound in National Art Library, Dyce Tall 8^o 5342. It is possible that they represent only a fraction of a larger collection of material once in Dyce’s possession.)

The largest confusion in the supply of material to Bulmer’s presses – the disturbance to the sequence of The Underwood across volumes 8 and 9 – is discussed below. More local evidence of physical adjustments made during the printing of the edition is offered by the presence of at least eight cancellans across the nine volumes. Rather than being numbered in sequence, as is implied by H&S 9.143 , the survival of more cancellans than previously noted proves that they were in fact numbered by reference to the volume in which they were to be bound (details are given in the collation above). Further errata are indicated by a printed list at 1.ccclxii. The text of one cancellandum was transcribed in manuscript by F. G. Waldron, along with Gifford’s perhaps self-serving identification of the print-shop as the culprit rather than the editor (see Lockwood 2002, 410 n.47 ). The printed copy from which Jonson’s text was set apparently does not survive, although Gifford came into possession, via Nicol or F.G. Waldron, of the materials gathered by Whalley towards a never-realized second edition of his 1756 Works. Bulmer’s compositors nonetheless worked from a set of Whalley’s edition, which had been collated by Gifford (and presumably marked up) against earlier quarto and folio texts of Jonson. Gifford made use, too, of manuscript witnesses to Jonson’s text, although this, like his use of contemporary quarto and folio texts, was unsystematic, conditioned more by availability than any larger conceptions of textual theory. He was the first editor to draw on British Library MS Harley 4955, the ‘Newcastle Manuscript’, as well as what is now Huntington Library MS HM 741, a manuscript of The Gypsies Metamorphosed, that was at the time owned by Gifford’s friend Richard Heber.

At the Quarterly Review, Gifford developed a reputation as an interventionist editor, adjusting and rewriting copy with little delicacy for the feelings of his contributors (Shine and Shine, 1949 ; Cutmore, 1991 , 1994 ). His approach to Jonson’s text was less carefree, but his commitment to a modernized text – in spelling, punctuation, and sometimes phrasing – is in some ways similarly energetic (1816, 1.ccxxxix-ccxliii). Gifford’s text was set up from the text of Peter Whalley’s edition, although its readings were collated against early editions in quarto and folio. In dealing with printed texts for which both quarto and folio witnesses survive, Gifford tended to sort eclectically between variants, following first one and then another copy-text without apparent principle. The first footnote to the first scene of Every Man In – the first play printed in the edition – states this principle with brutal economy: ‘It signifies little which is taken, though it may be just to note the variation’ (1816, 1.7). Further examples, not necessary to be repeated here, are discussed by H&S (9.143-5). This was a way of working that Gifford had adopted in his edition of Massinger (1805; a revised second edition was published in 1813), and on which he contentedly reflected in the prefatory material to the 1816 Works. ‘In the execution of this part of the work, the mode adopted in the revision of Massinger was carefully followed: if the approbation of the public may be trusted, no change was required’ (1816, 1.ccxxxix).

Perhaps the most difficult editorial challenge presented to Gifford by the materials at his disposal was the treatment of the Cavendish Christening Entertainment in British Library MS Harley 4955, the Newcastle manuscript. A closer examination of the ways in which Gifford responded to this manuscript text can give a clear example of the limits of his expertise in, and awareness of the diversity of, early modern texts. The Cavendish Entertainment was transcribed for Harley 4955 in the open italic hand of John Rolleston, secretary to the Earl of Newcastle, probably at some point between 1630 and 1634. Rolleston uses a bolder, larger italic to differentiate speech headings and editorial cues from the body of his text, separating dialogue from apparatus to consistent and clear effect, all within a spacious and elegant use of the page (Kelliher, 1993 , offers a full discussion). Nonetheless, Gifford struggled with the manuscript. At one level this is simply a matter of inclusion. Because, with Isaac D’Israeli’s help, he discovered the manuscript only after Jonson’s other masques and entertainments were already in print, Gifford prints the entertainment not centrally on the page but as a long footnote to his Und. 89, ‘An Epigram to William Earl of Newcastle, on his fencing’ (‘They talk of Fencing, and the use of arms’) in volume nine of the edition (1816, 9.17-27; Lockwood, 2005, 106-7 ). In keeping with his modernizing approach, Gifford offered not a diplomatic text of the entertainment but one that brought it into line with the orthography and layout adopted elsewhere in the 1816 Works. The Forester’s welcome as it is transcribed in the manuscript – ‘S^r, y’are welcome to y^e Forrest, you haue seene a battell vpon a table, now you see a huntinge’ – is modernized and its abbreviations expanded: ‘Sir,’ the Forester begins in Gifford, ‘you are welcome to the forest: you have seen a battle upon a table, now you see a hunting’ (9.19). Elsewhere, Gifford supplies role-descriptions for the entertainment’s speakers. ‘Dugges, Kecks, Holdbacke’ in the manuscript (fol.48) become ‘DUGGS, wet nurse; KECKS, dry nurse; and HOLDBACK, midwife’ (9.20). In the same place, Gifford also separates out onto new type-lines the manuscript’s run-on dialogue of the three women. Italic type later distinguishes the text of the ‘SONG’ from the prose body of the entertainment.

Gifford is not, however, always as sure in his editorial treatment of the manuscript. The awkwardness with which the late-arriving entertainment was accommodated to the physical space of Gifford’s page extends to the awkwardness of the entertainment’s subject matter: pregnancy, childbirth, and some ribald female joking. Gifford silently emends the gentle blasphemy of Holdback’s ‘Nowe God Multiplye your higness’ (fol.48r) to ‘Now heaven multiply your highness’ (9.20), but his real difficulty lies with the three women’s fecund vocabulary. Holdback’s forthright speech is much altered by Gifford, as one example demonstrates. The manuscript reads:

I and whether it be, y^e fleshe Mole, or the winde
Mole or y^e water mole. I thanke god, and our M^rs nature, shee is gods
Chambermayde, and y^e Midwife is hers; wee can examine the vi\r/ginitie, and
friggiditye, y^e sufficience, and Capability of y^e persons, by our places,
wee trye all y^e Conclusions. (Fol.50)

In Gifford’s text this is both modernized and expurgated:

Ay, and whether it be a wind or a water mole, I thank God, and our mistress Nature: she is God’s chambermaid, and the midwife is her’s. – We can examine the sufficiency and capability of persons by our places: we try all conclusions. (9.23)

Here the larger flaws that bear on Gifford’s treatment of the manuscript are in evidence in miniature. His frigid omissions here are of a piece with more subtle alterations later in the entertainment, where Kecks’s unembarrassed joke on Dugg’s sexuality – ‘how were my Ladye provided against your goinge to men’ (fol.50v) – is muted by Gifford’s alteration of ‘men’ to ‘man’ (9.24). Less subtle is Gifford’s omission entirely of what he describes as ‘a ridiculous Song describing a battle between the Nurses within’ (9.26), a song perhaps omitted not least for its troubling rhyme that / twat in lines 21-2 (fol. 52). Editorial principles are set within, and sometimes set against, principles of decorum in Gifford’s handling of the entertainment’s text. Of all the Jonsonian texts which might have been discovered by a life-long Regency bachelor, the Cavendish Entertainment must have been the most embarrassing: more bears on Gifford’s handling of its text than simply editorial practice. It is true, too, that his expurgated text reflects concerns being aired in the culture at large. In 1811 Baron Field had asked in a dialogue printed in The Reflector, ‘Is it justifiable to reprint the Pruriencies of our Old Poets?’. Even the generally more accurate, old-spelling text of the entertainment published anonymously in The Monthly Magazine (41, 1816, 15-18) struggles with this particular rhyme pair (that / tat is its rendering of the manuscript reading).

Gifford’s edition, as well as its work on Jonson’s text, was moreover concerned to defend Jonson against what had by 1816 become a well-established tradition of biographical writing which set the presumed surliness and malignity of his character against the equanimity and amiability of his contemporaries, chief among them Shakespeare. Gifford’s rebarbative ‘Proofs of Ben Jonson’s Malignity, From the Commentators on Shakspeare’ (1.ccxlix-ccxci) gather together and refute the scattered charges leveled, with ‘complacent simplicity’, against Jonson from ‘Mr. Malone to Mr. Weber, from Mr. G. Chalmers to Mr. Stephen Jones’. Gifford’s commentary to the extracts from Jonson’s accusers sets out to counter each and every charge made. Set against these derisory ‘Proofs’, Gifford offers a series of ‘Characters of Jonson’ (1.ccxciii-cccvii) which more neutrally situate the poet’s biography in relation to his work. This editorial matter is consistent with a focus in the edition more largely (as I have argued elsewhere, Lockwood (2005) on a friendly Jonson; it is important, therefore, to recognize the extent to which Gifford was able to draw on the resources of his own friends in his work on the edition. A copy of the first folio (1616) was made available to Gifford by John Dent; this copy had earlier been presented by Jonson himself to Francis Yong (it is now Elizabethan Club, Yale University, +13; see Parks (1986) , 142-3). Among other resources, Gifford was able to borrow printed book and manuscripts from the book-collector Richard Heber (as we have seen) as well as printed books from the library of the actor John Philip Kemble. He was introduced by Isaac D’Israeli to the public collections of the then British Museum Library. Most notably, his friend Octavius Gilchrist, a Stamford antiquary who had published in 1808 An Examination of the Charges Maintained by Messrs. Malone, Chalmers and Others, of Ben Jonson’s Enmity &c. Towards Shakspeare , and in 1811 A Letter to William Gifford, Esq. on the Late Edition of Ford’s Plays; Chiefly as Relating to Ben Jonson, contributed a note on ‘Portraits of Jonson’ to volume 1 of the edition, and edited the text of Jonsonus Virbius for volume 9. Although Gilchrist was not identified formally by Gifford as a contributor, he served as a vital source of information and support during the making of the edition, contributing, for instance, the headnote to Theobalds in volume 6. The long, largely unpublished series of Gifford’s letters to Gilchrist (in the John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh) also show the editor drawing in great measure on his correspondent, his interests and his expertise.

Besides including Jonsonus Virbius for the first time in a collected edition of Jonson’s Works, Gifford also introduced other alterations to the sequence in which Jonson’s texts had been presented by Whalley’s edition. The Case is Altered, printed last in volume 7 of Whalley’s seven-volume edition, was moved by Gifford so that it followed the fragmentary dramas, The Sad Shepherd and Mortimer his Fall in volume 6 of his nine volumes. So too, Jonson’s manuscript exchange of verse with Inigo Jones was situated in volume 8, following the masques to which it related, Love’s Triumph and Chloridia, rather than with the other examples of Jonson’s ungathered verse inserted in the sequence of The Underwood. Here, Gifford intercalated a run of nineteen poems between Und. 12, ‘An Epitaph on Master Vincent Corbett’, and Und. 13, ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackville’. Together with the long footnote at the end of The Underwood containing the text of Jonson’s Cavendish Christening Entertainment, these poems reshape Jonson’s posthumous collection around ideas of friendship (Lockwood, 2005, 102-07) .

Despite the ferocity with which Gifford’s text was reviewed, it served as the basis for most later nineteenth-century editions of Jonson. It was reprinted in Barry Cornwall’s single-volume stereotyped edition (1838) , the plates of which were used by their publisher, Edward Moxon, in 1853, for an edition with added notes by Alexander Dyce. Moxon’s stereotyped printings also formed the basis for the nineteenth-century American editions of Gifford’s Jonson printed in Boston by Phillips, Sampson and Company from 1853. Even editions not directly descended from the Moxon/Cornwall Works of 1838 relied explicitly on Gifford’s text. Robert Bell’s 1856 edition of Jonson’s Poetical Works followed Gifford’s text, errors and all, ‘for the sake of uniformity’. Francis Cunningham, who twice reprinted Gifford’s text in the 1870s, was characterized – rather cruelly – by Percy Simpson as a ‘camp-follower of Gifford’ rather than as an editor in his own right (H&S, 9.150) . Cunningham’s nine-volume reprint of Gifford’s text , printed at the Chiswick Press for Bickers and Sotheran in 1875, is probably most responsible for this impression, although it offers the best explanation for it. Cunningham’s 1871, three-volume reprint of Gifford’s edition for John Camden Hotton (itself reprinted in 1872 by Chatto and Windus), had corrected Gifford’s text, and offered a scattering of additional explanatory notes. But the 1875 edition, started without his collaboration and to which he therefore came late, was taken directly from copies of Gifford’s 1816 Works, resulting in an ungainly series of supplemental notes by Cunningham, set at the end of each volume, which correct and dispute earlier material. In fact, whatever the textual flaws of the 1875 edition, Cunningham steadily continued the process of adding to Jonson’s canon that Gifford had taken over from Whalley. He gathered for the first time Jonson’s ‘Ode’ from Hugh Holland’s Pancharis (1603) , and the manuscript translation of Martial’s ‘Vitam quae faciunt beatiorem’. He also continued to enrich the context that Jonson’s life provided for his text by printing what had been unavailable to Gifford and his associates, the full text of the Informations (Lockwood, 2005, 108-10, discusses Gifford’s research for and responses to what were known then as the Conversations). Cunningham was also able to print new contemporary records: the accounts from the Edinburgh city archives of Jonson’s visit and the entertainment offered to him in 1618, as well as records of his examination by the Attorney-General in 1629 and his appointment as City Chronologer. Cunningham’s early death, still in his mid-50s, on 3 December 1875, deprived him of what A.H. Bullen described in his Athenaeum obituary as an ‘intention to edit Ben Jonson elaborately’ (ODNB). Any materials he had prepared for this proposed edition are not now located.