There are many riddles in Jonson’s chronology, though fewer these days as scholars gradually clarify the details of his career. However, my title refers to a famous essay – famous amongst Jonsonians at least – by W. W. Greg, first published in The Library in 1926, and reprinted (with revisions) in 1966. Greg’s objective was to untangle the confusions in the sequencing of Jonson’s published works created by the appearance in them of two, incompatible systems of dating: some are dated according to the calendrical system characteristic of almanacs, which calculated the year from 1 January to 31 December, and others are dated by the ‘legal’ system adopted in official documents, which deemed the year to begin on Lady Day (25 March). Greg surveyed the dates that appear in Jonson’s printed texts, and sought to establish whether there was any pattern as to which were legal and which calendrical. The implications of this problem are surprisingly far-reaching, since a significant proportion of Jonson’s works lie in the zone of ambiguity between the two systems, 1 January-24 March: notably the masques, which were typically danced on Twelfth Night and Shrovetide, but also several plays that had winter premieres. Greg’s solution has become canonical and is repeatedly invoked in discussions of dating, but a great deal of new thinking has taken place since he wrote, including G. E. Bentley’s The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1943-68), Herford and Simpson’s Oxford edition of Jonson (1925-52), and the new Cambridge edition. This seems a good moment to revisit Greg’s essay and ask whether his conclusions still stand up.

Greg arrived at two judgements that have been particularly influential. He believed that, with minor exceptions, the dating system used in the 1616 folio was calendrical; and he argued that Jonson’s practice shifted decisively around 1620, when an early preference for calendar dating gave way to a new preference for legal dating. I want to argue that it is by no means clear that Jonson’s practice was consistent either at the beginning or the end of his career, and that this lack of consistency is just as evident in the folio as anywhere else. But I also wish to suggest, more broadly, that the ‘riddle’ cannot be solved in the form that Greg propounded it.

To begin with the folio, the kinds of date mentioned fall into two groups, divided between the plays and the masques. The plays are arranged in chronological sequence (though with the revised Every Man In silently substituted for the original version), and each concludes with a statement of date and performance using a version of the standard formula ‘This Comoedie was first acted, in the yeere 1598. By the then L. CHAMBERLAYNE his Seruants’. This creates an impression of orderliness, and implies that the dating of each play is authoritatively presented. In the case of Volpone, which, exceptionally, had already appeared in quarto with an epistle bearing the date ‘11. of February. 1607’,   the prefatory date was removed, perhaps because it clashed with the information at the end of the play that its first performance took place in 1605. Matters are slightly different with the masques, many of which had already appeared in quartos, or circulated in manuscripts, that carried their own, often quite specific dating (see the list in the Appendix). The entertainments and masques are printed as the last two sections in the folio and each is arranged in chronological sequence, with two exceptions: The Althorp Entertainment is placed after The King’s Entertainment, with which it had been published in quarto, and The Masque of Beauty is similarly placed next to its sister masque, Blackness. The folio repeats all the dates given in the quartos, with the exceptions that the date of The King’s Entertainment was omitted, and the information that Hymenaei was danced at the Essex-Howard wedding – in retrospect a deeply embarrassing event – was suppressed. Of the previously unprinted texts, the minor entertainments at Highgate and Theobalds (1604-7) are all dated, but the masques written after The Masque of Queens have no date, with the single exception of The Golden Age Restored, which carries ‘1615’ in its header. This last, as we shall see, has caused much perplexity.

It is clear from this summary that Jonson’s practice with dating was shaped by the pre-folio publication of his early masques, texts which necessarily went into print accompanied with much circumstantial information about their performances. As John Peacock (1991), 81-2 has shown, the parent genre of printed masques was the descrizione, the narrative pamphlet describing a single festival or sequence, which had developed in sixteenth-century Italy as the means by which such occasions were publicized. Peacock emphasizes that Jonson went his own way, rendering more poetic a form that was originally a kind of news-writing, rhetorical and historical in nature. Jonson’s published texts privileged the masques’ ideas at the expense of their occasions; nonetheless, all his masque quartos make statements about the dates of performance. Before the folio, four masque quartos had been printed, one a single-text volume (The Masque of Queens), the others being collections that contained two or three texts. Of these four, the collection containing Hymenaei and the Barriers gives us no insight into Jonson’s dating practice. The title page has the printer’s date 1606, which is calendrical, but Jonson’s part of it – assuming he wrote the wording of the front matter – says simply that the masque and barriers were performed ‘on the eleventh, and twelfth Nights, from Christmas’, with no further statement about year. (For a list of actual dates of performance, see the Appendix to this essay.) With The Masque of Queens and the collected volume containing Blackness, Beauty and The Haddington Masque the case is clearer. Queens is dated ‘Febr. 2. 1609’ on the title page, which is a calendrical date, as are the separate dates given for the other three, respectively Twelfth Night 1605 and 1608, and Shrove Tuesday (9 February) 1608. But for the other collected volume, the 1604 quarto containing the text of his contribution to The King’s Entertainment, the Panegyre and The Althorp Entertainment, Jonson had used the legal system, dating The King’s Entertainment to ‘Thursday the 15. of March. 1603’, and the Panegyre, on its half-title, to ‘19. of March. 1603’. Possibly it suited Jonson to use 1603 dates, given that these two texts were published alongside another 1603 text, The Althorp Entertainment, dated ‘25 of Iune 1603’: it gives the collection a pleasing unity. But the choice of legal dating does lead to a striking collision on the title page, where Jonson’s ‘1603’ sits oddly above the statement ‘Printed at London by V.S. for Edward Blount, 1604’. Possibly Jonson preferred to use the 1603 date because he was keen for the volume to seem as timely as possible. He was on no good terms with his collaborator in the royal welcome, Thomas Dekker, and he ensured that his text of the entertainment was printed in advance of Dekker’s more detailed narrative which was, so to speak, the ‘official’ version of the day’s events (see the Introduction and Textual Essay to King’s Ent.). On the other hand, with its complex marginalia and many stop-press corrections, Jonson’s was a difficult text to print, and it is unsurprising that the printer had not finished with it before 1603/4 had turned into 1604. Whatever the story behind it, the contradiction between Jonson’s ‘1603’ occupying the same page as the printer’s ‘1604’ makes even more apparent the poet’s perception that the royal entry belonged to the last days of the (legal) year.

As Greg noted, when Jonson reprinted the text of The King’s Entertainment in 1616 he adjusted it, silently deleting the date, although the date of the Panegyre was allowed to stand. Greg saw this as part and parcel with Jonson’s application of calendrical dating to the folio, and suggested that the Panegyre’s legal date remained only through an oversight. In fact, the situation is more complex than this, for Jonson’s revisions effectively altered the chronological significance of The King’s Entertainment. Not only was its date suppressed, but the detailed title-page, with its almost hundred-word summary of the occasion, place and participants, was boiled down to the simple statement, ‘PART OF THE KINGS ENTERTAINMENT IN PASSING TO his Coronation’. As it happens, this paraphrase was far from correct, for it changed the occasion on which the text had been performed. The King’s Entertainment was staged for James’s ceremonial welcome into the city of London on 15 March 1604, which had been delayed until nearly a year after the accession because of plague. The coronation, though, had taken place much earlier, on 25 July 1603, as soon as practical after James’s journey from Scotland. Perhaps, twelve years on, Jonson’s memory was playing him tricks. Or perhaps the form of words in the folio was devised by the printer rather than the poet. Or perhaps Jonson wished to elevate the political significance of the royal entry, for the coronation, as the constitutional ratification of James’s kingship, was an altogether more important occasion than the welcome: it was an event at Westminster rather than London. Or perhaps he wished the sequence of the early festival entertainments to stand as a kind of platonic version of James’s accession, in which the accidents of history were silently corrected: one of the points made in the speeches welcoming James is that his accession marks a revolution in time, from which the calendar will have to start anew (King’s Ent., 527-31). Whatever the reason, the decision to link the text with the coronation necessitated its date being suppressed, so that this change demonstrates not a new preference for calendrical dating but some discreet tinkering with the past. And one helpful consequence of the change was that it finessed the sequence of the early festivals, allowing the royal entry, the Panegyre and the Althorp entertainment to be reprinted in the order in which they were first published without appearing to undermine chronology. A properly historical sequence would have placed Althorp first (as it was staged for Queen Anne and Prince Henry in June 1603), but there was a symbolic advantage in repeating the quarto’s arrangement and beginning the royal festivals with the show addressed to the King. Deleting the date of The King’s Entertainment allowed this to be done without making chronology seem to back-track on itself – as is the case if we register that the March 1603 date retained with the Panegyre is a legal reckoning, and so post-dates the June 1603 of the Althorp entertainment that follows it. Moreover, the Panegyre’s non-calendrical dating was emphasized, for the quarto’s modest half-title wording was now amplified into a full folio page, and set with all the dignity of a large upper-case font.

If we turn to the other end of the masques, we find that a similar problem arises in relation to the folio’s final text, The Golden Age Restored. Greg was aware that Mercury Vindicated and The Golden Age Restored must have been the masques that were performed in January 1615 and 1616, but there was no detailed external evidence, and the appearance of the legal date ‘1615’ at the head of The Golden Age Restored conflicted with the pattern of calendrical dating that be believed he saw emerging in the folio.   He therefore assumed that the date ‘1615’, if it was calendrical, must indicate that in printing these last two masques Jonson had positioned them in the reverse of their order as written – the reason for which, he speculated, was that The Golden Age Restored made a stronger ending to the volume than Mercury Vindicated would have done. This view persuaded Percy Simpson, who endorsed it in volume 10 of the Oxford Ben Jonson, adding some (rather baffling) arguments of his own.   More influentially, Simpson adjusted his commentary on the masques to reflect Greg’s new sequence, printing it in volume 10 in the order of the two texts’ appearance in volume 7 (with Mercury Vindicated first), but placing the contextual material relating to the 1616 performance with the earlier masque, and vice versa. Affairs remained in this chaotic state until 1979, when John Orrell published a newly discovered eyewitness account of the masque danced on 6 January 1616, which proved beyond doubt that it had been The Golden Age Restored (Orrell, 1979b). This meant that the printed order was correct and that Jonson’s dating had followed the legal system after all – assuming, of course, that Jonson was responsible for inserting the date in the first place. The Golden Age Restored is unusual amongst the final masques of the folio in bearing a date. All the other previously unpublished masques are undated, and it may be that some other hand than the author’s supplied this detail. For example, the printer could have set up the masque from copy prepared by a scribe, who perhaps introduced the date while normalizing Jonson’s foul papers. Or perhaps ‘1615’ is really a convenient shorthand for a looser and unspecific formula, such as ‘the Christmas season 1615-16’. But however we account for it, it remains the case that the masques as a group were inconsistent about dating, and less completely drawn into a calendrical system than Greg believed. The exceptions to his analysis were more significant than he was aware.

The chronology of the masques section of the folio, then, was far from unitary, and made use of both systems of dating. The evidence concerning the earlier section, the plays, is not so easy to interpret, because the contextual information about their dates of first performances is less specific than it is for the masques. Nonetheless, some of the same doubts arise here, in relation to three plays that present special dating problems: Sejanus, Volpone, and Epicene.

The folio dates the performance of Sejanus to ‘1603’, but editors have disagreed radically over its meaning. The first performances cannot have taken place before Queen Elizabeth died (24 March), for the folio says that the actors were ‘the King’s Men’. Opportunities for performance in the following months were severely reduced, because almost immediately after James’s accession London was plunged into a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague that kept the playhouses closed for an extended period down to 9 April 1604. There was a brief window of opportunity for renewed playing in early May 1603. The playhouses would have been shut between the onset of Elizabeth’s final illness and her funeral on 28 April 1603, but Philip Henslowe’s diary indicates that the Rose did manage to stage a few performances after the funeral and before the plague took full hold. However, the King’s Men were not officially taken into royal patronage until 19 May, by which time the plague closure was already in place, as is indicated by their patent, which licenses them to perform ‘when the infection of plague shall decrease’: so any performances that may have been squeezed in before the extended closure would technically have been staged in the name of the Chamberlain’s Men (Barroll, 1991a, 103). In the present edition, Tom Cain argues forcefully that the first performance of Sejanus took place between 9 and 16 May, though other scholars have followed E. K. Chambers (1923) in supposing that it had to wait until the Christmas season 1603-4, during which period the King’s Men acted at court on 26, 27, 28, and 30 December, 1 January, and 2 and 19 February, even though public playing was still forbidden. In these circumstances, there is some doubt as to whether Jonson’s date ‘1603’ was legal or calendrical.

Volpone presents a clear case of legal dating. It is dated 1605 in the folio, but amongst the various topical allusions in its dialogue is one that pushes that date firmly into 1605/6. At 2.1.40-47, Sir Politic Would-be and Peregrine discuss rumours that three porpoises and a whale have recently been seen in the Thames. Their conversation sounds bizarre, but it has a factual basis, for on 19 January 1606 a porpoise was indeed found near Woolwich, followed a few days later by a whale that came within eight miles of London, incidents that were well enough remembered to be recorded twelve years later in Edmund Howes’ continuation of Stow’s Annals. Greg discounted these allusions on the basis that they could have been interpolations or coincidence, but if the play was finished and on the boards in March 1606, the dialogue coincides nicely with Jonson’s claim in the prologue that Volpone was written in five weeks’ space and that the idea for it was conceived less than two months before its performance. Other topical references push the date of the play beyond 1 January 1606: particularly, parallels have been found between the play’s preoccupation with plotting and the Gunpowder Plot which was uncovered in November 1605. If these indicators are correct, then Jonson’s ‘1605’ certainly means ‘1606’ (see Richard Dutton’s introduction in the present edition).

And then there is Epicene, glossed in the folio as having been acted ‘in the yeere 1609. By the Children of her Maiesties REVELLS’. Once again, this is a date affected by plague, for the playhouses were shut from July 1608 virtually all the way to the end of 1609. There is no clear indication as to when they reopened. On 7 December 1609 the tally of weekly plague deaths fell from fifty-one to twenty-eight, below the level at which the playhouses were usually permitted to open. Whether they began playing immediately after such a long closure is unclear: Leeds Barroll, the foremost modern authority on the subject, thinks they remained shut well into January 1610, though his opinion is much the most pessimistic (Barroll, 1991a,, 182-3). A further problem with the 1609 date is that the Children of the Queen’s Revels did not technically act under that title until 4 January 1610, which was when they acquired a patent that invested them with their new name. Of course, the company may already have known in December that royal patronage was coming in their direction, for they performed five plays at court in the Christmas season 1609-10 and needed confirmation of their occupancy of a new playhouse, the Whitefriars (though the payment for their Christmas performances was still made to them not under the name of Children of the Queens Revels but as the Children of Whitefriars) (Chambers (1923), 2.59). It seems likely that Epicene was one of the five plays they took to court at Christmas, but if the plague closure extended beyond December 1609, it may not have been seen publicly until early in 1610. The earliest datable reference comes from 8 February 1610, when the Venetian ambassador reported that Arabella Stuart had taken offence at what she thought was a libel on her in its dialogue: this suggests that in February the play was fresh on the boards.   As with Sejanus, the question of whether Jonson’s ‘1609’ is legal or calendrical remains impossible to answer, but these various straws in the wind do encourage the thought that it may really mean ‘January 1610’. (The same point is also made in David Bevington’s introduction to Epicene in the present edition.)

On their own, each of these examples involves a certain amount of doubt. Cumulatively, though, they suggest that Greg’s belief that the folio was organized according to a consistently calendrical scheme was misplaced, and perhaps even that Jonson’s underlying preference in the first half of his career was for the legal reckoning. Our doubt additionally gains some interesting symbolic reinforcement from one text in the folio: the Haddington Masque. Danced on 9 February 1608, this masque has as its centrepiece a representation of the heavens in the form of a great celestial sphere, on which are displayed symbols of the zodiac. The presenter, Vulcan, glosses the signs of the zodiac in sequence, and he begins with Aries, the constellation governing the month from March 21 to April 20. It is, of course, conventional in descriptions of the zodiac to begin with Aries. Nonetheless, the arrangement reinforces our perception that for Jonson the spring, rather than 1 January, was the turning point of the year.

Moving to Jonson’s career after 1616, we find a similar mix of legal and calendrical dating, though now with a more consistent preference for legal reckoning. Again the masques supply the greatest body of evidence, although their information is complicated by the unreliability of the dates attached to them in the second folio of 1640. This edition was put together after Jonson’s death, and while some of the dates are correct, there are individual errors of chronology and sequencing which show that the texts were overseen by an editor or editors – presumably Kenelm Digby, though conceivably also the publisher, Thomas Walkley – whose information about them was less than perfect. Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue and The Fortunate Isles are both dated a year later than they were performed, the 1619 date for Pleasure Reconciled putting it in the one season when Jonson could not possibly have written it, for he was walking to Scotland and so absent from the court. The Masque of Owls was misdated by two years and printed out of sequence, as was Pan’s Anniversary, which was misdated by a whole four years and badly misplaced in the chronology. And although The Vision of Delight was accurately dated (it is assigned to ‘CHRISTMAS, 1617’, making it the masque for 6 January 1617, repeated on 19 January), it was placed after Lovers Made Men, which was performed on 22 February 1617 – an error in sequencing that Percy Simpson silently carried over into the Oxford edition.   Clearly, the second folio dates are only of limited usefulness as a guide to Jonson’s later practice with the masques.  

The 1640 folio does contain one group of texts that are arranged in a precise chronological sequence – eleven poems variously dated from 1629 to 1632 that cluster, not quite continuously, towards the end of the poetry collection, The Underwood (nos. 62-8, 71-4). It is tempting to ascribe these dates to Jonson himself. It seems likely that some time before his death, perhaps when working on the abortive 1631 folio, Jonson began preparing a new collection of poems for publication. Some editors have seen signs of his shaping hand in the ordering of the early parts of The Underwood, though the collection was manifestly incomplete at his death and the arrangement of some sections must reflect Digby’s choices – especially towards the end, where we reach poems addressed to Digby himself and his wife (see Donaldson, OA, 680-1, and 2000a, 133-4). It is impossible to be sure just who added the dates in Underwood, nos. 62-74. Perhaps Jonson marked dates on a cluster of texts as he was working through his papers; alternatively, Digby could have done it, either when reducing Jonson’s poems to order after his death, or earlier, as he received individual copies from Jonson’s hand. The seeming reliability of the dates tends to favour the first option, though since not all the dates are absolutely accurate, as Ian Donaldson points out, the true state of affairs cannot finally be established.  

Much the most interesting evidence from this period comes from six masques that were written between 1622 and 1631 and published as independent quartos. Strikingly, each of these quartos is dated according to the legal reckoning, and the editor of the second folio acknowledged this by adjusting the date of three of them by one year, thus drawing them into a calendrical reckoning. These quartos seem to be a strong testimony to Jonson’s dating preferences in the 1620s, though reservations still need to be entered. They are unusual in that most are designed not for public sale but for distribution at the performance. Of the six, only one, Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, carries the usual title-page declaration about the stationer and his shop. One, Chloridia, gives the stationer’s name but no advertisement of public sale, and the other four simply print the date of performance without further information. The inference is, then, that four, possibly five, were printed for limited circulation, and may well have been handed out at the masques themselves, perhaps as keepsakes for the masquers or guides to the allegory for the spectators.   This suggests that they were printed some time in advance of the masques being danced, a deduction that is confirmed by the title pages of Time Vindicated, Neptune’s Triumph, and The Fortunate Isles, which carry statements about the dates of performance that are clearly inaccurate. The dates given for Time Vindicated and The Fortunate Isles are several days adrift from the dates on which (from other sources) we know the performances took place, while the title page of Neptune’s Triumph, calling it ‘a Masque at the Court on the Twelfth night 1623’, is completely misleading, since that performance was cancelled, and although the text was printed, it was never actually staged. These anomalies show that the quartos were being made ready while the masques were still being rehearsed, and hence that their dates may well have been calendrically correct at the time of printing. Furthermore, this rather complicated genesis raises the question of how certain it is that the dates reflect Jonson’s own practice: how can we be sure that he supplied them, rather than some other individual overseeing preparations for the events? It is notable, for example, that The Masque of Augurs was printed in a version that did not represent Jonson’s final thoughts, for when the text was reprinted in the second folio it appeared in enlarged form, with a new part for John Urson and minor revisions to the language, plus extensive literary marginalia that were not present in the quarto. The absence of the marginalia is perhaps the strongest testament to the kind of text the quarto is: it was designed for consumption on the day, whereas the fully authorized version intended for leisurely study in the library was not printed until 1640. So although the masque quartos consistently adopt the legal reckoning, considerations of context and transmission prevent one from saying with complete confidence that they establish a Jonsonian preference.

How far does the dating of other works that were printed after the first folio reflect Greg’s conjectured shift towards the legal reckoning? Three texts in the second folio apparently use a legal dating. The first is The Staple of News, dated 1625 on the title page but probably first performed in the spring of 1626. The play includes references to the coronation of Charles I and the death of William Rowley, the comic actor with the King’s Men, both of which events took place in February 1626. These allusions (unless they are interpolations) seem to indicate that the date was calculated according to the legal year, and the statement on the title page carries Jonson’s own imprimatur because the play was one of the three printed for the abortive folio of 1631, which he personally oversaw and abandoned on realising how incompetent the printer was. The others are two closely linked poems (Underwood, 73 and 74), one addressed to Richard Weston on the day he was made Earl of Portland – dated ‘17 Febr. 1632’, according to the legal reckoning – the other on his son’s return in March 1633 from a diplomatic mission to Venice and Turin, dated ‘1632’.   To these one can add a text not present in the second folio, Jonson’s letter 18 (to the Earl of Newcastle) dated 4 February 1631. Herford and Simpson made no comment on this date, and in the absence of significant internal evidence, Greg felt that no inferences could be made about it, but it seems quite possible that the date meant was 1632. The letter was Jonson’s cover note for three poems in praise of himself, by Viscount Falkland, Nicholas Oldisworth and R. Goodwin, that he was forwarding to Newcastle, and which now survive in the Harleian manuscripts. Oldisworth’s verses are dated 1629 and Goodwin’s seem to belong to the paper controversy aroused by Jonson’s ‘Ode to Himself’ (also 1629), but Falkland’s verses probably date from the autumn of 1631 (H&S, 11.340-44, 396-8, 399-402). Called ‘An anniversary’, they are a memorial on the death of Sir Henry Morison alluding to Jonson’s own, more famous ode in Morison’s memory (Underwood, 70), and they add the statement that this was Falkland’s ‘third Farewell’ to his friend. But since Morison died in August 1629, Falkland’s second ‘farewell’ must have come in August 1630 and the third in August 1631: in which case Jonson could not have sent a copy of the poem to Newcastle in the preceding February 1631. Hence the date of the letter must be calculated according to the legal reckoning.

To set against this trend, there are three post-1616 dates that are clearly calendrical. One appears in the quarto text of the masque Lovers Made Men, the title page of which has the statement ‘PRESENTED … On Saterday the 22. of FEBRVARY. 1617’ – a calendrical date that is repeated (simply as ‘1617’) in the second folio. The date may well have been supplied by Jonson, though since the quarto was probably printed in order to be gifted to the visiting French ambassador, and Jonson’s name appears nowhere in it, the title page could have been devised by someone else, and the large date ‘1617’ repeated at the foot of the title page clearly comes from the printer. The second case is the date ‘January 19. 1619’ appended to the copy of ‘My picture left in Scotland’ transcribed by William Drummond into his private memoir of conversations with Jonson during the poet’s visit to Scotland. Jonson had stayed with Drummond over Christmas 1618-19 and apparently sent him the newly-composed verses in a letter written during his last week outside England, 17-25 January. This too must be calendrical, though it is not necessarily copied from Jonson himself, and may have been supplied by Drummond as a note of when he received the poem. The third date, though, most certainly is Jonson’s, the ‘1629’ that appears in the 1631 octavo edition of The New Inn, as part of a vituperative title-page statement, that was clearly written by the poet, about the play’s disastrous performance history at the Blackfriars. According to Edmond Malone, the play was licensed on 19 January 1629, and one presumes that it would have been performed shortly after. In the Revels edition of The New Inn, Michael Hattaway takes Jonson’s ‘1629’ to mean that the play was not staged until after 25 March: in reading the date this way, he follows Greg’s assumption that by this stage of his career Jonson always used the legal reckoning. However, a hiatus of over two months after the licensing seems a long time for the King’s Men to wait to mount a new Jonson play, and the second epilogue, a defence of The New Inn against its critics addressed to the King and Queen but never actually used, constitutes strong testimony pointing in the opposite direction. This epilogue shows that Jonson was expecting an early performance at court, but since it remained unspoken, the play must already have flopped at the Blackfriars and must have disappeared from the repertory before the 1628-9 Whitehall season had finished (the epilogue cannot have been designed for the 1629-30 court season, since there would have been no point in Jonson writing a defence of a play that had been damned as a failure eight months earlier and had no prospect of revival). Since on 27 February 1629 the King’s Men were paid for sixteen plays recently staged at court, the very strong presumption must be that The New Inn had already passed its brief life on the boards in January or February 1629; and this, in turn, means that Jonson’s ‘1629’ is calendrical.

So examination of the dates from Jonson’s later career presents us with a situation that is almost as inconsistent as that to be found before 1616. After 1616 legal dates predominate, but as in the earlier part of the career, the exceptions are significant and no entirely uniform pattern can be found. On the contrary, his usage continued to mix legal and calendrical reckonings, and no clear rationale emerges as to why one system was adopted at one moment and the other at another. Indeed, the starkest contradiction in the whole canon comes from the last decade: the remarkable circumstance that for the two plays with disputable dates that were printed in 1631, The Staple of News and The New Inn, Jonson dated one by the legal reckoning and the other calendrically. The most that one can say, looking at his career as a whole, is that he calculated the majority of his dates according to the legal system, especially after 1616, but that a substantial minority were expressed calendrically. The ratio of legal to calendrical dates across the whole canon comes out at almost exactly 2:1.

It is disappointing not to be able to lay down firmer rules for interpreting Jonson’s dates, but the above analysis does suggest that he was genuinely inconsistent in his habits, and that Greg’s attempt to find a predictable pattern was flawed. And two larger points do emerge from the detail of discussion, which bear onto future interpretation of the sequence of his writings. One is that Greg’s argument assumes a greater degree of authorial control over textual presentation than is warranted by the complexity of the evidence. It is by no means clear that all the dates were supplied by Jonson himself. Almost certainly some came from the hands of scribes, editors or printers, and – as the contradictory title page of the King’s Entertainment quarto demonstrates – the potential for conflict between authorial and printing-house preferences was considerable. In the case of the masques printed for limited distribution, it is particularly difficult to know whose voice speaks on the title pages. If these small volumes were printed at the expense of patrons and were in the nature of gifts circulating in an intimate social circle, it seems quite likely that the form of words on the title page might well have been determined by someone other than the poet.

Secondly, lurking in Greg’s argument is an old assumption that Jonson was somehow exerted a superhuman degree of control over the persona that his works presented – Jonson the anally retentive personality given to an almost pathologically orderliness, in Edmund Wilson’s famous Freudian account (Wilson (1938), 240-61), or the textual martinet in whose printed texts there is scarcely an accident (as the textual analyses in the Oxford edition sometimes suggest). Certainly Jonson was exceptionally invested in his textual performances and presented his writings with an unusual degree of self-consciousness and care, but even he could not achieve absolute internal consistency. Rather, dating is one significant area where his achievement of textual uniformity seems less than fully accomplished. Given this residue of doubt, it seems safest to say that, whatever the underlying drift of Jonson’s dating habits, some degree of personal inconsistency was always possible and must be allowed for when determining his chronology. The dates cannot be referred to a pattern, for one does not exist, nor is it certain that all originate in Jonson’s hand. We can safely establish his chronology only by taking each date individually and on its own merits.

APPENDIX: DATES IN THE JONSON CANON

The following table lists all the dates that appear in Jonson’s printed texts and (where relevant) in any of the surviving manuscripts. The texts are listed chronologically in order of composition, and their dates are reproduced exactly in the form in which they are given; any undated text does not appear in this list. The dates are divided into two groups: the first column lists the dates from the quartos and any manuscripts, the second column gives them as they are reproduced or otherwise adjusted in the first (1616) and second (1640) folios. The final column supplies corrected calendrical dates where they differ from any of the dates supplied in the quartos or folios. In the case of the plays, the arguments for redating are given above. In the case of the masques, the information about their dates of performance is based on the surviving extrinsic documentary record, such as financial records, court correspondence, and eyewitness accounts.

quartos/mss folios corrected date

Every Man In		1598
Every Man Out		1599
Cynthia’s Revels		1600
Poetaster		1601
Sejanus		1603	1603 or 1604
Althorp	25 June 1603	25 June 1603
King’s Ent.	15 March 1603	undated	1604
Panegyre	19 March 1603	19 March 1603	1604
Highgate Ent.		May Day	1604
Masque of Blackness	Twelfth Night 1605	Twelfth Night 1605
Volpone		1605	1606
Hymenaei	Twelfth Night [1606]	undated
Two Kings Ent.		24 July 1606
Volpone	epistle 11 Feb. 1607	undated
Theobalds Ent.		22 May 1607
Masque of Beauty	Twelfth Night 1608	Twelfth Night 1608
Haddington Masque	Shrove Tuesday 1608	Shrove Tuesday 1608
Masque of Queens	2 Feb. 1609	2 Feb. 1609
Epicene		1609	1610?
Alchemist		1610
Catiline		1611
Bartholomew Fair		1614
Golden Age Restored		1615	1616
Devil is an Ass		1616
Christmas his Masque	1615	1616	Dec. 1616/Jan. 1617
Vision of Delight Christmas		1617
Lovers Made Men	22 February 1617	22 February 1617
Pleasure Reconciled		1619	1618
‘My picture’	19 January 1619	undated
News New World		1620
Pan’s Anniversary		1625	1621
Gipsies Met.		August 1621
Masque of Augurs	Twelfth Night 1621	Twelfth Night 1622	1622
Time Vindicated	Twelfth Night 1622	Twelfth Night 1623	19 Jan. 1623
Neptune’s Triumph	Twelfth Night 1623	Twelfth Night 1624	1624 (unstaged)
Masque of Owls		1626	1624
Fortunate Isles	Twelfth Night 1624	Twelfth Night 1626	9 Jan. 1625
Staple of News		1625	1626?
New Inn	1629	–
Underwood 62		1629
Underwood 63		1629
Underwood 64		1629
Underwood 65		1630
Underwood 66		1630
Underwood 67		1630
Underwood 68		1630
Underwood 68		1630
Love’s Triumph	1630	1630	1631
Chloridia	Shrovetide 1630	Shrovetide 1630	1631
Underwood 71		1631
Letter 17	20 Dec. 1631
Letter 18	4 Feb. 1631		1632
Underwood 72		Novemb. 19 1632
Underwood 73		17. Febr. 1632	1633
Underwood 74		1632	1633
Welbeck Ent.		1633
Bolsover Ent.		30 July 1634
Underwood 79		New Year 1635