Jonson’s first folio was published in November 1616 by the London printer and bookseller William Stansby, with an emblematic title-page designed, almost certainly under Jonson’s personal direction, by William Hole, one of the leading English engravers of the day. The close interest Jonson took in such emblematic designs is evident from his verses on ‘The Mind of the Frontispiece to a Book’ (The Underwood 24 and Illustration 125), describing and interpreting the title-page to Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (engraved by Renold Elstracke from Ralegh’s design), which Stansby had published in 1614. Some mock-scholarly verses written a few years earlier, playfully expounding the significance of the title-page of Coryate’s Crudities (see Illustration 60, also engraved by Hole and printed by Stansby in 1611, and the text of Crudities on 4.187ff.), further testify to the pleasure that Jonson, like many of his friends at this time, found in emblematic frontispieces. One such friend, the jurist and historian John Selden, is thought to have advised on the design of the frontispiece to Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), for the first eighteen books of which he had also written ‘illustrations’ or learned explanatory notes (Corbett and Lightbown, 1979, 155). Jonson’s engraver, William Hole, had come to prominence in London through the maps and title-page he had designed for another old friend of Jonson’s, his former teacher William Camden, to adorn the second edition of Britannia in 1607. Jonson and Hole may have become first acquainted through Camden’s mediation, or that of Stansby himself, for whom Hole had completed a number of other frontispieces, including those for Florio’s Queen Anna’s New World of Words and Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity (both published in 1611) and Thomas Lodge’s translation of Seneca (1614).

The design of Jonson’s title-page, like the title itself, might have put readers in mind of another famous folio that also appeared in 1616: The Workes of the Most High and Mighty Prince, Iames, by the grace of God King of Great Brittaine France & Ireland Defendor of the Faithe &c., printed by Robert Barker and John Bill. For Jonson to have described as his Workes a volume which included plays – a form of literature not highly esteemed at the time – was seen by some contemporaries as a pretentious, if not oxymoronic, gesture (Wit’s Recreation, 1640). In a further act of emulation, Jonson’s title-page appeared to echo the architectural design that Renold Elstracke had prepared for James’s frontispiece, which had similarly displayed a row of four columns below a decorated pediment, a central rectangular panel announcing the title and authorship of the work, an oval cartouche beneath it with details of printer and publisher, and two allegorical female figures standing within the alcoves at either side of the design. The two figures in James’s title-page represent RELIGIO (at the left) and PAX (at the right). In Jonson’s title-page, in a bold substitution, their places are taken by TRAGOEDIA and COMOEDIA respectively. Tragoedia stands before a damask curtain holding a sceptre and wearing a crown, a robe and tunic, and the high boots associated with ancient tragedy; a helmeted mask hangs on the column beside her. Comoedia wears the chiton (or ancient Greek tunic) along with slippers and a wreath in her hair, while a broad-brimmed hat adorns her mask on the nearby column. Perched jauntily on the ornate scrolls above the pediment are two further figures: a SATYR with pan-pipes and a PASTOR or shepherd holding a pipe to his lips, representing Satire and Pastoral respectively. Above them both, combining the costume of Tragoedia with the more comfortable footwear of Comoedia, stands the figure of TRAGI COMOEDIA.

Engraved around the pediment is a motto taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica (92), SI[N]GULA QUAEQU[E] LOCVM TENEANT S[O]RTITA DECEN[T]ER, ‘Let each style keep the appropriate place allotted to it.’ Considered in relation to Jonson’s dramatic practice, the motto and the accompanying design present something of a puzzle. Jonson had not, after all, managed to keep Satire and Comedy in their appropriate places, but had run them audaciously together in a new hybrid genre of his own invention, which he termed ‘comical satire’. Conversely, he had shown little interest in Tragicomedy, depicted here at the centre and pinnacle of the edifice, apparently sharing Sir Philip Sidney’s dislike of this ‘mongrel’ form (Apology for Poetry, ed. Shepherd, 1965, 135). No example of tragicomedy is represented in the 1616 folio, nor is Jonson known ever to have attempted a work of this kind. Nor for that matter does any pastoral play appear in the folio. The May-lord was probably not written until 1618 (see note on this lost work in volume 5, pp. 343–5). Jonson’s later pastoral comedy, The Sad Shepherd, left unfinished at his death, was not to be published until 1641, in the third volume of the second folio.

The allegorical figures of the frontispiece are best understood not as literal indicators of the several kinds of dramatic writing which Jonson chose to include within his first folio, but as representing in a more general way the scope and diversity of his authorial ambitions. For Jonson’s first folio was not simply a collection of dramatic works, as Shakespeare’s first folio was destined to be. Along with its nine plays, it contained more than a dozen court masques, a smallish group of court entertainments, the Panegyre addressed to James at his entry to his first session of parliament in 1604, and two major collections of poetry, Epigrams (which Jonson describes in his dedication to Pembroke as ‘the ripest of my studies’) and The Forest. Jonson is at pains to display in the volume the variety and versatility of his writing talents. Satire and Pastoral are represented not through individual works but in a more dispersed fashion throughout a larger canon: in such masques as Oberon and entertainments such as Althorp (which William Gifford, mindful of its characters and action, was to retitle The Satyr) and in poetic collections such as The Forest, where classical fauns, dryads, and satyrs move easily through the recognisably English rural landscape.

Beneath the figures of Tragoedia and Comoedia are two emblematic representations of the theatre. In the left panel is the wagon (PLAVSTRVM) in which Thespis, semi-legendary inventor of Tragedy, is said to have travelled through the Attic landscape, the vehicle serving as his primitive stage. A jar of wine and a goat are fastened to the back of the wagon: tragedy being thought to have originated in a ritual involving either the sacrifice, or the prize, of a goat, as reflected in the Greek word τραγωδία, ‘goat-song’. Horace had described the activities of Thespis in Ars Poetica (311–15). In Jonson’s translation (311–15):

Thespis is said to be the first found out

The tragedy, and carried it about,

Till then unknown, in carts, wherein did ride

Those that did sing and act; their faces dyed

With lees of wine.

In Discoveries, 1899–1900, he was to allude more scornfully to Thespis’s cart as a ‘tumbril’, ‘the original dung-cart’ from which the modern stage evolved. In the right-hand lower panel is depicted an ancient amphitheatre (VISORIUM) sunk beneath ground level. A Chorus, their hands linked, dance around an altar from which flames ascend. A sacrifice is being performed.

In a cartouche above the pediment is a section of a Roman theatre (THEATRVM) resembling the Colosseum. The emblem is suggestive not merely of theatrical performance, but of the larger ambitions of the folio. As William West has shown in his study of theatres and encyclopaedias in early modern Europe, the theatrum was a common symbol at this time of the totality of human knowledge, representing a site in which all worldly thought and action might be contained and displayed (West, 2003). In his dedication to Pembroke prefixed to the Epigrams, Jonson refers to ‘my theatre, where Cato, if he lived, might enter without scandal’ (27–8). Jonson’s ‘theatre’ here is clearly not in any literal sense a contemporary playhouse, but a carefully organized collection of poems which displays ‘so many good and great names as my verses mention on the better part’ (13–14), along with satirical portraits of generic figures worthy of contempt: an epitome of the society he sets out to praise and to condemn. The 1616 folio as a whole serves as another, more capacious theatrum, containing and exhibiting the works that Jonson at this point of his career thought worthy of preservation. What is shown, however, is only half a theatre, for as Jonson perceives, he is only half-way through his literary career. With good fortune, more writings may still be to come.

Beneath the title of the volume and the author’s name in the central panel of the design is another tag from Horace: neque, me vt miretur turba, laboro; / Contentus paucis lectoribus (Satires, 1.10.73–4). Jonson characteristically emphasizes, no doubt to the despair of William Stansby, his complete indifference to the market potential of the volume: ‘I do not strive to catch the wonder of the crowd, but am content with a few readers.’

The composition and significance of the 1616 folio are discussed in 'The Printing and Publishing of Ben Jonson's Works', 1.clxiv-clxxxvi'; for further analysis, see in particular Gerritsen (1959), Donovan (1991), Gants (1997, 1999), and Bland (1998b). On the design of the frontispiece, see H&S, 9.15–17, Hind (1955), Corbett and Lightbown (1979), van den Berg (1991), and Donaldson (2003); on William Hole, see Griffiths (2004).

IAN DONALDSON