University of Virginia Library

The Concluding Pages of the Jonson Folio of 1616
by
James A. Riddell

Some years ago, in their justly admired edition of Ben Jonson, Herford and Simpson[1] established what they thought were the original and the corrected versions of the last two pages of the Jonson Folio of 1616, based on what they considered to be sound bibliographical evidence. The pages in question are those on which are printed the concluding passages of Jonson's masque The Golden Age Restored. Initially, Herford and Simpson suggested that "it is possible that the original ending [of the masque] was used at the court performance and that the revision was an afterthought designed to give a more significant ending to the Folio" (VII, 420). They amplified this observation later in their "Survey of the Text," but in a strangely self-contradictory way. "The Masques, of which Stansby registered a number in 1615," they contend,

If the "transposing" of the speeches was a stop-press "correction," as it surely must have been since both versions are extant and the type was not reset,[2] how could it have been made by Jonson—who, we are told, "cannot have read the proofs"? I can think of no answer. What, then, could have led such careful scholars into such a muddle? The answer seems to be that they were convinced that the large-paper sheets of all of the gatherings of the Folio were printed after the small-paper sheets,[3] and since the large-paper copies have the "corrected" version of the masque, Jonson must have been responsible—even though they must contradict themselves to make the contention. But it is a mistake to assume that the large-paper sheets were always printed first. Kevin Donovan has demonstrated conclusively that in the case of the masques large-paper sheets were sometimes the first printed, for instance in gatherings 4M-4P.[4] The same holds true, in fact, for many gatherings in the Folio, which Doctor Gerritsen has been aware of for over thirty years, and which I hope to demonstrate in the not-too-distant future.[5] In the case of The Golden Age Restored, Donovan has also shown that "the version ending with the speech of Pallas and the praise of Jove [is most probably] the revision" and that the other way round "is much less likely." I shall show that the other way is in fact impossible.

But first I should like to call attention to some of the directions that commentary and criticism have taken in recent years as a result of the Oxford editors' assumptions about the "original" and "corrected" versions of the two pages. It would, in fact, be fair to say that influential interpretations of the ending, and therefore of the masque itself, have been misdirected because the "original" and "corrected" versions have been wrongly construed. In a note to his edition of the masques Stephen Orgel somewhat extends the speculation of Herford and Simpson by suggesting that The Golden Age Restored was "Performed twice, January 6 and 8, 1615. This precedes Mercury Vindicated. Possibly Jonson printed it out of chronological order because the descent of Astraea and closing paean to King James made The Golden Age a more effective conclusion to the 1616 folio, in which it appears as the final work."[6] Giving due credit to the Oxford editors, he amplifies this a bit by saying that the final speech of Pallas originally followed that of Astraea, and the two "are so printed in some copies of the first folio. Originally, that is, the masque concluded by moving with Pallas from earth to heaven; but Jonson changed his mind while the volume was in the press, and in the revised version Astraea decides to remain on an earth transformed by the excellence of King James."

Jonathan Goldberg, interested in demonstrating Jonson's participation in "an age where all is bought and sold," goes beyond Orgel in explaining why Jonson chose to end the collection of masques and thereby the Folio with The Golden Age Restored rather than with Mercury Vindicated. For Goldberg, the changed ending reveals yet more striking insights into Jonson's motives—and want of success—than Orgel had ventured. Jonson wanted the king to give him money ("crassly put, the masque concerns James's largesse, for the simplest terms that translate the restoral of the golden age are monetary ones"); but even though Jonson rearranged the ending of The Golden Age Restored in an effort to press his case, he had but little luck: "[James] went on giving and grudging, and although Jonson revised the printed version of The Golden Age Restored to leave the kingdom of Jove quite firmly 'present here' (line 215), the poet's power in that instance remained something

he could only exhibit in his text and not with the monarch he tried to imprint."[7]

Joseph Loewenstein takes the process one step further. He omits the "original" printed version. He talks as if there were only the "original" version, the one which was a part of the masque when it was performed at court, and another version, "printed with a text that manifestly scrambles the conclusion as it was performed in 1615."[8] Curiously, Loewenstein may be right about the order of the speeches in the court performance, but for the opposite of the reason he adduces. That is, if the Astraea/Pallas ending is the corrected one, as I am convinced it is, it may very well be that of the court performance. What accounts for the Pallas/Astraea version being machined first I do not know. It has the masque ending with "Galliards and Coranto's," which might have made sense to a compositor; a couple of pages of Jonson's manuscript may have been mixed up; possibilities for conjecture are numerous.[9] Whatever caused the original setting to be as it was, someone soon intervened to get it right. Although it has been thought that Jonson had relatively little to do with the printing of the masques—unlike the bulk of the volume, in which he took extraordinary interest—he may have been the one who intervened.[10]

In any case, Loewenstein builds an argument that depends upon the Pallas/Astraea ending being the "corrected" one, one which reflects Jonson's attempt to make a statement on the printed page that, in effect, subverts the statement he "originally" devised:

Perhaps it is useful to speculate about iconographic meanings that attend Jonson's manipulations of the printed versions of his works. It is unfortunate to base such speculation on a bibliographical assumption that turns out to have been wrong. In the following pages I shall argue that the Astraea/Pallas ending makes much more sense, and, for reasons both bibliographical and literary, must be what Jonson intended. It is the former, of course, that I take to be the clinching argument.

Bibliographical Evidence

When stop-press corrections are made, they come early in the run, or there is, of course, little point in making them. That is, if the aim of the printer is to have as many corrected sheets as possible, he will begin proofing and correcting as soon as he can. And if one is talking about authorial corrections, or at least an attempt to follow authorial intention, one or the other of which seems most likely in the present instance, corrections would be made early or not at all. Therefore, the mere proportions of copies with the Astraea/Pallas conclusion or the Pallas/Astraea conclusion provide evidence as to which is the corrected version. In the argument I wish to pursue here, this evidence corroborates conclusions that are drawn from a close examination of physical differences in the printing of the two versions. The sequence is this: all of the large-paper sheets of 4Q2-3v and 1v-4 were machined with the Pallas/Astraea conclusion[11] and then some of the small-paper sheets (in the neighborhood of ten percent) were.[12] Then someone intervened to reverse the order of the Pallas/Astraea speeches. The sequence is decisively established by a piece of type that was broken during the machining of 1v-4 after the speeches had been rearranged to Astraea/Pallas.[13] In all large-paper copies and in the small-paper copies with the original arrangement (i.e., Pallas/Astraea), after the word "unsold" in line thirty of 4Q4 (the penultimate line of Astraea's speech) the comma is intact (see Fig. 1). After the type was rearranged, and the line became line eight of 4Q4, for a while the comma remained intact (as in four of sixteen copies with the final leaf present that I have recently examined). Subsequently, however, during the press run of the rearranged forme (Astraea/Pallas), the comma, its face somewhat broken, went adrift. As the broken comma moved, it was pushed into the letter "d," more and more, by stages. A glance at Figs. 2 and 3 (reproduced at twice actual size) reveal that such movement did take place, even to the point of the broken comma subsequently damaging "d." The letter "d" and the disintegrating comma seem to have survived the press run; at least I am not aware of any evidence that they did not. Although one might argue that

the Pallas/Astraea ending was machined first, that during the press run, or even after, the comma was broken and subsequently replaced when the speeches were rearranged, the argument will not hold. Even punctuation marks can be distinctive. Depending upon how the comma was inked (there is of course some variation), little or almost no curve can be seen in the concave side; the convex side is flattened at an angle of about forty-five degrees at the bottom. I have taken a sample of commas in the text nearby. Of one hundred successive commas, this one being the last of the lot, none compares with it. Although there could, of course, be more than one comma thus distinctive, the chances are slim, and the chances are exceedingly remote that a compositor replaced the present one with a "duplicate" (if such a thing even existed) when the Pallas/Astraea ending was altered to be Astraea/Pallas, or at any other time. If one compares the (intact but somewhat distorted) comma following "unsold" with the commas in the half-dozen lines immediately preceding, one sees that the "unsold" comma remained the same until it was broken.

There are, conveniently, several other details which, though less conclusive, are nevertheless useful in helping to confirm the order of printing that I have just described. Sometime after the Pallas/Astraea speeches were rearranged, another variation was introduced. In line three of 4Q2 a space between the words "fraud" and "and" was pulled to the level of the type face

(no doubt by the inking ball) and subsequently inked and printed.[14] The raised space is in itself less conclusive than the broken comma because the space could have been pulled to the "surface" and then subsequently forced back down. However, with the evidence of the broken comma providing the essential underpinning for my argument, the raised inking space serves quite well in support.

Another detail is that the Pallas/Astraea version has "The End" in caps and small caps, in rather small type. The Astraea/Pallas version has "The end" in much larger type and in upper and lower case. The font used for the reset "The end" is the same as that used for the words "The Catalogue," on the first page of set type of the preliminary matter, ¶3.[15] It is reasonable to suppose that the compositor, following the customary practice of setting the preliminaries last, was drawing upon that font when the speeches were reversed and that he employed it as a matter of convenience. As it happens, the font is one that was employed but sparingly in the Folio. Aside from "The Catalogue" on ¶3 and "The end" on 4Q4, it appears at most at sixteen places,[16] each time as part of the title of a play or entertainment or masque, but in no instance running for more than two or three words.

There is also another connection between the final pages of the volume and the preliminaries. The watermarks in the preliminaries are all grape bunches. I have charted all watermarks in twenty-two small-paper copies and have found only one instance of these grapes in the body of the volume (in 4I2.5 of one copy). This single example, present perhaps by accident, does at least show that the grape-bunch stock of the preliminaries was in Stansby's shop when some of the last quires were being printed.

To return to the issue raised at the first part of this section, how many copies, then, were printed with the original Pallas/Astraea ending and how many with the reverse? I have consulted sixty-nine copies of the Folio, and add to that number six of those cited by Greg which I have not yet examined, for a total of seventy-five. Four of those (all small-paper copies) are missing both of the last leaves, and thus provide no evidence. Of the seventy-one remaining, six are large-paper copies, all of which retain the Pallas/Astraea ending. One small-paper copy, the Lowell volume in the Houghton Library,[17] has bound in with the normal small-paper sheets several of large-paper cut down to small-paper size, including all of 4Q. This can be readily determined by examining the watermarks. There are some three dozen different watermarks in the various sheets used for the small-paper printing, but large-paper

copies have only variants of one watermark, a shield with three lions.[18] Of the sixty-four copies with the final quire printed on small-paper sheets, six have the Pallas/Astraea ending and fifty-eight the reverse. As the vast majority of the small-paper copies, and therefore a substantial preponderance of all copies,[19] have the Astraea/Pallas ending, the mere probability of there being more corrected copies than uncorrected suggests that Astraea/Pallas is the corrected state.[20]

Literary Implications

If the bibliographical details determine that the Astraea/Pallas ending is the corrected one, how does this affect our reading? Is the Astraea/Pallas ending, at the very least, consistent with the arrangement of other parts of the Golden Age Restored? In the first place, there is a great deal of symmetry in the masque, both in its beginning and ending—its "framework"—and within its parts. The masque begins with (stage direction): "pallas in her chariot descending," to explain the implication of events. Jove intends to restore justice to mankind by returning Astraea to the face of the earth. To ready earth (or at least "this happie Ile") for its new Golden Age, in which "burried arts shall flourish," Pallas calls forth the poets "Chaucer, Gower, Lidgate, Spencer."

At the conclusion of the masque, Jove's intention realized, Astraea once more on earth, Pallas ascends. The conclusion can be seen in three parts: (1) We hear Astraea, who is content with her return to earth, observing: "What a change is here! I had not more / Desire to leave the earth before, / Then I have now, to stay;" (2) "pallas ascending calls them" to tell them that they are now to live with the restored Astraea ("them" refers to the celebrants, the members of the audience, who, in effect, represent mankind); (3) finally, for the restoration of the Golden Age, we hear the Quire declaring that "To Jove, to Jove, be all the honour given, / That thankefull hearts can raise from earth to heaven."

Of the symmetries within the masque, the one that bears most on the present argument lies in the various presentations of the Quire. Throughout the masque, the function of the Quire is to moralize ("Let narrow Natures [how they will] mistake, / The great should still be good for their owne sake" [101-102]), to institute action ("Awake, awake, for whom these times were kept" [133]), and to summarize, with the moralizing and summarizing often

coming at the same time. The last portion of the masque—about the last two-fifths of the text, though it must have constituted well over half of the playing time—contains the three dances of the masque and the commentary following them, all celebrating the return of Astraea to earth. The dances and their music are introduced by the Quire: The pattern of the parts which follow is quite consistent. After "The first dance" there are lines spoken or sung by Pallas, Astraea, Age, Pallas, and the Quire. There follows "The maine daunce," then lines spoken or sung by Pallas, Poets, and the Quire, and finally "Dance with ladies," then lines spoken or sung by Astraea, Pallas, and the Quire. The Quire's concluding prayer of thanks is the couplet mentioned above: Which calls attention to one more pattern that suggests one more argument that the Astraea/Pallas ending is the one Jonson intended: all but three of Jonson's masques before The Golden Age Restored end with songs, and all of them that could end with a song do so.[21] Thus, the literary argument that I am suggesting is at the least compatible with the bibliographical one, and, given the strength of the former, may be considered to be compelling.

Notes