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Addendum: The Printing of the Plays in the Jonson Folio of 1616
by
James A. Riddell
In considering the printing of the 1616 folio edition of Ben Jonson's Workes, I previously identified six different title-pages for Every Man Out of His Humour.[1] I have recently discovered still another form of that page.
The six titles in the sixty-seven copies on which I drew earlier are linked with different states or settings of the conjugate text on G6v:
| G1r | G6v |
| (1) In compartment; Stansby alone (1 copy) | a (original) |
| (2) Plain; Stansby alone (3 copies) | a (original) |
| (3) Plain; Stansby for Smithwicke (19 copies) [from (2)] | a (original) |
|
(4) Plain; Stansby for Smithwicke; `Hor." in margin (6 copies) [from (2)] |
b (corrected) |
| (5) In compartment; Stansby for Smithwicke (23 copies) | b (corrected) |
|
(6) Plain; Stansby alone (9 small-paper, 6 large-paper copies) [reset] |
c (reset) |
The new variant occurs in a small-paper copy I recently acquired:
| (?) Plain; Stansby for Smithwicke | b (corrected) |
The characteristics of this new form suggest it falls into the sequence immediately before or after title-page (4). It has three features first noted in (4) the intact serif in `M[AN]', the abbreviation `Hor.' to indicate the source of the epigraph, and state b of G6v while its basic form (plain; Stansby for Smithwicke) is last recorded in (4). But it differs from (4) in several respects: the ascription for the epigraph occurs not in the margin but in the center of the page, and that abbreviation is printed not in upper and lower case (`Hor.') but in large and small caps (`Hor.'). In addition, with `Hor.' now inserted in the block of text, the distance from `The Author B.I.' to the long rule below the intervening epigraph is 41.5 mm, rather than 34 mm as in (4). Because the distance is also 34 mm in variety (3), it would seem that the sequence (3)- (4) was not interrupted by the new form and that the new title therefore followed (4) rather than preceded it. Because the new title-page and variety (5) share distinctive features (41.5 mm from `The Author B.I.' to the rule, and the
According to this ordering, title-page (3) was modified to variety (4) by adding the ascription to the margin. The printer next moved that abbreviation to the center of the page (creating title (4.5)); he reset this short text using large and small caps and inserted it as an extra line of type, without removing a line of spacing. The ascription and epigraph then formed what proved to be a durable unit; they were kept standing and were used again even in (6), which was otherwise reset.
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