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Notes
This wording is found in the final of five variant versions of the Dedication. For 'harbour and protection' Perry first wrote 'harbour', then changed it to 'a new birth', then 'protection', then 'harbour and protection'. When 'a new birth' became 'protection', Perry altered the original 'a kinde welcome' to 'a kind of new birth'. He only added 'and pray you to be a God-father' when 'protection' was expanded to 'harbour and protection'. Thus Perry gradually and painstakingly develops the image of baptism. See Harold Jenkins, 'The 1631 Quarto of The Tragedy of Hoffman', in The Library, 5th Series, 8 (1951), 88-99, pp. 89-93, and Jenkins's Malone Society Reprint of the play, 1950 (1951), pp. x-xi.
In the fourth version of the Dedication, Perry calls Kilvert 'a true Friend to Artes and Learning'.
Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare's Time, 1590-1642 (1971), p. 30; see also pp. 264-292. The case of the 'university wits' perhaps demands further consideration. It may be noted here that the names of Greene and Marlowe appeared on play title-pages only after the authors' notorious deaths.
W. W. Greg suggests that manuscripts of this kind are not likely to date from before 1624, when the scandal of A Game at Chess provoked a flurry of transcriptions, in The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (1942; rev. ed., 1954), p. 45. If this is true, the manuscripts underlying Webster's Duchess of Malfi (1623) and a number of plays in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio (not all in Ralph Crane's hand) must have been prepared specifically as printers' copies, for they would certainly have been 'literary' in style.
Jonson's one precedent for heading a play with a Latin tag is Robert Greene. His case is complicated by the fact that the tag appears on the title-page of the posthumously published James IV. The Latin tag may be a quirk of Greene's dramatic manuscripts, or the stationer Thomas Creede may have recognized 'Omne tulit punctum' as a distinctive motto associated with Greene from its appearance (in this or expanded form) in the title-pages of any of seven earlier works and the explicit of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.
Or for that matter Chettle, who may have at least partly rewritten Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592) in the course of editing it for the stationer John Danter.
Timothy Murray examines Jonson's use of the printed book to establish a stabilized, authored, and authoritative text, in 'From Foul Sheets to Legitimate Model: Antitheater, Text, Ben Jonson', New Literary History, 14 (1983), 641-664.
See, for instance, the preliminary material, act headings, and lists of speakers in William Alexander's Darius (Edinburgh, 1603, and London, 1604), and the preliminary material and irregularly set marginal notes in Matthew Gwinne's Nero (1603).
Ben Jonson, Works, edited by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (1925-52), 1:141.
See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (1984), p. 57.
In The King's Entertainment long marginal notes similarly flow into the full measure, but only at the foot of a page.
See Philip J. Ayres, 'The Iconography of Jonson's Sejanus, 1605: Copy Text for The Revels Edition', in Editing Texts: Papers from a Conference at the Humanities Research Centre, May 1984, edited by J. C. Eade (Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985), 47-53 and plates i-v.
For mannerism, see Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 2 vols. (1965); John Shearman, Mannerism (1967); Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Le maniérisme (1979), and Cyrus Hoy, 'Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style', Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973), 49-67. Dubois usefully identifies mannerism as a pole rather than a definitive style. Ralph Berry, in The Art of John Webster (1972), follows Shearman's more restricted and asocial application of the term 'mannerism' as based on maniera, 'stylish style', and describes Webster's art as baroque.
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