University of Virginia Library

Jonson's Authorization of Type in Sejanus and Other Early Quartos
by
John Jowett

When Hugh Perry, original publisher of Henry Chettle's Tragedy of Hoffman, gave the play to the reading public in 1631, he took the extremely unusual step of dedicating the play to a patron, Richard Kilvert. In assuming this prerogative of the author, Perry describes the play as 'wanting both a Parent to owne it, and a Patron to protect it', and sets out to remedy both wants. He is 'fayne to Act the Fathers part, and pray you to be a God-father . . . under whose wings it flyes for harbour and protection'; he adds further on, 'I doubt not, but from you it shall receiue a kind of new birth'.[1] In the play's first life it passed over the stage 'with good applause'; now the publisher himself brings it into a new world of arts and learning.[2] The author of this popular stage play is absent by default, and in his absence the stationer offers himself as a substitute, an adoptive parent. Perry presumes that, given decent family connections, a play should be able to gain acceptance as a work of literature, and so, no doubt, redeem its original sin of sub-literate popularity. He takes it for granted that a stage play needs an author as a prerequisite for its publication in print. As such, his Dedication is a sure measure of Ben Jonson's success in establishing plays as valid works of literature. Jonson's innovative expansion of the author function had firmly taken root.

In the title-pages of earlier printed drama the author was usually absent —with the significant exception of translated classical plays, where stage performance could be bypassed altogether and the text inhabited an altogether more elevated literary environment. The virtue advertised on the title-pages of other plays printed in the 1560s and '70s was their suitability for performance. Inferably, it is exactly because the text's origins lay in a tradition of stage enactment that the author was redundant and so unnamed.

A major change in the circumstances of performance came in the late

1580s, when permanent theatre buildings and relatively stable acting companies were established. These developments encouraged a body of professional playwrights to come into being, but in the first place merely allowed them the status of artisans. For instance, most of Chettle's dramatic work was written in collaboration, most of it never found its way into print, and much of the printed material, including Hoffman, would be unattributable were it not for Henslowe's financial records in his Diary. Similar considerations apply to John Day, William Haughton, William Hathaway, Wentworth Smith, and others, all of them prolific writers.

The requirement for an increased output and range of play-texts could, of course, be met in ways other than Henslowe's favoured method of team writing on a piece-work basis. Bentley distinguishes a small group of 'attached or regular professionals' who had long-term exclusive attachments to particular theatres. Their enhanced status in relation to the theatre company, however, prevented them from advancing the status of their plays as literary texts, for they were normally obliged not to publish in print plays written for the company.[3] Nor did circulation of plays in 'literary' manuscripts offer a viable alternative. There is no evidence for literary transcripts of plays from the public or private theatres until after 1616, the year of Jonson's printed Workes.[4] Plays are long and require considerable time to transcribe; moreover, the drama simply did not belong to an élite culture in the sense that metaphysical poetry did. As authored literature, ped to claim a readership that, despite excluding the illiterate, bore some relation to the stage audience; they had to be able to circulate freely amongst artisan and gentry.

Long before 1616, Jonson established himself as the pioneer amongst a small group of freelance dramatists whose independence of the acting companies enabled him to bring plays into print. He began his career as dramatist with the Admiral's Men; his work for them, like most of Chettle's, was never published. Jonson's first play to appear in print, Every Man Out of His Humour (Quarto, 1600), was written, like Every Man In His Humour, before it, for the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It is perhaps incidental that this was Shakespeare's company, and that it organized its playwrighting along lines distinctly different from the Admiral's Men. There may be equal significance in the fact that Jonson did not stay with the Lord Chamberlain's Men; the next two plays he wrote after the Every Man pair were for the Chapel Children

in 1601. Jonson's lack of obligation to the Admiral's Men and all other companies must be taken as the primary external factor that enabled him to become a publishing dramatic author.

Every Man Out of His Humour stands apart from all previously printed drama. This is appropriate, for the work is itself a kind of personal manifesto and, moreover, a theorized stage work alienated from its audience by the 'Grex'. The title-page proclaims the writer with an emphasis such that he is felt as an active hand behind the usually neutral and anonymous wording: 'The Comicall Satyre of / EVERY MAN / OVT OF HIS / HVMOR. / AS IT WAS FIRST COMPOSED / by the AUTHOR B. I. / Containing more than hath been Publickely Spo-/ ken or Acted. / With the seuerall Character of euery Person. / Non aliena meo pressi pede si propius stes / Te capient magus & decies repetita placebunt.' As the child is father of the man, the text brings forth its author. B. J. tumbles onto the title-page begotten in a tautology: 'composed by the author'. Neither term had previously been seen on the title-page of a play. In the Horatian motto Jonson even manages, by the sleight of hand of quotation, to insert the first-person pronoun 'meo' into the title-page's usually neutral third-person space.[5] And so, even though it does not belong to the same fiction as the play, the very title-page becomes textual in the particular sense of being subjected to an author function.

On this title-page Jonson suggests that the play was cut for performance and/or was revised and expanded for publication. It was always a selling point to advertise theatrical 'new additions', but the gambit of offering a non-theatrical text had not been tried before. Though it was to be occasionally imitated by others, it is in spirit peculiarly Jonsonian. He was to make the same gambit, with renewed emphasis, in bringing Sejanus into print. It is part of a general and programmatic elevation of public plays into authored works, involving a forceful declaration of the author's interest in details of book design and typography. Except in the cases of Every Man In His Humour, which was brought to the press by the theatre company, and Eastward Ho!, which was written in collaboration, his hands are on the very forceps that give each text its new birth. Trespassing in the opposite direction to Perry,[6] Jonson has appropriated functions of the stationer and printer. He harnesses for himself the work of the compositor to establish the equivalent of a house style and a standard which bear his own distinctive birthmark.

As he scorns the common auditors, Jonson often implies that they missed a predetermined meaning. And indeed the vagaries of performance inevitably ensure that a theatrical text's meaning is insecure and incomplete. Jonson's

efforts to preserve meaning intact take him along diverging paths towards stage platform and stationer's shop.[7] Ironically, the act of publishing in print in itself commits him to further diversification of the text. That fixed and stable entity the underlying text is in each manifestation marked by its absence; both performance and printed book are adumbrations, translations. In this situation the performance text can have no theoretical priority over the printed book. Each is a distinct phenomenon emerging from that deferred centre. And the book itself cannot be regarded as a neutral framework for an embodied text which arrives in it from elsewhere, for it has itself been textualized. Details of authography, typography, and page design are ostentatiously presented to be noticed and 'read'. Jonson makes the books overtly printerly; the type becomes (so to speak) a token.

Jonson's idiosyncrasy in matters of spelling and punctuation is apparent from the earliest play quartos. His punctuation painstakingly etches out the various nuances of phrasing, and as such works upon the text so as to stabilize its interpretation. However, it eschews the modern ideal whereby the pointing is most successful where it is least noticed: no small part of its function is precisely to be noticeable. This style of punctuation admittedly does not belong exclusively to the print medium, for Jonson and others (notably Ralph Crane) were frequently to adopt a similar style in manuscripts. But here we should recognize that the formalities of early Jacobean, especially Jonsonian, manuscripts and printed books could be cross-referential. Presentation manuscript copies of masques or plays might ape the layout of the printed book; conversely, a book might appear more 'printerly' precisely because of its imitation of sophisticated scribal practices. As we have seen, however, there was probably no such thing as a literary transcript of a play in 1605. And it was usually a matter of course for printed books to be more heavy, formal, and consistent in their punctuation than manuscripts. It may well be that the sophisticated manuscript style that later emerged as an end in its own right began in the restricted circumstance of the transcript prepared as printer's copy—which brings us back to Jonson himself.

Similar considerations apply to Jonson's spelling. In that it is regularized, it tends to consolidate word boundaries and the semantic units they enclose; but, by its inclusion of distinctive and pseudo-classical forms, it too becomes an element in the page's textual typography. Once again, any suggestion of a style based on the conventions of formal manuscripts and therefore alien to print will serve only to draw the actual medium of print more obviously into view; but once again it is more likely that the copy manuscript anticipates the printed document rather than referring to a tradition of similar manuscripts.

It is no accident that Poetaster (Quarto, 1602), Jonson's first play set in imperial Rome, should anticipate Sejanus (Quarto, 1605) in using 'massed'

stage directions and marginal annotations in the printed text—though the annotations in Poetaster are confined to three literary sources and four commentary notes.[8] In each book the turn away from the visual semblance of a text deriving from acted drama converges with the text's historical authentication in classical works. By thus validating the work, the marginal notes also question its mimetic operation: in what way does a representation of ancient Rome represent aspects of the world as Jonson and his readers knew it? As Livor (Envy) says in the prologue to Poetaster, 'I am preuented; All my hopes are crost, / Checkt, and abated . . . Rome: Rome? O my vext soule, / How might I force this to the present state?' The immediate humour is at the expense of Envy, with Rome being presumed different from the present state; but contextually the lines make the audience expect a correspondence, provokingly uncertain in extent yet certain in its presence.

Both plays got their author in trouble with the authorities; both quartos include in their authorial texts statements that the plays were taken as defamatory, and that the published text has required alteration. In Poetaster's postscripted note 'TO THE READER' Jonson claims to have been 'restrain'd . . . by Authoritie' from printing his Apology from the Author; in the epistle to the readers prefixed to Sejanus he blames the marginal notes themselves on 'those common Torturers, that bring all wit to the Rack' and have forced him to show his 'integrity in the Story'. The ground is in each case more discretely negotiated in the 1616 Folio. The begrudging afterword to Poetaster has been replaced by the dramatic epilogue in which Jonson famously explains his satirical method as 'To spare the persons, and to speake the vices'; in Sejanus the marginal notes and the explanatory address 'To the Readers' have been dropped—along with much of the commendatory verse and the Quarto's defensive but implausible addendum to the Argument, in which, as we shall see, the person of the king requires a very particular sparing.

Though there are analogies to various features of the Sejanus Quarto in various academic tragedies,[9] in many respects Jonson's immediate model was another of his own publications: the previous year's 'B. JON / King James his Royall and Magnifi- / cent Entertainement through his / Honorable Cittie of London' (Quarto, 1604). This text is a monument to, and a literary celebration of, a prestigious dramatic spectacle that was itself firmly located in a historical moment. But here too Jonson is not content to remember; instead he refashions the presumptive text into a new and altered work. Here too the efforts of a collaborator (Dekker) have been deleted, and the remaining Jonsonian text has been supplemented. The Quarto includes other speeches celebrating James's accession to the English throne and the Entertainment at Althrop. Furthermore, the text of The King's Entertainment has extensive marginal notes and other kinds of typographical display that anticipate

those found in Sejanus. In both books Jonson seeks a style of page layout which will enhance the classicism of his subject. His technique is to monumentalize the dramatic text. There are obvious affinities between the printed text of the entertainment and the occasion of its performance, where triumphal arches would have quite literally framed the spoken words. The book can in this instance be regarded as a translation of the event. In the case of Sejanus, something more radical is involved, for the book breaks with the conventions of printing the kind of dramatic work that Sejanus is.

What Jonson offers his reader in the Quarto of Sejanus is far from a typical play-text with a border of annotation. Sejanus perpetuates the neoclassical entries and scene divisions of earlier Jonson play quartos. It is indeed the first to develop them to a consistent and even exaggeratedly austere classicism, and the first to print all the character names at the head of scenes in capitals. It is by far the most extreme in its quantities of prefatory matter (fourteen pages of it), its inscriptional effects, and its excessively formalized authography. In its physical make-up, the book consistently obtrudes itself between text and reader. We may see it as a greater text, itself layered, which holds, qualifies, or quotes the inner. And the address 'To the Reader' in the outer text asserts that the inner text itself has been revised; the book as a whole therefore both occludes and draws attention to the original collaborative work that had been performed on stage two years earlier.

Repression of the stage play is just one part of a larger endeavour to intensify and narrow the readers' response to the inner text. Any accusation of mere eccentricity will be tempered when the dangers of Jonson's situation are taken into account. The stage play had been regarded, not surprisingly, as a subversive work. According to Drummond, Jonson 'was called befor ye Coūncell for his Sejanus & accused both of popperie and treason' by Jonson's 'mortall enimie' Northampton.[10] Philip J. Ayres suggests that the specifically treasonable aspect of the play was the trial of Caius Silius, in which unhistorical details of Jonson's treatment would have suggested an analogy with the trial of Essex.[11] Jonson's Catholic leanings came to official attention once again as a consequence of the Gunpowder Plot: in November of 1605 (the year Sejanus was published) the Privy Council engaged him as a minor government spy against those associated with the conspiracy. Earlier in the year he had spent time in prison, not for his religious beliefs but for his part in the anti-Scottish Eastward Ho!. Though already established as the Court's leading writer of masques, Jonson was beseiged with danger.

The admonition printed after the Argument makes a clear reference to King James's preservation from the Gunpowder Plot. It thereby draws the author into prominent view as one who anxiously dissociates himself from

the Catholic conspirators. The expense incurred is that he imposes a conspiculously unfitting interpretation on his own play:

Instead of the customary disclaimer of topical intention, this passage asserts the definitive and correct topical reading; like such disclaimers, it should not be trusted at face value.[12] This clearly is not, however, a persuasive account of Sejanus. In its providential view of the play's events and their application to the present, it sits very uneasily below the Argument, which is neutral and factual to the point of being cryptic. A similar absence of concord is indicated by the very appearance of the printed page. It is the seven lines of the coda, not the thirty-one lines of the Argument itself, that are printed in standard pica type. In contrast, the Argument appears in much smaller long primer. The Argument is thus in a smaller typeface than any other part of the book except for the marginal notes themselves. It looks as though the type size of the Argument has been reduced specifically to fit the coda on the same page, and to print it in the same type-size as was originally intended for the full Argument. In other words, the coda appears to have been added on the spur of the moment after the book's layout had been determined, and was given priority over the Argument itself. A simple calculation proves that the page could indeed result from this sequence of events. If the Argument without its afterword had been set in pica it would have conveniently fitted the single page.

My concern here is to note, not that certain events can reasonably be inferred, but that a visible impression of them is given. The page layout signals it, whether fictively or not. We should, I suggest, see the layout as polemical, and a consistent part of Jonson's larger project in bringing Sejanus into print. The text's allusions to Jonson's personal situation as a Catholic and as a suspect traitor for writing Sejanus itself mediate between history and the printed book. In so doing they generate the author in a historical context as a dimension of the text.

The marginal notes to Sejanus are another deeply ambiguous denial of any intention towards political satire, and, as we have seen, Jonson drew particular attention to this aspect of them. Physically, they constitute a distinct block of smaller print forming an intermittent column alongside the play within. The type on the page gives a material representation of the way the notes metaphorically frame and defend the play—how they contextualize it and uphold its integrity. The dramatic work has entered a new literary environment which is expressed in type through the conventions of page layout. Compared with the normative play quarto in which the distribution

of space on the page still owes something to the layout of the theatrical manuscript, the shape of type-masses on the Sejanus page has been fundamentally altered. In the normative quarto the theatrical manuscript's four vertical columns are squeezed to fit the page size: the speech-prefix column is thus replaced by indents from the left-hand margin; the right-hand column is considerably reduced, so that long verse-lines fill the measure or even overflow it. However, that typical play quarto retains some features of the manuscript. It too is visibly variegated between verse and prose; its speech units are distinctly marked off from each other; theatrical stage directions, highlighted in italic type, are interspersed through the dialogue with relative frequency; and white spaces intrude from both left and right margins to break the text into units of dramatic articulation. None of this is true of Sejanus. Instead, prose is reserved for special inscriptional effects; no theatrical stage directions are to be found; new speeches are not indented; and the verse-line, where split between speakers, is printed on a single type-line, preserving the metrical unit at the expense of the theatrical speech unit. The flanking notes confine the dramatic text to a particularly narrow column, so that the play is presented as an elongated but solid and relatively unbroken oblong of type. The layout is again a polemic in its own right.

A particular example of the layout's textual significance may be found on sigs. K3v-4, where the play represents Sejanus' ritual appeal to the goddess Fortune for oracular knowledge of his future. One may suspect that a sententia marked in italics immediately before the entry on K3v and a mid-scene entry direction (exceptional in a text using 'massed' entrances) are just two initial excuses for the kind of typographical display in which these pages freely indulge. A tendency that runs right through the Quarto here becomes acute: to sacrifice textual clarity in favour of typographic virtuosity. In the third type-line after the entry on K3v, the stage direction (here a misleading term) is accordingly split into two distinct levels: a presumptively archaic 'TVB. TIB.', in capitals as if to replicate an inscriptional source, and the glossarial explanation on the same line, in lower case with conventional capital initials, 'These sound, d while the Flamen washeth.' This gloss in turn receives extensive comment in the marginal note signalled by the superscript 'd'.

The formula is repeated, but more expansively and intelligibly, on the opposite page, K4 (see illustration). The first two type-lines once again deploy an unusual range of types. What distinction is being made between roman capitals and the usual roman lower case, between either and italic? Do these different type-styles denote varying degrees of textual authority? There are no clear answers, and the marginal note 'a' again complicates the effect. But the note itself adds a radically new dimension to the page's typographical layout. It spills leftwards from the right-hand margin to occupy the entire measure for three lines. Then comes the amplification of 'TVB. TIB . . .', and the detailed account of the Flamen's ritual acts. After this description, the note signalled 'b', like 'a' before it, intrudes across the full width of the page, forming a barrier between the ritual and the dialogue that

follows.[13] The passage of non-dialogue is therefore surrounded on three sides by incursive annotations. What we witness here is not a record of dramatic action. The moment and place of the stage have been bypassed: the original ritual is itself re-enacted, so to speak, in typography.

Jonson's annotations, nowhere more excessive, as always serve to validate facts; but here their particular function is to endorse the ceremony and decorum of the events they gesturally enclose. Their length is no mere encumbrance but a purposeful device. It is precisely where the semblance of ordinary dramatic dialogue is suspended that the marginal notes make their repeated inroads into the space of the play text. The annotations go beyond their usual function of holding the text from unmediated contact with the outside world. They here seal off one special part of the text, the ritual, from contamination with another, the dialogue. Thus they become an encapsulating vessel in which the ritual is physically, typographically, held.

If this marks an erasure of the stage, it erases the historical present as well; for if it were not for the vigorous historicising within the Roman context, would not some details of the ceremony seems suspiciously Catholic in flavour? But all sanctimony is scandalously emptied when Sejanus, calling religion a blind mistress or a juggling mystery, throws the priest's wares scorned on the earth. The words 'blind Mistresse' and 'mystery, Religion' appear lower on the same page, in an unannotated passage otherwise printed in conventional roman type; they are printed in italic, so as to visibly pick out the dangerous juggling with words. A maze of possibilities stands between this moment and Jonson's interrogation on his Sejanus and his papistry.

Later in Act 5, Tiberius' letter to the Senate, which in the play is the device on which the denouement hangs, in the printed book provides another occasion for some extravagantly formal inscriptional effects. On M1v a centred heading is printed in brevier capital lettering with pica for initials, and the opening greeting below it appears in brevier capitals with points between words. In the main part of the letter, which is conventionally printed in italics, the repeated words 'CONSCRIPT FATHERS' are set in spaced long primer italic capital letters and the words 'HONORABLE FATHERS' in pica and brevier Roman capitals. For dramatic purposes the contents of the letter exist only in speech, but Jonson seizes on the print medium in order to reproduce the letter's supposed graphic features in all their Romanitas. Here Jonson moves beyond the tabulation of sources, beyond the purely literary technique of modified implantation, to give, as it were, a type facsimile of a key document that has been incorporated into the text. Insofar as the text relates to stage production, the inscriptional effect is a fiction; but the typographical style is particularly similar to that of The King's Entertainment, which repeatedly quotes and represents the inscriptions of the actual tableaux, and indeed gives a large 22-line facsimile of a Latin inscription. In Sejanus Jonson acknowledges a source that may have influenced the entertainment

as well: the examples of inscriptions reproduced in Barnabé Brisson's De Formulis et Sollemnibus Populi Romani Verbis (Paris, 1583).[14] Jonson cites De Formulis at three significant points: on E4; in a note keyed to the formulaic opening of the senate's meeting in 3.1, where Varro's words are printed in two lines of capital and italic type; and again on K3v-4 and M1-1v, the pages bearing the ceremony with the flamens and the opening of the inscriptional letter.[15] There could be no clearer mandate to regard the text as an object whose physical attributes are themselves invested with textuality.

Elsewhere I have further related this strange and extraordinary quarto to the play's oppositional qualities, the practical risks of publication, and the apparent contradictions in Jonson's ideological stances.[16] Another critical line of enquiry would begin by describing the play as mannerist (in line with Arnold Hauser's use of the term), as regards its verbally signified features of tone, imagery, and structure: its satirical waywardness from high tragedy, its preoccupations wth voyeurism and the statuesque, the schism between Tiberius and Sejanus as central figures. The same art-historical term can be applied to the text's typographical features: its problematization of historical space in the physical space of page layout, the ostentatious stylization of classical effects.[17] The critical implications are therefore far-reaching in various directions, and they emphasize the need for the reader of Sejanus to take into account the Quarto's typography. Needless to say, I am not satisfied by the common editorial position which regards the Quarto as superseded by the 1616 Folio text. I suspect, with Greg and Bowers, that an eclectic text should properly be Quarto based,[18] but the whole thrust of my argument is against an eclectic text in the first place. If it comes to a choice between Quarto and Folio, each printing is of such high authority that the purely textual sense of that word ceases to be sole arbiter. In the Folio, though it is essentially a modified reprint, the most distinctive features of the Quarto are weakened, abandoned, or dispersed. The Quarto is in various senses more textually significant; it is also more culturally significant, more Jonsonian.

To put the same point another way, the Jonson quartos sketch out an evolving history of interaction between performance and print, text and

author, author and society. There are good reasons why the author should most virulently announce himself, and be most severe in displacing the theatrical text, when he presents a play that has already put him in conflict with the state. Jonson sounds embattled, and is. The Jonsonian author cannot, however, be simply equated with the man himself. He depends on the capacity of the text to invoke a writer who proclaims the text his and addresses it to the world; he depends on the text's capacity to generate an authorial presence. This figure is a rhetorician, and the book's typography and layout are elements in the rhetoric. He is also a good parent. He defends the text; or rather, makes it ready to defend itself. And he creates a space for it to exist in. These manoeuvres take place in the text itself, and Jonson's transcription and revision of the stage play mean that it is impossible, even if it were desirable, to separate off the stage work from the penumbra of print. The text is the whole book, with its typographical as well as verbal semantics. It is a vehicle for the self-created author, that voice within the text who hails its readers and directs it to them. This voice emerges because it has specific work to do. It defines itself because the text, and the extratextual, biological, and historical author, existed in the real world.

Notes