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Notes
C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds. Ben Jonson, 11 vols. I am grateful to Adrian Weiss for helpful suggestions he has made.
Herford and Simpson correctly note that "the printer unlocked the forme and transposed the stanzas without disturbing the type" (VII, 420).
"The Final Quires of the Jonson 1616 Workes: Headline Evidence," Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), 119.
Johan Gerritsen, "Stansby and Jonson Produce a Folio," English Studies, 40 (1959), 54. It is to be regretted that in the last thirty years Dr. Gerritsen has not been able to set out the very promising (and tantalizing) fruits of his investigations into the Jonson 1616 Folio; I earnestly pray that my "not-too-distant future" will be measured in terms of years, not decades.
Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries (1983), pp. 136, 268, n. 22.
Joseph Loewenstein, "Printing and 'The Multitudinous Presse,'" in Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (1991), p. 186. This also is the argument that Loewenstein makes in his Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (1984), pp. 122-123, although in that volume he does acknowledge two printed versions.
I have no confidence that I shall ever be able to resolve the question, although I suppose that someone might. If Jonson's holograph should come to light a logical answer might present itself—but that seems a very dim hope.
The extent to which Jonson oversaw the printing of the masques is not clear. Herford and Simpson thought that he had nothing to do with their printing, but this assessment may need to be revised.
Jackson was of the opinion that only large-paper copies had the Pallas/Astraea ending (William A. Jackson, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, English Literature, 1475-1700, 3 Vols., [1940], II, 575).
These are close to the proportions noted by Charlton Hinman in his examination of the sheets in the Shakespeare Folio of 1623: "We shall find that the earlier of the two states of a given variant forme in the Folio is often represented by about 10 per cent of the copies examined. Commonly, for example, an uncorrected state is found in some six or eight out of seventy-five copies" (The Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, 2 vols. [1963], I, 229, n. 1). See, also, Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), p. 353.
It is understandable that Greg overlooked this detail when he concluded that for "the reversal of the final speeches in The Golden Age Restored . . . there is no typographical evidence to determine the direction of the changes" (W. W. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration [1939-1959; rpt. 1970], III, 1072).
Strictly speaking, there is no significance to the number of occurrences of either the broken comma or the pulled space—one of each would be enough to sustain the argument—but of twenty copies I have recently examined which have at least one of the last two leaves, eight have the raised space.
The number depends upon certain variants; for instance, three words in the font appear on the titlepage for EMO that is printed without a border.
Shelf-mark 1479.1. The other large-paper sheets which have been cut down are all of quire 4I and 4P1.6. In the Folger Library there is a large-paper 1616 Folio (14751.2, Copy 2) with one small-paper quire, 3L, bound in.
Allan Stevenson deals with this watermark in "Watermarks are Twins," Studies in Bibliography, 4 (1951-52), 57-91. The Jonson Folio contains several varieties of the mark: Stevenson's Figure 4 reproduces one of them, and on p. 81 he describes another. The same paper was also used by Stansby for the large-paper copies of Aaron Rathbone's The Surveyor, which, as Donovan has demonstrated, was printed at the same time as the final quires of the Jonson Folio.
One might assume a total of 700 to 1200 copies, of which perhaps fifty or so might be large-paper.
Herford and Simpson note that the Pallas/Astraea ending is that reproduced in the (second) Folio of 1640 (VII, 420). All that this means is that a folio (large-paper?) with that ending was used as printer's copy; nothing more can be inferred.
Mercurie Vindicated and Golden Age end with—respectively—"Chorus" and "Quire." Do both terms mean that the recitation of each is in song? It is pretty clear that such is the case for "Chorus," as the parts to which it answers are described in the stage directions as songs, and it would answer in kind. As for "Quire" there is no point in calling it by that name unless song is meant. The three masques that do not end in song are The Speeches at Prince Henries Barriers, A Challange at a Tilt, at a Marriage, and Hymenaei. The first two have no songs in them; the third ends with a long, sober speech by "Truth."
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