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Notes
Gerritsen, rev. of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vols. IX — XI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950 — 52), English Studies 38 (1957), 121. All citations of Jonson are from this edition, 11 vols. (1925 — 52), referred to hereafter as H&S; i/j and u/v have been regularized to conform with modern practice. I am grateful to John Bidwell for his useful advice.
These succinct terms are those of W. W. Greg, in A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1939 — 1959; rprt. 1970), III, 1071. For convenience, I shall use Greg's terminology where I can.
R. B. McKerrow and F. S. Ferguson, Title-page Borders used in England & Scotland, 1485 — 1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1932). McKerrow and Ferguson, who do not note the Jonson title-pages, mistakenly cite for the first appearance of the compartment several of the subtitles in Stansby's "1617" printing of Hooker's Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. Even though the Hooker subtitle for Book 5 bears the date "1616," it can be seen that the Jonson plays must have been printed earlier. The woodcut border sustained damage during its use; the crack "through the jewel at the foot on left" noticed by McKerrow and Ferguson (p. 177) began to appear as the in compartment title-page for Poëtaster was being machined.
I follow the spelling of Smithwicke as it appears on the title-pages instead of the more usual spelling of Smethwick or Smethwicke, as found in Herford and Simpson, Greg, and the New STC.
At one place in Epicoene ("sheet Yy [Act I and Act II up to scene ii, line 64]"), to account for sloppy printing in all three of the large-paper copies that they consulted, they offer the following conjecture: "The dislocation in sheet Yy must have occurred when the edition was being printed off and after Jonson had passed the proofs. It was probably due to an accident in the printing-house — for instance, to a workman dropping the formes. It was reset without consulting Jonson. What would he have said if he had discovered a copy in this state can be but faintly imagined" (V, 148 — 149). See, also, IX, 40.
Herford and Simpson also mistakenly assume that the reset page 84 (sig. G6v) appears only in large-paper copies (IX, 56).
"The Final Quires of the Jonson 1616 Workes: Headline Evidence," Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), 119. See, also, J. A. Riddell, "The Concluding Pages of the Jonson Folio of 1616," SB 47 (1994), 147 — 154. Gerritsen has noticed several large-paper sheets in Every Man Out with the original settings (p. 54 in "Stansby and Jonson Produce a Folio," English Studies, 40 [1959], 52 — 55).
As Stansby's men, like others, used swash and "normal" italic letters indifferently, it seems most likely that those letters were distributed into the same compartments. McKerrow notes that "these swash letters, whatever may have been their original purpose, seem to have been used at all times absolutely interchangeably with the plain letters in all positions." He also notes that such use itself may be of interest in bibliographical investigation (R. B. McKerrow, Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927; 2nd impr., corrected 1928], p. 296). For a few more examples (on one page) in the Jonson Folio see: the penultimate line in the Prologue for Epicoene (sig. 2Yv, original and reset), the plain and swash "M" in "Muse"; two lines further on the same page, the plain and swash "A" in "Another"; fifteen lines further on the same page, the plain and swash "A" in "Act" (that the plain and swash letters were used indifferently can also be inferred from the fact that on both the original and the reset page there is one plain "A" and one swash, that is, they were merely exchanged between "Another" and "Act" in the reset). Throughout the volume swash and plain varieties of "A" are used willy-nilly in the word "Act." See, also, the discussion of swash and plain "M" in the final pages of the plays, below.
The textual apparatus for Every Man Out is silent on the matter; the "it is" for "'tis" which appears in the reset variant is ascribed in the apparatus only to the 1640 and 1692 Folios. The "it is" of the reset variant is recorded in the "Textual Survey" (IX, 56), where the implication is that only large-paper copies had the reset G6v sheet. In fact, it appears also in a number of small-paper copies.
A greater bibliographer could make the same mistake. Jackson incorrectly identified the Elizabethan Club (Dent-Gott) copy as being large-paper (William A. Jackson, The Carl H. Pforzheimer Library, English Literature, 1475 — 1700, 3 vols. [New York: (The Merrill Press), 1940], II, 573, n.). Large-paper copies can most easily be identified by watermark. So far as I am aware, there is only one kind of watermark in the large-paper copies; it is characterized by a shield with three lions. I have briefly discussed this topic on pages 152 — 153 in "The Concluding Pages of the Jonson Folio of 1616."
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932, pp. 6 — 7. That it is the copy that Herford and Simpson consulted, see H&S, IX, 40.
Ford does not say how he measured the width of the page. He gives the width of the Grenville large-paper copy as 8 ⅖” and the Douce as 7 ¼”; I make them to be no more than 8 ¼” and 7”. After this article was completed, the Huntington Library was given by Mr. Kendrick Schlatter a collection of books that included 1616 — 1640 Jonson Folios, with the following in pencil on the free endpaper of the first volume: "Note these two volumes are | those chiefly mentioned in | Collation of the Ben Jonson Folios | 1616 — 31 — 40 — — Oxford 1932 — — | By H L Ford." The first of these is the volume that Ford calls his "premier copy," and an inspection of it reveals his method of measuring. He measured the vertical dimension off of a page (11 ⅛”); he measured the horizontal along the inside cover from the back of the spine to the front edge of the cover (7 ⁷⁄₁₆”). The volume is printed, as I had supposed, on small paper stock. There is confirmation that the volumes are those owned by Ford from the text of Vol. II. The "trial title-page" for Bartholmew Fayre, as described and illustrated by Herford and Simpson (VI, 4 and 9) is that present in the Schlatter set. Herford and Simpson identify the photo illustration on page 9 as coming from Ford's copy. The Schlatter copy is identical, including a distinctive small ink mark below the left-hand side of the epigraph and a smudge below the right-hand side.
Huntington, 12 ⅝”; Clark, 12 ⅜”; Grenville (British Library), 12 ¾” (as noted by Ford [I measure it as 12 ⅝”]); Crocker, 13 ¼” (as noted by Jackson).
Greg's four title-pages and my six are reconciled thus: Greg makes no distinction between (3) and (4), but he does note a "variant: without Hor. in the margin," without attempting to account for it. He makes no distinction between (2) and (6).
On the other hand, a copy at the Folger (shelfmark 14751, copy 3) can boast two, one in compartment and an (added) plain.
At the William A. Clark Library (shelf-mark PR 2600 / 1616), Harvard (Widener 60 — 1116), and Beinecke (1978 / +50).
Why Smithwicke's (or Smethwick's) name should appear at all is not clear, for as Greg notes, he "had no traceable interest" in the play (III, 1072).
The accounting of Herford and Simpson is, of course, only partial: "A minor variant is the omission of 'Hor.' in both forms of the title-page, its insertion in the right margin in some copies [i. e., number (4)], and the centering of it above the quotation in the large-paper copies [i. e., number (6)]" (IX, 20, n. 2).
For a chart of the distribution of the skeletons and a description of the alteration, see Appendix I.
Some "mysterious resettings [on T2.5, 2X1.6, 3A1.6, and 3T1.6] made after the Folio had been published," perhaps about 1640, as suggested by Herford and Simpson (IX, 40), apparently do not bear on the present argument. It should be mentioned that all of these "mysterious resettings" derive from only one source, the "mysterious" Ford "A" copy. Gerritsen adds to the "reset" sheets of the Oxford editors Q3.4, 2M1.6, and 3L3.4, but thinks that all were printed much earlier than 1640 ("Stansby and Jonson Produce a Folio," p. 55). Whatever reset sheets there may be other than those for quires G and H and I3.4, they would have been reset for some reason other than enlarging the press-run.
Most likely the entire imprint was newly composed. These are the distinctive qualities that I could identify.
Except in two sheets (of a possible sixty-six) the misshapen watermarks do not appear in Epigrammes until about half way through the printing of that section, but after that they appear with great frequency.
It seems to have lasted through about ten or twelve percent of the press-run. Of twenty-seven copies that I have recently examined, including three large-paper, three (all small-paper) have the comma present.
It may well be that other small bits of type were left standing, for instance, "A Comœdie," as it appears on the title-pages of Epicoene and Every Man In, but in most cases the type is so regular that one cannot be sure.
I have not detected any variants in these final pages, and none is noticed by Herford and Simpson.
The page number is set within parentheses, between rules, in the center of the page. Such page numbers appear on all final pages of plays after Every Man Out.
R. B. Parker finds the ligature in three of the forty copies of the Folio that he collated for his Revels edition of Volpone (1983, p. 357). He also notes that Dr. Gerritsen had seen eight copies with it; I have seen it in two copies of twenty seven that I have recently examined. Parker calls it "State 3," although it should be considered to be the first of two states. Parker's "State 2" (with "Como die," missing the medial "e") is simply an error, one which I think I must have introduced when I corresponded with Professor Parker as he was working on his edition, some twenty years ago.
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