Abstract
Shakespeare’s death in 1616 coincides fortuitously with the publication of Ben Jonson’s Folio. While Shakespeare’s First Folio appeared seven years after the playwright’s death, Jonson was only in the middle of his long career when he collected his works together and carefully saw them through the press. The Shakespeare Folio, as I will discuss later in this chapter, was a posthumous monument designed to construct a specific kind of reading experience that was surely influenced in part by the way Jonson’s Folio elevated plays into works that demanded serious reading attention. In Jonson’s case, this may have attracted a certain amount of amusement, as evidenced by the epigram: ‘Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mystery lurk, / What others call a play you call a worke’.1 Recent scholarship has been uncertain about whether the Folio represents something of a conscious mid-career shift on Jonson’s part away from the public stage. It is indisputable that after the Folio’s publication Jonson produced only three further plays for the public stage (or four if one includes The Devil Is An Ass, which was performed in the same year as the Folio but not published until 1631): The Staple of News, performed in 1626, The New Inn, performed in 1629, and The Magnetic Lady, performed in 1632. So while Jonson continued his masque output at the rate of almost two per year up until 1625, and also produced a considerable amount of poetry, it is certainly the case that the bulk of his plays were behind him and that the Folio presents the plays as something more like texts to be read (and preserved), than scripts to be performed.2
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Notes
For an important reconsideration of the Folio as book, which does still underline its status as a presentation of the plays as ‘reading texts’, see Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 182–214.
Stephen Orgel’s pioneering The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965) and The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) remain key studies; Martin Butler, The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2008);
for a recent interesting, wide-ranging study of how masques were interpreted throughout the seventeenth century see Lauren Shohet, Reading Masques (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Martin Butler, ‘“We are one mans all”: Jonson’s “The Gipsies Metamorphosed”’, YES 21 (1991), p. 256.
The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 2, p. 374, and quoted in Butler, ‘We are one mans all’, p. 357.
James Knowles, ‘“Songs of baser alloy”: Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed and the Circulation of Manuscript Libels’, HLQ 69 (2006), p. 154.
Again see Knowles’s discussion, ‘Songs’, pp. 158–9; Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts (London: Mansell, 1980), vol. 1, JnB 625–53, JnB 654–70.5.
References are to Ben Jonson, The Staple of News, ed. Anthony Parr (Manchester University Press, 1988).
See the influential account of news in Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present 112 (1986), pp. 60–90.
Karen Newman, ‘Engendering the News’, in The Elizabethan Theatre XIV (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1996), pp. 49–69;
for a complementary interpretation of the play as related to an economic crisis over the supply of money in the 1620s, and the idea that the prodigal plot centres upon the concept of a balanced economy reflected in individual households, see Stephen Deng, ‘Global Oeconomy: Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News and the Ethics of Mercantilism’, in Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, eds, Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 245–63.
Marcus Nevitt, ‘Ben Jonson and the Serial Publication of News’, Media History 11 (2005), pp. 53–68.
References are to Ben Jonson, The New Inn, ed. Michael Hattaway (Manchester University Press, 1984).
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 259.
See Martin Butler, ‘Late Jonson’, in Gordon Macmullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 166–88;
and in a more extended argument, Julie Sanders, ‘“The Day’s Sports Devised in the Inn”: Jonson’s “The New Inn” and Theatrical Politics’, MLR 91 (1996), pp. 545–60;
and for a provocative argument that the revival of the play at the then new RSC Swan Theatre enlisted The New Inn for a conservative nostalgia in the 1980s (a cultural materialist argument that itself now seems very much of its time), see Peter Womack, ‘The Sign of the Light Heart: Jonson’s “The New Inn”, 1629 and 1987’, New Theatre Quarterly 5 (1989), pp. 162–70.
Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, eds, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 712.
Taylor has an extremely elaborate and authoritative account of the textual situation in ibid., pp. 712–865; for a succinct account see T. H. Howard-Hill, Middleton’s “Vulgar Pasquin”: Essays on A Game at Chess (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), pp. 159–95.
Many theatre historians have written about the play’s record-breaking run; see for example Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 4th edn (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 268.
Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from the Revels edition: Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Manchester University Press, 1993).
Gary Taylor, ‘Historicism, Presentism and Time: Middleton’s The Spanish Gypsy and A Game at Chess’, Sederi 18 (2008), pp. 147–70.
Chamberlain, Letters, pp. 577–8. The comments on the play are collected together in both the Revels edition and the Oxford edition: Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 1773–885. Oxford adds two sources discovered after the publication of the Revels edition, and has comments in French, Italian and Spanish in the original languages rather than translated as in Revels.
The poem is in the Revels and Oxford editions, but see the transcription and detailed analysis in Geoffrey Bullough, ‘“The Game at Chess”: How it Struck a Contemporary’, MLR 49 (1954), pp. 156–63; quotations are from Bullough.
See Charleton Hinman, The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), vol. 1, pp. 334–65.
For libels, see McRae, Literature, Satire, esp. chap. 4; for Wither see Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/4 (Cambridge University Press, 1986); see Margot Heinemann’s more cautious account in ‘Drama and Opinion in the 1620s: Middleton and Massinger’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 237–65, in which she argues that the plays represent a longer-standing ideological position.
See Annals of English Drama, 3rd edn, ed. Sylvia Wagonheim (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 119–21; Annals notes a private performance by Edward Dering’s circle of an adaptation of Henry IV at around this time, but not necessarily in 1623.
Ben Jonson, Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 410;
see the brief but suggestive account of Jonson’s self-consciousness about the masque’s political difficulties in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 2–3.
Martin Butler, ‘Courtly Negotiations’, in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook, eds, The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 36.
See the illuminating comparison in Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 33–9.
Anthony James West, The Shakespeare First Folio: The History of the Book (Oxford University Press, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 5–6.
See, for example, W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), pp. 80–1;
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 36–9.
See Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare in Print (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 44–5.
See for example G. P. V. Akrigg, ‘The Arrangement of the Tragedies in the First Folio’, Shakespeare Quarterly 7 (1956), pp. 443–5.
Elizabeth made the remark to William Lambarde, BM Add. MS 15664, fol. 226; see Charles Fitter, ‘Historicising Shakespeare’s Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex’, Early Modern Literary Studies 11 (2005), pp. 1–47.
Blair Worden, ‘Shakespeare in Life and Art: Biography and Richard II’, in Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne, eds, Shakespeare, Marlow, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 23–42.
Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard II, the Play of 7 February 1601, and the Essex Rising’, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008), pp. 1–35;
and see the article on the conversation which uses new archival material to authenticate Elizabeth’s conversation: Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II? The Authenticity of Lambarde’s “Conversation”’, RES 64 (2013), pp. 208–30.
Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 203–16.
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Salzman, P. (2014). Drama. In: Literature and Politics in the 1620s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137305985_2
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