Detailed project description

1 THE PRINT EDITION

1.1 Textual contents. The Print Edition will contain the complete works of Ben Jonson - the seventeen completed plays, the surviving dramatic fragments, the more than thirty court masques and entertainments, the complete poems (including Jonson’s three short Latin poems, the inscriptions, and his two translations of Horace's Ars Poetica), the English Grammar, Discoveries, and letters to and from Jonson, along with the Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden. The edition will seek to include recently discovered materials (such as Jonson’s epitaph on Thomas Nashe, and Britain's Burse), and will give a clear sense, afforded by no other modern edition, of the shape, scale, and variety of the entire Jonsonian canon.

1.2 Organization. The ordering of the canon will differ in two important ways from that of Herford and Simpson: first, in the matter of dating, and secondly, in the general arrangement of the contents.

1.2.1 Dating. The Oxford editors' sense of 'early' and 'late' Jonsonian work has been increasingly questioned over recent years. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson will be the first edition of Jonson's complete works to appear since Herford and Simpson, and the first therefore to incorporate recent revisionary thinking about the sequence and composition of the canon.

1.2.2 General arrangement. The Oxford Ben Jonson separates plays, masques, poetry, and prose into different volumes. The Cambridge Ben Jonson will present them in chronological order, without generic division, thus giving an altogether clearer sense of the variety and chronological progression of Jonson’s work. The major poetry collections - Epigrams (1616), The Forest (1616) and The Underwood (1640) - will nevertheless be presented intact according to the dates of folio publication. This is because most of the poems in these collections are not precisely datable, and also because the significance of the collections as collections, with their own carefully structured sequences and juxtapositions, is coming increasingly to be recognized. Most of the poems that Jonson chose not to include within his major collections (such as those which Herford and Simpson entitled Ungathered Verse) can however be dated with reasonable accuracy, and will be printed at appropriate points throughout the edition. The titles of datable poems from the collections will also be printed within brackets under the appropriate date: e.g. under 1599 ['On Margaret Radcliffe': see Epigrams, 40], etc.

1.3 Editorial Contents. The principal editorial material in the Print Edition will be as follows. An asterisk signifies that further material relating to this item is available within the Electronic Edition.

1.3.1 General Introduction of approximately 25,000 words, prepared chiefly by the General Editors, including:

Life and Times *

Actors, Companies, and Playhouses *

The Court Masque *

Editions, Printers, Texts *

Critical Reputation *

1.3.2 Summary materials, prepared by General Editors:

Chronologies (Life; Works; General)

Select Bibliography *

1.3.3 Introductions to individual works (prepared by Contributing Editors): These will vary considerably in length. Each play will be prefaced by an introduction of around 3,000 words, commenting on date, stage history, source materials, social and political contexts, textual history, etc., and offering a brief critical appraisal and list of further reading. Introductions to individual masques and entertainments may often be quite short (e.g. 1000 words), serving essentially as headnotes, though certain masques (such as Hymenaei and The Gypsies Metamorphosed) will demand rather lengthier treatment: 2,000-2,500 words). The major poetry collections will each have introductions of around 1,000 words; the introductions to Discoveries, the English Grammar, Conversations with Drummond, etc. will be approximately 2,000 words apiece.

1.4 Format. The aim is to produce a set of six volumes of an attractive and easily manageable size and shape; to be sold, perhaps, as a boxed set. The total text will be set in single column; annotation, set in a slightly smaller font, will occupy space equivalent to approximately 35% of the text, presenting an over-all appearance not unlike that of the New Cambridge Shakespeare.

1.5 Presentation of the text. It is one of the curiosities of contemporary scholarship that, owing to the continuing domination of Herford and Simpson, Jonson is normally quoted in old spelling, while Shakespeare, owing to the ready availability of many modern-spelling editions, is nearly always quoted in a modernized form. This presentation perpetuates the popular notion of Jonson as a less accessible, more formidably learned writer than Shakespeare. A central feature of the Cambridge Ben Jonson Print Edition is its presentation of modernized texts. Each of these modernized texts in the Print Edition will be linked to the earliest relevant texts (in quarto, folio, manuscript, etc.) in the Electronic Edition, making textual comparisons of all kinds a relatively simple matter. This linkage between the Print Edition and Electronic Edition minimizes the traditional editorial dilemmas of old spelling versus modern spelling, and folio versus quarto: multiple options will now be available. Editorial preferences will nevertheless be clearly evident in the established text of the Print Edition.

1.5.1 Modernizing conventions. The edition will spell words as they are spelled today, avoiding as a general rule obsolete forms, unless there appears to be compelling evidence of dialectal use or wordplay. In modernising punctuation, the Cambridge edition will aim to capture the rhythm of the original as expressed in modern idiom.

1.6 Copy-texts. The Cambridge edition will select as copy-text the editions most closely supervised through the press by Jonson, and will evaluate the authority of revisions in later editions on a text-by-text basis. For reasons explained below, the general preferences of the edition are likely to diverge significantly from those of the Oxford Ben Jonson.

1.6.1 The 1616 folio. Percy Simpson, who was chiefly responsible for textual decisions in that edition, placed great reliance on the authority of Jonson’s 1616 folio, arguing that Jonson himself had carefully supervised its progress through the press, and believing the folio therefore represented the author’s own considered and most recent thoughts. The folio is taken as copy-text for all of the plays in volumes three to six of the Oxford Ben Jonson - except, of course, for Eastward Ho! and the first version of Every Man in his Humour - and for the relevant masques in volume seven, with the single exception of The Masque of Queens, which was printed from holograph. The folio was also allowed to dictate even quite minute details of textual presentation. Simpson’s preference for the 1616 folio was questioned even while the edition was in preparation, and has been further criticised in recent years. The work, for example, of Johan Gerritsen (English Studies, 38 (1957), 120-6 and 40 (1959), 525) and Kevin Donovan ('Jonson’s Texts in the First Folio', in Jennifer Brady and W. J. Herendeen, eds., Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (University of Delaware, 1991) has shown that while Jonson’s involvement with the 1616 folio was indeed remarkable by the standards of his day, its authority is by no means as great or as unproblematical as Simpson imagined.

1.6.2 The quartos. Recent papers by David Gants and Mark Bland (published by Macmillan in Re-presenting Ben Jonson, ed. Martin Butler, 1999) confirm and extend the findings of these scholars. Kevin Donovan and Helen Ostovich at the same conference argued persuasively that in the case of Every Man Out of His Humour, at least, the quarto text is in many ways preferable to the folio, being closer to the experience of the playhouse. These arguments have wider applicability to other quarto texts, such as Cynthia’s Revels. The quartos are often also to be preferred on account of their printing-house history. The folios were set from marked-up copies of quarto texts, whose orthography and accidentals therefore are of great significance. The traditional doctrine that editors should select as copy-text the final version which the author approved in his lifetime has been importantly modified in recent years by scholars such as Thomas Tanselle (Studies in Bibliography, 1994) who distinguish between an author’s ‘final’ intentions and ‘new’ intentions - such as the intention to revise a play for a reading, rather than a theatrical, public. The import of such recent textual work for Jonson is not to displace the authority of the folio across the board, by any means, but to address the textual problem in as full and complex a dimension as possible.

1.7 Texts in two states. Every Man In His Humour will be the only play to be presented in the main edition in two distinct versions, Q and F. Variant forms of certain poems (e.g. The Forest, 10) will also be printed in their entirety, as will the variant versions of the much-revised masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed. While there would be obvious value in presenting the two versions of Every Man in His Humour on facing pages, as in J. W. Lever’s Regents Renaissance edition, the chronological arrangement of the present edition works against that possibility. As the two versions will appear in separate volumes, however, they can be read side-by-side. Special care will be taken with lay-out and presentation to make this an easy experience, and avoid the necessity of repeating certain notes. A two-text edition on facing pages might easily be derived from the main edition and marketed separately.

1.8 Collation of variants. Q/ F/ MS variants of a substantive nature will be recorded at the foot of the page, along with a very selective citation of plausible readings proposed by previous editors but rejected in this edition. Readers seeking a more detailed collation will turn to the Electronic Edition, where the earliest texts will be stored.

1.9 Annotation. Annotation (lexical, historical, political, classical, biblical, biographical, etc.) will be printed immediately below the text. The notes will be at level judged helpful to an averagely intelligent undergraduate student, and more advanced readers. Some repetition of information in notes to different works within the edition will be inevitable, but some centralizing will be made possible through the system of Indexes described in 2.1.3.2 above.

1.10 Stage directions. Unlike the Oxford Ben Jonson, which paid relatively little attention to such matters, the Cambridge edition will attend with particular care to questions of staging and performance. Editors will be encouraged to remain alert to the plays as texts for the theatre as well as texts for reading: ambiguities of staging will often be as deserving of a note as are lexical ambiguities. Editors will also be encouraged to be wary of providing directions that unnecessarily limit the possibilities of stage action. Any additions to or expansions of copy text stage directions will appear within the text in square brackets. The significance of particular stage directions and any problems arising from them will be discussed from time to time in the annotation.

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