Abstract
In 1612, William Jaggard issued the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of poems he had first published in 1599. The title page of all three editions attributes the book to “W. Shakespeare,” and the book does include versions of two poems later included in Shakespeares Sonnets (1609), and three songs that had appeared in the 1598 Love’s Labor’s Lost quarto. However, other poems had appeared in printed poetry collections of Bartholomew Griffin and Richard Barnfield, and other poems seem unlikely to be Shakespeare’s.1 The contents of the first two editions are identical, but the third edition greatly expands the book by including, as the title page advertises, “two Loue-Epistles, the first from Paris to Helen, and Hellens answere backe againe to Paris.”2 It also adds an additional seven unadvertised poems, including “That Menelus was cause of his owne wrongs” (107), and “The Tale of Cephalus and Poeris,” and several others. This additional material takes up almost 70 pages, dwarfing the 20 poems that initially appeared in Passionate Pilgrim, and apparently crediting Shakespeare, who had established his poetic reputation with the popular Ovidian poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, with a substantial new canon of Ovidian work.
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Notes
For the textual history of Passionate Pilgrim, see The Passionate Pilgrim, ed. J. Q. Adams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939);
Shakespeare’s Poems, eds. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Thomson Learning), 2007, 489–98;
Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (New York: Oxford UP), 2002, 74–82.
Citations from Hyder Edward Rollins, ed., The Passionate Pilgrim: The Third Edition, 1612 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.)
See Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 59–68;
Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 522–3;
James P. Bednarz, “Canonizing Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 60 (2007), 264–5.
For instance, see Benedict Scott Robinson, “Thomas Heywood and the Cultural Politics of Play Collections,” SEL 42 (2002), 361–80, but see also Loewenstein, Possessive Authorship 50–2 and 104 and
Sonia Massai, Shakespeare and the Rise of the Editor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), 165–70 for measured considerations of Heywood’s concern about the impact of the book trade and the theater. Troia itself offers a brief, critical account of the invention of print, one that, like Daniel’s story of Nemesis, begins with deceit: he credits print’s invention to Faustius, who purportedly claimed to be the inventor of print after having stolen the technology from his master, Coster (Johns, 331–5): Humphrey the Duke of Gloster, was depriu’d His harmlesse life at Bury: Suffolke now Was banisht England, where he long had striu’d By the King’s grace to make the Barons bow, Iacke Cade, a mutinous Rebell, now suruiu’d, Dating the Kings Edicts to disalow: This was the yeare of Iubilee: In Menz, Faustius first printed, at his owne expence. The Turkish Mahomet sackt and despoylde Constantinople: at this time was fought Saint Albons battaile, where the King was foyld, and by the Duke of yorke a prisoner blought To London, (2P5v) Where Daniel’s Pandora only implies the turmoil that print will cause, Heywood associates print’s development with moments of historical turmoil: in addition to Cade’s rebellion (which Daniel also cites as a key moment in the development of print), he indicts the sack of Constantinople and Henry VI’s defeat at Saint Albons as events analogous to the emergence of print culture. As with Daniel, Heywood’s career in print suggests a more practical, accommodating relationship with print culture, and his presentation as author and editor in Troia may be an attempt to present the folio as a model book.
Douglas Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 107.
Herendeen, “Introduction,” in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, eds. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1991), 13.
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), 238–40.
The 1598 Chaucer would appear in a revised and improved second edition in 1602, but it would not again be reprinted until 1687. Derek Pearsall observes that the Speght Chaucer “held sway for well over a hundered years … It was the text read and owned by Milton, Junius, Pepys, Dryden, and Pope, and by a multitude of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gentlemen with respectable tastes and sturdy bookshelves” (“Thomas Speght (ca.1550–?).” Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers [Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984], 91.) The most influential part of the book may have been the biography of Chaucer, which remained definitive until 1840 (77).
Eisenstein, Printing Press 81. For Eisenstein, the ability of print to disseminate correction is a crucial aspect of “standardization,” one of the three major innovations she ascribes to print. See Printing Press 80–8. But see also, Randall McLeod (aka Random Clod), who has demonstrated how errata lists and stop-press corrections could not assure that print could not always defeat error; indeed they often put the reader at a disadvantage by acknowledging the non-uniform production of printed work (“Information on Information,” Text 5 [1991], 241–81.) Similarly, see David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), pp. 97–138, for a more skeptical account of print’s potential to actually correct error. It is probably safest to acknowledge that the degree to which print could accurately present text was a matter of debate rather than to generalize about how early modern subjects understood this capacity; my argument simply recognizes that, at the very least, a group of poets and other literary writers more or less support Eisenstein’s optimistic characterization of attitudes toward the early modern press.
The most complete examination of the use of Blackletter in English printing may be found in Bianca Finzi-Contini Calabersi’s 2004 Columbia University dissertation Gross Characters: the Unseemly Typography of Early Modern Drama, pp. 65–126. More recently, see Douglas Brooks, “Typographic Nostalgia: Play-Reading, Popularity, and the Meanings of Black Letter,” The Book of the Play, ed. Marta Straznicky (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 2006).
William Kuskin, “‘The Loadstarre of the English Language’: Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendaer and the Construction of Modernity,” Textual Cultures 2 (2007), 27–8.
For an account of Jonson’s possible goals for his Workes that ties the book into Elizabeth Eisenstein’s conception of print culture, see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Amherst, MA: Harvard, 1989), 221–3.
Latin text from Workes, ¶3v-¶4r; translations adapted from D. H. Craig’s in Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, ed. D. H. Craig (New York: Routledge, 1990), 125–6.
Translation from John T. Shawcross, ed., The Poetry of John Donne (Garden City, NY: Anchor 1967), p. 218.
See also Dennis Flynn and Marcia Karp, “Donne’s ‘Amicissimo, et Meritissimo Ben: Jonson’ and the Daring of Volpone,” Literary Imagination, 6 (2004), 368–89.
Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1994), 19. Jonson acknowledges a “second Pen” who contributed to the publicly performed text of Sejanus, and informs his reader that he has removed this “weaker” material in the published quarto (H&S IV 351). For Jonson’s bibliographical self-presentation in these books, see Tribble, Margins, 146–57.
Ranjan Ghosh, “Ben Jonson and His Reader: An Aesthetics of Antagonism” [sic], The Comparatist 27 (2013), 140.
Jonson, Timber, in Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Ian Donaldson (New York: Oxford, 1985). All citations from Timber are keyed to this edition.
Lorna Hudson, ed. and intro., Volpone and Other Early Plays (London: Penguin, 1999), xvii.
D. F. McKenzie, “Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve.” Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, eds. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S. J. (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 2002), 200.
Roger Chartier, Forms and Meanings (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995), 30.
See Julian Roberts, “The Latin Trade” in CHB4 and R. B. McKerrow, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1557 –1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1968), 31–3.
For a recent consideration of Daniel and other author-figures in EMI and their significance for illustrating “the topicality of the literary scene in 1598,” see Robert Miola, Ben Jonson: Every Manin His Humour (Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2000), 16–18. Miola discusses the quarto text of the play, but such topicalities are relevant to the 1616 text as well.
Epicoene, 4.4.83–4; Bartholomew Fair, 5.3.81–6, both cited from Bevington et al., The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 9 volumes (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002).
Tom Cain, ed. Poetaster (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 255, note 530.
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© 2014 Francis X. Connor
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Connor, F.X. (2014). Ben Jonson’s Workes and Bibliographic Integrity. In: Literary Folios and Ideas of the Book in Early Modern England. History of Text Technologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438362_4
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