The Riddle of Jonson's Chronology Revisited

Library

Volumn 4, Issue 1, 2003, Pages

  Butler, Martin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0345447598     PISSN: 00242160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/library/4.1.49     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. 'The Riddle of Jonson's Chronology', The Library, IV, 6 (1926), 340-47. The essay was reprinted, with some revisions, in Greg's Collected Papers, ed. by J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, 1966), pp. 184-91.
2. 'The Riddle of Jonson's Chronology', The Library, IV, 6 (1926), 340-47. The essay was reprinted, with some revisions, in Greg's Collected Papers, ed. by J. C. Maxwell (Oxford, 1966), pp. 184-91.
3. It seems probable that this is a calendrical date on the likely - though not certain - assumption that the printer's '1607' on the title-page is calendrical.
4. John Peacock, 'Ben Jonson's Masques and Italian Culture', in Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance, ed. by J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 81-82.
5. For the actual dates of performances, compiled from financial documents, court correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, see the Appendix.
6. See the comments in Dekker's narrative that suggest how irked he was by Jonson's implied disparagement of his work: The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. by Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1955), II, pp. 254-55.
7. Ben Jonson, ed. by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, II vols (Oxford, 1925-52), VII (1941), p. 103.
8. Mercury Vindicated is preceded in the folio by A Challenge at Tilt, which had been staged for the marriage celebrations of the Earl of Somerset in 1613-14. Mercury Vindicated could not have been performed in this season because Campion's Masque of Squires was the masque for Twelfth Night 1614, and the details of all the other entertainments mounted are well documented. This means that Mercury Vindicated and The Golden Age Restored must have been performed in the two Christmas seasons before the publication of the folio, namely 1614-15 and 1615-16.
9. Ben Jonson, X (1950), pp. 545-56. Simpson argues that the order must be reversed because although Andrew Kerwyn was the paymaster for The Golden Age Restored, the signatory for Mercury Vindicated was his widow Margaret, Andrew having died in the twelve months between January 1615 and January 1616. But this argument makes no sense, because there is nothing in the payment to connect the sums of money with any specific masque. The accounts simply say that Andrew Kerwyn administered the payment for whatever masque was danced in 1615 and that his widow was responsible for the (unnamed) masque a year later. Simpson also argued that The Golden Age Restored could not have been danced in 1616 because of lines that seemed to allude to the recent scandal that had been disclosed about the death of Sir Thomas Overbury; but one of the links that locates the masque in January 1616 is precisely its allusion to Overbury.
10. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, 1991), p. 103.
11. Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare's Theatre, pp. 182-83.
12. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), II, p. 59.
13. The Venetian ambassador dated his dispatch 18 February 1610, according to the continental system; this was ten days ahead of the calendar in England, where the date would have been 8 February.
14. A special problem is presented by Christmas his Masque, which is dated '1616' in the 1640 folio but '1615' in the Folger manuscript. My guess is that the '1615' date, which is in a different hand from that which wrote the text, was added at a later time, perhaps when the manuscript was sewn together with other papers to make a larger volume. In the absence of any other records for Christmas his Masque, it is not absolutely certain whether the folio date means Christmas 1615-16 or 1616-17. However, the exclusion of the masque from the first folio, and the mention in the dialogue that the weather has been unusually mild - which corresponds to surviving records from December 1616 - suggest that the 1616 - 17 season was meant. Even so, it remains unclear whether the masque was performed before or after 1 January.
15. It is also striking that the three plays that form the opening section of this volume - Bartholomew Fair, The Devil is an Ass, and The Staple of News (all printed in 1631, but not issued until 1640) - were not arranged in chronological sequence of performance. The signatures of Devil is an Ass are continuous with those of Bartholomew Fair, but the separate title-page printed for them in 1640 lists them in the order Bartholomew Fair, Staple of News, Devil is an Ass, and that is how most copies bind them up.
16. See the judicious comments in Ben Jonson, ed. by Ian Donaldson (Oxford, 1985), pp. 680-81, and Donaldson's further remarks in his 'Jonson's Poetry', in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 133-34.
17. See the judicious comments in Ben Jonson, ed. by Ian Donaldson (Oxford, 1985), pp. 680-81, and Donaldson's further remarks in his 'Jonson's Poetry', in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. by Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 133-34.
18. Ian Donaldson observes (privately) that there is a conflict between the 1631 date on the 'Epistle Mendicant' (Underwood, 71) and the poem's statement that 'Disease [...] [Has] cast a trench about mee, now, five years'. Jonson's first paralytic stroke came in 1628.
19. This suggestion was first made by Percy Simpson in Ben Jonson, VII, p. 625. The very small numbers in which copies of the late masque quartos survive further suggest that their print run was correspondingly short. See also Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604-1640 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 20-22.
20. This suggestion was first made by Percy Simpson in Ben Jonson, VII, p. 625. The very small numbers in which copies of the late masque quartos survive further suggest that their print run was correspondingly short. See also Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604-1640 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 20-22.
21. The Oxford editors date Weston's ennoblement to 1632 (Ben Jonson, XI, p. 96) but they have misread Jonson's date as calendrical. His son was reported on 20 March 1633 as 'newly come back from his ambassages' (Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (London, 1848), II, p. 175). The two poems were thus written within six weeks of each other.
22. The Oxford editors date Weston's ennoblement to 1632 (Ben Jonson, XI, p. 96) but they have misread Jonson's date as calendrical. His son was reported on 20 March 1633 as 'newly come back from his ambassages' (Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of Charles I (London, 1848), II, p. 175). The two poems were thus written within six weeks of each other.
23. Ben Jonson, XI, pp. 340-44, 396-98, 399-402.
24. I refer to Edmund Wilson's Freudian interpretation of Jonson in The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects (London, 1952), pp. 240-61; but assumptions about Jonson's almost incontrovertible consistency are frequent in the Oxford edition too.