News from Ben - The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

News from Ben

Leeds is one of three centres around the globe - the others being Canberra and Chicago - from which scholars are directing work that aims to produce a new complete edition of Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Jonson was one of the most important and voluminous authors of the English Renaissance. He left seventeen complete plays, over three dozen court masques and entertainments, three collections of verse, a grammar of the English language, two translations of Horace's Art of Poetry, a commonplace book containing his thoughts on ideas and manners, a sheaf of letters, and many scattered poems, inscriptions and marginal doodlings that were either not collected or not published in his own lifetime. In addition, his traces are to be found all over the cultural and intellectual circles of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. A gregarious and combative personality, Jonson either knew everybody or fought with everybody, and trying to establish his impact on his times is a life's work in itself.

The last comprehensive reprinting of Jonson's works was the 11-volume Oxford edition, edited by C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson. A truly heroic work of scholarship, the Oxford Jonson took its three editors more than fifty years to complete. Fortunately for Oxford University Press, Percy Simpson proved to be extremely long-lived, but by spreading the workload, the Cambridge Jonson aims to take rather less than fifty years. The edition was announced at a conference at Leeds in 1996, and we plan to see print in 2009. To accomplish this, the three general editors - Martin Butler at Leeds, Ian Donaldson at Canberra and David Bevington at Chicago - have assembled a team of twenty-three contributing editors, each of whom is responsible for one or more texts. There are additionally two music editors, six consultants (some of whom are also editing texts), an in-house design team from Cambridge University Press, an electronic editor, and two research associates who are funded by a five-year grant in excess of £500,000 awarded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Board. At the present count, the team comprises more than fifty individuals working in Britain, North America and Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Two of these are based at Leeds, Martin Butler and David Lindley (who is editing eleven of the masques); one, Karen Britland (who is editing the Dubia), worked at Leeds for four years as the Ben Jonson research associate; and a fourth, the late Inga-Stina Ewbank (who has edited Catiline) was a distinguished former member of the School of English.

Why do we need a new edition of Jonson? At the simplest level, the Cambridge edition will be the first to include the newly discovered works that have come to light in recent years - the Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609), the surviving verses for the Merchant Taylors' Entertainment (1607), and some previously uncollected poetry, including Jonson's poem in memory of the writer Thomas Nashe. Were we to discover one or more of the half-dozen lost plays that he wrote but deemed not worth publishing, we would be very pleased indeed. But, of course, the Jonson canon has not changed that much. What will be more important is the range of evidence that the new edition will draw on, the changed perception of Jonson's career that it will reflect, and the more user-friendly manner of its presentation. The Oxford edition was based on a detailed comparison of as many of the surviving manuscripts and early print copies of Jonson's texts that its three British editors could reach. In today's global scholarly community, the range of evidence we can draw on is considerably more extensive, using materials beyond Britain and Europe to which the previous editors did not have access. For example, one important volume is The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, an interim collection of texts published by Jonson in 1616. For our edition, over fifty copies of this volume will have been compared. By studying the minute but plenteous differences between these copies, we can build up a very detailed picture of its printing. Similarly, for the poetry, there are over four hundred surviving manuscripts that contain transcriptions of Jonson poems, some of which incorporate changes that show the author's hand at work. Our edition will edit the poems on the basis of a much greater survey of the manuscripts than has previously been undertaken, and allow us to see for the first time how Jonson's poems circulated outside the realm of print. And one revolutionary decision we have made is to sequence the order of the texts in the edition chronologically by date of publication. No previous edition has attempted this, and it will allow the shape of Jonson's career and its inner relationships to be apparent as never before.

The Cambridge edition will also include a great deal of supporting material that helps to explain and contextualize Jonson's writing, some of it never previously published. We shall include the first complete edition of the original or early musical settings of songs in the plays, and the dance tunes used in the court masques. There will be a complete listing of the books that remain from Jonson's library, many of which carry his characteristic annotation and underlings. (Many of Jonson's books survive - the Earl of Pembroke gave him cash to buy books every Christmas, which he would do, but then sell on as his funds diminished, meaning that rare book collections around the world now possess volumes with his signature in them: shown on the right is an example from the Leeds University collection). Our edition will also include a complete reprint of surviving legal records relating to Jonson's life, the first fully comprehensive collection of documents relating to the performance of the masques (such as eye-witness accounts and payments for costumes and scenery), a census of all known performances of his plays, an archive of material referring to Jonson from his death down to 1700, transcripts of the early attempts to write his biography, and a complete listing of the criticism written about him by modern critics. As a resource for work on Jonson, the edition aims to fulfil as many scholarly needs as it can.

Then there is the matter of how you reach your readers and what use they will make of the edition. Many Jonson editions tend to be rather intimidating. Jonson was a formidably learned writer, and the Oxford editors loftily declined to translate his Latin and Greek, presuming that readers would possess the same linguistic abilities as the poet. Our edition will not only do the translations, but will print the texts in modern spelling, a choice that allows Jonson to be read as an equal alongside his great contemporary Shakespeare, who always has his old spellings modernized in today's editions. This should allow Jonson to reach a much larger readership than has been the case in the past. Notwithstanding this decision, the Cambridge edition will also cater for the scholars who need the old spellings and the look of the original texts on the page, for we are publishing in two formats simultaneously - a six volume modern-spelling edition in print, and an electronic edition which will have the texts in old-spelling and as many digitized images of the manuscripts and early print editions as we can squeeze in. And because the edition will be published electronically as well as in print, the total corpus will be rapidly searchable and will continue to respond flexibly to many as yet unformulated questions that we cannot at this point precisely anticipate. Of course, if you don't want the whole edition but just (for example) Volpone or The Alchemist, then it will be possible, in time, to buy those parts separately, for we are planning 'derivative' editions of anthologies or single texts for the larger market. For those, I'm afraid, you'll have to wait until after 2009: but if you want to see more details of the whole project now, do consult Martin Butler's collection of essays Re-Presenting Ben Jonson: Text, History, Performance (Macmillan, 1999), or follow the link to the Cambridge University Press website.