Even if the adoption of F1 as copy text for a modern critical edition seems clearly called for, questions still remain as to whether Q offers a superior choice in specific instances. For one thing, the formatting of F1, with massed entries at the heads of scenes, the absence of stage directions including all entrances and exits, the omitting of a speech prefix for the speaker at the head of each scene, the provision of marginal notes (some of them taken over from Q) citing sources and commenting at a few points on significant stage action, and the like, plainly conform with Jonson’s wish to present his readers with a literary text in the neoclassical tradition rather than a theatrical script. This present edition is committed to giving greater weight to texts with theatrical provenance or features than do Herford and Simpson and some other editors, and in that sense F1 Poetaster moves away from theatrical concerns. The important point here is that the quarto text remains a vital part of the play’s stage and textual history, even if F1 is best suited overall for copy text.

The cut at 4.5.107 is certainly an instance where Q deserves serious consideration. Cain (1995) includes this passage in his Revels edition of 1995, and defensibly so, if one sees this as an instance of censorship in a play that had been assailed by censorship pressures in 1601-2. Since, however, the passage found its way into Q in 1602 despite those pressures, and since Jonson clearly had a freer hand in 1615-16 to restore the defence of his art about which he felt so embattled, the decision to omit the passage at 4.5.107 would seem to have been his on grounds other than those of fearing censorship. It is included in this present edition in the textual collation and in a commentary note at 4.5.107.

Other possible candidates for a restoration of Q’s readings might include some changes in the speeches especially of Tucca and Horace where they touch on the quarrel between Jonson and his adversaries in the theatre. Should one prefer Q’s ‘Leueret’ to F1’s ‘ferret‘, for example, or ‘Caprichio’ to ‘PANTALABVS’, or ‘Paunch' to ‘Stiffe toe’, or ‘Death of Pluto’ to ‘life of PLVTO’, or ‘Rascall’ to ‘stiffe-toe’, all of these in an especially concentrated area of revision in the speeches of Tucca in 3.4? To do so would require a textual argument that one is restoring original Jonsonian readings which then retreated under pressure of censorship or public opinion. Once again, the counter argument is that Jonson took the opportunity to restore censored readings as he revised the text for folio publication, while at the same time changing the wording of Tucca’s speeches as seemed to him appropriate for a literary text.

In an old-spelling edition, as Gerritsen (1957) and Cain (1995), 287 have noted, a case could be made for following Q in the matter of accidentals, and is thus a factor that Herford and Simpson might well have considered, but it does not apply to the present modern-spelling edition. Modern spelling does, to be sure, create its own problems, notably with a word like ‘satyre’ or ‘satyricall’, spelled thus in Q and F1 (e.g. 3.4.299, 4.3.94, 5.3.27 and 29 and 261) as though in acknowledgement of a presumed derivation from the Greek satyr play. A resonance is lost with modernizing to ‘satire’, but the commentary can ameliorate the difficulty by pointing out what is at stake. So too with ‘trauaile’ (see Induction, 59, 1.2.4), which its frequent ambivalence as suggesting ‘travel’ and ‘travail’; goodman and good man (1.2.19), Marry/Mary (1.2.66, 2.1.47, etc.), prithee/pre’thee (2.1.94), compliment/complement (2.2.186, 3.4.69), write/wright (3.1.8), whither/whether (3.1.97), straiter/straighter (3.4.201), quit/quite (5.1.46), preying/praying (5.3.79), and still others. Here, as Fredson Bowers was fond of saying, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

Stage directions are notably absent from F1 Poetaster, and an editor might wish to save Jonson from his own studiously literary bent in the interests of seeing the play in the theatre. This approach has substantial appeal in a play like Every Man Out of His Humour, for example, where the quarto is manifestly more aware of its theatrical milieu. The quarto of Poetaster is, on the other hand, nearly as literary in format and flavour as the folio text. The exits that are included in Q are easily restored to this critical F1-based edition with the use of brackets to indicate that they are not a part of F1, along with collation notes indicating when they are or are not taken from Q. Many other stage directions are provided in this present edition of Poetaster in brackets, including entrances; massed entries at the heads of scenes are emended as little as possible, but are still emended to indicate when characters so named actually enter or reenter later in the scene; added words in such stage directions are bracketed. Speech prefixes are regularized in accord with the editorial guidelines of this Jonson edition as a whole.