John Waterson claimed the printing rights for The Staple of News by entering it in the Stationers’ Register in April of 1626 (Arber, 1875-94, 4.156), not long after its ungratefully received first performances early in February of that year. This was, as John Creaser notes (in his general essay on F2(2) in this database), the first effort towards the publication of any of Jonson’s plays written after 1611. But Waterson did not print the text, possibly because a mild stroke disabled Jonson from preparing the play for print. Whatever its cause, the delay in printing was protracted, and Waterson transferred his rights in Staple to Robert Allot on 7 September 1631 (Arber, 4.260). Jonson and Allot were planning a new collected volume, to include Bartholomew Fair, The Devil Is an Ass, and Staple.

The text was printed by John Beale in the year of this transfer to Allot, and a very few copies were issued at that time (Greg, 1939-59, 3:1075-8), but it was not widely published until 1640 when it appeared as part of the issue we now refer to as the second folio, in fact a very irregular issue. Staple may be found bound with Bartholomew Fair and the first edition of The Devil Is an Ass, with and without Richard Meighen’s general title page of 1640; it may also be found bound with Bartholomew Fair and the second edition of The Devil Is an Ass (1641), again both with and without Meighen’s title-page. That each play had been printed with a separate title page made it possible to sell them separately, and copies originally bound separately do survive. Yet Bartholomew Fair and Devil Is an Ass are signed and paginated continuously, suggesting a plan to present the three plays in the order of their composition and performance. Although the signing of Staple is discontinuous – its first signature is 2A – it is regularly bound after the other two plays, although it can also be found bound between them. This non-chronological ordering is easy enough to explain: on the title-page for the collection which presents it as the second volume of the Jonson’s Works, Staple appears as the second in the list. This trio of plays, in one of the two variant orders – Bartholomew Fair, Devil, Staple or Bartholomew Fair, Staple, Devil – also often heads larger collections of those works not published by Stansby in 1616.

Collation of 32 copies (and spot-checking for known variants in 20 more copies) has revealed an unusual dearth of variants in the printing of Staple. In and of itself, such a low level of correction during printing can witness either to very careful revising prior to presswork or to very careless proof-reading during the printing proper. (It can also simply witness to efforts to balance printing and proofing and respond to pressures and lassitudes in the management of concurrent printing projects.) In the case of Staple, as with the other plays in this collection, we must regard the low level of stop-press correction as consistent with a more general carelessness, possibly induced by the claims of competing printing jobs. Whatever the cause, Jonson’s dissatisfaction with Beale was hardly unwarranted, as John Creaser discusses at some length in his Textual Essay. Most of the stop-press corrections catch obvious mechanical errors largely irrelevant to the text proper: mis-signing of F2, loose type at the top or bottom of a page, a page left with too much white space and therefore vulnerable to smudging. Even so, we cannot speak of Beale’s house as having committed itself to a high level of mechanical finesse: errors of pagination at 2C2 and C4 are left uncorrected, having probably gone entirely unnoticed.

The collational formula for the play is 2^o: 2A-2C⁴ D-H⁴ I⁶ [$3 (+I4) signed; 2C3 signed ‘C3’); 38 ll., pp. [1] 2-75 [76] (misprinting 19 as 9, 22 as 16, 63 as ‘36’]. The contents are: 2A1: Title-page; 2A1v: Persons of the Play; 2A2-2A2v: Induction; 2A3: Prologue for the Stage; 2A3v: Prologue for the Court; 2A4-I6: Text of the play proper; I6v: Epilogue. The title-page, which is signed, unusually, reads (within double rules): ‘THE STAPLE | OF | NEVVES. | [rule] | A COMEDIE | ACTED IN THE | YEARE, 1625. | BY HIS MAIESTIES [swash B, M, and T] | Servants. | [rule] | The Author Ben : Ionson. | [rule] | Hor. in Art. Poet. | Aut prodeſſe volunt, aut delectare poetæ: | Aut ſimul & iucunda, & idonea dicere vitæ | [device 374] | [rule] | LONDON, [swash ^1-2 N, D] | Printed by I. B. for Robert Allot, and are | to be ſold at the ſigne of the Beare, in Pauls | Church-yard. 1631.’

On the basis of recurrence of individual pieces of type in the first five pages of a gathering, Parr concluded that the play was set by formes (Parr, ed. Staple, 4). Casting off presented virtually no difficulties: the bulk of the play is in verse (however casual), with only fairly short prose intermeans appearing at act junctures and thereby allowing for considerable latitude in the handling of vertical spacing. Despite this latitude, which may seem to have been over-indulged on C4v, and under-exploited at the juncture of D1v and D2, Beale’s house was unable to begin Acts 2 or 4 on a new page.