On 3 October 1610, in the year of its first-known production, The Alchemist was entered in the Stationers’ Register:

Walter Burre.   Entred for his copy vnder thandes of Sir George Bucke

         and Th’wardens a Comœdy called, The Alchymist made

         by Ben: Johnson          vj^d

              (Arber,1875-94, 3.201)

The play was not published until 1612, and the first quarto (Q), like the plot of the play, represents a 'venture tripartite' bringing together the publisher Walter Burre, the printer Thomas Snodham, and the bookseller John Stepneth, all of whom worked in and around St. Paul's Churchyard. The title page reads as follows:

THE ALCHEMIST./ VVritten/ by/ BEN. IONSON./ --Neque, me, vt miretur turba, laboro:/ Contentus paucis lectoribus./ LONDON,/ Printed by Thomas Snodham, for Walter Burre, and are to be sold by Iohn Stepneth, at the West-end of Paules./ 1612.

By 1612, Burre was well established in the London book trade. He had a strong reputation as a publisher of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; and he had already developed a working relationship with Jonson, having issued the first quartos of Every Man In His Humour (1601), Cynthia's Revels (1601), and Catiline (1611). But Snodham was near the beginning of a long and varied career that would see him become Jacobean England's most prolific printer of music. Stepneth, for his part, can only be associated with seven surviving books, but he used Burre’s sign for his first publication in 1609 (Blayney, 1990, 27) and two of the others were plays printed by Snodham – Jonson's Alchemist and Cyril Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy (1611). There are signs that Stepneth may have been developing closer relations with Jonson since he entered the Epigrams in the Stationer's Register on 15 May 1612; but he died later that year, and if Jonson's unflattering portrait of his bookseller in Epigram 3 was directed at Stepneth it is unlikely that he would have continued to send business his way.

Careful comparison of the 1612 Alchemist and the 1611 Atheist's Tragedy, along with earlier printings of Jonson's plays, suggests that the appearance of Q owed something to both Jonson and Burre but little to Snodham or Stepneth. Tourneur's text looks like other standard dramatic quartos: the title page explains that the play 'in diuers places...hath often been Acted' and the stage action is described in separate, italicised directions, while (beyond a list of dramatis personae) there is no prefatory matter whatsoever. Jonson's more conspicuously literary production shares with Burre's Catiline a number of features, including the continuous printing of lines with speeches by multiple characters to create a full metrical unit (associated by Zachary Lesser, 2004, 66-70 with university and/or classical drama, which also tended to use massed entries at the beginning of scenes). And while the 1612 Quarto retains the list of roles, it removes virtually all signs of staging: the text itself contains next to nothing in the way of stage directions and there is no reference to a company or its performances on the title page. In their place we have a Latin epigram from Horace's Satires, and between the title page and the beginning of Act 1 we find Jonson's dedicatory epistle to Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth (A2), a preface to the reader (A3), George Lucy's poem in praise of Jonson (A3v), a plot summary in acrostic verse (A4), and a prologue (A4v). The play itself occupies Sigs. B-M⁴. As with many of Jonson's dramatic publications, the printed page offers a new occasion for staging of a different kind in which author, reader, and patron all have starring roles.

The number and nature of press variants in surviving copies of Q has sometimes been taken as a sign of Jonson's active participation in the printing process, but whether or not this was the case it does suggest that someone noticed a fair number of errors and made a serious effort to correct them. Henry de Vocht’s 1950 edition of The Alchemist, Edited from the Quarto of 1612, contains a full list of variants discovered in re-collating the copies examined by Herford and Simpson (H&S, 5.275-7), including two copies from the Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Malone Copy at the Bodleian, Bryan Twyne's copy from Corpus Christi College Oxford, a copy at the British Library, and one in private hands. I offer a complete table of corrections at the end of this essay, incorporating de Vocht's additions to the list provided by Herford and Simpson, but cite here his brief overview: