The Masque of Augurs was first printed as a slim quarto, with no indication of author, printer or publisher. The title-page reads, simply, ‘THE / MASQVE / OF / AVGVRES. / WITH THE SEVERAL / Antimasques. / Presented on Twelfe night. / 1621.’ The quarto was perhaps intended for the masquers to use while preparing for the performance, or (more probably) for distribution to the spectators on Twelfth Night itself. Although there is no absolute proof that it was printed before the performance, the masque texts were printed in advance for Time Vindicated (1623), Neptune’s Triumph (1624), and The Fortunate Isles (1625), and it seems likely that this custom began with Augurs. Only four copies have survived, two in the British Library (C.39.c.34, Ashley 961), and two in the Bodleian Library (Mal. 62(8), Vet. A2 f.60). All of these are identical, save that the final note (374-8) is present only in C.39.c.34. In order to accommodate the note, the words ‘The End’ have been moved up towards the last line of the text.

The quarto consists of two gatherings, eight leaves unnumbered, collating A-B⁴. The running title is ‘The Masque / of Augures.’ Patterns of distinctive type in the running titles – particularly, an ‘f’ with a broken tail, and variation between swash and italic ‘A’ and swash and italic ‘M’ – indicate that a single skeleton was used, but that the sequence of the headlines was reordered between the printing of B (inner) and B (outer). The text was set seriatim by a single compositor, as is shown by the breaks that appear mid-sentence in the prose speeches that occupy signature A, and by the progressive abbreviation of the speech headings, from ‘GROOM.’ and ‘NOTCH.’ to ‘GR.’ and ‘NOT.’ The prose speeches and verse songs are set in roman with italic used for stage directions and some emphasized words, but a special effect is reserved for the Dutchified Englishman, Vangoose, whose speeches are all printed in black-letter, the typographical equivalent of his outlandish dialect.

The fact that the note that was added to B4v in the course of machining the text carries Jonson’s initials suggests that the author was consulted during the printing, though there is little evidence that the printer’s copy was in his hand. The stage directions are all cast in the present tense, but there are none of Jonson’s distinctive spellings, and if he proofed the quarto, he overlooked two major errors: ‘Fabros Palabros’ for ‘Paucos Palabros’ (222), and the reversal of two speech-headings on A4v (see commentary to 200-06). A further straw in the wind is the absence from the title page of any Latin motto, which might have been a sign of Jonson’s hand in shaping the presentation. By contrast, all the other late masque quartos (Time Vind., Neptune, Fort Is., Love’s Tr., Chloridia) are ornamented with mottos. The added note in British Library copy 1 suggests that Jonson’s involvement in the printing may have been only at the last minute; had it come any earlier, one would expect that the other errors might also have been corrected.

The Masque of Augurs was one of four masques entered in the Stationers’ Register on 20 March 1640, by [Andrew?] Crooke and R. Sergier, as part of a larger entry attempting to establish copyrights in advance of the publication of the second folio (see Pan’s Anniversary: Textual Essay). It was subsequently reprinted in F2 , where it occupies sigs. M1-N2r of the masque section, pages 81-91, between The Gypsies Metamorphosed and Time Vindicated, in a version which contains significant revisions by Jonson himself. H&S argued that F2 was set up from a source independent of the quarto, since beside the added and altered passages, there are manifold changes of spelling and punctuation, more so than in the case of other masques in F2 that were set from quarto copy. For example, there are sixteen changes of punctuation on the first page of F2 alone – of which only the bottom half consists of dialogue – as well as constant orthographical differences such as eu’n/even, venter/venture, Lions/Lyons, gamsters/gamesters, pretty/prettie, buttry/buttery; more striking spelling variations later in the text include account/accompt and nostrils/nosthrils. Against this, Greg (1942) argued that, extensive though these variations are, they represent the kinds of divergence in pointing and spelling that could reasonably be ascribed to compositorial preference, and the difference in treatment of the copy might indicate that this section was set by different compositors.

Moreover, two features point quite strongly towards a dependence on Q as copy-text. One is the fact that F2 miscorrected the error in the speech headings at 200 and 202, accommodating the anomaly of two successive headings for Notch by running his speeches together. But since this is a false resolution of the problem (see commentary note to 200-06), it indicates that the error was present in the copy for F2, and hence that the copy was likely to have been Q (or at least, that whoever made the change was not the author). Secondly, P. Maas (1942) pointed out that F2’s lacunae at 250 and 299 were related: in each case F2 omits a word that is present in Q, and, coincidentally, the omitted words appear at identical positions on successive rectos, B2 and B3. This suggests that the copy of Q from which F2 was set up was physically damaged, and that these two pages had a small hole in the same place, caused perhaps by wear, or by an object inserted between the leaves, or by scorching from a spark. It would seem, then, that the printers were not working from an independent scribal transcript but from a copy of Q that came accompanied with Jonson’s revisions, possibly with small authorial changes on the page and longer inserted material (the ballad and marginalia) added as loose sheets. Nonetheless, F2 retains significant authority for editors because of its status as an authorially revised text.

In other ways, the printing of F2 was inferior to Q. Speech headings are incorrectly set in lower-case type at 242, 296, 298, 360, and 362, and the pointing is generally less good than Q’s. The Latin marginalia are very inaccurate and need extensive emendation. Vangoose’s Dutchified English is also treated inconsistently. Some of Jonson’s revisions intensify its outlandishness – for example, he changed ‘selva’ to ‘selven’, and ‘head’ to ‘hoffen’ – but the effect is diluted because F2 allows other, more common words to lapse into their ordinary English forms, such as ‘tis’ for ‘dis’, ‘such’ for ‘sush’, and ‘was’ for ‘vas’. The last page is especially poorly treated, with three blunders, at 346, 349, and 361. During the process of printing, stop-press changes were made on four pages, but the high level of error persists:

M1.4 (inner)
M1v (82)	state 1	state 2
34	chimney?	chimney!

[Many state 2 copies lack the comma after ‘us’ in line 38, but this is a poorly printing character and not a variant as such: the comma is faint in some state 1 copies and it leaves a trace in some state 2 copies]

M4r (87)
26	Janees	Jances
27	valer.	Valer.
28	cemarum	comarum

state 1: 4, 6, 9, 20, 25, 26, 28, 29, 34, 38, 42

state 2: all other copies

M2.3 (inner)
M2v (84)	state 1	state 2
26	frrom	from

state 1: 32

state 2: all other copies

N1.4 (inner)
N1v (90)	state 1	state 2
10	Deitie	Dietie
43	(r)	(x)

state 1: 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 18, 21, 37

state 2: all other copies

Jonson’s revisions for F2 were of four kinds: the stage directions were altered from present tense to past tense; the prose dialogue in the antimasque was touched up and occasionally supplemented; John Urson’s ballad was added to the first antimasque dance; and the explanatory marginalia were added to the main masque. The usual assumption is that F2 represents the masque as it had been altered for its Shrovetide repeat performance, though there is no external evidence to confirm this, and one wonders whether Jonson’s decision to intensify the satire on the Groom of the Revels (by adding comments on his appropriation of household supplies, 24-30) would really have been tactful at court. Conceivably the marginalia were added with a view to the masque’s circulation after the performance, perhaps for a patron (such as Prince Charles, rather as Queens had been annotated for Prince Henry, or possibly Buckingham), but they could equally well have been written much later, for example when Jonson was preparing material for the second folio that he may have been trying to put together in 1631. Whether the other changes were made in 1621 it is impossible to be sure. The revisions had certainly been made by 1631, for stanzas 1-5 and 8 of John Urson’s ballad are quoted in The Drinking Academy, or The Cheater’s Holiday, attributed to Thomas Randolph . References in the text to ‘Urson’ and to the bears as ‘His Majesties cattle’ ( Randolph, 1930, 15 ) indicate that the author knew not just the ballad but the whole antimasque. Randolph’s play is a half-length skit possibly intended for performance at Cambridge University or at the Salisbury Court playhouse during the period when he was acting as house dramatist (c. 1630-1), and internal evidence indicates that it was written between 1626 and 1631 (see Bentley, 1941-68, 5.976-80 ). His quotation suggests that the ballad may have been circulating in manuscript long before it appeared in print. On the other hand, as someone who claimed to have been adopted as a ‘son of Ben’ ( Randolph, 1638, 22-3 ), Randolph might simply have been benefiting from whatever privileged access he had to papers that Jonson was working on privately towards the end of the 1620s.

Randolph’s extracts from the ballad have the following substantive differences from F2:

135 Who] That

138 knew] know

139 ale’s o’] Ale is

145 Nor the] Nor

148 once there] there once

166 to] til

167 about to] about

168 They] They’l

The ballad was also reprinted as ‘The Post of the Sign’ in Recreation for Ingenious Headpieces (1663), Z3v-5r, and as ‘A Ballad called The Jovial Bear-ward’ in Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719), 4.38-9 . Another extract from the masque, Nicholas Lanier’s setting of Apollo’s song ‘Do not expect’ (324-35), is preserved in British Library Add. MS. 11608, fol. 17v, a miscellany of songs collected in the mid-seventeenth century. It has two substantive variants: ‘Thus much’ for ‘Some things’ (329), and ‘our Peeres’ for ‘Our powers’ (331).

Outside the collected editions, The Masque of Augurs has also appeared in The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of James I, ed. John Nichols (1828) ; Ben Jonson: Masques and Entertainments, ed. Henry Morley (1890) ; English Masques, ed. H. A. Evans (1897) ; Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (1969) ; Ben Jonson: Selected Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (1970) ; and Inigo Jones; The Theatre of the Stuart Court, ed. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (1973) .

The following copies of F2 were collated for this edition:

1. Boston Public Library, **G.3811.8 (Sir Lister Holte copy)

2. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Fol 1640 JON

3. Brotherton Library, Leeds, Brotherton Collection Lt q JON

4. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 1

5. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 2

6. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 3

7. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 4

8. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 5

9. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754, copy 6

10. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 1

11. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., 14754a, copy 2

12. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62101-v.2

13. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 62103

14. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 495468 (Schlatter-Shaver copy)

15. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 600688

16. Huntington Library, San Marino, California: 606598

17. Houghton Library, Harvard University, fSTC 14751 v.2 (Norton Perkins copy)

18. Houghton Library, Harvard University, HEW 6.10.10. v.2 (Widener copy)

19. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1616a copy 2 [a copy of F2, notwithstanding the call number]

20. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 2

21. Library of Congress, Washington D.C., PR2600 1640 copy 3

22. New York Public Library, *KC 1640

23. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Vet.A2 d. 73

24. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 520

25. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Don. d. 66

26. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Douce I.303

27. Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gibson 518

28. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (Furness-Schelling copy)

29. University of Pennsylvania, Folio STC 14754 (RBC copy)

30. University of Pennsylvania, PR2600 C40 v.2 (Edwin Forrest copy)

31. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pforz. 560

32. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600

1640 vol. 1, copy 1, Stark 5433

33. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Pr 2600

1640 vol. 2, copy 2, Woodward-Ruth 1

34. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Wh J738

+B641

35. Clark Library, Los Angeles, *F PR2600 1640c

36. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 1 (C. W. Bradley copy)

37. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640 copy 2

38. Beinecke Library, Yale University: J738+B640B (Morris Tyler copy)

39. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1977+424 (John Milton Boardman copy)

40. Beinecke Library, Yale University: 1978+47 (Norman Holmes Pearson copy)

41. David Gants copy

42. Martin Butler copy