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.