The printing of the quarto

Though Dudley Carleton referred, on 7 January 1605, to ‘a pamphlet in the press’ which would save him the pains of describing the Masque of Blackness to John Chamberlain (Lee, 1972, 67 ); Masque Archive, Blackness, 00), Jonson’s first court masque was not printed until 1608, when it was issued together with the Masque of Beauty and the Haddington Masque in a single quarto. Meanwhile Hymenaei had already been published. The title-page of the quarto, which opens: ‘The / Characters / of / Two royall Masques. / The one of blacknesse, / The other of beavtie’, confirms the intimate narrative link between these two works, and suggests that publication was delayed until the diptych – clearly planned from the outset as a pair – was complete. To have refrained from issuing the masques until their aesthetic, narrative, and iconographic programme was fulfilled would certainly accord with Jonson’s high sense of purpose in his court entertainments, and their interconnectedness is further confirmed by the fact that these two masques are printed as a sequential pair in F1 , rather than being placed in chronological order, whereas Haddington was printed in its correct chronological place in the sequence of masques.

The incorporation in this quarto of Haddington, one of the two masques that had intervened to delay the completion of Blackness’s programme in Beauty raises a number of questions. The entry in the Stationers’ Register by the quarto’s publisher, Thomas Thorpe, on 21 April, 1608 reads:

Thomas Thorpe Entred for his copie vnder thandes of Sir George
Bucke and Thwardens The Characters of Twoo Royall Maskes.
Invented By Ben. Jonson vj^d

There is no mention of Haddington, which was not separately registered. It was, however, certainly printed at the same time, since the signatures run on continuously, and the style is consistent throughout. The fact that Haddington has its own title-page, coupled with the absence of running-heads, suggests that its printing might have been something of an afterthought. Of the ten surviving copies of the quarto, however, five lack the Haddington masque, and in one of the British Library copies (that which contains a dedicatory inscription to Anne) it is bound as an independent work (though this separation was probably made during eighteenth-century rebinding). This raises an intriguing question. The absence of Haddington in half of the surviving copies might imply that although it was convenient to print all three masques together, it may have been imagined that they constituted two distinct ‘works’, which could be sold separately, even though it would seem odd, and awkward, to cut the sheet on which Haddington continued directly from Beauty in order to offer the masques for sale as independent items.

Nonetheless, the fact that these three masques were printed in a single quarto means that it is convenient to discuss their printing as a unit. The collation of the quarto is: A1 blank; A2, the title-page with the verso blank; A3-C2, The Masque of Blackness; C2v-E2v, The Masque of Beauty. These pages have the running title The Queenes Masques. E3 bears the title-page for Haddington; E3^v blank; E4-G4v The Haddington Masque, without any running title. As Lavin (1970) has shown, the printer was George Eld, who was also responsible for the quartos of Sejanus (1605), Eastward Ho! (1605), and Volpone (1607), as well as part of The King’s Entertainment (1604), co-printed with Valentine Simmes. All three masques are printed in a consistent style, with the text of the speeches and songs in italic, the prefatory matter and stage-directions in roman. An oddity in the printing is the fact that there are five variations in the catchwords: at A3 ‘Plynie’ where text reads ‘Plinie’; B2v ‘oce.’ for ‘oceanus’; C1 ‘æthi.’ for ‘æthiopia’; C2v ‘colour’ for ‘coullor’; D2v ‘digni.’ for ‘dignitas’.