In the 1616 folio, Every Man In His Humour occupies gatherings A1-F6v, pp. 1-72. A1 is the title page, with the verso blank; A2 gives the Dedication to William Camden; A2^v lists ‘The Persons of the Play’ and identifies the scene; A3-F6 contains the text of the play; F6^v provides information on the first date of performance, the name of the acting company, and a list of the ‘principall Comoedians’. The running title is ‘Euery Man in his Humour’.

Despite its position of first place in the folio volume, EMI (F) was not the first play to be printed by William Stansby. The first quire to go through the press was G, the initial quire of EMO (Gerritsen, 1959). One reason for the delay in printing EMI may have been that Stansby had to negotiate printing rights with William Burre, who had published the EMI quarto in 1601 and still retained half interest, and who may have intended to bring out his own collection of Jonson’s plays, many of which (including EMI, Cynthia’s Revels, Sejanus, Volpone, Epicene, and Alchemist) were his in whole or in part; John Smethwick, who owned the rights to EMO, was evidently more amenable (Bracken, 1988; Bland, 1998b). The deferred printing of EMI was done in two batches, suggesting that Jonson was still at work revising this play when the folio printing began, though some revision could have taken place earlier. Eager to achieve professional and social advancement through the publication of his plays in the handsome folio format, Jonson extensively revised the first plays in the volume, and none more so than EMI. Because Stansby appears to have printed by quires, proceeding from the inner to the outer sheets and with type left standing long enough to print six formes, Jonson would have had more time in which to correct proof than was normally available, and may indeed have been able to work on the proofs at home rather than in the Cross Keys shop (Gants, 1997). Press correction in EMI, on the other hand, is less common than in EMO, when the printers were still familiarizing themselves with their assignment; and the amount of press correction continued high in other plays printed early in the process, notably Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster, and Sejanus. The first gathering of EMI seems to have been printed during the middle of Epicene (2X5-3D6), and the remainder after the completion of Epicene, The Alchemist, and Catiline – in other words, at the end of the plays in F1 but before the Epigrams, The Forest, the entertainments, and the masques. Authorial revisions during printing of the early plays (including EMI) are high compared with in-house press correction; authorial revisions are less common in the later plays, and rare in the poems, masques, and entertainments (Donovan, 1987, Gants, 1997 and 1999).

James Riddell (1997b) has advanced a powerful argument that the extensive cutting of quarto passages in Act 5, especially the long speech of Lorenzo Junior in defense of poetry, may have been necessitated by lack of space in the six full quires set aside for this play but printed only late in the process, when adjustments in the number of pages provided for this play would have required an anomalous discontinuity in the pagination of the volume. Although critics have speculated about Jonson’s possible literary reasons in making such cuts, the theories do not well account for the fact that the folio EMI still retains at the start of the play (1.1.7-24) the father’s worry that his son Lorenzo is wasting his time on ‘idle poetry’, whereas in the rest of the folio version this inclination toward poetry is no longer in evidence. The anomaly can be explained when we consider that the beginning of the play, down through 1.3.104, had indeed been printed early and could no longer be reset without considerable expense and adjustment. If, as seems likely, it was discovered late in the game that the printer, Stansby, had not allowed enough space for the entire play, we can see how Jonson may have been obliged to make sizable cuts in the very last pages. The fact that these pages are not crowded in the folio printing may simply mean that Jonson cut enough to make crowding unnecessary. Stansby’s miscalculation is plausible enough, given the crowded printing of the quarto and the fact that Jonson was extensively revising throughout. Most of Jonson’s revisions added material to long speeches; in the final pages, the reverse is true, not only of Lorenzo Junior’s defense of poetry, which is cut entirely, but also of other long speeches toward the end, which are shortened. Gants’s analysis of the use of paper stocks tends to support Riddell’s argument (1997).

See Textual Essay on EMI(Q) for information on Stationers’ Register entries and on publication history of that earlier text; and see the Introduction to EMI(F) for information on the likely date or dates of revision resulting in the folio text of 1616. The folio text is a substantial revision, with added passages, cuts of quarto material, and much rewording of similar speeches. The setting is shifted from Florence to London, and most of the characters are renamed with English names. The textual notes in this present edition do not attempt to catalogue all the many changes between Q and F1. They are best studied by comparing the two texts, side by side; this edition facilitates such a comparison by printing the two texts in different volumes.

Press corrections in F1 are as follows:

		State 1	State 2
A2:5 (o)
A2 (3)
5		C LARENTIAVX	[omitted]
A5v (10)
19		t’ haue	than t’ haue
37		in-kind	in kind
A3:4 (o)
A3 (5)
8		ſtage	ſtage,
A4v (8)
9		vncle, here,	vncle here
15		in a very	in very
A1:6 (o)
A6 (11)
20		lettler	letter
D1:6 (o)
D6v (48)
5		you	your
D2:5 (o)
D5v (46)
31		Would	W ould
40		To	T o
F3:4 (o)
F4v (68)
21		metamorphoſis	metamorphoſis