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When visiting Drummond of Hawthornden over Christmas 1618, Jonson declared (without recorded explanation) that half his comedies were not in print (Informations, 306). As well as lost early works disowned by the playwright, these must have included the two recent masterpieces, Bartholomew Fair (first performed October 1614) and The Devil Is an Ass (mid-autumn 1616). Previously, Jonson’s practice had been to publish in quarto, fairly soon after their first performances, those plays he wished to acknowledge (with the probable exception of Epicene, which seems to have first appeared in print in the 1616 folio). But the three plays that eventually made up what for convenience here is called volume two of the second Folio reached the reading public only after Jonson’s death and after protracted and tortuous delays.
The first sign that Jonson wished to have his later plays published came not with the Fair and the Devil but with The Staple of News. Shortly after its first performances in February 1626, John Waterson laid claim to this play by entering it on the Stationers’ Register on 14 April: ‘John Waterson[.] Entred for his Copie under the handes of Master Doctor WORRALL and Master Islip warden A booke Called The Staple of Newes being A Comedie./ … vjd’ (Arber, 1875-94, 4.156) . In the event, however, no quarto seems to have been printed, and the play is next recorded when Waterson’s rights were transferred to Robert Allott (or Allot) on 7 September 1631: ‘Master Allott. Assigned over unto him by a note under the hand of Master John Waterson a booke called The stapell of Newes written by Master Ben: Johnson . . . vjd’ (Arber, 4.260) .
This transfer signalled a serious attempt by Jonson — ‘finding himself now near the close or shutting up of his circle’ (Mag. Lady, Ind., 79-80) — to get his later plays read. That year, the Fair, the Devil, and the Staple were, as recorded on their title-pages, ‘Printed by I.B. for Robert Allot’. It is just possible that there was some intention to make the plays available separately, since each title page announces that the wholesale copies ‘are to be sold at the signe of the Beare, in Pauls Church-yard’, Allott’s office and bookshop. Separate copies of Devil were indeed being advertised in the 1650s, although this may have been because supplementary copies of this play alone had been printed in 1641 (see below; also Greg, 1939-59, 3.1078 , and Williams, 1977, 92 ). Clearly, however, Jonson conceived of the plays as forming a distinct folio volume, or part of such a volume, a successor to the great folio of 1616 . In a letter to the Earl of Newcastle (cited below) he refers to individual plays as a ‘piece’ and a ‘morsel’ of ‘my book’, while he did not include his latest play, The New Inn (1629), which appeared separately in an octavo edition in 1631 (entered on the Stationers’ Register by Thomas Alchorne, 17 April that year, and printed for him by Thomas Harper). Typographically, they also constitute at least the beginnings of a volume: Bartholomew Fair encompasses signatures A-M4v (three sheets in sig. A, the preliminaries, and pairs in the play itself) and, after the preliminaries, is paginated 1-88. The Devil Is an Ass follows on with signatures N-Y4, paginated 91-170, and (omitting sig. Z as inappropriate for a new text) The Staple of News starts with sig. Aa, though the double-letter signature becomes single from C3, continuing until rounded off with a three-sheet gathering at I6. Pagination, however, here begins afresh at p. 1. As these signatures indicate, the three plays were printed, and were intended to appear, in chronological order.
Three plays alone would have made for a much shorter volume than F1 and would have left much of Jonson’s writing over the previous fifteen years out of print. It is conceivable, therefore, that, on the lines of F1, Jonson also intended to include some of the more recent masques and poems, even though he was publishing The New Inn elsewhere. A possible indication here, as Martin Butler argues in the Textual Essay on The Masque of Augurs (1622), is that the revised version of this masque was certainly in existence by 1631 and might have been prepared for inclusion in F2.
Be that as it may, Jonson’s ambitious project was to be frustrated, apparently because of his extreme dissatisfaction with ‘I.B.’, Allott’s printer John Beale, whose work does indeed blemish all three plays with innumerable errors. Initially, this may seem surprising, for both Allott and Beale were substantial presences in the contemporary book-trade. Robert Allott took freedom of the Stationers’ Company on 7 November 1625 (Arber, 3.686) , established himself quickly, and was especially productive in the early 1630s. He continued as a publisher and bookseller until his death in 1635, when his business at the Black Bear in St Paul’s Churchyard went initially to his widow Mary. On 1 July 1637, Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News were among sixty-one books transferred from Mary to John Legatt and Allott’s old servant Andrew Crooke (Arber, 1875-94, 4.387 ; Williams, 1977, 76-7; Devil was probably omitted by oversight).