The Fortunate Isles and their Union was first published in quarto, with no indication of printer or bookseller. Probably it was intended for private circulation at the time of the performance. The title page says it was ‘design’d for the Court, on the Twelfth night. 1624’, but since the masque was actually danced three days after this date, the printed version must have been ready for distribution before the delay in performance came about. Two weeks earlier, the Master of the Revels, Sir Henry Herbert, had made the following entry in his office book (Bawcutt, 1996a, 159 ):

The Masque book was allowed of for the press & brought me by <M^r. Ion 29 Dec^r. 1624.>

The original office book is lost and this entry survives only in the form of an incomplete nineteenth-century transcript; the words in angled brackets once formed part of the passage but have subsequently been cut away. Almost certainly it refers to The Fortunate Isles, and it suggests that Jonson was directly involved in the preparations for his text’s publication – so long as the assumption is correct that ‘M^r. Ion’ is Jonson and not Inigo Jones. In a very similar entry in the office book for 1635, it was Jones who brought the ‘argument’ or plot-summary of the anonymous French pastoral Florimène to Herbert for licensing. However, it is odd that it was felt necessary to obtain Herbert’s licence for printing, since when masques went into print, it was usually without the Master of the Revels’s allowance. The only other instances that we know of were Florimène and William Davenant’s Britannia Triumphans (1638). Perhaps this indicates some nervousness after the previous year’s fiasco over the unperformed Neptune’s Triumph. It should be added that the performing licence for ‘The Masque’ reproduced from Herbert’s office book by H&S as if it referred to The Fortunate Isles is an error; this relates to a lost play performed by the Palsgrave’s Men, and has nothing to do with Jonson’s masque (see Bentley, 1943-68, 4.642-4 ).

The quarto consists of three and a half sheets, collating A-C⁴, D², unnumbered. The detailed collation is: A1 title-page; A1v blank; A2-D1 text; D2 blank. The running-title is ‘THE FORTVNATE ISLES’. The quarto is generally well printed, and is spaciously laid out. As with Neptune’s Triumph, the stage directions are not printed in italic but in a larger roman font, and considerable white space is left at the bottom of C1, enabling the description of the antimasque dances to be more generously presented on the following verso. The decision to run the text onto the half-sheet D is all the more remarkable, given that had the printers wished to limit the text to three sheets, the necessary savings probably could have been found through the usual devices of compression.

Almost certainly, Q was set up from authorial copy or from a good transcript, as it contains several typical Jonsonisms. Although the punctuation is neither entirely consistent nor in Jonson’s densest manner, the use of exclamations and question marks is characteristic: for example, ‘But I see nothing! that I should! or would see!’ (23; compare also 114 and 180, and the uncorrected state of 128-9, which originally contained Jonsonian question marks). Parentheses are used to signal asides or interjections, as at 34, 38, and 41, and italics are adopted for names, non-standard words, or emphasis. Diacritics are carefully marked in the Latin motto on the title page, and appear three times in ‘aëry’ (1, 26, 51). There are Jonsonian elisions at 134 (you’haue) and 199 (Thou’art), while ‘’hem’ appears six times. Beside these features, the stage directions are full and specific, and the copy is generally clean: for example, the rare word ‘Wondersly’ (241) is accurately reproduced (in F2’s reprint , it is officiously corrected to ‘Wondrously’). It is likely that the last four pages, which were repeated almost verbatim from Neptune’s Triumph, were set from marked-up pages taken from the quarto of that masque. One clue is the incorrect pointing of ‘sports.’ (377): this should have taken a comma or colon, but, because in Neptune’s Triumph the corresponding line lay at the foot of a page, it had been mistakenly printed as a stop, which was then carried over into The Fortunate Isles. In supplying marked-up quarto copy, Jonson took the opportunity of correcting ‘on’ to ‘one’ at 436, and of making minor revisions at 392.

Q contains some striking spelling variations, particularly between ‘do’ (nine instances) and ‘doe’ (seven instances) and ‘me’ (eight instances) and ‘mee’ (six instances). There is also more limited variation between ‘aery’ and ‘aerie’, ‘SKOGAN’ and ‘SCOGAN’, and ‘Howle-glas(se)’ and ‘Owle-glas’. These might be signs of diverging spelling preferences between two compositors, but they are more probably the orthographical inconsistencies of a single man, since alternate spellings appear within the same forme, and even on the same page (for example, ‘do’ and ‘doe’ on both C3v and C4v, and ‘SCOGAN’ and ‘SKOGAN’ on B3v; ‘go’ and ‘goe’ also appear together on C4v). Small differences between the running titles indicate that two skeletons were in use, the most conspicuous evidence being the appearance of a comma in place of a stop in ‘THE FORTVNATE ISLES,’ on B4v and C4v. The Oxford editors (H&S, 7.703 ) considered that the omission of Merefool’s name from the stage direction at the foot of A2 was a technical fault (the last word is ‘M^r.’ and ‘MERE-FOOLE’ is the catchword, but the first word on A2v is the character’s name as speech-heading). However, this is a stylistic device that appears elsewhere in the transmission of the masques, for example in Pleasure Rec. and Gypsies.

Eight copies of the quarto survive:
1 British Library, London: C.34.e.30 (the Garrick copy) (-D2); a large-paper
copy
2 British Library, London: C.33.e.7(4) (a copy owned by the antiquary
Humphrey Dyson, d. 1633) (+D2)
3 British Library, London: 1070.1.26 (-D2)
4 Victoria and Albert Museum, London: The Dyce Collection (-D2; D1 severely
cropped)
5 Bodleian Library, Oxford: Mal. 193(5) (a copy with Robert Burton’s initials
on the title page) (+D2)
6 The Houghton Library, Harvard University: 14427.24.65* (-A1, D2)
7 Huntington Library, Pasadena: 62052 (the Bridgewater copy) (-D2)
8 University of Texas, Austin: Pforz. 547 (the Clawson copy, formerly in the Pforzheimer collection, New York) (-D2)

As the volume passed through the press, changes were made to the title-page and to sheet B:

A1r	state 1	state 2
Motto	cantúqsue	cantúsque

state 1: copies 2, 5
state 2: copies 1, 3, 4, 7, 8
Sheet B (outer)

B1r	state 1	state 2
12	past	pass’d
B2v
20	Foxe	Fox
21	Court.	Court;
23	askt	ask’d
25	a foote	o’ foote
B3r
11	for it	for’t
22	Gymnosophist,	Gymnosophist
26	Laureat	Laureat

state 1: copies 1, 2, 4, 5, 6
state 2: copies 3, 7, 8
Sheet B (inner)

B1v	state 1	state 2	state 3
9	see?	see,	~
10	whom?	whom.	~
18	Alls	All’s	~
B2r
2	patience.	patience;	~
3	other,	other	~
11	in steed	in stead	~
B3v
5	called	call’d	~
12	Crambe!	Crambe	Crambe.
27	Latitude.	Latitude!	~
c.w.	O,	~	O
B4r
3	gentili∫simus¡	gentili∫simus!	~
5	questioni∫simus	question-i∫simus	~
6	life,	life;	~
29	in all,	in, all	~

[The reading in line 3, state 1, is uncertain: the final character looks most like an inverted exclamation mark, though it prints so poorly that it is difficult to be sure.]
state 1: copies 1, 4, 6
state 2: copy 5
state 3: copies 2, 3, 7, 8

In the above analysis, it is assumed that states 1 and 2 of B (outer) are in the reverse order from that indicated in H&S, as such changes as ‘ask’d’ for ‘askt’, ‘for’t’ for ‘for it’, and ‘Laureat’ for ‘Laureat’ seem to be corrections, not corruptions. Some minor type-movement also took place in sheet C – on line 1 of C2, the comma at the end of ‘ioyn’d,’ works progressively upwards, and on C3, the stop at the end of line 9 works down – though no stop-press variants exist in this sheet.

The song ‘Come, noble nymphs’ (394-417) was printed in John Benson’s duodecimo edition of Jonson’s Poems (1640) , and scribal copies survive in five manuscript miscellanies from the early seventeenth century. These are discussed in the Textual Essay for Neptune’s Triumph.

The Fortunate Isles was included in the masque section of the collected works of 1640-1, where it occupies sigs. S3-V2, pages 129-43, between The Masque of Owls and Love’s Triumph through Callipolis. F2’s textual authority is limited, as it is merely a reprint of quarto copy. It follows Q’s punctuation and spelling closely, and reproduces Q’s errors at 173, 311, and 419. F2 improves Q at 53, but new errors are introduced at 126, 241, 277, 300, 432, and 436, and the date of performance on the title-page is erroneously corrected by the editor to 1626. One change was made as F2 passed through the press:

S3v (130)	State 1	State 2
3	feching	fetching

state 1: 7, 17, 24, 28, 33
state 2: all other copies

In some copies, the speech-heading ‘JOHPHIEL’ on line 9 of S4r lacks the ‘E’, but this is only a poorly printing piece of type, and is very faint in the copies that do have it.

Outside the collected editions, The Fortunate Isles 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, eds. Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong (1973) .

The following copies of F2 have been 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 Peason copy)
41. David Gants copy
42. Martin Butler copy