Oberon was printed in F1 , where it occupies sigs. 4N2-6, pages 975-83. It is something of an oddity, in that half way down page 977 the setting changes to double columns, reverting to a single column after the first four lines on page 980. It is the fact that the antimasque is written in heptasyllabics which makes this arrangement possible – and the next masque, Love Freed, which also begins with heptasyllabics, is similarly set in double column format until the final songs. Oberon begins in single column presumably because the substantial marginalia which accompany the opening would have been impossible to fit into a double-column arrangement, whereas the two marginal notes on pages 978 and 979 are short and can (just) be accommodated within this format. Apart from these two masques, double-column setting appears only at the very end of Queens, where the final song is so printed clearly in order to make room for the names of the masquers at the foot of the page. Taken together with the way the masques from Love Restored onwards are not afforded a fresh page start, the double-column layout in this masque suggests that the printers became anxious about the space these final masques were likely to take up (though in the event the final quire is made up of only four sheets, rather than the usual six, and one leaf remained blank). Why this should be is a matter of pure speculation – perhaps there were difficulties in acquiring the copy for these later masques, none of which had already been printed in quarto form, making the estimation of the number of sheets required and the casting-off of the copy a hurried, last-minute affair. Perhaps the complex setting of the earlier masques had put the project behind schedule, and the printers were simply anxious to get it done.

An impression of haste and confusion might also be suggested by the miscalculation of the number of sheets required in printing off the quires from 4M to 4O. This miscalculation led to the necessity of resetting or else reimposing within a new skeleton all of the pages of this masque (see Barriers: Textual Essay, for a fuller account). The story of the resetting / reimposing is not straightforward. The outer and inner formes of 4N2:5 were simply reimposed, with one correction of an obvious error on 4N2, as was the form 4N1:6 outer, with, again, the correction of one self-evident mistake (in Love Freed). The outer and inner formes of 4N3:4, however, present a more complicated picture. Here the type had not wholly been redistributed, so that the pages are a mixture of resetting and reimposition of standing type within a new skeleton. In 4N3 (p. 977) the top half of the page, above the double-column setting, was corrected and reimposed, the bottom half was reset. In the conjugate leaf, 4N4v (p. 980), the roman type had been distributed, but the italic of the stage directions was left standing, except for the final line of the last of them. This one line of italic type, together with all that in roman, was completely reset, with the introduction of substantive errors at lines 27 and 37. In the case of 4N3:4 inner, the bulk of the pages were reimposed, except for the note on 4N3v, which was reset, in the course of which two errors were corrected, and a new error introduced. On the conjugate leaf, 4N4, the note, though set from standing type, slips one line down the page in the course of reimposition. The forme 4N1:6 inner (containing the last page of Barriers and the last page of Oberon) was completely reset, introducing one error at line 35.

Table of variants

4N2:5 (o)

4N2 r 975

	IMPOSITION A	IMPOSITION B
	State 1	State 2
Rt	[omit]	Maſques.
22m	an∧ curious	and curious

4N3:4 (o)

4N3 977

	IMPOSITION A	IMPOSITION B
	State 1	State 2
15	call’d	called
	SETTING A	SETTING B
C1-35	ayme	aime
C2-35	ſhells	ſhels

4N4v

	SETTING A	SETTING B
C1-1	cōfeſſe	confeſſe
C2-1	rough,	~∧
C2-3	Euery	Euerie
5-7	[Imposition A]	[Imposition B]
13-18	[Imposition A]	[Imposition B]
20	ayre	aire
21 22	ayre Whilſt … chayre	aire Whil’ſt … chaire
25 26	iames . . . flies eyes	Iames . . . flyes Eies
27	ſeene,	beene;
30 31	very buryed	verie buried
33 34-5	eyes [Imposition A]	eies [Imposition B]
36	began	beganne
37	SYLVANE	SYLVANI

4N3:4 (i)

4N3v 978

	SETTING A	SETTING B
16m	*Erat ſolenne / Baccho in pomp. /tenerorum mo- / re puerorum / geſtaui à Sileno, / & Satyris, Bac- /chis praecendenti- / bus, quarum v- / na ſemper erat / Tympaniſtra, / altera Tibicina, / &c. vide Athe- / nae.	*Erat ſolenne / Baccho in pomo. / tenerorum more / purorum geſstaui / à Sileno, & Sa- / tyris, Bacchis / praecendentibus, / quarum vna / ſemper erat Tym- / paniſtria, altera / Tibicina, &c. / vide Atheanae.

4N4 979

	IMPOSITION A	IMPOSITION B
	State 1	State 2
4m	[note]	[note line 5]

4N1:6 (i)

4N1v 974

	SETTING A	SETTING B
2	mee	Me
13	After	[swash ‘A’]fter
16	blood	~,
23	heauen	heauen
26	propheſy	propheſie
30	ſhal … euery	ſhall … euerie
33	And this	And if this
43	nations	Nations
45	fly	ſky
47	flie	ſkie

4N6 983

	SETTING A	SETTING B
2	1.	~∧
4	2.	~∧
6	1.	~∧
9	2.	~∧
10	Faery	Faerie
11	dairy	Dairie
13	home	home>
14	ſong.	Song.
16	knights	Knights
20	aery	ayrie
21	vary	Varie
22	Faery	Faerie
23	tarry	Tarrie
27	Moone	[swash ‘M’]oone
35	After . . . And	[swash ‘A’]fter . . . [swash ‘A’]nd
35	ſong, the \ ſtarre	Song, \ ſtarre
42	fiery	Fierie
43	head!	~!

In all copies collated by David L. Gants, the distribution of variants is the same for each sheet (for the identification of copies, see the list at the end of this essay):

State 1: the rest

State 2: 4, 5, 10, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 38, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48

The printer’s copy for this masque may well have been a Jonson holograph. There are examples of his preferred classical spellings – ‘Paedagogue’ in the first note, ‘Praefect’ at 28 – and a number of Jonsonian elisions, including consistent use of his characteristic ’hem (63, 110, 119, etc.), and examples such as ‘They’ar’caues’ (115), ‘we’had’ (120). So too, we find his preferred ‘y’ spellings in, for example, ‘ayre’, ‘chayre’, ‘hayre’ (218ff., 280-1, 319). This evidence cannot be conclusive, but, together with the generally heavy punctuation, it strongly suggests a holograph MS as the basis for F1’s text.

Three songs survive with musical settings. Two songs by Ferrabosco are found in St Michael’s College, Tenbury, MS 1018. ‘Nay, nay’ is on f. 36 (JnB 688), ‘Gentle knights’ on 37v-38 (JnB 689). Though there is some repetition of the words in the setting of ‘Gentle knights’, and the underlay of verse to music is by no means clear at certain points, there are no substantive textual variants in this song.

In the first song, however, one or two of the variants may be of some significance. In this setting the final two lines are somewhat confused, with an extra bar of music scratched out, and with the final line weakly repeating ‘As with the ayer’ instead of F1’s ‘of which you are’. But if this certainly represents a copyist’s error, it is possible that the other two variants might record more purposeful modification of Jonson’s text by his composer. The pedantically metrical elision of ‘This’s’ (314) is expanded to ‘this is’, with each word set to a quaver, thus preserving the rhythm of the line without requiring an awkward hiss from the singer. In the next line the MS reads ‘or for Fayeries to forget’ in place of F1’s ‘Or, for Faies so to forget’. One might feel that this modified line moves rather more easily than Jonson’s, and while there is no reason to suppose that Jonson did not write the line in the form found in F1, it is quite possible that the singer at the first performance sang what is found in the Tenbury MS, since Jonson’s words would be awkward to fit to the melody as it survives. Transcriptions of the MS of both songs are to be found in Chan (1980), 235-8, and of the second in Walls (1996), 323-4 (though Walls inaccurately reports that the MS reads ‘light and airy’ for ‘bright and airy’ – it doesn’t). Spink’s edition of Ferrabosco (1966) gives transcriptions of both songs with added realisation of the bass part, as does Sabol (1978). The song settings are to be found in the Music Archive in the Cambridge Edition.

A setting of ‘Buzz, quoth the blue fly’ appeared, attributed to Edward Nelham, in John Playford’s Catch that Catch Can (1667), 75. The text diverges from that of the masque, and adds two lines at the end. It reads:

Buz quoth the Blew Fly, Hum quoth the Bee,
Buz and Hum and so do we
in his ears, in his nose, thus as you see,
He eat a Dormuse, else it was he,
Buz you have a thing above your knee,
I think it is as black as black may be.

The setting is printed in Chan, 239, and Sabol, 62. Sabol argues that the last two lines are in fact a separate catch – and it is true that the setting of the Jonsonian lines can be performed successfully (as it is on the CD by the Musicians of the Globe). Whilst Sabol suggests that ‘the words . . . are like additions Jonson occasionally made and later excised when his librettos were printed’, this does not seem to me at all persuasive. The bawdiness of these lines would not be appropriate to the place of the catch in the masque. But Sabol notes also that the modality of the catch ‘suggests composition early in the century’, and though Nelham received his appointment to the Chapel Royal in 1617 it is not absolutely impossible either that the catch (without the final two lines) might have been composed in time for the masque, nor that the attribution to Nelham is of the revised and extended version, and that another composer – perhaps Robert Johnson – provided the first part. But this must remain a matter of speculation.

COPIES OF F1 COLLATED (BY DAVID L. GANTS)

1. Huntington Library, 62100

2. Huntington Library, 62101

3. Huntington Library, 62104

4. Huntington Library, 62105

5. Huntington Library, 495467 (Ford Copy ‘A’)

6. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 1

7. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 2

8. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 3

9. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 4

10. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 5

11. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751, Copy 6

12. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 1

13. Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 14751.2, copy 2

14. Library of Congress, Yorke W.4.4

15. Gants Personal Copy, Fenton bookplate

16. Gants Personal Copy, Everard Home bookplate

17. British Library, G. 11630 (Grenville copy)

18. Boston Public Library, XfG .3811 .5

19. Boston University, YPR 2600 .C16

20. Wellesley College, qx - English Poetry

21. Bodleian Library, Douce I. 302

22. Huntington Library, 499968

23. Huntington Library, 499967

24. Huntington Library, 499971

25. Huntington Library, 606199

26. Huntington Library, 606202

27. Huntington Library, 606200

28. Huntington Library, 606574

29. Huntington Library, 606576

30. Huntington Library, 606599

31. Huntington Library, 606579

32. Huntington Library, 606582

33. Huntington Library, 606583

34. Brown University, Providence, PR 2600 - 1616

35. Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Lewis PR2600 1616

36. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616a

37. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ab

38. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ad

39. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616af

40. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ah

41. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616ak

42. University of Texas, Austin, Ah/ J738/ +B616am

43. University of Texas, Austin, AH/ J738/ +B616an

44. University of Texas, Austin, Wh/ J738/ +B616a

45. University of Texas, Austin, Pforz. 559

46. University of Texas, Austin, Woodward-Ruth 181

47. University of Texas, Austin, Stark 6431

48. University of Virginia, E 1616 .J64