The other substantial change Jonson made in the copy for F1 is the addition of twenty-seven stage directions, set in the margins. Q had contained only two, and these were essentially antiquarian, elaborating on the ritual at 5.172 and 183. Those Jonson added, many of them in Act 5, clarify the action for the reader in a more conventional way, though, as in Q, exits and entrances are not spelt out. Although the resulting total of twenty-nine stage directions in the 1616 version is in sharp contrast to Poetaster, which has only nine, it is broadly comparable to those in other plays in F1 (Volpone, the play that follows Sejanus, has thirty, Cynthia’s Revels forty). Only in these stage directions, some at least of which must reflect Jonson’s memory of the action of the unrevised play (see e.g. 5.430, 460), and in the list of actors, does F1 take the reader any nearer to the original performance than does Q.

Many of the revisions made before the printing of F1 began were matters of punctuation, including the omission of a number of the ‘metrical apostrophes’ used in Q. Here it is possible to agree with de Vocht that the responsibility may be a compositor’s. The same may be true of the change of Q’s ‘vertu’s’ to the blander ‘vertuous’ at 2.434, but at least one more substantial change must be Jonson’s. At 3.302-5 in Q, Silius tells Tiberius that

ſo ſoone, all beſt Turnes

With Princes, do conuert to iniuries

In eſtimation, when they greater riſe,

Then can be anſwer’d (Q, F3v).

This subversive (and genuinely Machiavellian) observation was the more disturbing in 1603-5 because Silius’s trial has strong parallels with those of Essex in 1601 and of Raleigh in 1603. In F1 Jonson modified ‘Princes’ with the adjective ‘doubtfull’:

all beſt turnes

With doubtfull Princes, turne deepe iniuries

In eſtimation (F1, 2K4v).