Set against editorial reshapings of Jonson's works through the eighteenth century are a number of theatrical refashionings of his plays, the most famous (and most frequently republished) of which were David Garrick's adaptations of Every Man In (1752) and The Alchemist (1763), the former running through fifteen editions before 1777. Francis Gentleman adapted Sejanus (1752) and The Alchemist (1770), the latter for Drury Lane; he also contributed at least a Prologue to a truncated two-act farce, The Tobacconist (1771), derived from The Alchemist to allow the actor ‘Mr. Weston's established merit in the character of Abel Drugger, more frequent, familiar, and compact opportunity of showing itself than the old play can possibly afford’ (The Advertisement, The Tobacconist, London: J. Bell, 1771, sig. A4v). Less successful was George Colman's adaptation of Epicene, printed in 1776 with a Prologue that spoke feelingly of changing theatrical tastes: ‘now we bring him [Jonson] forth with dread and doubt, / And fear his learned socks are quite worn out’ ( Epicene . . . with Alterations by George Colman, London: T. Becket, 1776, sig. A2). Jonson's plays, even if not performed as frequently as those of Shakespeare, had remained steady theatrical and commercial property, though the warning note sounded by Colman was soon to prove prophetic.

The nineteenth century

William Gifford's landmark nine-volume edition of 1816 speaks slightingly of Whalley's example: ‘He did little . . . for the poet; the form of the old editions was rigidly observed, and though a few notes were subjoined, they were seldom of material import, and never explanatory of the author's general views, though they occasionally touched on his language’ ( Works, 1816, 1.ccxxxiv). Actually, it is in its commentary that Gifford's edition chiefly departs from Whalley; its textual advances, though it did add one newly recovered entertainment from the Newcastle manuscript (BL, Harl. MS 4955) and a scattering of previously ungathered poems, are not radical. Gifford's commentary, his ‘Biographical Memoir’ of Jonson, and his gloweringly ironic ‘Proofs of Ben Jonson's Malignity’, amount to a thoroughgoing defence of Jonson's character against the attacks that had been levelled at Jonson by (it was not unfairly said) generations of Shakespearean critics – a defence which, if it did not entirely persuade all its readers of its truth, certainly polarized the edition's reception. (Compare Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2, 1818, 497–501, and 23, 1819, 558–60; The British Critic, n.s. 10, 1818, 183–99; The Retrospective Review, 1, 1820, 181–210; The British Quarterly Review, 25, 1857, 185–320; and The National Review, 6, 1858, 112–47, reprinted in The Eclectic Magazine, 44, 1858, 1–21. See Lockwood, 2005.) Two hundred and fifty sets of the edition were printed on royal paper and 1,000 on demy for purchase, at a cost of £9 0s 0d and £6 6s 0d respectively. Gifford was paid £450 for his work (publication accounts, 12 August 1816, Reading University Library, Longman Impression Book 6).

Whatever its faults of emphasis and accuracy, Gifford's edition served as the basis for the vast majority of those that followed in the nineteenth century. Barry Cornwall's single-volume stereotyped edition (Edward Moxon, 1838) reprinted Gifford's text (without annotation) and replaced his ‘Memoir’ with a new account (pp. ix–x). The stereotyped plates of the 1838 edition were employed by the publisher Edward Moxon in 1851, though here, perhaps under the influence of Alexander Dyce, whose notes correct and update many of its emphases, he returned Gifford's ‘Memoir’ to print (Dyce, ed. Jonson, 1853). In 1856, Robert Bell's edition of Jonson's The Poetical Works of Ben Jonson followed Gifford's text (as he put it) ‘for the sake of uniformity’ (p. 141). Francis Cunningham twice reprinted Gifford's text, first in a three-volume recension in 1870/1 (published by Hotten) and second in an elaborate nine-volume edition to which he contributed a series of end-notes to each volume ( The Works of Ben Jonson, 9 vols., Bicker and Son, 1875). Henry Morley's editions of the Plays and Poems (Routledge, 1885) and Masques and Entertainments (Routledge, 1890) are less explicit about their textual choices, though the latter edition offers to its readers ‘A Comment’ on Jonson's masques taken from Gifford's ‘Memoir’. As late as 1925, W. W. Greg, in reviewing the first two volumes of H&S, sniffed that since they departed from Gifford's ordering of The Underwood, ‘fuller references’ would have been helpful (Greg, 1926b, 1–17).

For a more detailed discussion of the collected editions discussed above, see Tom Lockwood's account of F3, 1716–17, 1756, and 1816 in the Electronic Edition.

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries

With the new century came the emergence of a scholarly approach known as the ‘New Bibliography’. Pioneers such as R. B. McKerrow and W. W. Greg asserted that editors should consider the influence of the printer as well as the author in shaping the final form of the text. The extent of Jonson's editorial involvement in F1 first spawned a sustained critical dispute in 1903 when B. A. P. van Dam and C. Stoffel argued that certain changes in Every Man Out were the responsibility of Stansby's correctors, not the author. This idea was further explored in 1905 and afterwards with a series of Jonson plays edited from the early quartos, not folios, and published as part of the series Materialien zur Kunde des älteren englischen Dramas in Louvain. These included The Sad Shepherd (1905), Every Man In (1905), Every Man Out (1907), A Tale of a Tub (1913), Cynthia's Revels (1913), Poetaster (1934), Sejanus (1935), Volpone (1937), and The Alchemist (1950). In addition, a facsimile transcription of the first half of a single copy of F1 was published as part of the series (1905–8). Each volume in the series, initially under the direction of Willy Bang and later Henry De Vocht, sought to explore how compositors and correctors shaped the work, and included extensive analyses of the press variants between individual copies of a playbook as well as textual variants between editions. Concurrent with the Materialien volumes, Yale University Press began issuing editions of Jonson's plays as part of their Yale Studies in English series, based upon doctoral theses that likewise paid careful attention not only to the literary but also bibliographical elements of each work. This series included The Alchemist (1903), Bartholomew Fair (1904), Poetaster (1905), The Staple of News (1905), The Devil Is an Ass (1905), Epicene (1906), The New Inn (1908), Cynthia’s Revels (1912), The Magnetic Lady (1914), A Tale of a Tub (1915), Catiline (1916), The Case Is Altered (1917), Volpone (1919), Every Man In (1921), and Eastward Ho! (1926).

Nevertheless, critical consensus of the time focused on the centrality of F1 as source of Jonson's authorial intentions. Among those championing the folio was Percy Simpson, who lauded it as ‘one of the most carefully and correctly printed books of its time’, asserting, as had Whalley before him, that ‘Jonson himself corrected the proofs’ (Bayfield, 1920, 295). Simpson, along with his wife Evelyn and their fellow editor Charles Herford, made a huge impact on twentieth-century Jonsonian scholarship with their magisterial Oxford Ben Jonson, an eleven-volume scholarly edition published between 1925 and 1952. First contemplated in 1888, the edition had, by the time of its completion, accumulated praise from scholars, teachers, and librarians, and had almost single-handedly revived interest in Jonson as a subject of intellectual inquiry. Seemingly unhindered by concerns over time or space or materials, the Oxford editors included along with the texts a Jonson biography summing up all that was known of the poet and playwright at the time, a first-rate set of literary annotations and glosses, invaluable commentary on all the plays, and other essential secondary resources such as a stage history of the plays, Jonsonian allusions, and a reconstruction of Jonson's personal library. Each work was prefaced with a brief discussion of the textual source. Footnotes indicated those variants which the editors considered important. The editors announced their governing principle regarding variants at the outset as follows: ‘The text of this edition is conservative and ignores unnecessary variants.’ Because Jonson wrote in a clear hand and oversaw much of his works through the press, according to the editors, little room was left for ‘the conjecturalist’. Indeed, in the editors’ view a heavy-handed approach to Jonson would merely identify an editor as ‘unfit for his task’ (H&S, 3.xi). In all of the six volumes containing Jonson's work, the editors retained this consistent, conservative approach to their task.