Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse

Abstract

The radical revisions of the Shakespeare and Middleton canons during the last twenty years have left Jonson’s canon strikingly untouched. Indeed, in the three hundred years between the printing of the two folios of 1616 and 1640 and the publication of Herford and Simpson’s Ben Jonson (1925–52) only two items of significance were added to Jonson’s dramatic corpus, The Case Is Altered in Whalley’s Works (1756) and the Entertainment at the Blackfriars in Gifford’s edition (1816). 1 Yet, despite this apparent canonical stability, the authority of Jonson’s Works (supplemented by the superlative editorial work of Herford and Simpson) and the survival of a massive manuscript corpus, 2 critics have long recognized that Jonson’s extant canon lacks many texts, especially the early, collaborative plays, as well as the works listed in the Conversations and ‘The Execration Upon Vulcan’. 3 Although many of these lacunae result from historical (or pyrogenous) accident, some of them were probably the production of Jonson’s careful self-presentation and self-censorship. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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