The Manuscripts of Ben Jonson and his Contemporaries

The Manuscripts of Ben Jonson and his Contemporaries' is concerned with the investigation and understanding of literary manuscripts from the early and mid seventeenth century, and the relationship between text and artefact. The research has involved the study of several hundred manuscript volumes, the transcription of all the surviving manuscript texts of Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Sir John Roe, and Sir Thomas Overbury, as well as several well-known anonymous or doubtfully attributed poems. It has, for instance, identified further poems written by Nicholas Hare (and thus de-attributed 'Variety' from the Donne canon). Most importantly, the research has placed Jonson's role in the manuscript transmission of poetry under scrutiny for the first time. It employs codicological, watermark, palaeographical, and textual analysis to re-date, de-attribute, and/or attribute texts and documents. Further, it argues both for the significance of Jonson's involvement in the manuscript practices of the period, as well as for the editing of his later poems and masques from manuscript rather than print. The broad areas that the book seeks to address include the early history and creation of these documents, an understanding of the social and textual networks of which they form a part, and an analysis of the usefulness of the surviving versions for editorial purposes.

Although the book will be primarily analytical in its methodology, that approach has been conceived through a social theory of textual activity. As McKenzie insisted, all books and most manuscripts exist in social contexts: groups of people who create, transmit, and consume the written or printed word. Likewise, the circulation of manuscripts involves forms of social co-operation and exchange, as well as individual instigation and agency. The intention, here, is not simply to argue in favour of 'a sociology of texts', for that phrase disguises what might be called 'the archaeology of the document'. What the book attempts to do is move the discussion on. In terms of editorial theory, the intention is to depart from prevailing assumptions and argue for a reconstructive archaeological approach that links the layering of historical evidence with the philological and textual methods of traditional scholarship. The important point is that the validity of such an approach should emerge from the study of the documents rather than be imposed upon them.

Thus, 'The Manuscripts of Ben Jonson and his Contemporaries' seeks to address several gaps in our understanding of the production and transmission of texts and documents in the early modern period. Under-utilised forms of social documentation, as well as stemmatic analysis, provide the context for a technical analysis of the structure of the manuscripts, the scripts in which they are written, and other material details such as the study of paper, and the evidence that can be adduced from bindings. The point is not to encumber the text, but to point up where appropriate the connections and discontinuities between the various kinds of evidence, so that the human story of the transmission of these documents might begin to emerge.

The implications of this study for the understanding Jonson's poetry requires that a slightly broader account of the evidence be taken than simply documenting the relationship between various manuscripts. If, at times, the methods used are technical, almost forensic, that is because they have to be to demonstrate that certain things are possible and other things are not, or are (at least) less likely. The larger argument is about the editorial process, about what we do with this information once we have it, about what it means for the study of Jonson and Donne in particular, and about how it changes our understanding of the literature of the early modern period more generally. As such, the book will provide the background to my old-spelling Oxford edition of Jonson's 'Poems' to be published in 2008.