The Times Literary Supplement, 1329 (21 July 1927) 500
The appearance of Volume I (the Introduction) of this magnificent Herford and Simpson edition of Jonson was noticed everywhere with the applause that it deserved. 1 For any but an audience of highly trained specialists there is less matter for discussion in the subsequent volumes containing the plays; but each merits, and the future volumes will merit, distinguished mention and the renewed thanks of the general as well as the academic public. For exact texts are the basis of literary criticism and appreciation; we have now, after three hundred years, a definitive text of Jonson, the text which everyone who writes about Jonson will have to use.
The text of Jonson’s plays has always been thought to be the most nearly accurate in the whole of Elizabethan drama. So they are: Jonson took great trouble over the publication of his plays; of all the Elizabethans it was he who cared most deeply for the judgment of posterity. He cared also for his plays, not only as drama but as literature; thought of them probably as matter that would be read as well as played. One of the things to be learnt about Jonson from this edition, which gives every important variant, is the labour of alteration and improvement which he expended in giving literary perfection and polish to his work: he would have continued to revise and alter with every new edition. He it is who taught the English poet to write with care and revise with labour; he is the ancestor of Dryden and Pope, the first “classic” of English literature in the French sense. 2 Nevertheless any one of the short prefaces prefixed by the editors of this edition to the several plays is the fruit of great labour of textual criticism. We think of the Elizabethans as careless editors of their own texts and of the Elizabethan publishing trade as swarming with “pirates.” But Jonson was not a careless editor, and we are not at the mercy of piratical publishers of his plays; yet the state of the publishing trade and the printing art in his time was so undeveloped that even Jonson could not expect to produce a perfect text. And this being so, the situation is only complicated by Jonson’s passion for revision. The editors say modestly that “no problem arose” in editing the first two plays of this volume, though they admit a few confused passages and a number of misprints [xi]. For the text of The Case is Alteredthey make handsome recognition of the work of Whalley (1756) and Gifford (1816). 3 But –
in Every Man out of his HumourJonson did not rewrite, he revised his early version. He worked over the Quarto text, submitted it to a close...
