Without entry in the Stationers’ Register, Catiline His Conspiracy was first published by Walter Burre in 1611. The title page reads as follows:

CATILINE / his CONSPIRACY. / VVRITTEN / by / BEN: IONSON. / --His non Plebecula gaudet. / Verum Equitis quoq[ue], iam migrauit ab aure voluptas, / Omnis, ad incertos oculos, & gaudia vana. / LONDON, / Printed for Walter Burre. / 1611.

The printer is unknown (though STC conjectures it might have been William Stansby). Walter Burre was a London stationer who, like most of his contemporaries, liked to publish religious texts and other didactic works that would sell well among London’s book-buying public. He published Edmund Scott’s An Exact Discourse of the . . . East Indians in 1606. He entered in the Stationers’ Register, in 1616, a translation of St Francis of Sales’s Introduction to a Devout Life, though he then transferred the rights to John Spencer in 1630. His large-folio publications included John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Sir Walter Ralegh’s incomplete History of the World (1614). At the same time, during his twenty-four-year-long career he published some eight plays, four of them by Jonson. Burre seems to have had a knack for turning failed stage plays, whether for adult actors or boys’ companies or private performers, into successful publications. Thus Catiline in 1611 afforded a challenging opportunity for Burre, one in which Jonson must have been happy to collaborate with the publisher. Earlier, Burre had published Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour and The Fountain of Self-Love, or Cynthia’s Revels, both in 1601; and he was to publish The Alchemist in 1612 (having registered it in 1610). Among his non-Jonson plays were Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament in 1600 (the play not having been publicly staged), Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters in 1608, Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle in 1613 (another stage failure, despite its appeal today), and Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar in 1615 (never having been publicly staged).

To compensate for his risk in publishing unpopular plays, Burre adopted various strategies aimed at appealing to the Inns of Court crowd and other sophisticates, much as Richard Bonian and Henry Walley had done in their 1609 quarto of Troilus and Cressida, proclaiming, in a publishers’ blurb introduced into the play’s second ‘state’ of printing, that this play had never been ‘staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar’, nor ‘sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude’. Burre’s strategies in Q Catiline were to highlight various features provided to him by Jonson that declared the piece to be a tragic ‘poem’ for the cognoscenti: a Latin epigram on the title page, a dedication of the work to an aristocratic patron committed to supporting works of the highest sophistication, commendatory poems lauding the play for its classical rigour, the massing of characters’ names at the head of each scene without further indication of entrance or exit, omission of a speech prefix at the commencement of each scene (since the speaker is understood to be the character first named in the massed entry), the supply of a disembodied chorus to each act other than act 5, the printing of the whole (as in texts of Seneca’s plays) without any hint of staging, a Roman font for proper names like CETHEGVS or GABIONIVS, composition of the dialogue in studiously regular iambic pentameter verse throughout, arrangement of half-lines in such a way as to make clear how the half-lines are to be paired, marginalia that are ambivalently stage directions and a kind of commentary (e.g. ‘He answers with fear and interruptions’, 5.3.55), long acts without marking of scene intervals (though scene breaks are implicit in acts 3-5 and are marked accordingly in this edition), and so forth. Jonson had used the same severely classical and ‘continental’ format in his quartos of Fountain (1601), Poetaster (1602), and Sejanus (1605); and of course Jonson chose this same format for the plays in the 1616 folio. On the other hand, some earlier plays in quarto (such as Every Man Out, 1600, and Every Man In, 1601) had adopted the more ‘English’ style of marking entrances and exits.

Ample press-correction observable in extant copies of Q Catiline attests to Jonson’s characteristic interest in ensuring that the printed text represent his dramatic and literary genius as accurately as possible. For instance, at 1.1.160 (B3r 29) the revised state (as embodied in Cambridge University Library Syn. 7.61.12) introduces the word ‘their’ into a line that in the uncorrected state is metrically deficient; the revised state reads ‘So threatened with their debts as they will now’. At 1.1.268 (B4v 33) Jonson seems to have corrected ‘They had’ to ‘They’had’. At lines 1.1.531-2, in the opening lines of the chorus to act 1 (C4v 14), a normal capital ‘C’ is made large. At 4.2.25 (4.84 in H&S , I1v 26 in the quarto), ‘So lately aimed at, not an hour sithence’ is changed to ‘So lately aimed at, not an hour yet since’. Some other corrections in state 2 may well have been normal corrections by a proofreader, but some at least bear witness to the author’s careful intervention. As H&S show, the corrections are especially numerous in the inner forme of gathering I, and many of these look authorial. The corrections here may also suggest that Jonson, for all his clinical accuracy, had limited time to devote to press-correction; he devoted minute attention to this gathering that he seemingly did not have for other portions of the text. Was he particularly concerned about this part of the text because it is situated in act 4, which had encountered such hostility on stage? (For a detailed collation of press-corrections, see at the end of this essay.)