A Challenge at Tilt was first printed in F1 , where it occupies sigs. 4O6- 4P2v, pages 995-1000. It falls, therefore, in the last part of the volume where pages had to be reset or reimposed because of a failure to print sufficient copies (see Barriers, Textual Analysis, for a fuller account). In this masque the formes were reimposed, not reset (the faulty counting appears to have been discovered during the printing of 4P, and so the type was still standing). On one sheet, 4P2, some press variants exist from both impositions, and one or two obvious errors were corrected in the reimposed sheets, but, as is usual, almost all these corrections are of little importance. Only at 131, where the reimposed sheet changes ‘I?’ to ‘O’ might one argue that there is a question of substance. One might argue that ‘I’ (meaning ‘Ay’) could make sense here, but the modification seems sensible enough, though one cannot assume that any reference was made back to the original manuscript when it was introduced.

As is the case with all the later masques in the volume, Challenge does not begin or end on a separate page, but opens with the title and first five lines following on directly from Love Freed, and its final ten lines followed immediately by Irish.

There are barely any clues as to the nature of the manuscript which served as printer’s copy. There is one ‘’hem’ (88), the characteristic Jonson elision of ‘them’, and a couple of examples of ‘y’ spellings (of ‘entertayn’ and ‘maintayne’) but these are scarcely compelling evidence, and though the punctuation is not untypical of Jonson, it is perhaps lighter than his usual practice. This suggests the probability that the folio text was printed from a scribal transcript.

As with the text of Barriers there is little more than the most basic indication of exits and entrances, and though the baldness of the text might be partly explicable by the fact that Jonson saved both his own embarrassment and that of the participants at this celebration of an ill-fated marriage (see Headnote), it is consonant with the tendency of all the later masques and entertainments in the Folio. The text is very much a record of Jonson’s contribution to the event, rather than an account of its performance.

List of variants

4O1:6 (o)

4O6v 996