Christmas His Masque was first printed in the masques section of the second folio (F2) , where it occupies sigs. B1-4r (numbered 1-7). The fact that no gathering A was used suggests that the printer, John Dawson Junior, expected Christmas to be the first text in a volume that began with the masques, and left A spare for a general title-page and preliminaries. As the first of the masques, B1r is modestly decorated: the title is generously set and there is a factotum initial for the opening word of dialogue, but there is no collective title-page for the masques as a section, and the effect of the section beginning is rather spoiled by the wrong-fount ‘Q’ that appears in the word ‘MASQUE’ in the second line, and the damaged ‘H’ (lacking its lower right serif) in ‘CHRISTMAS’. The factotum, which shows Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist on a charger, was used in three other books printed by Dawson around this time: R. Ward’s Animadversions of War (1639; sigs. E6 and F6); volume 3 of G. Saulnier’s The Love and Arms of the Greek Princes (1639; sig. 2E2); and Threnoikos: The House of Mourning (1640; sig. A2). H&S (9.103-4 ) note that in 1634 this factotum was owned by John Haviland, but Haviland died in 1638, at which point it must have passed to Dawson (McKenzie, 1972 ).

F2 presents the fullest text of Christmas, being the only source for the description of the masquers, 22-53. However, two short speeches are missing (95-7), and there are other small omissions and errors that need correcting from the manuscripts. From the fullness and descriptiveness of the stage directions, it seems probable that the text derives from a literary transcript, based on Jonson’s performance text but introducing improvements into it, perhaps made for post-performance distribution. The directions cannot correspond exactly to the text as staged, for they are contradictory about whether the verses were sung by the whole company or by Christmas alone; this suggests that at some point they were worked over by a copyist. If so, the scribe in question might have been Ralph Crane, who in 1618 prepared the Chatsworth manuscript of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. Some of the characteristic features of Crane’s hand are present. There is a marked preference for question marks over exclamation marks; a very high recurrence of commas and of capitalized words (other than for names and the beginnings of sentences); and a tendency towards excessive hyphenation, not only for names but in words and phrases such as ‘paire-Royall’ (37), ‘his-rule’ (162), ‘Twelfe-night’ (194), and ‘Hinch-boyes’ (226-7) (for the basis of these comparisons, see the statistical analyses in Howard-Hill, 1972b, and Honigmann, 1996 ). Against this, the text lacks Crane’s strong preference for semicolons over colons, nor does it have his frequent use of parentheses, though it does have two examples of a distinctive Craneism, a single word in parentheses, ‘forsooth’ at 242 and ‘sir’ at 257. The case for F2 deriving from a Crane transcript, then, seems reasonably strong, even if in such a short sample it is not possible to mount a full-scale complete statistical comparison. If this attribution is correct, the putative manuscript lying behind F2 is chronologically the earliest example that we know about of a theatre text copied by Crane.

Forty-two copies of F2 have been collated for this edition (see list at end of this analysis). Two corrections were made during the printing:

B1v (2)		state 1		state 2
25		carrring		carrying

state 1: all copies except 16, 41, 42

state 2: 16, 41, 42

B2r (3) state 1 state 2

B2r (3)		state 1		state 2
1		BABIE-COCKE.		BABIE-CAKE.

state 1: 5, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42

state 2: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 17, 20, 22, 28, 29, 30, 34, 38, 41

Parts of Christmas His Masque appear in five manuscripts. Of these, the most important is Folger MS J.a.1 (JnB 563 in Peter Beal’s list), a dramatic and poetical miscellany consisting of eighteen separate items dating from c.1610-20, bound into a single volume in the eighteenth century and now disbound into separate fascicles (for details, see R.H. Bowers, 1959). The masque, titled ‘Christmas his / Showe’ and endorsed by a different hand as ‘Mock-maske. / The Christmas shewe / before the Kinge. 1615’, originally occupied fols. 168-74 of the manuscript. This comprises seven leaves, of which 169-70, 171-2, and 173-4 are conjugates; the title leaf was originally folded around 169-70 and its blank half has been cut away, leaving a stub between 170 and 171. The pages are ruled at the top and sides; speech headings are placed in the upper box on 169r and 170r, and a correction is written into the left margin on 170v. The text is written in a neat secretary hand, occupying between 18 and 25 lines to a page. It is written with some care: blank spaces between the ends of prose lines and the right-hand margin are sometimes filled in small dashes, and capitals frequently decorated with small flourishes. One distinctive feature is the presence of a decorative grave accent over the letter ‘à’ when used as an indefinite article: this has implications for the editor, as it could easily be confused with an elision.