The Devil is an Ass was first printed in 1631, together with Bartholomew Fair and The Staple of News, as part of a plan to issue a companion volume to the 1616 folio of Jonson’s writings. But no publication materialized until 1640, when these three plays (each prefaced by its original 1631 title-page) were issued together under the general title of ‘THE WORKES OF BENIAMIN IONSON. The second Volume’. The tortuous history of this publication is discussed by John Creaser in his essay on F2(2) in the electronic edition.

Some copies of The Devil is an Ass (as of the other two plays) were distributed in 1631. At least one stitched, unbound copy of our play has survived (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, PR2610 A1 1631; formerly classified as Ah/J738/+B641, copy 16) and is perhaps one of those which Jonson sent to patrons and friends (see H&S, 1.211 ). Such distribution is unlikely to have made a significant dent in the stock, but for some reason there was during the 1630s sufficient decline in the number of copies of The Devil is an Ass to warrant a reprint in 1641, which was used in a variant issue in that year of the 1640 volume, together with the unexhausted 1631 stock of the other two plays. Coming after Jonson’s death, the reprint has no authority, and it has been consulted but not extensively collated for the present edition.

John Beale’s printing of The Devil Is an Ass was more accurate than that of Bartholomew Fair, which precedes it in F2; but it nonetheless supplies plenty of ammunition for editors and textual scholars who have echoed Jonson’s animadversions on the ‘lewd printer’. John Creaser in his essay acknowledges the careless typesetting that disfigures all three plays, while pointing out that Beale, following the example of Stansby in the 1616 folio, created a more handsome layout and typography for Jonson’s work than was afforded to the Shakespeare first folio in 1623 or to Jonson’s last plays in the 1641 edition. Creaser also draws attention, however, to the disparity between Beale’s sloppy printing of these plays and the high standard of his non-dramatic publications, which suggests that proof-reading in this instance was taken no more seriously than it was in the printing of quarto play-texts generally regarded as ephemeral. This attitude clearly infuriated Jonson, but did he make a serious attempt to ameliorate its effects? A curious feature of the 1631 plays is the scattered, apparently random, but highly specific press corrections that were made during the printing process. John Creaser is inclined to regard most of these as ‘half-hearted tinkering by printers rather than punctilious interventions by the author’; and James Riddell (1997a ), 67-73 has provided some useful analysis of this process at work in a number of the variants in The Devil Is an Ass. Yet it seems probable that only Jonson would have bothered to make recondite alterations of roman to italic for certain words and phrases like those on signatures P2:3v (pages 109 and 112). It is certainly true, though, that his could not have been a sustained and consistent scrutiny, and alongside these minute alterations a large number of obvious mistakes survive. Typical examples of compositor errors that were caught by Jonson or a proof-reader can be seen in the Collation Table below; obvious misprints have otherwise been silently corrected. The collation of twenty-six copies of the play (many of which were not consulted for previous editions) has revealed very few previously unknown variants, and none that affects the modernized text of the present edition.

Beale’s text preserves many of the ‘literary’ features that Jonson sought to give the printed versions of his plays, and may have been set from a reasonably clean scribal copy of The Devil Is an Ass – unlike the authorial foul papers that have been postulated as copy for Bartholomew Fair and which may help to explain the particularly poor printing of that play. What emerges, despite Beale’s errors, is a particularly clear example of Jonson’s attempt to create a new kind of theatrical text. The 1631 printing of The Devil Is an Ass includes a large number of marginal annotations, some of which function as stage directions, either because they spell out a particular action or indicate a character’s mode of response; while others provide a scholarly gloss upon a word or piece of action. The resulting text is a rather strange hybrid, offering information in the margins that is of variable theatrical value and lacks the learned weight and consistency of the annotations to Sejanus. As an exercise in recreating the play for readers, it is only a qualified success, and a modern editor must decide what to do with much of this information. Here the scholarly urge to preserve Jonson’s words can find itself in conflict with the requirement to produce a coherent text for modern readers – including actors and stage directors. In this edition, the marginal notes have been incorporated into the body of the text where it is felt that they have some histrionic value – in other words, where they offer a practical direction to an actor or assist our sense of the texture, pace or emotional character of the scene. In all other instances these annotations are preserved in the collation.

COPIES COLLATED

1 Beinecke Library (Elizabethan Club), Yale University, 1978+47