Potter once called ‘the dispiriting apparatus of notes’.1

As the line-numbering of The Alchemist and of the verse-scenes of Volpone corresponds with that in the standard Oxford edition by Herford and the Simpsons, a zealous reader can make full use of the thorough annotation in their volumes of commentaries. For the prose-scenes of Volpone and for Bartholomew Fair my abbreviations of Jonson’s own scene-divisions (1, i, 1, ii, etc.) should also make for easy reference to massively annotated editions. I have made no attempt to make a comprehensive survey of the numerous parallels with classical and Renaissance authors, nor have I tried to explain every learned allusion. Those who want to know, for example, that in The Alchemist, 1, i, 1, Subtle’s ‘I fart at thee!’ is like the Latin oppedo and the Greek χαταπέρδω will want to make use of Volume X of the Oxford Ben Jonson; others of us will continue to believe that such words were actually heard sometimes on the lips of Jonson’s contemporaries.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In preparing the text and notes I have, of course, benefited greatly from the work of my many predecessors, particularly the labours of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. Professor Harry Levin’s excellent one-volume Ben Jonson: Selected Works was, alas, unannotated, but, throughout, I have been guided, enlightened, and occasionally inhibited, by the scholarship of previous editors and by the insight of critics and commentators. Any editor is greatly indebted to others. For example, a casual glance at the editions of Bartholomew Fair by Eugene M. Waith (1963) and Edward B. Partridge (1964) will reveal how deep is their debt to E. A. Horsman’s edition for the Revels Plays (1960); I had the good fortune to be able to consult and make use of the work of all three gentlemen. I am grateful to Professor David Daiches and Mr R. P. C. Mutter for advice and encouragement.

FURTHER READING

The bibliography on p. 33 and the prefatory matter to the three separate comedies show that there is no lack of critical and scholarly books on Ben Jonson. There has indeed been something of a Jonson revival in the United States with Professor Levin, dedicatee of at least two striking books on the dramatist, as the doyen of American Jonsonians. The general reader must be warned, however, that Jonson’s notorious learning has called forth an answering pedantry in some of his more recent American commentators and scholarly exegetes which is manifested either in a fancy line in chapter headings, ‘Comoedy of Affliction’ and ‘(Although no Paralel)’, or in mandarin prose:

With Zeal-of-the-Land Busy… we are back on the highroad of linguistic caricature, where every cobblestone, every pebble, shrieks affectation, and the whole gives off a lurid phosphorescence more like that of a Martian than an earthly landscape…

Unlike Busy… Overdo is auto-intoxicate.

Scholars who have immolated themselves in some part of ‘The Background’ (Renaissance philosophy, rhetoric, satire, psychology, alchemy, the Great Chain of Being itself) are sometimes slow to get back to Jonson’s marvellous liveliness on the printed page and to the theatrical potentialities of his comedies.

Had I put an epigraph on the title-page, I should have adapted some words of Jonson’s from the epilogue to Cynthia’s Revels, or The Fountain of Self-Love:

                By God ’tis good, and if you lik’t, you may.

Falmer House,                                                                                         M. S. J.

The University of Sussex,

Brighton

St Bartholomew’s Day, 1965

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. BIBLIOGRAPHIES

W. W. GREG. A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols., 1940–59.

S. A. TANNENBAUM. Ben Jonson (A Concise Bibliography), 1938.

S. A.