Ben Jonson was Shakespeare s great contemporary and [Jonson's canon] is not quite as large a corpus, but it s a pretty large corpus of plays, poems and some prose, as well. He lived longer than Shakespeare. He was a very argumentative, quarrelsome, contentious man. They got along apparently, as far as we know, pretty well, although there was a famous sense of the difference between the two of them, but he is the other major dramatic figure during Shakespeare s lifetime. So Ben was his great rival in the contemporary and he wrote Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicoene, Every Man In His Humor, Every Man Out of His Humor. These are plays which were very big on the London scene.
Especially in the theater, texts keep changing. The truism of the post-structuralist: that there isn t a text, but texts. There s a plural--that they evolve through time. It is so true of the theater. A man writes a script or a woman writes a script, submits it to a company, they act it, they don t like this and that, they throw certain things out and amend it as it s going along. It gets published in various editions, then it gets performed by later generations, through the 19th and 20th and 21st centuries. Then you ve got a whole structure here, which is somehow based around a thing that s called Volpone.
This is called the edition of Herford and Simpson, those are the two editors. It s available in eleven volumes, big, fat volumes. It s again, quite a corpus. It is a very substantial piece of work based very primarily on the great folio edition that he brought out first in 1616. There was a later folio in the 1640s and he did a lot of revising. The older school of method used to take the view that you should use the folio because that would seem to represent his final views and so on. But the folio is very literary, whereas the earlier texts are sometimes much more theatrical. He wanted to make them literary, because he thought of himself as a literary giant. He s preparing this text for his posterity and so on. But there are real questions now in terms of textual method and what you want and so on and there are arguments in favor of going back to these earlier editions as the basis for your work. So the text will actually be different.
where as that earlier edition is very scholarly and it s not a user-friendly edition in terms of something available for graduates, undergraduates, even for people in the field. The learning in it is very scholarly. The old spelling means that you really have to love that and it s not one you d want to use for your classroom use or for theatrical use. So we re going to use modern spelling and introduce more, sort of glossing and terminology. We're just straightening out verbal and meaning difficulties in the text too and will try to aim at user-friendly for an audience that will include sort of the whole academic community.
There are a number of things we are changing that will make it a very different edition. One is that we re now going to bring out an electronic edition, along with the print edition. So the electronic [edition] will be able to expand into having more extensive information about sources and textual problems, that sort of thing. We can also, if we want, include essays because an electronic edition can be open-ended; you can keep bringing stuff into it. So that s exciting.
We re still piecing out what the electronic edition of this Jonson will be like, but obviously it offers opportunities for hypertext so that you can pull up the 1616 folio and put it side-by-side with an earlier quarto or also with your edited page. We will provide an old spelling edition of the text and you can compare that with the modern. There are lots of good illustrations about Jonson's costuming especially, you can pull up other commentaries, you'll just be able to work as they were in the library by putting things up on your screen. I'm hoping that that s what s going to happen. I assume that that's the case.
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Ian Donaldson on the life of Ben Jonsonby OUPAcademic455 views
sounds fascinating...
Hermes1548 4 months ago
According to Cambridge University Press, "The book will be published in January 2012, with an electronic version available by 2013." I'm looking forward to it! Thanks.
Loumademe 4 months ago