Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio: A Revolution in Print?

Abstract

In its own time, Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio was considered revolutionary. Jonson’s contemporaries were astonished by his hubris in printing a collected Workes, which included a number of plays and masques, in a folio volume during his own lifetime. At the same time, his folio served as a model for the First Folio of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1647 Folio. Plays and masques were regularly printed in quarto and octavo volumes in the early modern period, so the novelty of the 1616 Folio does not lie in the printing of plays and masques. Rather, the publication of these highly collaborative genres in a volume dedicated to the fame of the single « Author » may well have been at the heart of the revolutionary aspect of Jonson’s project. In Sejanus, His Fall (1605), Hymenaei (1606) and The Haddington Masque (1608), we see how Jonson confronts the moral quandary of appropriating his collaborators’ work for himself and the strategies he uses to justify himself for posterity.