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performances of
Volpone
there may well have been scrawled ‘A bed thrust out. Volpone in it’. In this edition locations are added in square brackets: [
Volpone’s house
.] or [
The Fair
.]. These locations have been kept brief, and it is emphasized that they are sometimes conjectural. In the front-matter to the individual comedies I have summarized the sort of problems that occasionally arise about the precise location of particular scenes – problems which a director or a stage-designer can solve by adopting a composite-set.
    Jonson’s marginal stage-directions have usually been retained, though seldom kept in the margin. Square brackets indicate editorial stage-directions (many of them stemming from nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors), but sometimes a cryptically brief authorial stage-direction has been superseded by one in square brackets. Occasionally a stage-direction by Jonson has been placed in round brackets within a speech.
SPEECH-TAGS
    The names of speakers are usually printed as contractions in the Jacobean editions of Jonson’s comedies. These have here been expanded throughout, so that similar speech-tags like
Volp
. and
Volt., Corb
. and
Corv
., no longer confuse the reader, but are replaced by
Volpone, Voltore, Corbaccio
, and
Corvino
. The
Win
. and
Winw
. (which muddled the first printers of
Bartholomew Fair
) are here replaced by
Mistress Littlewit
and
Winwife
.
ANNOTATION
    The notes in any edition of plays by Jonson present a problem, for the range of his classical, contemporary, topographical, and other references is immense. The appropriateness of a mythological allusion or the sharpness of a Jacobean reference can often be appreciated by a present-day reader only if he refers to the notes. I have tried to divide notes into two broad categories – glosses on Jacobean expressions and on words that have changed their meaning are printed as footnotes, while explanatory notes on classical and literary references, proper- and place-names, and allusions to Jacobean life appear with the longer critical comments at the back. Occasionally, where the reader might miss the point of a speech, the word ‘Note’ appears at the foot of the page to refer him to the back of this book. Usually no such indication has been considered necessary, and it is hoped that the reader who is puzzled by a particular difficulty
will
find it explained in a note. At times he will look in vain for this help. Comprehensive annotation of all three comedies would lay too heavy a burden upon Jonson, and most readers will prefer, first time through, being carried forward by the pace of the developing action and by the rhythm and buoyancy of the dialogue, to being slavishly dependent on what S. 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 atthee!’ is like the Latin
oppedo
and the Greek χαταπ έ ρδω 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.