There are eleven commendatory and dedicatory poems at the start of Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone, or, The Fox, both as it first appeared in print in 1607 and in the new Arden edition edited by John Jowett. That’s a lot of praise. As Jowett tells us, the effect is to produce “a network of association between notable people”. Jonson asserts that he belongs in an elite sphere of early-modern writers (his learned cheerleaders include John Donne and George Chapman), putting himself and this play about overinvestment in the wrong sort of riches at the centre of that sphere.
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, on the other hand, as James Loxley notes in his Arden edition, shows at least the possibility of imagining an anti-elitist society. In Thomas Dekker’s version of early-modern London, inequalities are conjured away. Simon Eyre the shoemaker becomes mayor, class divisions are overcome in the marriage between Rose Oatley and Roland Lacy, and shoemaking is exhibited as a craft with cultural capital. If the play reflects the London of its day, then the image in its mirror is one turned upside down.
Early-modern London was a more complex place than this reading would allow, of course, and Loxley knows it. His introduction explains the unrest that was rife in London in the late sixteenth century, and in particular the resistance to Dutch migrants who joined existing trades. The Dutch shoemaker “Hans” in The Shoemakers’ Holiday, actually Roland in disguise, triggers mockery and stereotyping among the other characters, yet is the means by which Eyre socially ascends. Rather than using historical context as a key to unlock Hans’s role, Loxley is good on how he offers a glimpse of class-specific attitudes towards migration.
Loxley’s attention to place shifts from international relations to the early-modern capital. When Ralph agrees to bring a pair of newly made shoes for Hammon “to the sign of the Golden Ball in Watling Street”, the footnotes tell us not only where Watling Street is, but locate multiple sites of the Golden Ball to show that Dekker probably didn’t have one place in mind. Loxley’s enthusiasm for Tim Ingold’s “taskscape” – a place made by living in it – brings theoretical vibrancy to this historic detail. Early-modern London emerges from this edition as a performed site as well as a geographic one. The introduction shows how Dekker makes use of the Rose Theatre’s set-up, including a central “discovery space” that operates across three scenes as alternatively the street and a shop.
Loxley is interested in communities and political levelling, so it makes sense that his choice of title, The Shoemakers’ Holiday (rather than the singular Shoemaker’s used by David Bevington in the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama and all three New Mermaids editions), emphasizes “a series of invocations of holidays” and resists the centring of any particular festival or munificent individual. Volpone, or, The Fox has an equally unsteady sense of its own title. While modern editions usually refer to Volpone, Jowett is faithful to his base text of 1607 in using The Fox as the running header. The effect is not only editorial fidelity, but a reminder of the animal fables that are central to this play. Jowett draws attention to these fables in his close reading of “The Persons of the Comoedye” (helpfully reprinted here), which gathers all bar one of the animal-based figures under Volpone himself. The introduction, meanwhile, includes a detailed exposition of foxes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with reference to animal fables by Aesop, William Caxton, the second-century Greek Christian text Physiologus and Marie de France.
Chasing all these foxes makes clear the amount of learning on display from both Jonson and Jowett. While the formidable Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson has done much of this Penelope-like tracing of textual threads, the extra room afforded in this single-work edition means that Jowett can, for example, quote the relevant lines of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History evoked by Volpone’s musings on old age in Act 1 Scene 4, as well as find new resonances in a monologue by the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. At times, these footnotes risk casting a Casaubonian gloom rather than lighting up the textual signposts that the passing of 400 years and Jonson’s propensity for learning (and showing off) have made difficult to read. But Jowett has gathered an unprecedented amount of scholarship into footnotes that trace not only Jonson’s various sources, but the editions in which he found them. The introduction cuts through the swathes of Jonson’s references and gives us something to hold onto: Lucian, Plautus, Terence and Juvenal are pulled out and presented to the first-time reader as Jonson’s most significant predecessors. Introductory sections on dramatic structure and particular characters amass contextual knowledge and performance histories with illuminating clarity.
Loxley is a welcoming editor for newcomers to The Shoemakers’ Holiday, with concise introductory sections (“The Tradesman’s Wife”, “Resenting Strangers”) that scoop out key issues in digestible nuggets. He begins every scene with a footnote explaining its location (that focus on place again) and narrative significance. Both editors gloss moments in which layers of deceit become tricky to peel back, such as Mosca’s false claims to be “bound by Bonario”.
Both also write about grappling with Arden’s editorial policies, which occasionally sacrifice nuance in the name of consistency. In The Shoe-makers’ Holiday, Rose speaks in verse, but her half-line “Sybil what news at London?” needs the next sentence from the usually prosaic Sybil’s speech, “None but good”, to complete it. As Loxley notes, the Arden policy of indenting the first lines of prose, but not verse, means making definite decisions, without the option to “leave lines such as Rose’s in what seem to be their properly indeterminate state”. Jowett, too, takes on the publisher’s punctuation policy in his introduction by transcribing 5.10b.66–70, complete with its “delicate but dragging commas placed with uncertain effect”, which are necessarily banished from an edition with modernized punctuation.
Both editors are fundamentally invested in these plays’ existence as printed texts. Two of Jowett’s four appendices are devoted to textual matters, including one on the Folio Workes of 1616. Another is Alfonso Ferrobosco’s setting of “Come My Celia”, Volpone’s song, which circulated independently of the play itself. The Shoemakers’ Holiday was first printed with two three-man songs before the text of the play, a separation that Loxley retains. The effect is to recreate the sense that these songs belong to the world of the play and might be performed outside it by early-modern readers. Another song, “Round Boyes Indeed. Or The Shoomakers Holy-Day”, printed by John Wright, who owned the publishing rights to Dekker’s play, is included as an appendix. In addition, five extracts from Thomas Deloney’s prose celebration of shoemaking, The Gentle Craft, point readers towards the most pertinent moments of Dekker’s chief source.
“Hence is it now that I render myself grateful”, Jonson wrote in the epistle to The Fox; a sentiment that will be echoed by users of these rich and learned editions.
Georgina Wilson is a postdoctoral research associate at Thin Ice Press and the University of York
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