Ben Jonson Folios - The Second Folio, 1640/1

The Second Folio, 1640/1

Two folio collections of Jonsonian works were issued in 1640-41. The first, printed by Richard Bishop for Andrew Crooke, was a 1640 reprint of the 1616 folio with corrections and emendations; it has sometimes been termed "the second edition of the first folio." The second volume was edited by Jonson's literary executor Sir Kenelm Digby, and published by Richard Meighen, in co-operation with Chetwinde. That volume contained later works, most of them unpublished or uncollected previously—six plays (including the three printed in 1631), two of them incomplete, and fifteen masques, plus miscellaneous pieces. In the Digby/Meighen volume—identified on its title page as "the Second Volume" of Jonson's works—the varying dates (1631, 1640, 1641) in some of the texts, and what editor William Savage Johnson once called "irregularity in contents and arrangement in different copies," have caused significant confusion.

• Plays:
  • Bartholomew Fair
  • The Devil is an Ass
  • The Magnetic Lady
  • A Tale of a Tub
  • The Sad Shepherd (unfinished)
  • Mortimer: His Fall (fragment)

• Masques:
  • Christmas, His Masque
  • A Masque Presented in the House of Lord Hay
  • The Vision of Delight
  • Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue
  • For the Honour of Wales
  • News from the New World Discovered in the Moon
  • A Masque of the Metamorphos'd Gypsies
  • The Masque of Augurs
  • Time Vindicated to Himself and to His Honours
  • Neptune's Triumph for the Return of Albion
  • Pan's Anniversary, or The Shepherd's Holiday
  • The Masque of Owls
  • The Fortunate Isles, and Their Union
  • Love's Triumph Through Callipolis
  • Chloridia: Rites to Chloris and Her Nymphs
  • The King's Entertainment at Welbeck
  • Love's Welcome at Bolsover

• Miscellaneous:
  • Underwoods
  • Horace, His Art of Poetry
  • The English Grammar
  • Timber, or Discoveries