Jonson, Ben. Sejanus. London: Printed by G. Elld for Thomas Thorpe, 1605.
Ben Jonson's Sejanus is remarkable for its extensive printed marginalia; the margins of the 1605 text are virtually encrusted with citations to classical sources. The marginalia serves several functions. Jonson had previously been imprisoned for charges of sedition in Eastward Ho! and the Isle of Dogs. As he explains in his opening letter "To the Readers," the meticulous arrangement of citations along the border of his play serves to prove his "integrity in the story." Jonson deflects charges of sedition against Sejanus by using his literary antecedents to produce a literary-historical alibi.
The play's marginalia also works to protect Jonson from an audience that extends beyond the Privy Council. The first performance of Sejanus (1603) was an unmitigated disaster; the 1605 printed play seeks to reconfigure this reception, creating a "distinct reading text" (Jowett 280). Evelyn Tribble notes that Sejanus represents "an early attempt on the part of Jonson to determine readership by dictating the form his printed book would take" (147). Furthermore, as Richard Newton has discussed, a key element of Jonson's work was a desire to impose his own rules for reading, rules that would extend beyond his historical moment and into the future with his text. In the interest of this project, he "labors throughout his writing to appropriate to himself the epithet 'classical'" (39) and to "tie his works to the classics" (34).
For more information, see Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); John Jowett, "'Fall before This Booke': The 1605 Quarto of Sejanus," Text:Transactions of the Society of Textual Scholarship (1988): 279-295; and Richard Newton, "Jonson and the (Re-)Invention of the Book," Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982).
Folger Call No. 14782. K3v and K4r.
