The Polybian Text: Historiography in the Margins of Ben Jonson’s Quarto Sejanus. by Brock Cameron MacLeod. B.A., University of Victoria, 2001 M.A., Queen’s University, 2002 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the Department of English © Brock Cameron MacLeod, 2010 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photo- copying or other means, without the permission of the author. 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B.A., University of Victoria, 2001 M.A., Queen’s University, 2002 Supervisory Committee Dr. Janelle Jenstad, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. John Tucker, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Cedric Littlewood, Outside Member (Department of Greek and Roman Studies) iii Supervisory Committee Dr. Janelle Jenstad, Supervisor (Department of English) Dr. John Tucker, Department Member (Department of English) Dr. Cedric Littlewood, Outside Member (Department of Greek and Roman Studies) Abstract Since its 1605 quarto publication, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus has inspired much critical commentary. Although criticism credits Jonson with a compositorial role in the Quarto’s production, critics continue to assess its marginalia as a defense against application or a scholarly pretense. Editors have pared down the marginalia, setting them as footnotes or endnotes; others have relegated them to appendices; still others have abandoned them entirely. Neither critics nor editors have weighed Jonson’s marginalia beside the dramatic text they inform. Reading the Quarto Sejanus as a composite of margins and centre, within its bibliographical, theoretical, and literary contexts, shows it to be a learned study in emergent theories of historiography. In its innovations, the composite redresses the inefficacies of contemporary historians and editors. To understand Sejanus’s textual interactions, the opening chapter examines the quarto itself. In each feature of its composition – from its title page, through its prefatory epistle, laudatory poems, and argument, to its very mise-en-page – the Quarto Sejanus declares itself the learnedly innovative product of long labour, and demands to be read as such. Chapter 2 considers the impact upon Renaissance historiographers of historiographic iv models, ranging from Gildas Sapiens to North’s Plutarch, and theoretic models, from the Florentine to the Polybian. The composite Sejanus is innovatively Polybian in its comprehensive attention to human cause and circumstance. Sejanus’s historiographic claims are tested against Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Chapter 3 begins the process of investigating Sejanus’s bibliographical innovations. The investigation begins with the reception of the scholarly text in 1605 through three interdependent early-modern practices – margination, education, and reading – to show that, having no conception of supplementarity, the Renaissance reader read the whole page. Chapter 4 produces something of the Quarto Sejanus’s bibliographical context through two contemporary marginated texts – Matthew Gwinne’s Latin drama Nero and Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso. Chapter 5 tests my claims to the Quarto Sejanus’s bibliographical innovation within the context created in Chapter 4. The Quarto’s composite form transcends the limits of the text to a degree unmatched by its dramatic or historiographic contemporaries, allowing Jonson to model right and ill-reasoned action through psychologically realized characters within vividly historicized events. v Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ii Abstract iii Table of Contents v List of Figures vii Preface viii Acknowledgments x Introduction: Reading into the Margins 1 Sejanus: Genesis 24 Chapter 1: The Material Text as Semiotic Context 49 What’s in a Name: Titular Claims to Innovation 68 Epistolary Claims: The Letter “To the Readers” 79 Laudatory Poems: The Early-modern Peer Review Process 101 Chapter 2: Historiography and the Polybian Text 140 The Practice and History of Historiography 144 The Bishops’ Ban: An Historiographic Conflagration 145 Learning Historiography: The Fount 151 Learning Historiography: Florence and the English Polybians 157 Dramatic Historiography: Shakespeare and Parallelography 186 Dramatic Historiography: Motive and Circumstance in Sejanus 198 Terentius: The Quarto’s Polybian Historiographer 211 Chapter 3: Marginalia and the Beleaguered Text: An Overview 234 Annotation: The Roman Fount 236 Annotation: Scholastic Programmatics 239 Annotation: Humanist Comprehension 243 Annotation: Ubiquity, the Market, and Decline 252 Annotation: Theory and Practice 259 Chapter 4: Annotative Uses and Abuses in Nero and Orlando 271 The Functions of Nero’s Marginalia 272 vi The Functions of Orlando Furioso’s Marginalia 292 Chapter 5: The Functions of Sejanus’s Marginalia 321 Conclusion: Beyond the Polybian Text 366 Appendix 1: Figures – Nero, Orlando, and Sejanus 374 Appendix 2: Conjectured Bibliography of Sejanus’s Marginal Resources 395 Works Cited 400 vii List of Figures Figure 1, Sejanus A4r 370 Figure 2, Sejanus B2r 371 Figure 3, Sejanus K4v 372 Figure 4, Nero P2v 373 Figure 5, Nero P3r 374 Figure 6, Nero Q2v 375 Figure 7, Nero Q3r 376 Figure 8, Nero A3v 377 Figure 9, Nero A4r 378 Figure 10, Nero D2v 379 Figure 11, Orlando 77/G4r 380 Figure 12, Orlando 142/M6v 381 Figure 13, Orlando 160/O3v 382 Figure 14, Sejanus B1r 383 Figure 15, Sejanus B2v 384 Figure 16, Sejanus I3r 385 Figure 17, Sejanus I3v 386 Figure 18, Sejanus I1r 387 Figure 19, Sejanus N1r 388 Figure 20, Sejanus N2r 389 Figure 21, Sejanus K4v 390 Pages from Seianvs His Fall (Ashley 3464) have been reproduced with the generous permission of The British Library Board. Pages from Nero (STC 12551) have been reproduced with the generous permission of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. Pages from Orlando Furioso (RB 62722) have been reproduced with the generous permission of the Huntington Library. viii Preface I first came upon the Quarto during my MA. In one evening I began reading Sejanus for a course on closet drama and Tacitus for a Latin class. It quickly dawned on me that Jonson had translated Tacitus. I hunted out the Quarto and found the marginalia and the direction to read Dio Cassius. From the first time reading Tacitus and Dio together with Sejanus, I suspected something more was at play than a plagiary’s reliance on sources. The reliance was too patent, and Jonson had just damned the plagiary (and helped coin the term) in Poetaster. My interest piqued, I committed myself and my PhD work to tracing every note to its source. After thousands of miles, hundreds of hours, and innumerable discoveries, I had compiled every excerpt to which the Quarto’s margins direct the reader in a 370-page document comprising transcriptions and translations. Compiling this document showed the comprehensive genius of Jonson’s historiographic and satiric labours. In the Quarto he truly had accomplished “integrity in the Story.” With the “what” revealed to me, the “why” remained. To discover why Jonson had gone to such lengths to offer the whole story, I had to situate the “what” in the fullest scholarly context possible. No critic or editor has previously attempted such a situation – perhaps because no other has followed the margins faithfully to the fullness of “what.” Critics have discussed Jonson’s employment of Tacitus; others have discussed his invocation of Juvenal; others his debt to Machiavelli; still others his reliance on Lipsius. Most often critics argue that Jonson drew Tacitus or Juvenal or Machiavelli into Sejanus for pointedly politic reasons. Yet what critics have missed and the margins insist upon is that no single source prevails in Sejanus. Sejanus is a symphony. The study that follows interprets that symphony. In compiling the collection of translations and transcriptions from which I draw my conclusions, I consulted those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions of the histories for which Jonson has provided publication details, and Renaissance editions of those humanist texts he cites. I have provided an appendix listing all of the Quarto’s marginal resources.