Jonson’s folio collection, The Works of Benjamin Jonson (1616), represented an ambitious and ground-breaking attempt to preserve his plays, poems, and other writings for future generations to appreciate. Many copies of this monumental publication have indeed survived, some with extensive annotations, giving us a unique insight into Jonson’s early reception and early modern reading practices more broadly. Drawing on the remarkable collection of copies at the Huntington Library, this essay explores in detail a number that were extensively annotated in the 17th century. The investigation highlights how Jonson’s early readers ranged from university students to classical scholars to literary enthusiasts. It examines how these different kinds of engagement with Jonson’s Works relate both to his conceptions of the reader and to the attempts of his early admirers to shape his posthumous reputation. It shows how quickly and widely Jonson’s collection was recognised as a significant literary publication, and how unpredictable and diverse were the ways in which it would be read.

Of all the many disparaging comments aimed at Jonson over the years, the accusation that he, or his work, is ‘pedantic’, is one of the most common. With reference to Montaigne, early modern debates about Latinate language, and the appearance of Jonson’s plays and poetry in the 1616 Works, this essay attempts to reframe the idea of pedantry to illuminate the broader meanings of the term as it is applied to Jonson. What is that concept doing in critical discourse? How does it position scholars, readers, and teachers in social space? As it pursues these ideas, the essay links some of the evidence of Jonson’s putative pedantry to wider aesthetic and thematic patterns in his 1616 folio. It argues that elements of the Works that get called ‘pedantic’ often reach out in complex ways to an audience that was only just beginning to understand itself as such. Along the way, it pays close attention to the logic of insult, to the place of complex and incomprehensible language in the plays, and to the effects of Jonson’s favourite technique for playful, and sometimes angry audience creation: division and classification.