So Exact His Text: Reading into the Margins of Sejanus

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, finding in Sejanus, the play, evidence of parallelography, whether it be ideologically instructional, in the mirror of princes tradition, or threateningly Republican. More benignly, they view the Quarto's bountiful margins as a scholarly pretext, a manifestation and awkward defense of Jonson's unorthodox education. Generically, they view the play as a Juvenalian satire, an imperfect tragedy, or a Machiavellian history and, sometimes, all three. As a satire, it suffers charges of application, of pointing too directly to contemporary events. As a tragedy, it fails to supply the necessary tragic error that leads to the hero's fall, not to mention the necessary hero. As a history, it takes too many liberties with the truth of argument. Editors have pared down the marginalia, setting them as footnotes or endnotes; others have relegated them to appendices; still others have abandoned then 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 center, 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.