1610, Oct. 3. Transfer from Thorpe to Walter Burre (Arber, iii. 445).
1605. Seianus his fall. Written by Ben: Ionson. G. Eld for Thomas Thorpe. [Epistle to Readers, signed ‘Ben. Jonson’; Commendatory Verses, signed ‘Georgius Chapmannus’, ‘Hugh Holland’, ‘Cygnus’, ‘Th. R.’, ‘Johannes Marstonius’, ‘William Strachey’, ‘ΦΙΛΟΣ’, ‘Ev. B.’; Argument.]
1616. Seianus his Fall. A Tragœdie. Acted, in the yeere 1603. By the K. Maiesties Servants. The Author B. I. William Stansby. [Part of F1. Epistle to Esmé, Lord Aubigny, signed ‘Ben. Ionson’. After text: ‘This Tragœdie was first acted, in the yeere 1603. By the Kings Maiesties Servants. The principall Tragœdians were, Ric. Burbadge, Will. Shake-Speare, Aug. Philips, Ioh. Hemings, Will. Sly, Hen. Condel, Ioh. Lowin, Alex. Cooke. With the allowance of the Master of Revells.’]
Editions by W. D. Briggs (1911, B. L.) and W. A. Neilson (1911, C. E. D.).—Dissertations: B. Nicholson, Shakespeare not the Part-Author of B. J.’s S. (1874, Acad. ii. 536); W. A. Henderson, Shakespeare and S. (1894, 8 N. Q. v. 502).
As the theatres were probably closed from Elizabeth’s death to March 1604, the production may have been at Court in the autumn or winter of 1603, although, if Sejanus is the something ‘high, and aloofe’ contemplated at the end of the Apologetical Dialogue to Poetaster (q.v.), it must have been in Jonson’s mind since 1601. The epistle to Aubigny admits the ‘violence’ which the play received in public, and ‘Ev. B.’s’ verses indicate that this ‘beastly rage’ was at the Globe. Marston’s verses were presumably written before his renewed quarrel with Jonson over Eastward Ho! (q.v.), and there appears to be an unkindly reference to Sejanus in the epistle to his Sophonisba (1606). But either Eastward Ho! or something else caused publication to be delayed for nearly a year after the S. R. entry, since Chapman’s verses contain a compliment to the Earl of Suffolk,
Who when our Hearde came not to drink, but trouble
The Muses waters, did a Wall importune,
(Midst of assaults) about their sacred River,
which seems to refer to his share in freeing Jonson and Chapman from prison about Sept. or Oct. 1605. Chapman also has compliments to the Earls of Northampton and Northumberland. It must therefore be to a later date that Jonson referred, when he told Drummond (Laing, 22) that ‘Northampton was his mortall enimie for beating, on a St. George’s day, one of his attenders; He was called before the Councell for his Sejanus, and accused both of poperie and treason by him’. Fleay, i. 372, suggests that the reference at the end of the Q version of the Argument to treason against princes, ‘for guard of whose piety and vertue, the Angels are in continuall watch, and God himselfe miraculously working’, implies publication after the discovery of the Plot. On the other hand, one would have expected Chapman’s reference to Northumberland, if not already printed, to be suppressed, in view of the almost immediate suspicion of a connexion with the Plot that fell upon him. Castelain, 907, considers, and rightly rejects, another suggestion by Fleay that Sejanus and not Eastward Ho! was the cause of the imprisonment of Jonson and Chapman in 1605. Fleay supposed that Chapman was the collaborator of whom Jonson wrote in the Q epistle, ‘I would informe you, that this Booke, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the publike Stage, wherein a second pen had good share; in place of which I have rather chosen, to put weaker (and no doubt lesse pleasing) of mine own, then to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my lothed usurpation’. Shakespeare also has been guessed at. If Jonson’s language was seriously meant, there were not, of course, many contemporaries of whom he would have so spoken. Probably the problem is insoluble, as the subject-matter of it has disappeared. It is difficult to believe that the collaborator was Samuel Sheppard, who in his The Times Displayed in Six Sestyads (1646) claims to have ‘dictated to’ Ben Jonson ‘when as Sejanus’ fall he writ’. Perhaps he means ‘been amanuensis to’.
Eastward Ho! (1605)