In 1605, stationers William Aspley and Thomas Thorpe entered “A Comedie called Eastward Ho” into the Stationer’s Registry. Although rarely performed in modern times, demand for the play was so high that three quartos were all printed by George Eld that very year. Whether that demand was driven by the play itself or the scandal it caused is unclear, but there is no doubt that passages expressing anti-Scottish sentiment in Eastward Ho! so thoroughly offended King James VI/I that two of its authors, George Chapman and Ben Jonson, were arrested and detained, although charges were eventually dropped. The most offensive sections seem to have been jibes about the unification of England and Scotland and social-climbing Scots included in an Act 3, Scene 3 description of Virginia, which is deemed mostly pleasant:

you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers; only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who, indeed, dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishman and England, when they are out on’t, in the world, than they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ‘hem were there; for we are all one countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here.

And a few lines later, “you may be an alderman there, and never be a scavenger; you may be a nobleman, and never be a slave”. The furor following the authors’ imprisonment resulted in the stationers making a significant alteration to Q1, meaning that copies of Q1 survive in both uncorrected and corrected forms, Qu and Qc.[1] In Qc copies such as this, E3r-E4r, which contained this section, were replaced with a half sheet insert, removing the most problematic passages from the play.

This particular copy of Qc includes a signature on the title page identifying one previous owner as the actor and book collector William Evans Burton (1804-1860). Burton, the son of a London printer, tried and failed to run his father’s printing firm after his father’s death. He gradually drifted into a career as an actor, playing with various regional companies before premiering at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1832. Several years later, he moved to the United States and became a successful actor-manager, operating in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He also established the Gentlemen’s Magazine, in the pages of which its editor Edgar Allan Poe anonymously accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, igniting the “Longfellow War.”

Burton’s successes as an actor, manager, writer, and publisher allowed to him accumulate a library of over 100,000 volumes, including numerous early modern printings of English plays, the most recognizable of which were copies of Shakespeare’s First, Second, Third, and Fourth Folios. The library was auctioned off after his death in 1860. This copy of Eastward Ho! was included in that sale, although the auction catalogue incorrectly identified it as a rare Qu copy.[2]

Dr. Molly G. Yarn

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Bibliotheca Dramatica. Catalogue of the Theatrical and Miscellaneous Library of the Late William E. Burton, the

Distinguished Comedian, Comprising an Immense Assemblage of Books Relating to the Stage ... (J. Sabin

& Co.: New York, 1860) <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t54f1mv98>

Gossett, Suzanne, ‘Eastward Ho!: Textual Essay’, The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson Online

<https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/Eastward_Ho_textual_essay/> [accessed 4 February 2021]

Keese, William L., William E. Burton. Author, Actor and Manager. by William L. Keese. (New York and

London: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1885) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43935/43935-h/43935-h.htm> [accessed 4 February 2021]

[1] Only two known copies of Qu survive, held at the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

[2] Lot 938, priced at $3.37. Sixteen other seventeenth-century Chapman quartos were also sold.