Abstract: This chapter takes as its focus William Gifford's 1816, nine-volume edition of The Works of Ben Jonson, offering a historicized account that seeks to understand how the conditions of its making influenced not only its methods but its later reception and influence. The chapter argues that Gifford's edition presented its readers with a social Jonson; and that Gifford, having conceived of the edition in terms that ally themselves closely with, and were earlier formed by, a Jonsonian understanding of friendship, was himself the beneficiary of a network of later literary friends, who provided him with help in the making of, and material vitally with which to make, the edition. The chapter then traces the sources of the manuscripts and books on which Gifford drew, as well as his own long correspondence with Octavius Gilchrist, drawing from this previously unpublished material a new picture of his working practices from which is derived an account of why the edition mattered then, and matters now today. Taking as test cases Gifford's treatment of Jonson's biography (including the Conversations with Drummond), and his handling of The Underwood, Jonson's final, posthumously-published collection of poetry, the chapter explores the way in which Jonsonian models of friendship can be read against and within the edition's editorial practice. The later part of the chapter then explores the hostile treatment that Gifford's edition attracted on publication, surveying its early reviews as a way of setting up a long engagement with the most important of Gifford's critics: William Hazlitt. In Hazlitt's account of Jonson, the chapter argues, we see not only an explicitly hostile political response to Gifford's alignment of Jonson with a particular mode of Regency Tory politics, but a vivid imaginative engagement with Jonson's writings, chief among them his Roman tragedy, Sejanus. This material begins to set up the interests of the book's second part: allusion and imitation.

Keywords: William Gifford, Gilchrist, William Hazlitt, editing, friendship, politics, Conversations with Drummond, The Underwood, collecting, manuscript,