Amateur theatre at the Inns of Court? The implications of a performance copy of Jonson's 1640 Folio

This article discusses a recently rediscovered copy of Ben Jonson's 1640 Works that contains seventeenth-century annotations to one play in particular—the comedy Epicene—that suggests its annotators were preparing the play for performance. We trace the folio copy’s provenance with the Powell family in Nanteos, Wales, and consider the possibility that it may have travelled with one of their owners when they took up legal careers in London . We argue that the annotated playtext may be connected to four other playbooks by Shakespeare and James Shirley that have been previously associated with seventeenth-century amateur theatricals, and that the new evidence provided by the Jonson text points plausibly to this cluster belonging to an amateur performance context centred around Gray's Inn in the middle of the century.