Hanson Ih Venus Adonis Collocation

John Hanson, the "I. H." books, and a Venus and Adonis collocation

Status: TANGENTIAL. Not Neville evidence. Do not cite in Henry Neville biography, correspondence, diplomacy, parliamentary, or authorship documents.

Created 24 August 2026 from corpus work done in the NV2 verifier workspace. This topic exists because the material surfaced during Virginia-Company and I. H. checking and should be preserved with its controls, not because it bears on Neville. There is no Neville witness anywhere in it, and none is implied. It sits beside `john healey tangential` and inherits that topic's governing conclusion: keep the I. H. identity nodes separate until an external record equates them.

1. What is established

1.1 Three books are one hand

Four rare forms whose complete EEBO-TCP witness list is this set of books (denominator: 23,144 documents, original-spelling layer):

A02622 = John Hanson, Time Is a Turne-Coate (1604); A02436 = I. H., The Diuell of the Vault (1606); A02438 = I. H., This Worlds Folly (1615).

Fifteen further rare forms are shared between two or more: vniformall (df 5), inundate (7), t'immure (7), euiscerate (8), diuulg'd (12), bedasht (13), eurypus (14), ytost (17), discute (22), gormandize (29), prolixious (30), grizly (32), conclusiue (39), enuiron'd (39), slaughtring (39).

Independent corroboration: A02622 × A02436 share 15 rare 3/4-grams (df ≤ 25 in the 3,815-document 1590–1620 field), collapsing to 11 distinct passages. The shared phrases are poetic diction — the chaps of hell, loath'd of earthly eye, shrill cries, siluer streames, deaths darke, through each street — not Gunpowder-Plot subject matter, which is what the two books most obviously have in common.

Size-matched null, re-verified 25 August 2026 on a fresh donor sample. Unrelated contemporary documents truncated to exactly 17,023 × 2,025 lemma tokens and compared both ways, 600 pairs: median 1, 99th percentile 7, max 29, 2 pairs ≥ 15, empirical p = 0.005.

An earlier run on a different donor sample gave median 0, 99th percentile 5.2 and max 11 over 484 pairs. Report the 25 August figures: they are the more conservative of the two, and the difference between them is a useful caution — the null depends on which documents are drawn, and its maximum exceeds the observed value, so this measure separates these two books from most unrelated pairs, not from all of them.

The closest single parallel, found 25 August 2026 by reading the quotations rather than by counting. Both books put two forms of restricted currency in the same clause, qualifying Iesuites and beside damn'd:

spanized = 2 documents of 23,144 (these two). The compound is likewise in 2: bloudsworne occurs only in A02622 and bloodsworne only in A02436, so a search on either spelling alone returns a single witness and hides the parallel.

This is not one of the 15 counted n-grams: the phrase index runs on the lemma layer, where the two compounds do not align. It is a reminder that spelling-split compounds are invisible to both a word test and a lemma-phrase test, and that reading the passages recovers what the counting misses.

Time Is a Turne-Coate is signed "John Hanson" in full at the foot of its dedication. Evidence level: strong for common authorship of the three.

A02441, The House of Correction (1619), carries none of the markers and is not attached to the group.

1.2 The first line of The Diuell of the Vault echoes Venus and Adonis

Every EEBO-TCP document with an obdurate + flint adjacency, any spelling — nine in total: Venus and Adonis; Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597); Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598); The Seuenth Booke of the Myrrour of Knighthood (1598); Drayton, The Barrons Wars (1603); A02622; A02436; Mornay's Teares tr. Healey (1609); Shakespeare, First Folio (1623).

"art thou obdurate" is unique to A12045 in EEBO-TCP. flintly occurs in two documents: A02436 and Gabriel Harvey's Foure Letters (1592).

Evidence level: the collocation count is secure. The inference that A02436 is quoting Shakespeare rather than drawing on a shared poetic register is a reading, not a measurement — Drayton has it twice and Marston's Pigmalions Image is itself an avowed Venus and Adonis imitation.

1.3 Healey's use of the phrase is not forced by his source

Mornay's Latin Lachrimae (1606) reads in [s]axum obrigescas — "harden into stone" — answered by mollescamus … colliquescamus. Healey renders the single verb as an English doublet, "obdurate flinty", and the antithesis as "let vs be mooued, let vs bee melted". Mornay uses silex elsewhere in the same book, which Healey translates faithfully as "flint". The word "flinty" is Healey's interpolation at this point.

Witness caveat: read from a Google scan of the 1606 print whose OCR confuses long s, printing "laxum" where sense requires saxum, and garbling ἀπάθεια. Neither reading means flint, so the point does not turn on it, but the letter should be checked against a clean copy before use in print.

2. What is NOT established

• Nothing here concerns Henry Neville. No Neville name, hand, document, or

association appears in any of it. Do not import it into Neville files.

• That the I. H. of A02436/A02438 is John Healey. The four markers are absent

from Healey's 598,000-word corpus (Of the Citie of God, Mornay's Teares, Epictetus), which is a well-powered negative. At least two distinct I. H.s.

• That A02436 quotes Venus and Adonis directly rather than sharing a register

with Drayton and Marston. See §1.2.

• That Hanson wrote every section printed under his name — see the standing

caveat in `richard field rare phrase transmission 1599 1601 1604`.

• That the documented apprentice and the poet are the same John Hanson. See

§3.1: it is a well-supported inference, not a proven identity, and the ODNB entry (ref:odnb/12226) still gives a different candidate — "perhaps the scholar of Peterhouse, Cambridge" who graduated BA in 1604, with nothing of the book trade.

• That the apprenticeship explains the Venus and Adonis collocation. It does

not: Field printed the poem in 1593, five years before the binding. See §3.2.

3. The Richard Field thread

3.1 Hanson was Richard Field's apprentice (documented)

Recovered 24 August 2026 from the project's own dossier Hanson, Winter, and Field: John Hanson in Richard Field's Printing House (prepared 28 July 2026; local copy at [local source path removed], also sent as an email attachment on 29 July 2026).

Caveats carried from the dossier itself, which must travel with the claim:

• The displayed trade records expose no shared person identifier, so the

identity of the apprentice with the poet is an inference from same uncommon name, same Company, same master and the expected apprenticeship-to-freedom pathway. The original binding in Liber B (Stationers' Company TSC/C/05/01) has not been inspected.

• The ROLLCO display leaves bond length, value and start date blank, so a

conventional seven-year term must not be assumed.

• The dossier notes that the older biographical identification — the Peterhouse

BA of 1603–04 repeated by the ODNB — sits awkwardly beside a London apprenticeship, and that the university register repeats the DNB/Cooper attribution rather than supplying an independent bridge. Two candidate Hansons remain in play.

3.2 What the apprenticeship does and does not do for §1.2

Does: it puts a John Hanson physically inside Field's printing house from 1598 to 1611, which is a real material route for text to move — copy, casting-off, proof, formes, repeatedly handled sheets. The dossier uses it to explain Hanson's demonstrable reuse of Thomas Winter's Second Day (Field's press, entered Nov 1602) in Time Is a Turne-Coate (1604), where "so deep a theme" occurs in only those two documents in the corpus.

Does not: supply a route to Venus and Adonis. *Field printed Venus and Adonis in 1593, five years before Hanson was bound. The apprenticeship is therefore not evidence that Hanson encountered the poem in the shop, and must not be used that way. What it establishes is that the author of Time Is a Turne-Coate* was a book-trade man in Field's house, which makes familiarity with Field's back catalogue unsurprising — a lowered barrier, not a demonstrated channel.

3.3 Consequence for the "I. H." imprint

The dossier draws a bibliographical consequence that bears directly on §3.4 below: if the author was Field's apprentice and was not free until 1611, then "Printed for I. H." on the 1604 title page cannot be read as proof that he acted as an independent Stationer in 1604. It may denote author financing administered through Field, a different I. H., or an imprint formula whose economic meaning needs reconstructing. STC's expansion "I. H[anson?]" is an attribution, not a title-page statement, and the brackets must stay visible.

3.4 The printer attribution — attribution only

STC-derived metadata for A02622 reads: "Printed [by R. Field] for I. H[anson?] and are to be sold [by G. Potter?] at the signe of the Bible in Paules Church-yard, 1604", with the note "Printer's, publisher's and bookseller's names suggested by STC."

Two consequences, both to be handled with the brackets intact:

1. STC expands the title page's "Printed for I. H." as **Hanson publishing his

own book** — so on this book "I. H." denotes the publisher, who is also the named author.

2. Richard Field, printer of Venus and Adonis in 1593, is the **bracketed,

inferred** printer of A02622 in 1604. That is a mechanism for transmission, not a demonstration of one. It requires physical bibliographical control — type, ornaments, formes, paper — exactly as `richard field` already stipulates for this entry.

A02436 is a different shop: "Printed by E. A. for Nathaniell Butter".

3.5 The 1616 convergence at George Purslowe's press

Verified 24 August 2026 from page images of STC 10426 held by the project ([local source path removed]), read directly. Correction, 25 August 2026: an earlier version of this paragraph called this the British Museum copy. The EEBO footer on the images identifies it as the British Library copy.

Title page: "EPICTETVS Manuall. CEBES Table. THEOPHRASTVS Characters. By Io. HEALEY. LONDON, Printed by George Purslowe for Edward Blount. 1616."

Three books off Purslowe's press in one year:

The revised dedication is Thomas Thorpe's, not Healey's. The 1616 volume opens with an Epistle Dedicatory to William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain, subscribed "Your Lordships humble deuoted, T. Th." Its argument is that the book comes to Pembroke as a dead man's legacy:

"All I can alledge in extenuation of so many incongruities, is the bequest of a

deceased Man; who (in his life time) hauing offered some translations of his

vnto your Lordship, euer wisht if these ensuing were published, they might

onely bee addressed vnto your Lordship, as the last Testimony of his dutifull

affection. (to vse his owne termes: The true and reall vpholder of Learned

endeauors.) This therfore beeing left vnto mee, as a Legacie vnto your

Lordship … such a sad priuiledge haue the bequests of the dead, and so

obligatory they are, more then the requests of the liuing."

Points of record, kept separate from inference:

1. Chronology correction. The 1616 dedication's "deceased Man" must not be

used to date Healey's death to 1610. He was demonstrably alive in 1613–14 — see `john healey tangential` §3a, which corrects the earlier reading and gives the revised 1614–16 window, together with the 1610 "actuall Trauailer … Uirginia" passage and the 1620 Crashaw dedication.

2. Thorpe is the publisher of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609), whose dedication is

subscribed "T.T."; he is also the publisher of Healey's Of the Citie of God (1610), printed by George Eld, who printed the Sonnets. The 1610 Epictetus survives in a variant with "Th. Thorpe" in the imprint alongside the Blount and Barret issue.

3. Edward Blount, the 1616 publisher here, is a publisher of the 1623 First

Folio, whose dedication is likewise addressed to Pembroke, and likewise presents a dead author's work.

4. Not established: that these facts constitute anything beyond a small,

tightly connected London trade in which the same handful of stationers recur. Purslowe printed for many publishers; Thorpe dedicated to Pembroke because Healey had; Blount's Folio role is seven years later. No inference from this paragraph belongs in a Neville document, and none is drawn here.

Relevance to §1.2: none direct. The 1616 volume post-dates The Devil of the Vault by ten years and Hanson's Time by twelve, and its Healey attribution is separated from the Hanson hand by the marker test in §2. It is recorded because it is the immediate publishing context of The Praise of King Richard the Third, which the NV2 prose-to-prose test placed 2nd of 114 authors for William Cornwallis (see ../../.. report reference in §5).

3.6 STC 10426 transcribed: the markers tested against the Characters

The gap recorded as open question 5 has been closed. The whole of the new matter in the 1616 volume — the translator's preface "To the Reader" and Theophrastus his Characters, 10,996 words, none of it in EEBO-TCP — was transcribed on 24–25 August 2026 from the project's page images of the British Library copy, and the tests in §1 were run against it.

Coverage, audited 25 August 2026: the 1616 front matter (leaves 001a–008b, 16 of 16), and the preface and Characters entire (092b–152b, 121 of 121, no failures). The Characters ends FINIS on leaf 152a. Not transcribed: leaves 009a–092a, the Manuall and Cebes his Table, which were in print in 1610 and are in EEBO-TCP as A00303 — on the assumption, not collated, that the 1616 settings do not differ substantively from 1610.

Method: the 152 openings were rendered at 400 dpi and split into 304 single leaves; each leaf was transcribed by a multimodal model under a diplomatic prompt forbidding any reconstruction from memory of another edition and requiring [illegible] / word[?] for doubtful readings; 121 leaves, 0 failures. Workspace, scripts and per-leaf files: [local source path removed] (README, WORKLOG, PROOFING, FINDINGS).

Result 1 — the four markers: null. None of suprauise/supervise, melpomens, spanized, tristall occurs in the preface (1,886 searchable words) or the Characters (8,924), searched u/v- and i/j-folded.

This strengthens §2. The claim that there are at least two distinct I. H.s rested on the four markers being absent from Healey's signed corpus, and the Characters was the one substantial Healey-attributed text that no test could reach. It can now be reported as searched and clear rather than as unexamined. The standing caveat that the negative rested on a corpus with a hole in it is removed.

*Result 2 — the obdurate + flint collocation: null.* Zero hits in a six-word window across obdurate/obdurated × flint/flinty/flintie/flintly in either text. The §1.2 marker does not appear in the 1616 volume, so the nine- document EEBO-TCP witness list in §1.2 is unchanged by this transcription.

Transcription reliability. Eight pages were collated word for word against their images and were exact, including headlines, signatures, catchwords, italic discrimination and words broken across lines. Two independent fidelity signals argue against silent repair from a modern edition: on p. 83 the model preserved the printer's own wil / will inconsistency four lines apart, and on p. 30 it transcribed "Aristophanes that noble Orator", reproducing the book's error where the received Greek names Aristophon. Zero [?] markers across 121 pages was treated as a warning sign rather than a success and is the reason the collation was done. Eight pages is not an error rate: the text is sound enough to search and to run null tests against, and no passage from it should be quoted as a verified witness until that passage has been read against its own leaf image.

3.6a A rare-word coincidence, recorded and controlled

Characters, leaf 150b (collated against the image), of the late-learner:

"When hee goes into the Countrie , riding vpon a borrowed horse, practising how

to salute those he meeteth, without a lighting, falling all-to-bemoiles

himself."

The Taming of the Shrew 4.1, Grumio (Folger text): "thou shouldst have heard in how miry a place, how she was bemoiled". Both are a rider going down in the mud.

Cite this passage by leaf, not by page. The leaf prints "83", but the printer's numbering in the final gathering is disordered: it runs 70, 71, 82, 83, 74, 75, 86, 87, 78, 79, 90, 95, 82, 83, 94, 45, 86, so nine numbers appear twice and two different pages are numbered 83. This passage is on the second of them. The text itself is continuous and complete across 97 pages; only the numbering is broken.

bemoil in every spelling occurs in 10 of 23,144 EEBO-TCP documents — Palfreyman 1572, Lemnius 1587, La Popelinière 1595, Florio's Montaigne 1613, the First Folio 1623, the Shrew quarto 1631, Good sir you wrong your britches 1620, Fonseca 1629, Taylor 1633, Ovid's Festivalls 1640. Two of the ten are the same Shakespeare play counted twice. The 1616 Characters is an eleventh witness, previously unrecorded, because the book is not in TCP.

Controls, which is why this is not offered as evidence:

• Bemoil means "to bemire, cover with mud", so the shared mud is semantic

necessity, not coincidence. The horse is not entailed; both have one.

• The word was independently available in print well before 1616 (four witnesses

above), so no contact with Shakespeare is needed to explain a writer knowing it.

• The Shrew was not printed until 1623, seven years later. Whoever wrote the

1616 English cannot have read Shakespeare's use of it in print.

• The 1616 form uses the intensive all-to- construction; Shakespeare's is a

plain passive.

Evidence level: a rare-word coincidence, logged so it can be re-found. It establishes nothing, and it is not a Neville or a Hanson datum.

3.6b A parallel checked and rejected

The preface, glossing Athenian theatre practice, says the redeemers of the theatres let everyone in at the end of the plays "( Cut and long tayle as wee say ) freely without paying". Shakespeare has the phrase in Merry Wives.

It is proverbial and worthless as a parallel. 19 EEBO-TCP documents across spellings — Nashe three times, Greene, Dekker, Jonson, Fletcher, Rowley, Davenant, Holinshed twice, The Returne from Pernassus — and John Clarke's Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina (1639) lists it as a proverb. The translator's own "as wee say" flags it as an idiom. Recorded here so that it is not rediscovered later and mistaken for a link.

4. Open questions

1. Physical bibliographical control on A02622 to confirm or remove the

bracketed Field attribution.

2. Whether the Peterhouse John Hanson (BA 1604) is the poet, and whether any

record connects him to the book trade.

3. Whether suprauise and the other three markers appear in any manuscript or

in any post-1620 or non-TCP printed source. 3a. Inspection of the original binding in Stationers' Company Liber B (17 July 1576 – 25 July 1605, TSC/C/05/01) for Hanson's father, age and parish, which would settle §3.1.

4. Whether the obdurate + flint collocation in Drayton (1597, 1603) precedes

or follows the epyllion vogue, which would decide §1.2.

5. ~~The 1616 Characters text is not in EEBO-TCP, so none of the corpus tests

in this topic could reach it.~~ CLOSED, 25 August 2026 — see §3.6. STC 10426 has been transcribed and the marker tests run against it. All null.

6. Whether the Thorpe dedication of 1616 quotes Healey's phrase for Pembroke

("The true and reall vpholder of Learned endeauors") from a surviving Healey dedication, which would fix which "some translations" he had offered.

5. Reproducibility

All counts are from the EarlyPrint indexes: FTS EarlyPrint computational index (23,144 documents, original-spelling word_text column) and doc ngrams (3,815 documents, 1590–1620, 500–50,000 tokens, postings pruned above df 100). Scripts, size-matched null distributions and raw results: [local source path removed] (cohesion, anchor, paratext match, ih vocab, rare words) with the write-up at IH EPISTLE REPORT §6a–6e.

Latin witness: [local source path removed]. Healey City of God working XML: [local source path removed] and A22641 verse only.

6. Citations

• Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis. London, 1593. EEBO-TCP A12045.
• Hanson, John. Time is a turne-coate. London, 1604. STC 12750. EEBO-TCP A02622.
• I. H. The diuell of the vault. London, 1606. EEBO-TCP A02436.
• I. H. This vvorlds folly. London, 1615. EEBO-TCP A02438.
• Mornay, Philippe de. His teares, tr. John Healey. London, 1609. EEBO-TCP A07774.
• "Hanson, John (fl. 1604)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12226.
• Records of London's Livery Companies Online (ROLLCO), Stationers' Company apprenticeship (29 Sept 1598) and freedom (8 Oct 1611, event STMM27476) records.
• British Book Trade Index, record 99665 (source key ST/0:0760).
• Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael. Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries. 1929, p. 11. Internet Archive scan.
• Vessey, Mark. "The Citie of God (1610) and the London Virginia Company." Augustinian Studies 30.2 (1999): 257–81.