“Are all diseases dead”: The Likelihood of an Attribution to Ben Jonson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Arents S288 (Acc. No. 5442), pp. 87–88, and Rosenbach 239/27, p. 327, attribute the poem that begins “Are all diseases dead nor will death say” to Ben Jonson. While A.S.W. Rosenbach (1876–1952) owned both of these manuscripts at one point, it was actually Edwin Wolf 2nd (1911–1991) who penciled in the Jonson attributions in both manuscripts. However, the poem is found in many other manuscripts without this attribution. This paper considers the origin and validity of Wolf's attribution, and then asks, apart from Wolf's attribution, if it is plausible that Jonson wrote the poem. Wolf's consistently correct attributions in Arents S288 and correct attribution in MS 239/27 indicate that he was not as unreliable as the Rosenbach Museum & Library suggests. Ludovick Stuart, the Duke of Lennox and Richmond, who is the subject of the poem, died on 16 February 1624. My research demonstrates that an attribution to Jonson is highly plausible in terms of biographical, manuscript, and stylistic evidence. Jonson knew the poem's subject: he lived with the Duke's brother, Esmé Stuart, Lord d'Aubigny, for many years, and d'Aubigny occupied the role of patron. While the poem is elsewhere attributed to Sir John Eliot (b. 1592) or John Donne, neither is a strong candidate. The Duke fulfills the categories that I establish as Jonson's motivations to write in this poetic form: he was a significant figure and he had a personal connection to Jonson. Moreover, Jonson wrote for d'Aubigny's family on repeated occasions – and at length – over many decades.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.316 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".