Ben Jonson's Antimasques

A History of Growth and Decline

Lesley Mickel

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138610132
• eBook ISBN: 9780429864445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1999, this volume examines how under the patronage of James I and then Charles I, Ben Jonson wrote no less than 28 court masques. Paying particular attention to the antimasque, Lesley Mickel discusses in detail those court entertainments which contributed significantly to the genre's evolution and development. Her approach is innovative in that she examines these court entertainments in relation to Jonson's poetry and dramatic works. This reveals some idea of the way in which Jonson perceived the relationship between satire and panegyric, as well as highlighting the related, if oppositional, views of state power which he expresses in the Roman plays and in the masques.

1

‘Free from servile flattery’: panegyric and the formation of the antimasque

An understanding of Jonson’s deployment of panegyric in both poetry and masque is an essential prerequisite for any analysis of the antimasque and its growth. The question that needs to be addressed here is why did Jonson obviously believe that the panegyric of masque needed to be offset by the irony of the antimasque? I believe that we will find the germ of an answer by scrutinising the poetry and paying attention to the ways in which the most hyperbolic of Jonson’s panegyric can, at times, subtly incorporate a note of mockery. I hope to demonstrate that rather than being a weakness in his poetic eulogies this rhetorical instability is, in fact, a great strength, ensuring the poet’s integrity and simultaneously fulfilling the terms of patronage. So it is to Jonson’s poetry I turn initially in an attempt to account for the antimasque’s evolution from ironic suggestion to overtly ambiguous satire; this entails taking into account both the historical context of certain poems as well as the implications of such an instability for Jonson’s personal philosophy and poetics. These are continuing concerns threading through the book, but my primary aim in this chapter is to demonstrate that the characteristic features of the antimasque are present from the first in an embryonic form in the earliest masque and poetry.

In laying the groundwork for an examination of Jonson’s early attempts to combine panegyric and irony in the masque, the first section of this chapter will explore the nature and purpose of Jonsonian praise, using his non-dramatic poems to present a rounded interpretation of a form that has so often been misunderstood and underrated.¹ Such misapprehension extends from Jonson’s contemporaries to present day readers, and in tackling some of the assumptions on which it rests I hope to offer a rationale for the poet’s accommodation of irony and satire within the masque. Focusing specifically on the early masques of Blackness (1605) and Beauty (1608) I will suggest that fracturing tensions arise in the masque, partly due to discrepancies between the historical and the ideal, and partly due to clashing philosophies of poetry, where, rather than sharing a ‘consociation of offices’, poet and monarch harbour different notions about the function and authority of each other. These tensions appear to be in danger of undercutting the previously established artistic unity of masque where music, drama, and dance are harmonised to ‘present the figure of those blessings’ bestowed by a divinely inspired monarch on his people.² Significantly, the kinds of contradictions that distinguish Blackness and Beauty are turned to advantage by Jonson and developed into the antimasque, creating a masque form capable of flexible interpretation, accommodating both the poet’s and the monarch’s sense of poetics. It is this very flexibility in masque that results in a particularly Jonsonian dynamic interchange between satire and panegyric that will be the subject of following chapters. At this stage in my discussion, however, I want to emphasise that satire and panegyric are complementary aspects of a Humanist tradition of didactic literature – an interrelation that the current critical preoccupation with ‘subversion’ can encourage us to gloss over.

Jonsonian panegyric: a textual criticism of ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’

For many years Wesley Trimpi’s pronouncements on Jonson’s ‘plain style’ dominated criticism of the author, but in the recent past this simplifying view of Jonson’s poetry has been opposed by critics such as Richard Peterson, who are more alert to the subtle complexities of much of Jonson’s verse. In his indispensable book, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, Peterson reveals the plasticity of Jonson’s verse, its capacity to house the three-dimensional shapes that are the monuments of praise.³ Moreover, Peterson demonstrates that Jonson’s classical learning is far from academic pedantry and rather a gathering in of all that is excellent in ancient literature to reshape it into poetry that meets the needs of his own age. Jonson and his contemporaries recognised this practice as imitatio and it involved studying and learning from the works of the best authors; selectivity was viewed as a crucial aspect of imitatio and rather than a parasitical dependence on an earlier literature it was an exercise in discretion: ‘to draw forth out of the best … with the bee, and turn all into honey’ (Discoveries, 11.3069–71). Peterson suggests that the poems of praise are transmitters of demanding ideals and concepts, and reveal an intricate structure with multiple layers of meaning. We may extrapolate from this argument a view of Jonson’s poetry as inherently dynamic, a poetry of rhetorical movement and debate that rejects the orthodox monologism of poetic praise for something more demanding.

Peterson’s critical approach offers an alternative to the common criticism of Jonsonian epideictics as the superficial tribute of a hireling poet to his patron, a poetry which lacks the personal integrity that we have come to associate with the more subjective poetry of the Romantics. Although Jonson himself, as well as his contemporaries, expressed varying degrees of reservation about his use of panegyric, much of our modern bias against the poet stems from a contextual misapprehension of Jonsonian praise, and the imposition of anachronistic ideals upon the public poetry of the Renaissance.⁴ As if in anticipation of such criticism, the poet himself justifies panegyric (ironically, whilst conceding that there are some grounds for the charge of flattery) in ‘An Epistle To Master John Selden’:

I have too oft preferred

Men past their terms, and praised some names too much,

But ’twas with purpose to have made them such.

(Underwoods, XIV)

These lines pointedly allude to the didactic drive of Jonson’s poetry and should remind us of the fact that the poet seeks to praise what is admirable in his subject in order to encourage him/her to maintain and pursue excellence; typically, Jonson also extends the same kind of exhortation to readers of the poem as well as to himself. In Jonson’s verse there is often a classically based searching self-criticism, which in this poem is prompted by the poet’s praise of Selden’s authorial integrity. Bearing these ideals in mind, we should not be troubled by reading in Jonson’s Conversations criticism of a man whom the poet also saw fit to praise in his public verse (See ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ and Jonson’s private remarks made upon the historical Wroth to Drummond in Conversations, ll.359–60). Similarly, in the masques of Blackness and Beauty Jonson praises James in the form of an alchemical sun-king; this is not empty eulogy, but praise of James in his symbolic capacity as a divinely inspired monarch ruling over his nation. In these masques Jonson poeticises the prevailing political order and makes it morally comprehensible, and the same kind of exhortation to virtue that Jonson extends to Sir Robert Wroth also applies to the King.⁵ It seems clear then, that in these instances masque and poetry are governed by similar didactic principles and operate on both a symbolic and an historical level: the real is idealised in an attempt to encourage Wroth/King James to emulate his better image, thus creating the possibility of transforming an ideal image into reality. However, despite Jonson’s practice of reading history symbolically, some tensions still remain, rising out of the gap between the symbol and the historical fact that lies behind it. In later court entertainments, rather than glossing over such a potentially embarrassing discrepancy, Jonson exploits it through the antimasque. This part of the court entertainment articulates a satirical discourse which emphasises the less elevated aspects of life under the early Stuarts, offsetting the masque’s philosophical eulogy of the state and its monarch. The dynamic interaction between antimasque and masque will be discussed in later chapters, but for the moment I want to examine these initially problematic discrepancies, firstly referring to his poem on Wroth, and secondly to the masques of Blackness and Beauty.

The fundamental ideals behind Jonson’s poetry of praise have been discussed by Jongsook Lee with particular reference to the two poems on Cecilia Bulstrode:

In the poems, Jonson is concerned with something more universal and less particular than the things that have happened to Cecilia Bulstrode, and he addresses far more general audiences than Cecilia Bulstrode and those associated with her.⁶

Lee focuses on the symbolic and broader public nature of Jonson’s eulogistic poetry rather than viewing it as specific commentary on historical persons. This critical perspective seeks to negotiate the tensions generated by Jonson’s alternate criticism and praise of the same historical figures, by arguing that the gap between so-called historic fact and idealising poetic fiction is not relevant for a study of Jonsonian verse. As a qualification of this premise, I would suggest that the historical aspect of Jonson’s panegyric is as important as the ideal; in disregarding the importance of fact and history, Lee misses the plasticity of Jonson’s verse, poetry which can operate simultaneously as both irony and praise. According to Lee, all historical persons are turned into allegorical figures; in my view this attempt to homogenise Jonson’s epideictics into one-dimensional symbolic meaning glosses over the dialectic set up within a poetry that can encompass both historical and idealistic aspects, fact and fiction, blame and praise.

In recognising the dialectic set up between the universal (ideal or symbol) and the specific (history or fact) in Jonson’s work, Anne Barton has brought to light the significance of names in the poet’s dramatic art.⁷ Similarly, names and naming are of the utmost importance in Jonson’s treatment of the subjects of non-dramatic satire or eulogy; for example, the ‘Court Pucelle’, Cecilia Bulstrode is stripped of her own name and given a more telling title that reveals her moral identity, (Underwoods, XLIX). This also has the effect of dehumanising the subject of the poem; she is no longer Cecilia Bulstrode but more akin to the traditional ‘vice’ figure of a mediaeval morality play. It is mere chance that we know the true identity of the subject of this poem; but for the pertinent note in Conversations (ll.646–8), the historical figure behind this vitriolic piece of satire would be just as mysterious as that of Lord Ignorant, Court-Worm, and Sir Cod the Perfumed (Epigrams, X, XV, XIX). The recipients of panegyric, however, experience the reverse of this symbolic renaming. Their historical names are the axis upon which the poem hangs, but their names also come to signify virtues beyond those of the specific individual referred to by that name. The focus upon name in eulogy has the same distancing and universalising effect as the renaming process of satire; the moral qualities synonymous with the name are of more importance than the individual behind the name. At the same time, however, the subjects of praise, unlike the generic figures of satire, do retain their real names and this invites cross-referencing with specific historical figures. Thus in his epitaph to Cecilia Bulstrode Jonson declares:

She was ’Sell Bulstrode. In which name, I call

Up so much truth, as could I it pursue

Might make the Fable of Good Women true.

(Misc. XXIV)

By invoking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women in the last line, Jonson acknowledges the fabulous nature of his portrayal of Cecilia Bulstrode, yet in naming his subject he also pointedly refers to an historical person. Around the historical subject of this poem Jonson weaves abstract values, much as a moralistic fable juxtaposes caricatured personifications of vice and virtue against a background of historical specificity. This approach is an integral part of a satiric tradition, which can be traced back to texts such as Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. While fabliaux is a genre often described as an anarchic celebration of animal appetite, this does not preclude a moral direction to the satirical content of the tale. This is demonstrated by a text such as the Miller’s Tale where mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Free from servile flattery’: panegyric and the formation of the antimasque
• 2 Arthur and Augustus: masque and the historical myth
• 3 Present occasions and removed mysteries: the topicality of the antimasque
• 4 Jonson’s consuming satire and the carnivalesque antimasque
• 5 Heavenly love and the collapse of the court masque
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index