Ben Jonson

Richard Dutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893745
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Interest in Ben Jonson is higher today than at any time since his death. This new collection offers detailed readings of all the major plays - Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair - and the poems. It also provides significant insights into the court masques and the later plays which have only recently been rediscovered as genuinely engaging stage pieces.

1 Introduction

The history

If Shakespeare was ‘not of an age, but for all time’, Jonson himself has always been firmly located in the age which created him. He gave to that age – more than any other writer – a voice and a literary definition. And that remains, I shall argue, crucial to his current critical reputation. There is a paradox in this, because no one did more than Jonson himself, in the monumental 1616 folio of his Works, to promote himself as a literary classic, a writer whose work transcends its own era.¹ Yet the definitions of ‘the classic’ he espoused were themselves the product of an early modern English culture he was helping to construct, and not timeless. They remained valid for a century or so after his death, but could not guarantee him readers, or a regular place on the stage, beyond that.

The survival of an author beyond his immediate readership (survival in the sense of being found both readable and relevant) depends ultimately on appropriation by subsequent generations. This is never a disinterested process of saving what is objectively or inherently valuable; it is a much more selfish business of recognising what can be used, what will serve a purpose (which may, of course, be very different from the uses and purposes for which it was written), and ruthlessly disregarding the rest. So it was with Jonson. The century following his death (1637) was one in which Britain asserted itself as a European and world power, and needed to promote its culture as concomitantly prestigious. In this context Jonson was widely admired as having set a bench-mark for English letters, especially the drama, as Dryden acknowledged in his fiercely nationalistic Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668, revised 1684):

I think him the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theatre ever had … Wit and Language, and Humour also in some measure we had before him; but something of Art was wanting to the Drama till he came … Johnson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate Writing … as he has given us the most correct Plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable Rules for perfecting the Stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us.²

It was from this perspective that he singled out Epicoene for what he called an examen, the first sustained piece of close critical reading in English culture, construing it as a model for the comedy of manners then in vogue on the Restoration stage.

Yet even this praise is tinged with condescension, the slight but unmistakable suggestion that Jonson remained contaminated by the faults of the era which he had done so much to correct:

One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it … If there was any fault in his Language, ‘twas that he weav’d it too closely and laboriously, in his Comedies especially: perhaps too, he did a little too much Romanize our Tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latine as he found them: wherein though he learnedly followed their Language, he did not enough comply with the Idiom of ours

– the pedantic Jonson who was never quite enough of what the Restoration would call a gentleman to allow innate good taste to take precedence over laborious learning. In this, as in so much else, he was contrasted with the ‘naturally learn’d’ Shakespeare: ‘I admire him, but I love Shakespeare’ (pp. 89–90). It would be wrong to give the impression that Dryden was absolutely typical of his time in this – there were many, for example, who genuinely respected Jonson’s Catiline (despite a disastrous first performance in 1611) as the most impressive tragedy of the century. Yet it was more than a straw in the wind. Jonson more often than not attracted the respect due to a founding father, rather than love: the veneration due to a historic monument rather than real enthusiasm.³

So it was that, with the decisive shift in taste in the mid-eighteenth century that paved the way for Romanticism, Jonson’s reputation not only dipped but was virtually eclipsed by the meteoric rise of that of Shakespeare. He was no longer useful.⁴ As Ian Donaldson puts it: ‘By the late eighteenth century, Jonson was commonly regarded as a writer whose work could not easily be revived, so time-bound was it, so heavily dependent upon topical and local allusions, so deeply immersed in the customs and practices of a bygone age … Jonson had placed his faith in the ultimate verdict of posterity, but posterity, it seemed, was to let him down.’⁵ Of course, some of Jonson’s comedies – Every Man In His Humour, Volpone and The Alchemist – never fell entirely out of favour, and were performed (often in altered forms) throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; David Garrick, for example, was a great success as Drugger in his own version of The Alchemist, while Dickens twice put on amateur productions of Every Man In His Humour.⁶ But the general neglect of his works only compounded the sense of the remoteness of his achievements, the diversity of which moreover made him a difficult figure to bring into focus – masques and entertainments based on arcane mythologies and written for long-forgotten events; so much of the poetry ‘occasional’ and compromised by its apparent flattery of patrons; tragedies which seemed to sacrifice psychological insight to the dead hand of scholarship; and even the comedies heavily freighted with long-lost allusions to early Stuart London, with obtrusively classical structures, and employing archaic ‘humour’ psychology. Late nineteenth-century commentators (even those who professed to admire Jonson) were often torn between faint praise for his capacity to render a ‘faithful transcript from low-life’ and berating him for his ‘tedious and intolerable realism’, while paying a kind of lip-service to his classical virtues and classic status.⁷

This was the situation T. S. Eliot addressed in a famous essay, first published in 1919: ‘To be universally accepted; to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure; and to be read only by historicans and antiquaries – this is the most perfect conspiracy of approval’.⁸ But Eliot’s witty attempt to appropriate Jonson’s classicism, elitist scholarship and verbal passion to his own Modernist aesthetic was, by its own nature, only ever likely to convince a select few. And it provided only the narrowest of solutions to what was clearly by then the greatest single impediment to a general appreciation of Jonson: his location in a historical past which was not only remote but which progressive opinion regarded as unsavoury. Virginia Gildersleeve, for example, painted in 1908 a typical Whiggish picture of ‘Tudor and Stuart despotism’, absolutist courts ‘almost completely out of touch and sympathy with the great movements [i.e. for civil liberty and religious reform] which were soon to triumph’.⁹ Jonson’s close identification with those courts made (and to an extent still makes) him a more suspect figure than most. Eliot certainly did not share this view of the period before the Civil War, but chose not to confront the issues in these terms, obscuring the historical specificities (and, indeed, the historical distance) by placing Jonson in a more abstract line of kindred spirits, dedicated to preserving the traditions and values of Christian Europe. But Eliot’s praise of Jonson was never as influential as his championing of other early modern poets, such as Donne, Herbert and Marvell. Their verse was served particularly well by the New Critics, whose largely a-historical style of close textual reading (in some respects following Eliot’s own lead) dominated the academy from the 1930s to the 1960s. John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks in the USA and F. R. Leavis in Britain echoed Eliot’s enthusiasm for the verbal, intellectual and emotional complexity of ‘the Metaphysical poets’, which was often felt to be peculiarly attuned to the dissonances of Modernism – and yet could be appreciated as an antidote to them. These qualities were far less apparent in the neoclassical plain style and the lyric, the two modes of non-dramatic verse at which Jonson excelled.

The dominant literary history of the mid-twentieth century (especially the literary history of the English Renaissance) largely effaced the social, economic and political contexts within which literature was written, focusing on idealised traditions of thought. E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture, which drew heavily on A. O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (1936), argued for the survival of a static, hierarchical, medieval frame of intellectual reference throughout the Tudor/Stuart period – a bulwark of essential certainties against the siren charms of ‘new philosophy’. Jonson does not figure heavily in this brief but influential book, though he is squarely invoked as one of the writers whose eminence ‘we can estimate … by the earnestness and the passion and the assurance with which they surveyed the range of the universe’. It is revealing that the most sustained reference to him relates to one of the court masques; Tillyard here notes in passing that it ‘is of course unthinkable that the new despotism of Tudors and Stuarts should not have exploited and enriched the old correspondence’ [between a monarch and the sun] but explores no further the interface between politics and literature.¹⁰ In recent times it has become commonplace to challenge (if not openly deride) Tillyard’s thesis, and the comfortable conservatism of fellow spirits.¹¹ We recognise that it was in part a reaction to the traumas of post-revolutionary Russia and Nazi Germany. Some suspect, however, that it also reflects a lingering, deferential class-consciousness which is still alive in Britain (and was only metaphorically transposed on to the literature of a pre-lapsarian Renaissance, where everyone knew his or her place) – and that is why these are still live issues.

The moral imperative

L. C. Knights’s Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson offered a distinctively different analysis. Published in 1937, it was a remarkably early (in British terms) response to the Marxist agenda, which related the drama of Jonson – challengingly seen as the representative figure, rather than Shakespeare – and his contemporaries to the prevailing social and economic conditions of early capitalism, drawing heavily on the work of R. H. Tawney and others. But, with hindsight, it can be seen that, for all the differences of methodology, the Jonson who emerges from Knights’s pages is not so different from the one sketched in by Tillyard. As the chapters specifically devoted to him suggest – ‘Jonson and Tradition’ and ‘Jonson and the Anti-Acquisitive Attitude’ – Jonson for Knights champions medieval and traditional values in the face of changing, not to say deteriorating, socio-economic conditions. This is not surprising from a critic closely associated with F. R. Leavis and the journal Scrutiny, where some portions of the book first appeared. Heirs in many respects of Eliot’s (and Matthew Arnold’s) determination to equate literature with high seriousness and moral earnestness, they appropriated Jonson as a new kind of bench-mark: an early bastion of English moral and cultural values (narrowly defined), against the demeaning influences of bad taste, ignorance and misapplied money. This view informed much of the criticism of Jonson between the Second World War and the early 1980s, although it was inflected by specific concerns and new perspectives, including a more sympathetic understanding of his imitation of classical precedents. The general predisposition to take Jonson’s pose as a free-standing moralist at face value was not directly challenged until the article by Don E. Wayne, included in this volume (see below).¹²

Two books in the 1960s, however, began to push Jonson studies in significantly new directions. Both were narrowly focused, but in ways that had radical implications for the location of Jonson as a whole within early Stuart culture. J. A. Barish’s Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy applied some of the earliest fruits of linguistic stylistics to a study of the prose in his comedies, demonstrating how he cultivated a deliberately asymmetrical, Senecan, anti-Ciceronian style, often terse, pithy and (especially to ears atuned to Shakespearean cadences) harsh. The insight can readily be translated to his dramatic verse, and has a variety of implications for what we mean when we talk of the ‘realism’ or ‘realistic texture’ of Jonsonian drama, which are carefully crafted artistic effects, not merely (as earlier critics often assumed) journalistic observations of the contemporary scene. And it can be correlated with a new perception of Jonson’s relationship with the world he was representing: ‘Where other baroque writers explicitly dramatise their tensions, in Jonson the tensions remain buried … The presence of tension in Jonson reveals itself most obviously in his insistent claim to be without tension: the oftener he protests his imperturbability, the less we are inclined to believe it.’¹³ Rather than the ruggedly independent, plain-speaking moralist inferred by Knights and others (with much support, it must be said, from Jonson’s own self-projections), we have the beginnings of a writer complexly implicated in the world he represents. Many of the works that have focused since on Jonson’s style and poetic strategies – especially in his non-dramatic verse, which often attracts a different critical register from the rest of his writing – have in effect been explorations of these ambiguities (even when they have disagreed with Barish’s analysis, in effect trying to close the Pandora’s box that he opened).¹⁴ Stanley Fish’s wide-ranging piece on the non-dramatic verse, r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 DON E. WAYNE Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View
• 3 JOHN G. SWEENEY III Sejanus and the People’s Beastly Rage
• 4 JONATHAN GOLDBERG State Secrets
• 5 STANLEY FISH Authors-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same
• 6 IAN DONALDSON Unknown Ends: Volpone
• 7 MARY BETH ROSE The Expense of Spirit
• 8 CHERYL LYNN ROSS The Plague of The Alchemist
• 9 JONATHAN HAYNES Festivity and the Dramatic Economy of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair
• 10 MARTIN BUTLER Late Jonson
• Further Reading
• Index