Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama

Satire and the Audience

Rebecca Yearling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349554256, 9781137563989
• eBook ISBN: 9781137563996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the humanist tradition of serio ludere. His works—deliberately unpredictable, inconsistent and metatheatrical—subvert theatrical conventions and provide confusingly multiple perspectives on the action, forcing their spectators to engage actively with the drama and the moral dilemmas that it presents. The book argues that Marston's work thus anticipates and perhaps influenced the mid-period work of Ben Jonson, in plays such as Sejanus, Volpone and The Alchemist.

1

The Playwrights and the Audience

Theatregoing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was essentially a new kind of cultural activity. The drama of the previous era had been an occasional, often haphazard affair, but now the experience of playgoing had been formalised and professionalised. Audiences were larger, playgoers were more sophisticated, and expectations were higher.

However, as with any new form of cultural activity, there was also considerable uncertainty about what the implications of the new theatre were, and how theatregoing might operate in practice. The professional drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was the nexus of a number of quite disparate English theatrical traditions: the medieval and early Tudor morality, mystery and miracle plays, classical comedies and tragedies, court interludes, folk plays. All of these early forms of drama had had different aims and degrees of moral purpose. Now, however, playwrights needed to decide what the new professional theatre’s role was within society: whether it was a business, a kind of shop which simply happened to deal in entertainment¹ or, alternatively, whether it should also be viewed as a kind of schoolroom, educating spectators in moral and social issues as well as diverting and pleasing them. At the same time, there was also uncertainty about the rights and responsibilities of the playgoers themselves: for example, whether they had a duty to pay intelligent attention to the drama, or whether their entrance fees had bought them the right to behave as they pleased within the playhouse.

As a consequence of such speculations, English theatre began to be more self-reflexive and self-critical during the mid-late 1590s as, increasingly, playwrights began to write plays wholly or partially ‘about plays’: works which reflected on the nature of stage performance, or the nature of spectatorship. In works by many of the most prominent dramatists of the day, there are moments of metatheatrical reflection, as the playwrights attempt to come to terms with the question of what it means to be a dramatist and what it means to be a playgoer. In the metatheatrical induction to the anonymous The Taming of a Shrew (c.1594), for example, the drunker tinker Slie is told to treat the play that follows as didactic: ‘’Tis a good lesson for us my lord, for us yt are married men’. In the prologue to the 1599 Henry V, Shakespeare appeals to his spectators for their imaginative participation in the theatrical experience, asking them to ‘think, when we talk of horses, that you see them’. In Hamlet (c.1600), the prince holds forth on the purpose of theatre – ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image’. In Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (c.1607), the spectators are presented with a play-within-a-play, which satirises the kind of demanding and foolish theatregoers who want to influence the play and have it reflect their own tastes and interests:

PROLOGUE: You seem to be an understanding man. What would you have us do, sir?

CITIZEN: Why, present something notably in honour of the commons of the city. […] I will have a citizen, and he shall be of my own trade. […] I will have a grocer and he shall do admirable things.

These excerpts, of course, all contain rather different ideas about what a play is for, and what being a theatre spectator might involve, but together they suggest the growing interest among playwrights in this period in exploring how spectators responded to drama, and what role they might play within the theatre.

John Marston and Ben Jonson quickly established themselves as a major force in this new, self-aware and self-reflexive kind of theatre. Both playwrights were fascinated by the nature of audience response, and in the issue of theatrical authority. As modern, experimental dramatists, they were interested in how much freedom a playwright had: how far he might push his own agenda and how much he was bound to be constrained by the tastes and expectations of his audience.

We can see this preoccupation with literary judgement and authority in the spoken paratexts to Marston and Jonson’s plays: the devices such as prologues and epilogues with which they surround their work. Prologues and epilogues are interesting in part because they allow the playwright to talk more-or-less directly to his audience (albeit through the mediation of the actor who actually speaks the lines). They represent a liminal space, attached to the play’s fiction but not straightforwardly part of that fiction, in which the playwright can try to frame his text and attempt to influence the audience’s reception of it. They are a place, therefore, in which the issue of authority becomes central. Paratexts indicate the kind of relationship that the playwright wants to establish between himself and his audience, whether it is that of a servant and his masters, of a teacher and his pupils, or of colleagues engaged in a collaborative enterprise. The dramatist may approach his spectators as a humble supplicant, pleading with them not to scorn his play, or he may assert himself with the imperious self-confidence of Marlowe in Tamburlaine Part 1:

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

View but his picture in this tragic glass,

And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

Marston and Jonson, however, develop the role of paratext in establishing and negotiating the relationship between playwright and audience still further, by employing the device of the critical induction before many of their plays. A critical induction is a metatheatrical playlet, performed before the main play starts, which dramatises the actual circumstances of the play’s production and so involves, for example, actors playing actors and/or stage-hands (as happens in Antonio and Mellida, Jack Drum’s Entertainment, Cynthia’s Revels and Bartholomew Fair) or actors playing spectators (as happens in Every Man Out of His Humour, What You Will, The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady).² The induction characters typically discuss types of drama, styles of acting, and modes of audience response, and, in the process, tell us something about how the playwright understands the relationship between himself and his audience. Critical inductions thus encourage the real theatre spectators to respond to the play in a more thoughtful, analytical fashion than they might otherwise, seeing the play not just as an entertainment but as a literary work, that has been constructed upon particular principles, and with particular aims in mind.

Jonson and Marston did not invent the critical induction: the use of actors playing audience members in an induction dates back at least as far as Henry Medwall’s c.1497 Fulgens and Lucrece; while the use of actors playing actors can, for example, be found in Anthony Munday’s c.1598 The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, which predates Marston and Jonson’s first known use of a critical induction, in Antonio and Mellida and Every Man Out of His Humour respectively, by at least a year. However, Marston and Jonson do exploit the possibilities of the device more consistently and coherently than any earlier playwrights did. Through their inductions, their prologues and their epilogues, the two dramatists engage in a dialogue about the nature of theatre, about how a playwright ought to present himself, how he should communicate with his audience, and how he should respond to criticism and public censure: a dialogue that suggests some fundamental disagreements between the two at the start of their theatrical careers in terms of their understanding of how the relationship between playwright and spectators might work.

Jonson and the audience

The attitude towards the audience that Jonson displays in his early plays is well known. In general, his spoken paratexts from this period suggest that their author has a distinctly low opinion of theatregoers, and resents what he sees as their tyranny within the playhouse, in their ability to disrupt or spoil the play if it is not to their liking, and their failure to appreciate truly innovative and artistic works, preferring the safe and familiar. In the 1600 Cynthia’s Revels, for example, Jonson has the boy actors who present the induction mock at least five different kinds of bad spectator, including the type who will swear ‘“That the old Hieronimo”, as it was first acted, “was the only, best, and judiciously penned play of Europe”’ (Induction 166–7). In Jonson’s prologue to Poetaster, meanwhile, the speaker attacks those audience members who come to the theatre with hostile intentions as nothing more than ‘base detractors and illiterate apes, / That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes’ (Prologue 70–1). Again and again, Jonson’s prologues, epilogues and inductions from the beginning of his career suggest a playwright who is frustrated with theatregoers, too many of whom are under-educated, under-appreciative, inattentive, prejudiced or stupid. Such spectators do not deserve to hold power and authority within the playhouse; instead, they need to be put down, put in their place.

Jonson refuses, therefore, to offer his spectators the flattery that characterises the prologues of many of his contemporaries. He will not praise their judgement or insight or kind tolerance; he will not plead for their approval of the play. As he writes in the epilogue to Cynthia’s Revels, ‘To crave your favours with a begging knee, / Were to distrust the writer’s faculty.’ Jonson’s pose in his early prologues, inductions and epilogues is author-centric, and typically suggests supreme self-belief. He insists that he neither wants nor needs to flatter, fawn and dissemble, when his works’ merits so clearly speak for themselves.

Not only does Jonson insist on the superiority of his work, but he also attempts to remove authority from his audience by insisting that, unless they agree with his judgement, there is something wrong with them. We can see this in the induction he wrote for his 1599 comedy Every Man Out of His Humour. Asper, Jonson’s aggressive and self-assertive induction spokesman (who claims also to be the author of the play that is to follow), is sceptical about the interpretative abilities and literary judgement of the spectators, and suggests that the play will work as a kind of test of them and their capabilities. ‘Attentive auditors’, who listen and enjoy the comedy, show that they have ‘happy judgements and composèd spirits’ (Induction 199, 192). However, the bored spectator proves that he has ‘neither art nor brain’ (177) when he sits

like an Aristarchus, or stark ass,

Taking men’s lines with a tobacco face

In snuff, still spitting, using his wried looks,

In nature of a vice, to wrest and turn

The good aspect of those that shall sit near him

From what they do behold! (Induction 178–83)

In other words, the audience’s intellectual worth will be shown in its response to the play. Drama is not a one-way process. The spectators may believe they are there to judge the action, but in return, the playwright will watch and judge them, assessing how adept they are as playgoers, how skilled they are at interpreting and appreciating what they see.³ If they do not respond to the play favourably then the only conclusion must be that ‘Art hath an enemy called ignorance’ (Induction 217). Asper thus attempts to keep control over the spectators by shaming then, insisting that to object to the play is to mark oneself out as a fool. Those who criticise his work, failing to appreciate its value, are accused of ignorance at best, and malice at worst.

This argument is, of course, begging the question. Jonson cannot actually prove that his work is good by any objective method, or demonstrate why his own judgement is superior to that of his spectators. He simply insists that it is – and he hopes by the magisterial confidence of his prologue and induction speakers to intimidate his spectators into accepting this opinion as fact. The audience is invited to take Jonson, or leave him, as he is – and at times he even goes so far as to express complete indifference about which option they choose. As the speaker claims in the famous last lines of Cynthia’s Revels,

Stiffly to stand on this, and proudly approve

The play, might tax the maker of Self-Love.

I’ll only speak what I have heard him say:

‘By God, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may.’ (CR epilogue 17–20)

The audience’s judgement, apparently, barely matters beside the authority of the author’s judgement.

During this period Jonson was doubtless aware that there were risks in creating an authorial persona that was too forbidding, too sternly judgemental. There was a possibility that, rather than shaming hostile spectators into reform, such a persona might actually antagonise them, inadvertently encouraging the very kinds of bad behaviour that threatened the play’s success. This is probably one reason why, in the induction to Every Man Out, Jonson deliberately works to prevent the audience associating him unequivocally with his spokesman Asper, by offering not one but two, quite incompatible, authorial portraits: the aggressive ideologue Asper, but also the rather more down-to-earth, hard-drinking, sociable figure described by Carlo Buffone at the induction’s end:

I drink this good draught to your health here […] This is that our poet calls Castalia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Editions
• Introduction: Why Does Marston Matter?
• Prologue: The Problem of the Audience
• 1 The Playwrights and the Audience
• 2 Dramatic Satire and the Crisis of Authority
• 3 John Marston: Provoking the Audience
• 4 Jonson and Marston: ‘I write just in thy vein, I’
• Conclusion
• Appendix: The Boy Actors: The Question of Intent
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index