Introduction
The demands that Ben Jonson makes upon his audiences, as
much as they were resisted in his own time, are often
seen as a major strength by modern critics, a
characteristic setting him apart from his contemporaries.
T. S. Eliot writes, "Jonson behaved as the great
creative mind that he was: he created his own world, a
world from which his followers, as well as the dramatists
who were trying to do something wholly different, are
excluded" (78). This expectation of challenge
associated with Jonson is reflected in a review by Peter
Holland of a modern theatrical production of Jonson's
The Alchemist, in which the critic complains that
the performance supersedes the author's ideas, failing to
give Jonson the author his due place:
The
virtuosic vocal display becomes the focus for the
audience's attention far more than anything that the
character is actually saying. Jonson's words, his
teasing suggestion that the audience is to be both
Face's jury and his next clients (or gulls) pass
unnoticed. The meaning of the language is lost in the
focus on the actor's performance....This Alchemist
never troubles its audience for a second.
This
complaint is not unreasonable, as it is evident, from
Jonson's own ambivalent attitude toward theatre expressed
overtly or covertly in many of his plays and poems, that
he himself felt that ideas superseded a pleasing
performance. For example, Leatherhead in Bartholomew
Fair worries that Littlewit's "puppet-play"
will fail to impress:
All the
foul i' the Fair, I mean all the dirt in Smithfield -
that's one of Master Littlewit's carwhitchets now -
will be thrown at our banner today if the matter does
not please the people....Your home-born projects
prove ever the best, they are so easy, and familiar.
They put too much learning i' their things nowadays;
and that, I fear will be the spoil o' this. (V i 3-16)
Implicit in
these lines is the playwright's own sense of degradation
at having to please the ill-educated mob who will not
tolerate plays with "too much learning." He
wants to challenge his audiences, a difficult maxim to
enforce in a medium which was seen, at least in the
milieu in which Jonson wrote, primarily as a form of
entertainment and diversion. A playwright who "troubles"
his audience too much is causing trouble for himself, as
Jonson discovered early in his career. [1]
Jonson's presence in his own work can thus be interpreted
as his way of expressing his dissatisfaction with theatre
as a medium for his own idea of art, and also as a means
of imposing a measure of authorial control on an art form
in which control is a tenuous thing and in a time when,
as Jeffrey Maston notes, the concept of individual
authorship was also tenuous: "...the author is a
historical development - an idea that gradually becomes
attached to playtexts over the course of the seventeenth
century..."(370). This tendency of Jonson's has
become as much a part of his legend as his off-stage life,
as observed by Bruce Thomas Boehrer in his essay "Epicoene,
Charivari, Skimmington" - "Jonson is...famous
for obtruding his authorial persona onto the business of
his plays..."(17) - and also L.A. Beaurline, who
notes that "Jonson's expansive, difficult
personality so permeates everything he did that it is
possible to find the man in his work at nearly every turn."
(317)
However, the following essay will argue that Jonson's
presence in his plays was not static: over the course of
a thirteen-year period, from Poetaster (1601) to
Volpone (1606) to Bartholomew Fair (1614),
one can observe, if not a graceful retreat by the author
from the "business of his plays," then an
increasingly subtle and less easily distinguishable
presence: in the later plays the masks or personae he
chooses to hide behind are more opaque (and more ironic
and/or ambiguous), and an increasing number of characters
serve as his mouthpieces. In this shift, we can see a
concurrent change in the author's attitudes about his
role as a playwright/poet, theatre and its audiences,
poetry, and his contemporaries. It is a gradual and
subtle move from hubris and idealism (about what his own
work could accomplish in his time) toward at least the
beginnings of a humility more consistent with his own
time, a grudging (and always ambivalent) acceptance of
the limits of the medium in which he worked, and his
place within the wider context of the English Renaissance
theatre.
Bruce Thomas Boehrer (in another essay, "The Poet of
Labour") writes of Jonson's proprietary notions of
authorship: "I take this complex of attitudes to be
Jonson's single most revolutionary contribution to
western literary history, leading as it does to the
nineteenth and early twentieth century myth of isolated,
elevated and autonomous authorial genius" (299).
However, I would argue that Jonson became increasingly
conscious that this notion was indeed, as Boehrer puts it,
a "myth." Looking at the progression of his
works over this period, his self-aggrandizement
increasingly has a satirical edge, as though as he
matured as an artist he became less, not more, satisfied
with his work and less assured of his classical ideals.
Leo Salingar suggests that in Jonson's work "...deeper
needs to commend himself seem to have been at work. In
his anger with the 'loathsome' ignorance and 'impudence'
of his public, there may have been the spark of a
suspicion that his own humanism was out-of date. Worse
still, it may have been prompted by the suppressed
recognition that his own comedies were not, after all,
consistently the best he felt himself to be" (45-46).
Poetaster
Presumably, Salingar is speaking here of Jonson's later
plays, because in Poetaster evidence of such
self-doubt is as absent as Jonson the author is blatantly
present. Here he obtrudes himself onto his work not
behind a fictional mask or disguise as in Volpone or Bartholomew Fair, but behind the historical
persona of the Roman poet Horace. Before this character
is introduced, however, Jonson first takes the
opportunity to defend himself in the Prologue against the
personified "Envy" - a rather thinly concealed
attack on his rival playwrights/detractors - which rails
against "...this hated play..."(After the
second sounding, 17). The Prologue comes in to answer
Envy on behalf of the author:
Here now,
put case our author should, once more,
Swear that his play were good; he doth implore,
You would not argue him of arrogance:
How e'er that common spawn of ignorance,
Our fry of writers, may beslime his fame,
And give his action that adulterate name.
Such full-blown vanity he more doth loathe
Than base dejection... (The third sounding, 15-22)
And through
the Prologue, Jonson attempts to justify his form of
defensive writing:
If any
muse why I salute the stage,
An armed Prologue; know, 'tis a dangerous age:
Wherein, who writes had need present his scenes
Fortyfold proof against the conjuring means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes,
That fill up rooms in fair and formal shapes.
(The third sounding, 5-10)
Jonson
continues in this critical vein in the first act of the
play, in which the young Ovid, a character initially seen
as sympathetic and possibly a representation of the
author (but later proven not to be) defends his pursuit
of the poetic vocation to his father:
...would
men learn but to distinguish spirits,
And set true difference 'twixt those jaded wits
That run a broken pace for common hire,
And the high raptures of a happy muse,
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
And beats at heaven gates with her bright hooves;
They would not then with such distorted faces,
And desperate censures stab at poesy. (I ii 212-220)
He is making
a clear distinction between good and bad, or false poetry
written for "common hire" (likening it to
prostitution) and placing himself firmly in the good
category. But this poet is not Jonson's ideal, because in
the eyes of Caesar, offended at the frivolous spectacle
Ovid and the lesser poets make of the gods and goddesses
of Rome (seen as sacrilege: "...oh, impious sight!"
IV vi 8 ), Ovid abuses his own gifts:
Are you
that first the deities inspired
With skill of their high natures, and their powers,
The first abusers of their useful light;
Profaning thus their dignities, in their forms;
And making them like you, but counterfeits? (IV vi 33-37)
Ovid is not a
good poet (although not a distinctly bad one like
Crispinus or Demetrius) because he does not serve the
interests of gods and kings. Coming from a writer as
controversial as Jonson, this could seem a strangely
conservative idea, but not if Caesar and company are seen
as fictional powers which exemplify Jonson's classical
ideals, rather than as portrayals of the political powers
of his own time with whom he had a much more complex
relationship. Explains Michael McCanles:
Poetaster
is a major document in the history of Jonson's
understanding and direction of his literary career....In
this early stage of his career Jonson already
envisions himself as an arbiter of the courts'
manners and morals....It is obvious that the dramatic
portrait of the Roman emperor embodies Jonson's ideal
of a political hierarchy open to appreciating and
advancing men of learning and creativity: a portrait
of vera nobilitas yearnings almost embarrassing in
the details of its wish fulfillment. (198-99)
The poet best
able to serve this political hierarchy is not the
frivolous Ovid but the practical Horace, to whom poetry
is not fun and games but work, and who, when he makes his
appearance at the beginning of Act 3, soon becomes the
play's most obvious contender for author stand-in. When
Crispinus, an equally transparent portrayal of Jonson's
dramatic rival John Marston, makes his appearance, any
doubts about what Jonson is doing in this play are
removed. Bad poets are not just an abstract concept; he
has real targets in mind. As Crispinus/Marston bombards
him with his coarse verse, Horace/Jonson, confident in
his superiority, seeks a discreet escape:
Cri. 'Rich
was thy hap, sweet, dainty cap,
There to be placed,
Where thy smooth black, sleek white may smack,
And both be graced."
'White' is there usurped for her brow; her forehead:
and then 'sleek' as the parallel to 'smooth,' that
went before. A kind of paranomasie, or agnomination:
do you conceive, sir?
Hor. Excellent. Troth, sir, I must be abrupt, and
leave you.
Cri. Why, what haste hast thou? Pray thee, stay a
little: thou shalt not go yet, by Phoebus.
Hor. (Aside) I shall not? What remedy? Fie, how I
sweat with suffering! (III i 76-87).
It's a clever
device, allowing Jonson to viciously attack his rival
through a dignified veneer, and makes for what is by all
appearances the one truly comic scene in the play. But
Jonson didn't get away with it. Thomas Dekker, another
rival playwright satirized by Jonson in Poetaster
through the portrayal of an even worse poet, Demetrius,
counter-attacked with an alternative view of Horace/Jonson
in his play Satiromastix. In this scene showing
Horace at work in his study, Dekker portrays him not as a
diligent worker and a careful revisor (as Jonson liked to
portray himself), but as just another inferior poet for
whom writing is an excruciating process due to his lack
of talent:
Hor. O me
thy Priest inspire.
For I to thee and thine immortall name,
In -- in -- in golden tunes,
For I to thee and thine immortall name,
In -- sacred raptures flowing, flowing, swimming,
swimming:
In sacred raptures swimming,
Immortall name, game, dame, tame, lame, lame, lame,
Pux, ha it, shame, proclaime, oh --
In Sacred raptures flowing, will proclaime, not --
O me thy Priest inspyre! (I ii 8-17)
And further
on in the play, Dekker attacks Jonson's arrogance,
recalling both Jonson's term "adulterate name"
in the Prologue to Poetaster and his indirect
reference to prostitution:
Hor. The
Muses birdes (the Bees) were hiv'd and fed
Us in our cradle, thereby prophecying;
That we to learned ears should sweetly sing,
But to the vulgar and adulterate braine,
Should loath to prostitute our Virgin straine. (Satiromastix,
II ii 55-59).
The Horace/Crispinus
scene in Poetaster is but one of many instances
of the author's own defensive posture. Before Caesar
becomes his patron, the underappreciated Horace announces
defiantly,
...if to
age I destined be,
Or that quick death's black wings environ me;
If rich, or poor; at Rome, or fate command
I shall be banished to some other land;
What hue soever, my whole state shall bear,
I will write satires still, in spite of fear. (III v
95-100).
Jonson could
be talking here as much about his troubles with the
authorities as his conflicts with other playwrights. But
overall, his attempt at self-vindication through the
mouthpiece of a classical poet was mocked by his
contemporaries, and is seen as offensive by some modern
critics. Rosalind Miles writes, "Jonson's decision
to introduce himself into this exalted company was
hubristic to say the least; and to cast himself in the
role of his beloved Horace was vainglorious in the
extreme" (57).
Poetaster marks a point in Jonson's career in
which he is forced to re-assess the ability of theatre to
serve his poetic purposes, a specific agenda which is
made clear in Volpone:
He that
is said to be able to inform young men to all good
disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues,
keep old men in their best and supreme state, or, as
they decline to childhood, recover them to their
first strength; that comes forth the interpreter and
arbiter of nature, a teacher of things divine no less
than human, a master in manners... (Epistle 22-27).
Jonson
apparently was temporarily convinced that either he could
not meet this maxim or that the public was not worth the
effort, as he did not write for a short period after the
unsuccessful first production of Poetaster. In
the somewhat mis-named Apologetical Dialogue, an
epilogue to the play written after it was first performed
for the published version and addressed "To the
Reader", the Author (shown unmasked this time, as
himself) says,
I, that
spend half my nights, and all my days,
Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face,
To come forth worth the ivy, or the bays,
And in this age can hope no other grace --
Leave me. There's something come into my thought
That must, and shall be sung, high and aloof,
Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's
hoof. (231-39)
Again, he
feels unjustly treated, arguing that the serious efforts
he makes at producing poetry "worth the ivy",
worthy of praise and fame, entitle him to more respect.
Miles writes of this scene,
The
aggrieved poet, brooding on his wrongs...framed quite
clearly the hope that he could somehow find the way
to work on the higher products of poetry which he
knew he was capable of at a safe distance from the
destructive malice or the crushing stupidity of the
public at large (67).
Volpone
He did not find a way. Jonson's "retirement"
after the debacle of Poetaster did not last long,
so presumably he retained a sense of the value of theatre
and a confidence in his own abilities to suit it to his
purposes. Nonetheless, as is evidenced in Volpone,
a note of caution begins to temper the confidence, a
sense that as an author he may be as susceptible to the
errors of the "jaded wits" from whom he
distinguished himself in Poetaster. The
difference in the way Jonson perceives himself as an
author is apparent when we note the similarity between
the scene in which Volpone meets the tedious Lady Wouldbe
and the scene between Horace and Crispinus noted earlier.
In this scene it is obvious that Volpone represents the
author as much as the Horace/Jonson connection is obvious
in the earlier play; Volpone's lines in particular could
be read as a slight re-wording of Horace's. And Volpone/Jonson's
contempt for Lady Wouldbe, as her name implies a
pretender to poetic grace and knowledge, is just as
devastating:
Volpone:
The poet
As old in time as Plato, and as knowing,
Says that your highest female grace is silence.
Lady Wouldbe: Which o' your poets? Petrarch?
Or Tasso? Or Dante?
Guarini? Aristo? Aretine?
Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all.
Volpone (aside): Is everything a cause to my
destruction?
Lady Wouldbe: I think I ha' two or three of 'em about
me.
Volpone (aside): The sun, the sea, will sooner both
stand still
Than her eternal tongue! Nothing can scape it. (III
iv 77-85)
Lady Wouldbe
reveals her ignorance in being unable to distinguish
inferior poets from the superior, a fault apparently on
almost the same scale as being one of those inferior
poets. But as unforgiving as Jonson still is, the nature
of the character through which he voices these views in Volpone
indicates just how far he has departed from his own
poetic ideal, and his righteousness about his own
authorial role. This incarnation of Jonson comes much
closer to the self-caricature that he carries yet further
in Bartholomew Fair. Volpone is no Horace;
rather than serving Jonson's professed purposes of poetry,
being "...a teacher of things divine no less than
human, a master in manners," Volpone uses his poetic
gift primarily to manipulate and deceive others. This
ability he enjoys for its own sake, quite apart from the
fact that it also makes him rich. In this sense he is
truly an artist, albeit a twisted one. But Volpone,
unlike Horace, is a flawed hero; the author has
apparently by this time recognized his own hubris.
Volpone's flaw is a refusal to recognize any limitations
to his art. He believes that he can win the unwilling
Celia over, for example, with his lofty verse (III vii
166-183); when poetry fails, he resorts to extravagant
promises notable only for their nauseating excess:
Thy baths
shall be the juice of July-flowers,
Spirit of roses, and of violets,
The milk of unicorns, and panthers' breath
Gathered in bags and mixed with Cretan wines.
Our drink shall be prepared gold and amber,
Which we will take until my roof whirl round
With the vertigo; and my dwarf shall dance,
My eunuch sing, my fool make up the antic. (III vii
213-220).
And when
promises also fail, Volpone resorts to force. The scene
is a devastating process of revelation, or the stripping
away of poetic pretensions to reveal the reprobate soul
beneath the appealing performer's mask, without which
Volpone is nothing:
Fall on
me, roof, and bury me in ruin!
Become my grave, that wert my shelter! O!
I am unmasked, unspirited, undone,
Betrayed to beggary, to infamy - (III vii 276-79).
Although
Volpone recovers himself and manages to re-mask with the
help of Mosca, his recovery is only partial. He has not
learned the essential lesson from his first unmasking,
that his powers to manipulate and shape his world are
limited, both by his own base nature and by his
dependence on others. The game he plays is a game of many
players and parts; his fault is in losing sight of this
fact. The realization starts to dawn on him finally in
Act Five:
To make a
snare for mine own neck? And run
My head into it wilfully, with laughter!
When I had newly 'scaped, was free and clear!
Out of mere wantonness! (V xi 1-4)
A few lines
further, when Volpone begins to suspect that Mosca has
betrayed him, he further castigates himself:
I am
farther in. These are my fine conceits!
I must be merry, with a mischief to me!
What a vile wretch was I, that could not bear
My fortune soberly; I must ha' my crotchets
And my conundrums! (V xi 13-17)
Self-knowledge
has come too late. At the end of the play, when Volpone
is sentenced for his crimes, he is virtually silent,
saying only "This is called mortifying of a fox"
(V xii 125). The implicit suggestion in this lack of
protest is that he feels he deserves his punishment, for
his arrogance if not for his immorality. Bryant observes:
Volpone,
in short, is a presumptuous poet like Ovid in Poetaster
and goes the way of all proud fools who acknowledge
no master and attempt to make their activity an end
in itself....His fault is not in his vitality or his
creativity but in his attitude toward these gifts and
toward the world from which and on which he works...Volpone
is another example of Jonson's poet gone wrong - a
perverted artist who can only be made worse if he
persists in a failure to recognize his human
limitations (64-65)
The "parasite"
Mosca, a less appealing character than Volpone, can
nonetheless also be seen as representative of the author,
or the theatre profession in general. In his soliloquy in
Act Three, Mosca makes the philosophical observation:
"O! your parasite/ Is a most precious thing, dropped
from above....Almost/ All the wise world is little else
in nature/ But parasites or sub-parasites" (III i 7-13).
The parasitic theatre distracts and amuses its host, the
audience, while metaphorically sucking its blood: taking
its money, manipulating it, deceiving it, concealing
contempt beneath flattery. This whole speech has an air
of ironic self-commentary, with Jonson making a very much
more cynical distinction between good and bad art than
was made in Poetaster:
I mean
not those that have your bare town-art....nor those
With their court-dog tricks, that can fawn and fleer,
Make their revenue out of legs and faces,
Echo my lord, and lick away a moth.
But your fine, elegant rascal, that can rise
And stoop, almost together, like an arrow....
And change a visor swifter than a thought,
This is the creature had the art born with him;
Toils not to learn it, but doth practice it
Out of most excellent nature... (III i 14-32)
Gone is
Jonson's respect for the laborious aspect of writing, his
argument against the criticism that he wrote slowly. [2]
Through this ironic mask (or the unapologetic actor
celebrating his masks of deception) we see an author with
a deep sense of ambivalence toward the medium in which he
works, evident also in the Epistle to Volpone:
...the
writers of these days are other things: that not only
their manners, but their natures, are inverted, and
nothing remaining with them the dignity of poet but
the abused name, which every scribe usurps; that now,
especially in dramatic, or, as they term it, stage
poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemy,
all license of offense to God and man is practiced (31-37)
In Volpone
Jonson appears to be far more conscious than previously
of two fundamental aspects of theatre: first, it is a
reductive medium, in which language is reduced and fitted
into a framework; what is of poetic merit is not
necessarily what serves the drama. And second, it is a
manipulative medium. Jonson the idealist is gone. In
place, through the mask of Volpone, we see a more
conflicted artist who both revels in and is ashamed of
his own trickery. The contrast is noted by Bryant:
For those
attuned to Jonson's reverence for poetry, creativity,
and the human capacity for invention, the effect of
Volpone can be devastating indeed; for here human
genius, given the reins, ends not in triumph but in
perversion and corruption (59)
The audience's
discomfort and confusion regarding Jonson's real
intentions is not necessarily alleviated by the
distancing device of Volpone (or the actor playing him)
coming forward at the end to speak of his character in
the third person: "...though the fox be punished by
the laws,/He yet doth hope there is no suff'ring due..."(v
xii 153-154). This device is interpreted by critics in
remarkably different ways. W. David Kay remarks of it,
"Since we are being asked to judge the performance
as a whole and since our delight comes from seeing poetic
justice visited on all the characters, including Volpone,
our applause will be a mark of appreciation for Jonson's
'true creation, not Volpone's false one"(399). To
Alan Fisher, however, the device has more sinister
implications: "...if we take what we have been
seeing as a spectacle of immorality, this appeal to
friendship asks us to lower our standard or accept our
complicity..."(82).
It seems more likely that Jonson's intent was closer to
the one proposed by Kay, because the device is far from
unusual in English Renaissance drama. [3] It can be seen
simply as a part of the formal end of every performance,
in which all of the performers remove their masks -
literal or figurative - and bow to the audience, inviting
their applause, indicating closure and a return to
reality. However, a potential problem with Kay's
interpretation of this device in Volpone is the
fact that the title character is too appealing for the
audience to be really "delighted" at his harsh
punishment.
What this problematic ending to the play seems to
highlight, above anything else, is Jonson's own
problematic relationship with his audience, which
persisted despite the author's own gradual realization of
the limits of his art. John Gordon Sweeney III writes:
Jonson's
is one theatre...which cherishes the moment of
confrontation between author and spectator. His
theatre insists that all activity dealing with social
man inevitably must face the question of authority
and its natural concomitant, conflict. Author and
spectator meet to judge one another, and the
fictional experience mediates what is a potentially
explosive situation. One of Jonson's special
aptitudes was recognizing that his authority to judge
his spectators resided in his willingness to indulge
their judgment of himself (8-9)
But, as
Sweeney observes further, Jonson was not always happy
with such an equitable relationship between author and
audience: "At times, moral and intellectual
imperatives are complicated by personal motives; in other
instances, the level of aggression seems inconsistent
with any 'higher purpose'"(15).
Bartholomew Fair
This tension between author and audience, and between the
author's own conflicting ideas about the purposes of
theatre, is as evident in the later play Bartholomew
Fair as in Volpone; the difference, however,
is Jonson's lighter hand and his even more diffuse
authorial presence in the play. In Poetaster,
the author was represented by a single character; in Volpone,
we can see the author reflected in both the title
character and, to a lesser extent, in Mosca; in Bartholomew
Fair, a number of different characters can be seen
as authorial stand-ins at various points in the play, and
most of these self-portraits are plainly satirical.
The most obvious of these is Justice Overdo. Despite his
profession, in disguising himself Overdo is taking on a
role more akin to that of author/player attempting to
manipulate, through deceit and trickery, the behaviour
and attitudes of others. (Overdo's name in itself could
be seen as self-commentary, as Jonson was often accused
of literary excess. [4] ) Like Jonson, he is fond of
invoking the classical poets to justify his own authority:
"...I will sit down at night and say with my friend
Ovid, Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira, nec ignis,
etc"(II v 61-63). The quote - in translation, "And
now I have finished a work, which neither the anger of
Jove, nor fire, nor sword, nor devouring time will ever
destroy" - echoes Jonson's own hopes for his work.
Further on, still in the classical vein, he refers
ironically to Leatherhead as "Orpheus among the
beasts" (II v 7), but the term could just as easily
be applied to himself, and fits Jonson's own conception
of himself as an author: an underhanded commentary on the
audience whom, like Orpheus the musician/poet, he is
trying to "tame" with his art. It is a term at
once indicative of his condescension toward his audience
and an ironic commentary on the duplicity of his own role.
G.R. Hibbard says in an introduction to Bartholomew Fair,
"(Overdo is) like Volpone, like Volpone's dupes, and
like the dupes in The Alchemist, a product of
Jonson's perception that the last thing a man will
abandon is his illusions, and especially his illusions
about himself" (xxviii). And in fact, Overdo's
illusions fail him, as he is shown in the end to be the
one deceived - by Edgeworth, by his wife - rather than
the deceiver. And Quarlous, one of the characters he has
attempted to dupe, has no hesitation in pointing out to
Overdo where his fault lies: "...remember you are
but Adam, flesh and blood! You have your frailty" (V
vi 93-94). This "Orpheus" has failed to charm
the beasts. As Volpone is "unmasked" and
brought low, so too is Overdo, although his presumption
does not hold the same dire consequences.
Other than through the most obvious one of Overdo, the
author's voice can be heard through several other
characters in the play, all of them either seriously
deluded or amoral. The tone of the anti-theatre invective
of the Puritan Busy, as much as he is an object of the
author's contempt, is often just a few steps removed from
the tone of Jonson's own criticisms of theatrical vice in
the Epistle to Volpone previously noted. Busy
responds to Leatherhead's argument that his play has been
approved by the Master of Revels: "The master of
Rebels' hand, thou hast - Satan's! Hold thy peace; they
scurrility shut up thy mouth; thy profession is damnable..."
(V v 16-18). Littlewit, a more direct caricature of
authors in general, provides the author with many
opportunities to attack both bad art and authorial
presumption. For example, Littlewit is unaccountably
impressed with Winwife's vulgar similes, and untroubled
by the fact that they are in reference to Littlewit's
wife:
Winwife:
Alas, you ha' the garden where they grow still! A
wife here with a strawberry-breath, cherry-lips,
apricot-cheeks, and a soft velvet head, like a
melicotton.
Littlewit: Good i' faith! -- Now dullness upon me,
that I had not that before him, that I should not
light on't as well as he! Velvet Head! (I ii 13-18)
Like Jonson,
Littlewit sees himself as superior to his colleagues:
"A pox o' these pretenders to wit! your Three Cranes,
Mitre, and Mermaid men! Not a corn of true salt nor a
grain of right mustard amongst them all" (I ii 33-35).
Littlewit is also obsessed with seeing the performance of
his own work, a proprietary interest no doubt
disproportionate to the value of the work itself and the
cause of the disasters he and his wife meet with when
they enter the fair: "I have an affair i' the fair,
Win, a puppet-play of mine own making -- say nothing --
that I writ for the motion-man, which you must see, Win"
(I, v, 131-134).
And even the minor characters are given comments
reflective of the author's views. When the disaster-prone
Cokes refuses to listen to his domineering servant Wasp's
counsel because Wasp has "been i' the stocks"(V
iv 88), possibly a reference to Jonson himself having
been jailed, Wasp replies sarcastically, "Nay, then
the date of my authority is out; I must think no longer
to reign, my government is at an end. He that will
correct another must want fault in himself" (V iv 89-91).
Joan Trash attacks Leatherhead as a "parcel-poet and
an inginer" (II ii 15) and asks him, "Are you
puffed up with the pride of your wares? Your arsedine?"
(II ii 17-18). Leatherhead, in preparing the puppet-play
for performance, reveals in his discussion with Cokes a
condescending (but no doubt realistic) attitude toward
the audience:
Cokes:
But do you play it according to the printed book? I
have read that.
Leatherhead: By no means, sir.
Cokes: No? How then?
Leatherhead: A better way, sir. That is too learned
and poetical for our audience. What do they know what
Hellespont is? Guilty of true love's blood? Or what
Abydos is? Or 'the other Sestos hight'?
Cokes: Th'art i'the right, I do not know myself.
Leatherhead: No, I have entreated Master Littlewit to
take a little pains to reduce it to a more familiar
strain for our people. (V iii 93-103)
These meta-theatrical
elements in Bartholomew Fair have two
contradictory effects. On the one had, they are appealing
to the audience, as Alan Fisher notes: "Bartholomew
Fair is (Jonson's) friendliest play, because he
seems to satirize not only folly but authority like his
own..."(82-83). But the self-satire does not
entirely obscure the play's underhanded commentary on its
audience's ignorance. For example, in the play's
Induction, which Fisher says "treats its playhouse
audiences with open contempt"(83), the Book-Holder (another
stand-in for the author) says of the play about to be
presented, "...the author hath writ it just to his
meridian, and the scale of the grounded judgements here,
his playfellows in wit" (Induction, 53-55). The
author has condescended (like the fictional collaborators
Leatherhead and Littlewit) to keep his play at a level
which the audience can understand. The Scrivener
announces further on:
In which time the author promiseth to present them, by us,
with a new sufficient play called Bartholmew Fair, merry,
and as full of noise as sport, made to delight all, and
to offend none -- provided they have either the wit or
the honesty to think well of themselves. (Induction, 77-81).
These are hardly "friendly" words, and they
reveal the flip side of Jonson's generous spirit, this
compulsion (never fully overcome) to put himself above
those whom his business is to entertain: an attitude at
odds with the essential humility demanded by the
theatrical medium. Says Fisher, "On these views
Jonson's wit retains its hostility and his audiences must
retain their discomfort" (83).
Conclusion
As a playwright distinctive in his ability to make his
audience feel "discomfort," Jonson was equally
adept at pleasing his audience, and the enduring appeal
of the latter two plays discussed indicates that he was
enough of a pragmatist to realize that he had to give at
least equal weight to the pleasing and the troubling
elements of his plays. And he was in many ways a creature
of his time, as much as his superior education set him
apart from his audience and most of his colleagues: for
example, the implicit misogyny and the obsession with
cuckoldry in Bartholomew Fair (ironically,
characteristics as likely to offend modern audiences as
to please contemporary ones) shows that he was familiar
with the common concerns and prejudices of his audience,
and had no hesitation in exploiting them for the purposes
of comedy. Observes Erin Roland-Leone:
There are
many things that Ben Jonson does not hold sacred in
this play: legal fanaticism, Puritanism,
relationships, merchandising, women. The crux of the
issue, though, is that whatever else may come and go,
women will always be women. To make indictments
against an entire gender...seems to contradict Jonson's
supposed humanism. However, this also puts him in the
mainstream regarding the problem of women (14)
With such
obviously mainstream ideas, the question needs to be
raised as to whether Jonson really was a man apart from
his contemporaries, and whether, indeed, he was ever
really secure in such a notion of himself. Certainly, the
defensive and desperate tone of many of his responses to
his "base detractors", and his increasing
tendency to cut himself down to size via his fictional
counterparts, suggest that he was not secure. His
obsession with authorial control notwithstanding, Jonson
must have been cognizant of the theatrical medium's
resistance to control by a single author: theatre is
collaborative in nature, and the author of a play
essentially relinquishes control and/or ownership of his
work when he hands it over for production. Boehrer
comments on this characteristic of theatre:
Himself a
product of authorial labour, the author becomes one
moving fiction among a host of others; moreover, just
as the others - Volpone, Subtle, Brainworm, and so on
- nonetheless remain subject to subsequent
refictionalization through the media of performance,
reading, literary history, etc., so does Jonson, too.
His work - even his own name - becomes appropriable
by others, and thus it resists Jonson's own
insistence upon the determinacy of authorial labour,
essence, and property (305-306)
It has been
the argument of this essay, however,that Jonson, at least
from Volpone onward, was fully conscious of the
essential "fiction" of his authorship, as much
as he resisted the idea and incorporated the resultant
tension into his plays. His awareness of his ultimate
dependence on the audience can be seen in so simple and
complex a gesture as his ending of Volpone: he
can ask the audience to "clap their hands," but
he cannot insist on it. The audience can always choose
not to applaud, or alternately (and as they frequently
did) throw at the stage "All the foul i' the Fair...all
the dirt in Smithfield." Art, for all its lofty
purposes, happens on the ground, and in Jonson's "dangerous
age" it is neither a clean nor safe business. Any
serious artist must be prepared for the "dirt"
- of which, justly or unjustly, Jonson received more than
his share - along with the praise.
Notes
1. I am referring here to Jonson's conflict with the
authorities and imprisonment resulting from the presumed
slander in his collaborative plays The Isle of Dogs (1597)
and Eastward Ho! (1604), the threatened prosecution of
Jonson by the people attacked in Poetaster, and the
commercial failures of Poetaster and Sejanus. (Hibbard,
xii-xiii).
2. Jonson defends himself from the criticism that he
wrote slowly at the beginning of Volpone:
This we were bid to credit from our poet,
Whose true scope, if you would know it,
In all his poems still hath been this measure:
To mix profit with your pleasure;
And not as some, whose throats their envy failing,
Cry hoarsely, "all he writes is railing,"
And when his plays come forth, think they can flout them,
With saying, "He was a year about them."
(Prologue 5-12)
He also comments on the need for a serious writer to
revise constantly in his poem, "To the Memory Of My
Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and What He
Hath Left Us:"
Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.
For though the Poet's matter, Nature be,
His Art doth give the fashion. And, that he,
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil: turn the same,
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,
For a good Poet's made, as well as born.
3. As an example of this device, Shakespeare in A
Midsummer Night's Dream has the actor portraying Puck
step partly out of character to address the audience at
the end of the play, essentially to beg
their indulgence:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumb'red here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend. (V i 412-419).
4. Re. Jonson's tendency to overwrite: G.R. Hibbard
writes of the opening of Jonson's Sejanus in 1603, "Still
underrated by many critics, this is, in fact, one of the
greatest political plays of the time; but its massive
achievement did not save it from the wrath of the
groundlings who could not tolerate its long speeches."
(xiii). Anthony Burgess writes, "When The Poetaster
or His Arraignment was first performed by the boys at the
Blackfriars, it impressed more with its smell of the lamp
than by the sting of its satire. Ben shows off his
learning in speeches of great length (one can hear those
children crying as the lines were beaten into them...)"
(176).
Works Cited
Beaurline, L.A. "Moralists, Scoundrels and Ninnies."
Modern Language Quarterly 46.3 (1985): 316-325.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Ben
Jonson's Volpone, or The Fox. New Haven: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1988.
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. "Epicoene, Charivari,
Skimmington." English Studies 75.1 (1994): 17-33.
___. "The Poet of Labour: Authorship and Property in
Ben Jonson." Philological Quarterly 72.3 (1993): 289-312.
Burgess, Anthony. Shakespeare. Middlesex: Penguin Books,
1970.
Cox, John D. and Kastan, David Scott, eds. A New History
of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997.
Dekker, Thomas. Satiromastix. The Dramatic Works, Volume
I. Ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1953.
Eliot, T.S. Essays on Elizabethan Drama. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1932.
Fisher, Alan. "Jonson's Funnybone." Studies in
Philology 94.1 (1997) 59-84.
Hibbard, G.R. "Introduction." Bartholmew Fair.
London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1977. xi-xxxii.
Holland, Peter. "A cheater and his punk brought low."
Times Literary Supplement. 25 Oct. 1996: 20.
Jonson, Ben. Bartholmew Fair. Ed. G. R. Hibbard. London:
Ernest Benn Ltd., 1977.
___. Poetaster. Complete Plays Volume II. Ed. G.A. Wilkes.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. 125-228.
___. "To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr.
William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us." Ben
Jonson's Literary Criticism. Ed. James D. Redwine, Jr.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. 165-167
___. Volpone. Ed. Alvin B. Kernan. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1962.
Kay, W. David. "Classicism and complexity in Ben
Jonson's art." Modern Language Quarterly 43.4 (1982):
395-403.
Maston, Jeffrey. "Playwriting: Authorship and
Collaboration." Cox and Kastan 357-382.
McCanles, Michael. Jonsonian Discriminations: The
Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility. Toronto: U
of T Press, 1992.
Miles, Rosalind. Ben Jonson: His Life and Work. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
Roland-Leone, Erin. "Jonson's Vessels Runneth Over:
A Look at the Ladies of Bartholomew Fair." English
Language Notes 33.3 (1995): 12-14.
Salingar, Leo. "Comic Form in Ben Jonson: Volpone
and the Philosopher's Stone." Bloom 45-66.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The
Complete Works. Ed. Peter Alexander. London: Wm. Collins
& Sons Co. Ltd., 1978. 198-222.
Sweeney, John Gordon Sweeney III. Jonson and the
Psychology of Public Theatre: To Coin the Spirit, Spend
the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
© May 2001, by Kathleen A. Prendergast
email the author |