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BEN JONSON

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BEN JONSON

A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS

Edited by
Jonas A. Barish

ASPECnUMM

Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, N. j.

Third printing August, ip6^

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION— /ona5 A, Barish l

BEN JONSON— T. S. Eliot 14

TRADITION AND BEN JONSON— L. C. Knights 24

AN INTRODUCTION TO BEN JONSON— Harry Levin 40

MOROSE BEN JONSON— Edmund Wilson 60

INTRODUCTION TO Every Man In His Humour— ^r^/iwr Sale 75

INTRODUCTION TO Every Man Out of His Humour—

C. H, Herford 82

THE DOUBLE PLOT IN Volpone— /onoj A. Barish 93

COMIC PLOTS: The Alchemist— Paw/ Goodman 106

Epicene — Edward B, Partridge 121

UNIFYING SYMBOLS IN THE COMEDY OF BEN JONSON—

Ray L. Hefner, Jr. 133

Catiline AND THE NATURE OF JONSON 'S TRAGIC FABLE—

Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr, 147

THE JONSONIAN MASQUE AS A LITERARY FORM—

Dolora Cunningham 160

Chronology of Important Dates 175

Notes on the Editor and Authors 177

Selected Bibliography on Ben Jonson 179

BEN JONSON

Introduction

by Jonas A. Barish

Probably no major author in English has suffered such a catastrophic
decline in popularity since his own day as has Ben Jonson. Certainly none
has been so punished for the crime of not being Shakespeare. Jonson was
from the beginning tied to the kite of Shakespeare criticism, or perhaps
it would be more exact to say that he was dragged captive behind the
triumphal chariot of Shakespeare worship. In the seventeenth century it
was fashionable, and profitable, to compare them, as Dryden did, to set
them side by side as the two giants of the English theater, to discuss
their respective virtues and evaluate their respective merits. By the time
the century was over criticism had rendered its verdict: Shakespeare's
pre-eminence would henceforth pass unchallenged. But by this time the
luckless Jonson was yoked to Shakespeare in an odious tandem from
which two centuries of subsequent comment would scarcely suffice to
extricate him.

During the eighteenth century Jonson remained much appreciated as
a writer for the stage. His chief plays held the theater fairly steadily till
about 1785. But during this same period his good name was being
poisoned in print by the editors of Shakespeare, who discovered early
that a convenient and safe way to praise *'their" poet was to abuse Jonson.
The well-authenticated tradition of Jonson's conviviality gave way to a
fraudulent countermyth: that Jonson, throughout his life, harbored an
envenomed dislike of Shakespeare, whom he lost no opportunity of re-
viling and ridiculing, despite the fact — so ran the tale — that it was
Shakespeare to whom he owed his start in the theater.

This insecure edifice of fantasy rested on a few bricks of fact. Jonson
had, to be sure, regarded his own kind of drama as superior to Shake-
speare's. He had poked fun at the rambling chronicle play, at the me-
andering romance. He had alluded slightingly to the "servant-monster"
in The Tempest, and had dismissed Pericles as a ''mouldy tale." ^ He

^For "servant-monster" see the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, line 127; for Pericles,
the "Ode to Himself," composed after the failure of The New Inn, line 21.

2 Jones A, Barish

was to pay for these sallies by being charged with conspiratorial malice,
and by having his works ransacked for ill-natured allusions. The prologue
to Every Man In His Humour was read not as a critical manifesto but as
a savage diatribe (an "insolent invective'*) against Shakespeare, wherein
every rift was loaded with rancorous ore. It was not enough that Jonson
should be satirizing the history plays of York and Lancaster: when he
speaks of the popular medley in which an infant is born, grows to man-
hood, and ends as an oldster, all within the space of a single afternoon,
he must needs be sneering at The Winter's Tale — Perdita, evidently, be-
ing the ancient greybeard in question. The lines on the creaking throne,
the nimble quib, the roird bullet and tempestuous drum, must in turn
be ^'pointed at" King Lear and The Tempest. For where else in Eliza-
bethan drama could one find storms and thunder? Jonson being so
addicted to this style of virulent allusion, it followed that Morose's de-
spairing wish, in Epicene, to attend a play that was nothing but fights
at sea, with drum, trumpet, and target, rather than stay married a
moment longer to a rasping shrew of a wife — this cry of misery could
only be a furious onslaught on Antony and Cleopatra. And it must also
have been Jonson, with his fever to pillory Shakespeare, who composed
the prologue to Henry VIII, where the spectator who comes for a bawdy
tale or a noise of targets is teasingly warned that he will be disappointed.
How did Jonson come to write a prologue to a play by his "enemy'7
Critical ingenuity rose triumphantly to the answer: he did so with the
collusion of Shakespeare's associates, who smuggled the offensive lines
into the play after its author had retired to Stratford-on-Avon and could
no longer defend himself. "Jonson, in all probability, maliciously stole
an opportunity to throw in his envious and spiteful invective before the
representation of his rival's play." ^

Once a fable of this sort finds proper soil, it sprouts like a weed; it
burgeons, and runs wild. The eighteenth century critics — those who were
involved — competed with each other in ascribing ignoble motives to
Jonson. They charged him not only with parody but with plagiarism,
with scurvy attacks on his fellow players, with a want of decency and
decorum. They imagined, and gloated over, scenes of discomfiture in

2 Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (London, 1784), I, 191. The phrase "insolent
invective" also comes from Davies (II, 37), as does the expression "pointed at" (II, 35),
in connection with the presumed allusions to Shakespeare.

Most of the charges against Jonson rehearsed in this paragraph may be found
assembled (and heatedly attacked) in W[illiam] Gifford, ed.. The Works of Ben Jonson
(London, 1816), I, i-ccxci, where the interested reader should look first. See also
Octavius G. Gilchrist, An Examination of the charges maintained by Messrs. Malone,
Chalmers, and others, of Ben Jonsons enmity . . . toward Shakespeare (London, 1808).

In my summary I have made no attempt to reproduce the actual order in which the
charges were made, but rather to give an idea of the aimless crisscross of pseudo-reason-
ing that lies behind most of them.

Introduction 3

which he was forced to acknowledge Shakespeare's superiority.^ Attempt-
ing to account for the gifts he received from noble friends — money,
books, hospitality — one critic reached a sage diagnosis: blackmail. The
noble friends were afraid of being lampooned in Jonson^s next satire;
they were paying him to keep his mouth shut.^

Other writers, less scrupulous, crossed the borderline from misinterpre-
tation into forgery, in order to defame Jonson. A certain Robert Shiells,
a Scotsman, in 1753 reprinted Jonson's Conversations with Drummond
of Hawthornden in an edition of Gibber's Lives of the Poets, Evidently
judging that Drummond had not expressed himself with sufficient vi-
rulence, Shiells silently interpolated into Drummond*s reminiscences an
apocryphal sentence of his own: "[Jonson] was in his personal character
the very reverse of Shakespear, as surly, ill-natured, proud, and disagree-
able, as Shakespear with ten times his merit was gentle, good-natured,
easy, and amiable." ^ Since, for the next half-century, Drummond's mem-
oir was known only in Shiells's version, all the literate world who cared
about the matter could assume that this sentence represented the opinion
of one who had known Jonson personally, and well. It became possible
for Isaac D'Israeli to say in 1814, apropos of the Conversations, that "if
I err not in my recollection, I believe that he [Jonson] has not spoken
favourably of a single individual!"! ^

Shiells, however, had already been outdone in inventiveness by the
Shakespearean actor Macklin. In The General Advertiser for 1748,
Macklin published a letter purporting to describe a pamphlet from the
reign of Charles I, bearing the quaint title, "Old Ben's Light Heart made
Heavy by Young John's Melancholy Lover." The burden of the pamphlet
is another elaborate canard about Jonson. Jonson is presented as in-
satiable in his malice against Shakespeare, hounding him in life, and
after death persecuting his disciples, in the present case Ford. "Ben,"
affirms Macklin, with that familiarity by which the eighteenth century
critics strove to convey their contempt,

Ben was by nature splenetic and sour; with a share of envy. . . .

This raised him many enemies, who towards the close of his life en-
deavoured to dethrone this tyrant, as the pamphlet stiles him, out of the
dominion of the theatre. And what greatly contributed to their design, was
the slights and malignances which the rigid Ben too frequently threw out
against the lowly Shakspeare, whose fame since his death, as appears by the

'^For these particular charges see Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, I, 155; II, 51-55,
111-114.

* See Gifford, Works of Jonson, I, xcii-xciii, citing Chalmers.

^Theophilus Gibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London,
1753) , I, 241. See Gifford, Works of Jonson, I, xL

^Quarrels of Authors (London, 1814), III, 305.

4 Jones A. Barish

pamphlet, was grown too great for Ben's envy either to hear with or wound.
It would greatly exceed the limits of your paper to set down all the
contempts and invectives which were uttered and written by Ben, and are
collected and produced in this pamphlet, as unanswerable and shaming
evidences to prove his ill-nature and ingratitude to Shakspeare, who first
introduced him to the theatre and fame J

And this letter too was destined to be cited and recited by the editors
of Shakespeare as crushing proof of Jonson's malevolence, until Malone
demonstrated that the pamphlet was a hoax from beginning to end, com-
pounded out of tears and flapdoodle by Macklin in order to puff his own
forthcoming revival of a play by Ford. Even so, there were those who
could not bring themselves to disbelieve its authenticity. Malone, himself
infected with anti-Jonsonism, had exposed it only with apology, and
reluctance, knowing that in the eyes of a proper Shakespearean any
mitigation of the charge against Jonson was tantamount to an attack on
Shakespeare.

What has happened — -to transpose the matter into terms which the
editors in question would neither have understood nor approved — is
that they have come to see in Shakespeare a Christ figure, and in Jonson
both the Judas and the mob demanding blood. Jonson*s "slights'* and
^'malignances,'' his *'sneers," "contempts," and "invectives," constitute
his direct persecution, his scourging and buffeting, of Shakespeare. The
Judas kiss is his famous dedicatory epistle to the 1623 Folio, in which
he addresses Shakespeare as "beloved master" and exalts him above
Sophocles — for had not Dryden himself pronounced these verses "spar-
ing" and "invidious"? ^

Why the case against Jonson should have been carried to such ex-
tremes is not clear. One contributory factor, doubtless, was the tendency
for eighteenth century scholars to view Elizabethan literary life unhis-
torically, in terms of its Augustan counterpart. Mistaking the Globe for
Drury Lane, and Paul's Walk for Grubstreet, they credited Jonson, or
discredited him, with the waspish behavior they had come to expect of
their own contemporaries in the theatrical world.

To the extent to which they articulated their own motives, the critics
aimed to deify Shakespeare, to show that in the precise degree to which
Jonson was raucous, hostile, and vindictive, Shakespeare was gentle,
mild, and forbearing. The hidden analogy with Christ insured that every
act of aggression on Jonson's part would redound to Shakespeare's
greater glory. But this ostensible purpose, however perverse in itself,
concealed, one suspects, a deeper one: the desire to find a suitable victim

"^ The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare [ed. James Boswell] (London, 1821),
I, 403.

^Alexander Pope, ed., The Works of Shakespeare (London, 1725), I, xii. See Gifford,
I, cclii.

Introduction 5

to maul and mangle. Macklin, as the excerpt from his letter shows, is
not really interested in exalting Shakespeare. He is interested in calum-
niating Jonson, for it is that that gratifies him. The elaborate tender-
ness for Shakespeare that expresses itself by inventing calumnies against
Jonson seems, at length, sadistic; it masks precisely the ferocity that is
projected onto Jonson. It comes at last to have about it, in however
attenuated form, the atmosphere of a witch-hunt, or a lynching-party.

Jonson's champion, when he finally arrived, was the redoubtable Gif-
ford, a scholar with a hot temper and a flair for polemics equal to Jon-
son's. In preparing his edition of Jonson's collected works — the first of
its kind to make much pretense to scholarship — Gifford regarded it as
a prime duty to cleanse Jonson's memory from the blackening it had
received at the hands of the editors of Shakespeare. In a prefatory memoir
of Jonson's life, and then more systematically in an essay entitled "Proofs
of Ben Jonson's Malignity, from the Commentators on Shakespeare," ^
Gifford reviews the charges against Jonson, one by one, and reduces the
bulk of them to absurdity. He could not quite make a clean sweep. Jon-
son had, beyond ^ doubt, on a few occasions spoken caustically of
Shakespeare. But he could topple the whole rickety structure of Jonson's
conspiratorial hatred and send it crashing into Lethe. When James Bos-
well (the Younger) reissued Malone's Shakespeare in 1821, he prefaced
it with a defense of Malone against Gifford. But while vindicating his
friend from the imputation of dishonesty, he granted that where Jonson
was concerned Malone had been trained in a school of prejudice, and
that in this domain, unhappily, the zeal for truth that inspired his re-
searches on Shakespeare flickered more fitfuUy.^^

Gifford, in any case, effectively silenced the chorus of detraction
against Jonson as a man. He could do nothing, however, to relieve him,
as an artist, from the comparison with Shakespeare that by now had
become a conditioned reflex, though this too was a topic on which he
had expounded with eloquence:

Shakspeare wants no light but his own. As he never has been equalled, and
in all human probability never will be equalled, it seems an invidious
employ, at best, to speculate minutely on the precise degree to which others
fell short of him. Let him with his own Julius Caesar bestride the narrow
world like a colossus; that is his due; but let not the rest be compelled to
walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find themselves dishonourable
graves M

^ Works of Jonson, I, ccxlix-ccxci.

^^ Plays and Poems of Shakespeare, I, xxxi.

" Works of Jonson, I, ccxii-ccxiii.

6 Jones A, Barish

But even without Shakespeare, the onset of romanticism was destined
to eclipse Jonson. The eighteenth century, while undermining his repu-
tation as a man, had continued to enjoy his plays. With the close of
the century and the rise of a new sensibility, Jonson ceased to be a live
force in the theater and became a dead author, an anatomy, useful for
exposing the errors of the past, but requiring much pickling. The roman-
tic notion of the artist conflicted with the Jonsonian image at every
point. The artist as seer, as warbler of native woodnotes wild, as
dreamer, as nocturnal wanderer, as sensuous interpreter of the physical
world, or decipherer of a mystical one; the artist as beautiful and in-
effectual angel, as wind or sensitive plant — none of these roles suited
Jonson. Everything that Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale was, Jon-
son was not. By his own choice he remained perdix, the partridge, a drab
bird, an earth-dweller, fearful of high places and undistinguished as a
melodist. His poetic creed stressed such prosy qualities as workmanship,
rather than inspiration, judgment rather than lyric excitement. Nine-
teenth century comment on Jonson harps on his deficient powers of
flight and song. Jonson, says Hazlitt, could not soar: "His genius ... re-
sembles the grub more than the butterfly, plods and grovels on, wants
wings to wanton in the idle summer's air, and catch the golden light of
poetry." ^^ Note that Hazlitt, in describing Jonson's shortcomings, gives
a sample of the way Jonson should have written. *'Wants wings to
wanton in the idle summer's air" — here is the critic showing the poet
how. If only Jonson, implies Hazlitt, had been able to say things like
that, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him.

The complaint from John Addington Symonds at the other end of the
century is similar: Jonson could not sing. True, he possessed learning,
energy, persistence, and other estimable traits. But,

Jonson paid the penalty of these extraordinary qualities. It follows from
what I have said of his work that he put nothing into his plays which
patient criticism may not extract: the wand of the enchanter has not passed
over them. There is no music which we hear but shall not capture; no
aerial hues that elude description; no "scent of violets hidden in the grass";
no "light that never was on sea or land"; no "casements opening on the
foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn." These higher gifts of poetry,
with which Shakespeare — "nature's child" — ^was so richly endowed, are
almost absolutely wanting in Ben Jonson.is

Behind Symonds' criticism, as behind that of A. W. Schlegel, whom he
is paraphrasing,!^ lies the notion that poetry exists to capture the in-

"^ Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, 1819), p. 71.
^ Ben Jonson, English Worthies (New York, 1898), p. 61.

"See A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, rev.
A. J. W. Morrison, Bohn Standard Library (London, 1846), p. 461.

Introduction 7

effable, to set snares for the invisible. Jonson, who dealt by preference
with everyday realities of the most palpable sort, was by such criteria
hardly recognizable as a poet at all.

Jonson as poet was chided for his failure to chant, to soar, to cast
spells; Jonson as playwright was reproached with a failure to create life-
like and endearing characters. Romanticism, with its interest in in-
dividual personality, was beginning to cherish psychological portraiture
in the drama. At the same time, while wishing to hear the unique accent
of the individual soul, it wished also to hear the still sad music that
bound soul to soul. Shakespeare satisfied on both counts, Jonson on nei-
ther. Shakespeare's characters possessed some of the mysteriousness of real
people; they seemed part of nature rather than literature. One wanted
to know where they had come from and what happened to them after-
ward. And even at their most depraved, even when they most villainously
declared their alienation from other men, they managed to express in a
dozen ways their common bond with the rest of humanity.

Jonson offered no such satisfactions. His characters — so it was charged
— were not individuals, but blueprints of types, or else, on the contrary,
they were so frantically individual, so rampantly eccentric, that they
ceased to seem human altogether. They were islands that never had and
never could form part of the mainland. Moreover they belonged not to
life but to literature, and to a labored, unspontaneous sort of literature
at that. They did not strike one as "extemporary creations thrown off
in the heat of the pen*';^^ they seemed "made up*' rather than "real.'*
They never prompted one to ask how many children they might have
had, or what their childhood might have been like. And far from strik-
ing chords of sympathy in readers, they tended to provoke a fascinated
repugnance, or a derisive dismissal. They were not, furthermore, the sort
of people one wished to live among. Nineteenth century readers thought
of themselves, precisely, as living among the characters of fiction. They
inquired into their good breeding and their family connections. In
Jonson, as Hazlitt witheringly observed, one always finds oneself in low
company.i^ Even the least prejudiced critics — Coleridge, Ward, and Swin-
burne— confessed themselves revolted by the rankness of Jonsonian real-
ism, and dismayed by the absence of "goodness of heart" in his person-
ages, his lack of a "cordial interest'' in his own dramatic creations.^"^

It follows that when Jonson was praised, as he sometimes was, he was
likely to be praised for odd reasons. Coleridge endorsed Sejanus and

^ Isaac Disraeli, Amenities of Literature (Paris, 1842), II, 183.

'^^ English Comic Writers, p. 75. Hazlitt continues, "His [Jonson 's] comedy, in a word,
has not what Shakespeare somewhere calls 'bless'd conditions.* " To which one is sorely
tempted to retort, "Bless'd fig's-endl"

^"^ Coleridge, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets, ed.
Mrs. H. N. Coleridge (London, 1849), I» 278, 270-271; Adolphus William Ward, A
History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne (London, 1875), I,
567-568; Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson (London, 1889), pp. 60, 29.

8 Jones A. Barish

Catiline for their usefulness as versified history. Ward reckoned it as
one advantage of the plot of Poetaster that it allowed Jonson to parade
his learning. And Swinburne noted approvingly that Volpone contained
'*a savour of something like romance." ^^ To praise Jonson, one had to
turn him into a schoolmaster, or an exhibitionist of learning, or a pur-
veyor of exoticism. Needless to say, none of these rather desperate shifts
afforded a sound basis for appreciation. As long as criticism of the drama
continued to center on character — as long as readers continued to judge
dramatic personages as though they were about to invite them to supper,
insisting that they have good hearts and good table manners — ^Jonson
was doomed to play satyr to Shakespeare's Hyperion.

In the various ways in which the critics taxed Jonson, they did not so
much say wrong things as inflate right things out of all reasonable pro-
portion. Even the eighteenth century editors, who turned Jonson into
a hobgoblin, started from something real: the intense sense of personality
that radiates from everything he wrote. On this score he forms an authen-
tic contrast to Shakespeare. Shakespeare effaces himself nearly to the
point of anonymity. Jonson always conveys the sense of his own comba-
tive presence. He hectors his audiences, he harangues his readers, he
stands before the recipients of his verse epistles "passionately kind and
angry" ^^ as the occasion requires. He forces us, in short, to react to him
as a man. Too many readers have been driven by Jonson's assertiveness
into taking up postures of defense. Postures of defense, however, once
grown habitual, are difficult to distinguish from postures of attack. They
become postures of attack. Hence, no doubt, the tone of personal outrage
in which Jonson's unfriendly critics often discuss him. Hence, also, per-
haps, the fact that the partisan of Jonson is likely to breathe a little fire
and brimstone — Gifford, for instance, whose proneness to passionate con-
troversy was notorious.

Ill

It was easy, in any case, for th€ post-Romantic generations to draw up
a heavy indictment against Jonson. But the evidence of Jonson's genius
kept rising to confound the indicters, and to demand a reassessment.
T. E. Hulme's now celebrated essay on classicism and romanticism —
probably written by 1914, though not published till well after its author's
death, in 1924 — showed the way the critical winds would blow.20 It re-
minded the literate community that there was more in books than the

^® Coleridge, Notes and Lectures, I, 282; Ward, Dramatic Literature, I, 564; Swinburne,
Ben Jonson, p. 35.

" Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden, line 687.
^See Speculations, 2d ed. (London, 1954), pp. 111-140.

Introduction 9

romantics, in their most extravagant reveries, had dreamed of: that such
qualities as wit, plainness, and flintiness of texture might legitimately
inhabit the house of art. Although Hulme did not speak directly of
Jonson, he presaged the moment when Jonson's critics would cease com-
placently enumerating his defects, and turn to a positive reassessment of
his virtues, as others would do for Donne, Marvell, Pope, and Dryden.

Before Hulme's essay was published, another new voice had spoken,
that of T. S. Eliot, reviewing, first in The Times Literary Supplement
and then in The Athenaeum, a study of Jonson that rehearsed much
the old case against Jonson in much the old tone of voice. Eliot's re-
views, later combined into a single essay, constituted a genuine fresh
look, the unconstrained responsiveness of an alert intelligence surveying
well-travelled ground. The romantics had looked on Jonsonian terrain
and seen only a wasteland. Eliot looked again, and found himself in a
land of plenty. He started, as a practicing poet might well start, with an
inspection of Jonsonian dramatic verse. From the most unpromising play
in the Jonson canon, Catiline, he disinterred two scenes which he labelled
successes. He then proceeded to define as closely as he could the nature
of the success, to point out that the vitality of Jonsonian verse lay in
"the design of the whole" rather than piecemeal in single lines. With this
demonstration Eliot freed Jonson from the tyranny of the '"touchstone"
method of appreciation, with its exclusive interest in nuggets, its clamor
for "memorable" lines. Having done so much, he moved to consider
Jonsonian comedy more at large, fishing out one by one the moldiest
terms in the critical armory — "humours," "satire," "caricature" — scrub-
bing them off and returning them clean of outline and distinct of mean-
ing. Though doubtless as much a symptom of the new climate as a cause,
Eliot's essay must in any case be accounted the most significant piece of
writing on Jonson since the seventeenth century. Together with Eliot's
other essays on seventeenth century poets, it disintoxicated a generation
of readers still drugged, as Hulme would have said, on romanticism. It
renewed their responsiveness to such Jonsonian virtues as craftsmanship
and hard comic sense, and it became, as a result, the indispensable start-
ing-point for all subsequent comment on Jonson.

To Eliot's essay must be added another milestone, the collected edition
of Jonson's works by C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson. This
monument of scholarship, which engrossed the energies of three eminent
scholars for nearly a lifetime, provided, for the first time, authoritative
texts of all Jonson's known works, and a critical apparatus of staggering
fullness and richness. It made Jonson available, and by its very presence
it constituted a defense. In his biographical sketch in the opening
volume, C. H. Herford presented a Jonson unblurred by bardolatry and
undistorted by angry partisanship. His survey of Jonson's creative
achievement displays similar virtues: he refuses to parrot cliches about
Jonson, but refuses also to be stampeded into unconventional statements

lo Jones A, Barish

for the sake of unconventionality. Unfortunately, nineteenth century pre-
suppositions about drama often impair the relevance of his judgments.
At crucial moments he tends to fall back on the inappropriate criterion
of psychology as a measure of excellence, or to embark on the mistaken,
and misleading, quest for "sympathetic" characters in the jungle of Jon-
sonian dramatic personages. Herford's virtues and weaknesses may be
sampled together in the Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour,
reprinted below.

Since Eliot's essay, and thanks to the labors of Herford and Simpson,
Jonson criticism has at last commenced to grow green. It cannot yet,
however, be said to be wholly flourishing, and one reason lies in the
nature of Jonson's appeal, of which Eliot had this to say:

The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not
in the single verse, but in the design of the whole. But not many people
are capable of discovering for themselves the beauty which is only found
after labor; and Jonson's industrious readers have been those whose interest
was historical and curious, and those who thought that in discovering the
historical and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well.
When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his
classical scholarship or of seventeenth century manners. We mean intelligent
saturation in his work as a whole. . . .21

It must be admitted that Jonson's most industrious readers continue to
be largely those whose interest is historical and curious. This is not ex-
clusively true of Jonson, but it is particularly true of him. He remains
the special domain of scholars, from whose ranks the critics more strictly
speaking emerge. It is chiefly the haunters of libraries and academies
who have been able to achieve the intelligent saturation in Jonson's
works as a whole that Eliot desiderates, because the rapid changes in
language and culture have pushed Jonson out of the reach of readers
without special instruction. Jonson criticism, in consequence, often has
an antiquarian tinge about it. The critic has arrived at Jonson partly
through a preoccupation with history, or language, or "seventeenth cen-
tury manners." And his most fruitful efforts on Jonson's behalf have
often been glossorial. Jonson's plays, of course, are not riddles, and his
poems are not Chinese puzzles. He does not, as a rule, stand in need of
the sort of explication that can make an impenetrable-looking poem by
Donne burst out into sudden blaze. Still, judicious "placing" of Jonson-
ian drama in its proper contexts, such as that performed in some of the
essays below, can cast sudden illumination, and bring out color and high
relief in what at first seems merely tame or flat.

Likewise, the quest begun by Eliot, and pursued by younger critics,
for structural principles in Jonsonian drama other than the threadbare

^ Selected Essays ipiy-ip^2 (New York, 1932), p. 128. See below, p. 15.

Introduction ii

and nearly unusable ones of "intrigue** and ''character" (understood in
their old-fashioned senses), has begun to bear fruit in studies of symbol-
ism, significant allusion, and generic form. Jonson has benefited from
the twentieth century rediscovery of form, from the reawakened atten-
tion to total structure, which the last century generally neglected. Just
as the Romantics and their successors valued the striking line more than
the ''design of the whole'* in a poem, so they valued also the striking
scene, the passionate crisis, more than the total design of a play. They fa-
vored authors like John Webster, not only because of their occasional
sublimities, but because the sublimities so often rose abruptly out of
nothing, like architectural ruins in a landscape. The eighteenth century
had anthologized the "beauties'* of its favorite authors; the romantic
critics compiled treasuries of their favorite scenes from Elizabethan
drama. But the eighteenth century had also had Dr. Johnson, who re-
proached Shakespeare for concluding his plots too casually, for dismiss-
ing his characters with too little regard for poetic justice. It was to a
similar concern for conclusions and cadences that Eliot restored twen-
tieth century criticism when he insisted on the total design, and his fol-
lowers have returned to Jonson with renewed respect for the "labored
art** that impressed Jonson*s contemporaries. Jonson, in his own critical
pronouncements, stressed decorum — the subordination of details to the
whole — and in his works he strove to construct harmonious unities, to
make the parts fit, and the end crown all. His plays are, as a result,
through-composed to a degree unique among writers of his period. It
was by virtue of constructive mastery that Dryden accorded him first
place among English comic playwrights, and one of the most rewarding
tasks of twentieth century criticism has been to take up where Dryden
left off, to discover where, and how, and to what degree, Jonson fulfilled
his own prescription for excellence.

In the pages below the reader will hear one discordant note. If Eliot*s
essay long ago earned pride of place as the classic of appreciation of
Jonson, Edmund Wilson's essay, "Morose Ben Jonson,** seems likely to
raise itself by merit to the bad eminence of the classic of demolition.
Eliot hoped to forestall prejudice by signalling to the reader some of the
riches of Jonson*s dramatic universe. Wilson undertakes to buttress
prejudice by making himself, in effect, a spokesman for the prejudiced.
He finds new terms for old repugnances by investing them in the intimi-
dating vocabulary of psychoanalysis. He certifies Jonson to us as an anal
erotic. More familiarly, more particularly, Jonson was a pedant, a word-
hoarder, a niggard; a spiteful, envious person; his characters do not seem
real, as Shakespeare's do; he cannot sing of love; his lyric gift is small.

If it is an editor's duty to include a piece as lively and challenging as
Wilson's in a collection like the present one, it is also a duty to caution
the unwary. Of Wilson's thesis one may say first that it should be taken
for what it is, a conscious attempt to set forth Jonson's deficiencies in

12 Jones A. Barish

full glare. It constitutes an anatomy in which healthy tissue is passed
over in silence, for the most part, and diseased tissue lingeringly dis-
sected. Much is said about Jonson's peevishness, but nothing that might
account for the affection and regard in which he was held, throughout
his life, by so many fellow authors and noble patrons.

One may say further of Wilson's ingenious psychograph that it pro-
motes, if it does not perpetrate, a confusion between the artist's emo-
tional problems and his art. For every symptom of maladjustment the
patient receives a black mark as an artist. But this is too simple, as who
should know better than the author of The Wound and the Bow} Just
as few authors will survive the comparison with Shakespeare to which
Jonson is perpetually being subjected, so few will survive such an inquest
into their psychic health. Hang all that offend that way, and one will
soon be forced to **give out a commission" for more authors. No doubt,
neurotic habits may warp creative activity, transmit themselves crip-
plingly from the artist to his art. But the emotionally deranged may also
enjoy metaphysical intuitions that normal men struggle to conceal from
themselves, as Sartre observed of Baudelaire.^^ The fact that "miserli-
ness" and "unsociability" and "a self-sufficient and systematic spite" form
the subject of much Jonsonian theater — a highly exaggerated proposi-
tion, one may add — tells us little of what most concerns us: how does
Jonson deal with his material? As soon as we ask the question we are
led to perceive how Jonson wrung poetry from his bizarre themes, how
he transmuted them into images of hallucinatory vividness, liberating
them from "goodness of heart" and setting them free to perform a sort
of danse macabre, Jonson gives us naked, unaccommodated greed, the
thing itself, yet paradoxically wrapped in the intoxications of poetry, and
made funny. What one responds to in his best comedies is the ferocious
energy with which his driven characters perform their antics, the out-
pourings of language in which they express themselves, their ranting,
their braying, their mincing, their affected posturing and rhapsodizing.
A volcano is erupting, but a volcano kept under strictest control, and
if the eruption resembles an anal expulsion, as Wilson claims, that does
not alter the fact that genius has intervened, to impose order and meas-
ure and pattern on the explosion.

Similarly, to arraign Jonson for failing to investigate the "causes" be-
hind his vixenish wives and impotent husbands, the "reasons" for
Morose's aversion to noise, is to call him to account, as the romantic
critics did, for something he never professed to offer, and which remains,
in his world, irrelevant. Jonson does not, certainly, analyze his characters
or psychologize over them. He incarnates, and sets in motion. He shows
us, in Morose, not how such a man came to harbor such an obsession,
but how, given the fact of the obsession, he behaves in the grip of it,

^Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris, 1947), pp. 35-36.

Introduction 15

how he teaches his persecutors to persecute him, and how the world may
be trusted to react. With different neuroses Jonson would doubtless have
written a different play; without neuroses he might perhaps have written
a better one. The fact remains that the play he did write is rich, original,
and unique. To question Jonson's psychic equilibrium in order to put
him in his place as a writer is to revert, mutatis mutandis, to the tech-
nique of those eighteenth century editors who sounded the charge
against his moral character in order to elevate Shakespeare. Caveat
lector.

Probably no other caveat is needed, except a reminder that much valu-
able comment on Jonson could not, for various reasons, find a place here.
Some of it was too technical or special; some of it too bulky, or resistant
to excerption. Nevertheless, the essays below may be said to represent the
state of Jonson criticism over the past forty years, both in its excellences
and in its defects. If they succeed in leading the reader back to Jonson
with a livelier sense of Jonson's qualities, they will have performed their
main office; if they succeed in giving pleasure, they will have accom-
plished another. If they have the luck to stimulate fresh thought and
provoke new interpretations, they will have deserved a niche in whatever
paradise is reserved as the final resting-place for such volumes as these.

Ben Jonson

by T. S. Eliot

The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that
can be compelled upon the memory of a great poet. 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 historians and antiquaries — this is
the most perfect conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputa-
tion of Jonson has been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in
the balance-sheet of English literature. No critic has succeeded in making
him appear pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne's book on Jonson
satisfies no curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study in
the *'Men of Letters Series'' by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place; it
satisfies curiosity, it supplies many just observations, it provides valuable
matter on the neglected masques; it only fails to remodel the image of
Jonson which is settled in our minds. Probably the fault lies with several
generations of our poets. It is not that the value of poetry is only its
value to living poets for their own work; but appreciation is akin to
creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is related to the stirring of sugges-
tion, the stimulus that a poet feels in his enjoyment of other poetry. Jon-
son has provided no creative stimulus for a very long time; consequently
we must look back as far as Dryden — precisely, a poetic practitioner who
learned from Jonson — before we find a living criticism of Jonson's work.
Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now. We have no diffi-
culty in seeing what brought him to this pass; how, in contrast, not
with Shakespeare, but with Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and
Fletcher, he has been paid out with reputation instead of enjoyment
He is no less a poet than these men, but his poetry is of the surface.
Poetry of the surface cannot be understood without study; for to deal
with the surface of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately
that we too must be deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and
smaller men also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something
at the start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want noth-

**Ben Jonson." From Selected Essays ipiy-ip^2 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1932 by Har-
court, Brace & World, Inc.; renewed, © i960, by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission
of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., and Faber & Faber, Ltd.

Ben Jonson 15

ing more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer
poetry in detail as well as in design. So does Dante offer something, a
phrase everywhere (''tu se* ombra ed ombra vedi'') even to readers who
have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as
well as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy
reader's fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms
of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is
to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse, but in the
design of the whole. But not many people are capable of discovering for
themselves the beauty which is only found after labor; and Jonson's in-
dustrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and curi-
ous, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical and
curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well. When we
say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his classical
scholarship or of seventeenth century manners. We mean intelligent
saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to enjoy him
at all, we must get to the center of his work and his temperament, and
that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see
him as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting
ourselves into seventeenth century London as it requires the power of
setting Jonson in our London.

It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and
it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric
comedy and because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he
burdened his two tragic failures. The second point marks an obvious
error of detail; the first is too crude a statement to be accepted; to say
that he failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell us
nothing at all. Jonson did not write a good tragedy, but we can see no
reason why he should not have written one. If two plays so different as
The Tempest and The Silent Woman are both comedies, surely the cate-
gory of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something pos-
sible for Jonson to have done. But the classification of tragedy and
comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic
literature of more rigid form and treatment — it may distinguish Aris-
tophanes from Euripides — is not adequate to a drama of such variations
as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a crude classification for plays so different
in their tone as Macbeth, The Jew of Malta, and The Witch of Edmon-
ton; and it does not help us much to say that The Merchant of Venice
and The Alchemist are comedies. Jonson had his own scale, his own in-
strument. The merit which Catiline possesses is the same merit that is
exhibited more triumphantly in Volpone; Catiline fails, not because it is
too labored and conscious, but because it is not conscious enough; be-
cause Jonson in this play was not alert to his own idiom, not clear in
his mind as to what his temperament wanted him to do. In Catiline Jon-
son conforms, or attempts to conform, to conventions; not to the con-

i6 T. S. Eliot

ventions of antiquity, which he had exquisitely under control, but to the
conventions of tragico-historical drama of his time. It is not the Latin
erudition that sinks Catiline, but the application of that erudition to a
form which was not the proper vehicle for the mind which had amassed
the erudition.

If you look at Catiline — that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy — you
find two passages to be successful: Act ii, sc. i, the dialogue of the politi-
cal ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla's ghost. These two passages are
genial. The soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson success in
content and in versification —

Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night

So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?

Can Sylla's ghost arise within thy walls,

Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls

Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads

Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?

Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills,

Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills? . . .

This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson. Without concerning
himself with the character of Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson
makes Sylla's ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and terrible
force. The words fall with as determined beat as if they were the will
of the morose Dictator himself. You may say: merely invective; but mere
invective, even if as superior to the clumsy fisticuffs of Marston and Hall
as Jonson's verse is superior to theirs, would not create a living figure
as Jonson has done in this long tirade. And you may say: rhetoric; but
if we are to call it "rhetoric" we must subject that term to a closer dissec-
tion than any to which it is accustomed. What Jonson has done here is
not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise filling in of a strong
and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow the outline; it is
far more careful and precise in its obedience to this outline than are
many of the speeches in Tamburlaine. The outline is not Sulla, for Sulla
has nothing to do with it, but "Sylla's ghost." The words may not be
suitable to an historical Sulla, or to anybody in history, but they are a
perfect expression for "Sylla's ghost." You cannot say they are rhetorical
"because people do not talk like that," you cannot call them "verbiage";
they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or the other vices in the
rhetoric books; there is a definite artistic emotion which demands expres-
sion at that length. The words themselves are mostly simple words, the
syntax is natural, the language austere rather than adorned. Turning
then to the induction of The Poetaster, we find another success of the
same kind —

Ben Jonson 17

Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves . . .

Men may not talk in that way, but the Spirit of Envy does, and in the
words of Jonson envy is a real and living person. It is not human life
that informs envy and Sylla's ghost, but it is energy of which human life
is only another variety.

Returning to Catiline, we find that the best scene in the body of the
play is one which cannot be squeezed into a tragic frame, and which ap-
pears to belong to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia and Galla
and Sempronia is a living scene in a wilderness of oratory. And as it re-
calls other scenes — there is a suggestion of the college of ladies in The
Silent Woman — it looks like a comedy scene. And it appears to be satire.

They shall all give and pay well, that come here,

If they will have it; and that, jewels, pearl,

Plate, or round sums to buy these. I'm not taken

With a cob-swan or a high-mounting bull,

As foolish Leda and Europa were;

But the bright gold, with Danae. For such price

I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter,

Or ten such thundering gamesters, and refrain

To laugh at 'em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.

This scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and the "satire'' is
merely a medium for the essential emotion. Jonson's drama is only in-
cidentally satire, because it is only incidentally a criticism upon the
actual world. It is not satire in the way in which the work of Swift or
the work of Moliere may be called satire: that is, it does not find its
source in any precise emotional attitude or precise intellectual criticism
of the actual world. It is satire perhaps as the work of Rabelais is satire;
certainly not more so. The important thing is that if fiction can be
divided into creative fiction and critical fiction, Jonson's is creative. That
he was a great critic, our first great critic, does not affect this assertion.
Every creator is also a critic; Jonson was a conscious critic, but he was
also conscious in his creations. Certainly, one sense in which the term
^'critical" may be applied to fiction is a sense in which the term might
be used of a method antithetical to Jonson's. It is the method of Educa-
tion sentimentale. The characters of Jonson, of Shakespeare, perhaps of
all the greatest drama, are drawn in positive and simple outlines. They
may be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are filled in, by much detail
or many shifting aspects; but a clear and sharp and simple form remains
through these — though it would be hard to say in what the clarity and
sharpness and simplicity of Hamlet consists. But Frederic Moreau is not
made in that way. He is constructed partly by negative definition, built

i8 T. 5. Eliot

up by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate him from the
environment in which we find him; it may be an environment which is
or can be universaHzed; nevertheless it and the figure in it consist of very
many observed particular facts, the actual world. Without this world the
figure dissolves. The ruling faculty is a critical perception, a commentary
upon experienced feeling and sensation. If this is true of Flaubert, it is
true in a higher degree of Moliere than of Jonson. The broad farcical
lines of Moliere may seem to be the same drawing as Jonson's. But
Moliere — say in Alceste or Monsieur Jourdain — is criticizing the actual;
the reference to the actual world is more direct. And having a more
tenuous reference, the work of Jonson is much less directly satirical.

This leads us to the question of Humours. Largely on the evidence of
the two Humour plays, it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied
with types; typical exaggerations, or exaggerations of type. The Humour
definition, the expressed intention of Jonson, may be satisfactory for
these two plays. Every Man In His Humour is the first mature work of
Jonson, and the student of Jonson must study it; but it is not the play
in which Jonson found his genius: it is the last of his plays to read first.
If one reads Volpone, and after that re-reads The Jew of Malta; then
returns to Jonson and reads Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, Epicene
and The Devil Is an Ass, and finally Catiline, it is possible to arrive at
a fair opinion of the poet and the dramatist.

The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type, as in Marston's
satire, but a simplified and somewhat distorted individual with a typical
mania. In the later work, the Humour definition quite fails to account
for the total effect produced. The characters of Shakespeare are such as
might exist in different circumstances than those in which Shakespeare
sets them. The latter appear to be those which extract from the charac-
ters the most intense and interesting realization; but that realization has
not exhausted their possibilities. Volpone's life, on the other hand, is
bounded by the scene in which it is played; in fact, the life is the life of
the scene and is derivatively the life of Volpone; the life of the character
is inseparable from the life of the drama. This is not dependence upon a
background, or upon a substratum of fact. The emotional effect is single
and simple. Whereas in Shakespeare the effect is due to the way in which
the characters act upon one another, in Jonson it is given by the way in
which the characters fit in with each other. The artistic result of Volpone
is not due to any effect that Volpone, Mosca, Corvino, Corbaccio, Vol-
tore have upon each other, but simply to their combination into a whole.
And these figures are not personifications of passions; separately, they
have not even that reality, they are constituents. It is a similar indication
of Jonson's method that you can hardly pick out a line of Jonson's and
say confidently that it is great poetry; but thete are many extended pas-
sages to which you cannot deny that honor.

Ben Jonson 19

I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft;
Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room
Fill'd with such pictures as Tiberius took
From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
And multiply the figures, as I walk. ...

Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The man who wrote, in
Volpone:

for thy love,
In varying figures, I would have contended
With the blue Proteus, or the horned flood. . . .

and

See, a carbuncle
May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark;
A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels. . . .

is related to Marlowe as a poet; and if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is also.
And, if Jonson's comedy is a comedy of humours, then Marlowe's tragedy,
a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has too exclusively
been considered as the typical representative of a point of view toward
comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation as a critic and theorist,
from the effects of his intelligence. We have been taught to think of him
as the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds with his later name-
sake), as the literary politician impressing his views upon a generation;
we are offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship. We forget
the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist in the scholar. Jonson
has suffered in public opinion, as any one must suffer who is forced to
talk about his art.

If you examine the first hundred lines or more of Volpone the verse
appears to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature,
but without Marlowe's inspiration. It looks like mere * 'rhetoric,'' cer-
tainly not **deeds and language such as men do use." It appears to us,
in fact, forced and flagitious bombast. That it is not ^'rhetoric," or at
least not vicious rhetoric, we do not know until we are able to review the
whole play. For the consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in the
end an effect not of verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and terrifying
directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what produces this simple
and single effect. It is not in any ordinary way due to management of

20 T. S, Eliot

intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic constructive skill: it is not
so much skill in plot as skill in doing without a plot. He never manipu-
lates as complicated a plot as that of The Merchant of Venice; he has
in his best plays nothing like the intrigue of Restoration comedy. In
Bartholomew Fair it is hardly a plot at all; the marvel of the play is the
bewildering rapid chaotic action of the fair; it is the fair itself, not any-
thing that happens in the fair. In Volpone, or The Alchemist, or The
Silent Woman, the plot is enough to keep the players in motion; it is
rather an *'action" than a plot. The plot does not hold the play together;
what holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into
plot and personages alike.

We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said
that Jonson's work is "of the surface"; carefully avoiding the word *'su-
perficial.'' For there is work contemporary with Jonson's which is super-
ficial in a pejorative sense in which the word cannot be applied to Jon-
son— the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. If we look at the work of
Jonson's great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster
and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton), they have a depth, a third
dimension, as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson's work
has not. Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching
down to the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson's most certainly have not;

Jbut in Beaumont and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it.

i Looking closer, we discover that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletch-
er's imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and
slightly withered flowers stuck into sand.

Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me.

As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy.

Remember some of these things? . . .

I pray thee, do; for thou shalt never see me so again.

Hair woven in many a curious warp.
Able in endless error to enfold
The wandering soul; ...

Detached from its context, this looks like the verse of the greater poets;
just as lines of Jonson, detached from their context, look like inflated
or empty fustian. But the evocative quality of the verse of Beaumont and
Fletcher depends upon a clever appeal to emotions and associations
which they have not themselves grasped; it is hollow. It is superficial with
a vacuum behind it; the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is;
it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and
deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we
apprehend the significance of any part. We cannot call a man's work
superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot be accused

Ben Jonson 21

of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has created; the
superficies is the world. Jonson's characters conform to the logic of the
emotions of their world. They are not fancy, because they have a logic
of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it gives
us a new point of view from which to inspect it.

A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson endeavored to promulgate,
as a formula and program of reform, what he chose to do himself; and
he not unnaturally laid down in abstract theory what is in reality a
personal point of view. And it is in the end of no value to discuss Jon-
son's theory and practice unless we recognize and seize this point of view,
which escapes the formulae, and which is what makes his plays worth
reading. \ 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 ex-
cluded, j Remembering this, we turn to Mr. Gregory Smith's objection —
that Jonson's characters lack the third dimension, have no life out of
the theatrical existence in which they appear — and demand an inquest.
The objection implies that the characters are purely the work of in-
tellect, or the result of superficial observation of a world which is faded
or mildewed. It implies that the characters are lifeless. But if we dig
beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath the deliberate
drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is discovered
a kind of power, animating Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the literary ladies
of Epicene, even Bobadill, which comes from below the intellect, and
for which no theory of humours will account. And it is the same kind of
power which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some but not all of
the *'comic" characters of Dickens. The fictive life of this kind is not to
be circumscribed by a reference to ''comedy" or to "farce"; it is not ex-
actly the kind of life which informs the characters of Moliere or that
which informs those of Marivaux — two writers who were, besides, doing
something quite different the one from the other. But it is something
which distinguishes Barabbas from Shylock, Epicure Mammon from Fal-
staff, Faustus from — if you will — Macbeth; Marlowe and Jonson from
Shakespeare and the Shakespeareans, Webster, and Tourneur. It is not
merely Humours: for neither Volpone nor Mosca is a humour. No theory
of humours could account for Jonson's best plays or the best characters
in them. We want to know at what point the comedy of humours passes
into a work of art, and why Jonson is not Brome.

The creation of a work of art, we will say the creation of a character
in a drama, consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or,
in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character. This is a
very different matter from the orthodox creation in one's own image.
The ways in which the passions and desires of the creator may be satis-
fied in the work of art are complex and devious. In a painter they may
take the form of a predilection for certain colors, tones, or lightings; in

22 T. S. Eliot

a writer the original impulse may be even more strangely transmuted.
Now, we may say with Mr. Gregory Smith that Falstaff or a score of
Shakespeare's characters have a **third dimension*' that Jonson's have not.
This will mean, not that Shakespeare's spring from the feelings or im-
agination and Jonson's from the intellect or invention; they have equally
an emotional source; but that Shakespeare's represent a more complex
tissue of feelings and desires, as well as a more supple, a more susceptible
temperament. Falstaff is not only the roast Manningtree ox with the
pudding in his belly; he also "grows old," and, finally, his nose is as
sharp as a pen. He was perhaps the satisfaction of more, and of more
complicated feelings; and perhaps he was, as the great tragic characters
must have been, the offspring of deeper, less apprehensible feelings:
deeper, but not necessarily stronger or more intense, than those of Jon-
son. It is obvious that the spring of the difference is not the difference
between feeling and thought, or superior insight, superior perception,
on the part of Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a greater range of
emotion, and emotion deeper and more obscure. But his characters are
no more "alive" than are the characters of Jonson.

The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds — the worlds
which artists create — do not differ only in magnitude; if they are com-
plete worlds, drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also. And
Jonson's world has this scale. His type of personality found its relief in
something falling under the category of burlesque or farce — though
when you are dealing with a unique world, like his, these terms fail to
appease the desire for definition. It is not, at all events, the farce of
Moliere: the latter is more analytic, more an intellectual redistribution.
It is not defined by the word "satire." Jonson poses as a satirist. But
satire like Jonson's is great in the end not by hitting off its object, but
by creating it; the satire is merely the means which leads to the aesthetic
result, the impulse which projects a new world into a new orbit. In
Every Man In His Humour there is a neat, a very neat, comedy of
humours. In discovering and proclaiming in this play the new genre
Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously, the route which opened
out in the proper direction for his instincts. His characters are and
remain, like Marlowe's, simplified characters; but the simplification does
not consist in the dominance of a particular humour or monomania.
That is a very superficial account of it. The simplification consists largely
in reduction of detail, in the seizing of aspects relevant to the relief of
an emotional impulse which remains the same for that character, in mak-
ing the character conform to a particular setting. This stripping is essen-
tial to the art, to which is also essential a flat distortion in the drawing;
it is an art of caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe's. It is a great
caricature, which is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious. The
"world" of Jonson is sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic imagina-

Ben Jonson 23

tion; it is somber. He did not get the third dimension, but he was not
trying to get it.

If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a
clearer understanding of his "rhetoric" and its applications, if we grasp
the fact that the knowledge required of the reader is not archaeology
but knowledge of Jonson, we can derive not only instruction in two-
dimensional life — but enjoyment. We can even apply him, be aware of
him as a part of our literary inheritance craving further expression. Of
all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the pres-
ent age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a
brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large
bold designs in brilliant colors, which ought to attract about three
thousand people in London and elsewhere. At least, if we had a con-
temporary Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it might be the
Jonson who would arouse the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia. Though
he is saturated in literature, he never sacrifices the theatrical qualities —
theatrical in the most favorable sense — to literature or to the study of
character. His work is a titanic show. But Jonson's masques, an impor-
tant part of his work, are neglected; our flaccid culture lets shows and
literature fade, but prefers faded literature to faded shows. There are
hundreds of people who have read Comus to ten who have read the
Masque of Blackness. Comus contains fine poetry, and poetry exemplify-
ing some merits to which Jonson's masque poetry cannot pretend. Never-
theless, Comus is the death of the masque; it is the transition of a form
of art — even of a form which existed for but a short generation — into
''literature," literature cast in a form which has lost its application.
Even though Comus was a masque at Ludlow Castle, Jonson had, what
Milton came perhaps too late to have, a sense for the living art; his art
was applied. The masques can still be read, and with pleasure, by anyone
who will take the trouble — a trouble which in this part of Jonson is,
indeed, a study of antiquities — to imagine them in action, displayed with
the music, costumes, dances, and the scenery of Inigo Jones. They are
additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense of form, of the purpose
for which a particular form is intended; evidence that he was a literary
artist even more than he was a man of letters.

Tradition and Ben Jonson

by L. C. Knights

I hate traditions;
I do not trust them.
Ananias

Recent revivals of Volpone and The Alchemist occasioned some sur-
prise— surprise that they were such good "theater/' The general impres-
sion seems to have been that in these plays Jonson had, somehow, tri-
umphed over his "weight of classical learning," had in fact forgotten it,
and had provided some very good fun instead of his usual pedantries.
It may not be quite fair to the dramatic critics to suggest that their de-
light at being entertained instead of bored showed how little Jonson is
read, but certainly the reception given to those plays implied a still wide-
spread misconception both of Jonson's intrinsic merits and of the extent
and kind of his indebtedness to the Classics.

Ben Jonson is a very great poet — more finely endowed, I think, than
any who succeeded him in the seventeenth century — and he read de-
liberately and widely. It was to be expected, therefore, that the effects
of his reading would be in some manner present in his verse. Dryden said
of him that he was a learned plagiary of all the ancients: "you track
him everywhere in their snow." But this, the common view, violently
distorts the sense in which Jonson is "traditional"; it not only makes
him appear to owe to the Greek and Latin writers a mere accumulation
of thoughts and phrases, it completely hides the native springs of his
vitality. The aim of this chapter is to correct the perspective, to show
that Jonson's art is intimately related to the popular tradition of in-
dividual and social morality.

A study such as this lies largely outside the field of strict literary criti-
cism; but without a background of criticism to refer to it is impossible
to say anything at all, and I propose to begin (without more apology for
the indirect approach) by selecting one play and merely trying to explain
why I find it admirable.

"Tradition and Ben Jonson." From Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson by L. C.
Knights. Copyright 1937 by L. C. Knights. Reprinted by permission of Chatto and
Windus, Ltd, and Barnes & Noble, Inc.

Tradition and Ben Jonson 25

Sejanus is chosen not only because it is commonly underrated, but
because it is the first play in which Jonson finds his proper scope: the
early "Humour" plays were mere experiments. Although here the typi-
cally Jonsonian method is deployed with less subtlety and richness than
in, say, Volpone^ the parallels between this ''tragedy" and the later
**comedies" are obvious and important.

The stuff of the play is the lust of political power and the pettiness
that so often accompanies political greatness. The world with which we
are presented is completely evil. Tiberius and Sejanus are equal in
cruelty and cunning; Macro, the agent of Sejanus' overthrow, is, like
others besides the principals, explicitly "Machiavellian"; the satellites
and senators are servile and inconstant; the mob tears the body of the
fallen favorite,

And not a beast of all the herd demands

What was his crime, or who were his accusers.^

The "good" characters are choric and denunciatory merely, representing
no positive values. How carefully anything that might bring into play
sympathetic feelings is excluded is seen in the treatment of Agrippina;
the meeting of her adherents, for example, is described (II, ii) in terms
that reduce it to a gathering of fractious gossips. And this exclusion oper-
ates in the smallest details — in Tiberius' remark about dedicating

A pair of temples, one to Jupiter

At Capua; th'other at Nola to Augustus,2

or in Sejanus' contempt for "all the throng that fill th' Olympian hall." ^
But in drama substance and criticism of that substance are insepar-
able, and the world of Sejanus exists only in the light of a particular
vision. The most obvious device for determining the angle of presenta-
tion is found in the vein of farce that runs throughout: there is a violent
juxtaposition of contrasts. After the heroics of Sejanus' "love-making"
Li via turns to her physician:

How do I look to-day?
Eudemus. Excellent clear, believe it. This same fucus

Was well laid on.
Livia. Methinks 'tis here not white.
Eudemus. Lend me your scarlet lady. Tis the sun
Hath giv'n some little taint unto the ceruse. . . .

{Paints her cheek.Y

^V, X (III, 147) (the references in parentheses are to the volume and page of the
Gifford-Cunningham edition of Jonson's Works, 1875).

2 III, iii (III, 86). sy, i (III, 113).

MI, i (III, 41).

26 L. C. Knights

Here, and in the other scenes of stylized farce (for instance, V, iii, or V,
vii, where the secret is passed round) there are obvious theatrical possi-
bilities. Perhaps the most effective scene would be the last, where the
senators first cluster round Sejanus — indicating by their verbal feu de
joie the kind of stylization demanded — then edge away as the drift of
Tiberius' riddling letter becomes clear, leaving only Haterius, kept "most
miserably constant'' by his gout. But the whole of the last act, with its
controlled confusion leading swiftly to an exciting climax, would act
well; and for more subtle dramatic play we can turn to the scene (III, ii)
where Tiberius and Sejanus maneuver against each other under cover of
friendship; the variations gain from the surface rigidity of the characters.
The essential Jonsonian mode, however, is determined by something
more fundamental than the separable elements of farce: it is determined
by the verse — a dramatic medium in which exaggeration is controlled
by a pervasively implicit sardonic mood. The exuberance of "Swell,
swell, my joys . . ." (V, i) is followed by

. . . 'Tis air I tread;
And at each step I feel my advanced head
Knock out a star in heaven.

It is "knock out"^ — the slight twist given to '^sublimi feriam sidera ver-
tice'' — that finally determines our attitude. But a longer quotation is in
place here. In Act II, scene ii, Sejanus addresses Drusus in soliloquy:

Thy follies now shall taste what kind of man

They have provoked, and this thy father*s house

Crack in the flame of my incensed rage, j

Whose fury shall admit no shame or mean. —

Adultery! it is the lightest ill

I will commit. A race of wicked acts

Shall flow out of my anger, and o'erspread

The world's wide face, which no posterity

Shall e'er approve, nor yet keep silent: things

That for their cunning, close, and cruel mark.

Thy father would wish his: and shall, perhaps.

Carry the empty name, but we the prize.

On then, my soul, and start not in thy course;

Though heaven drop sulphur, and hell belch out fire.

Laugh at the idle terrors: tell proud Jove,

Between his power and thine there is no odds:

Twas only fear first in the world made gods.

In the sentiments, and in the vigorous development of a single dominant
impulse, there is an obvious resemblance to Tamburlaine, But the atti-

Tradition and Ben Jonson 27

tude of sophisticated detachment toward the words, present in those
words, suggests what Jonson had learned from The Jew of Malta (a re-
lationship first stated in The Sacred Wood): with that play in mind we
are not likely to accept Coleridge's verdict of "absurd rant and ventrilo-
quism"— or not as he intended it. It is equally obvious that the speech
is not by Marlowe, that in its combination of weight and vigor it looks
forward to the finer poetry of Volpone and The Alchemist,

The means by which Jonson achieves that combination are here im-
mediately apparent. The alliteration not only adds to the general critical-
exaggerative effect, it secures the maximum of direct attention for each
word:

Sleep,
Voluptuous Caesar, and security
Seize on thy stupid powers.

More generally, we may say that whereas the auditory qualities of Shake-
speare's verse arouse a vibrating responsiveness, help to create a fluid
medium in which there is the subtlest interplay, the corresponding qual-
ities in Jonson cause the words to separate rather than to coalesce. ("Sep-
arate/* of course, is only a way of laying the stress.) Everything is said
deliberately — though there is no monotony in the varying rhythm — and,
following Jonson's own precepts for "a strict and succinct style," ^ with
the greatest economy. The economy of course is not Shakespeare's. There
are no overlaying meanings or shifts of construction; the words gain
their effect by their solidity, weight, and unambiguous directness of ex-
pression. How poetically effective that weighted style can be is demon-
strated again and again in the present play.

There be two.
Know more than honest counsels; whose close breasts,
Were thy ripp'd up to light, it would be found
A poor and idle sin, to which their trunks
Had not been made fit organs. These can lie.
Flatter, and swear, forswear, deprave, inform.
Smile, and betray; make guilty men; then beg
The forfeit lives, to get their livings; cut
Men's throats with whisperings. . . .^

Jonson's metaphors and similes tend to fall into one of three classes.
Many, perhaps the majority, are straight-forwardly descriptive. (**Meta-
phors far-fet," he said, ^'hinder to be understood.")

^ Discoveries, cxxix. « I, i (III^ 14),

28 L. C. Knights

The way to put
A prince in blood, is to present the shapes
Of dangers greater than they are, like late
Or early shadows.

Did those fond words
Fly swifter from thy lips, than this my brain.
This sparkling forge, created me an armour
T'encounter chance and thee? '^

A second class is formed by those metaphors that, like the "race of
wicked acts . . ." in Sejanus' soliloquy, heighten the effect of caricature.
But Jonson's most striking figures are magnificently derogatory.

Gods! how the sponges open and take in.
And shut again! look, look! is not he blest
That gets a seat in eye-reach of him? more
That comes in ear, or tongue-reach? O but most
Can claw his subtile elbow, or with a buz
Fly-blow his ears?

Jonson's triumph, we have been told, is a triumph of consistency, and
the habit of mind behind this last quotation provides the dominant tone
of the play. I have already commented on the exclusion of irrelevant
moods and associations, and there only remains to notice the character-
istic linking together of words that usually invite sympathy or admira-
tion with those demanding an exactly contrary response.

Like, as both
Their bulks and souls were bound on Fortune's wheel. ...

He . . . gives Caesar leave
To hide his ulcerous and anointed face. . . .^

One does not need to look up the various suggestions of weight and
clumsiness under ''cob" in the Oxford Dictionary to feel the effect of
"a cob-swan, or a high mounting bull" in the most famous speech from
Catiline,

It should be plain by now that the appreciation of Jonson starts from

■^This second image is bright and clear, but its surface quality is emphasized if we
put beside it the line from Henry V,

In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
where the rhythm, the double meaning of "quick" and the fused impression of swift
movement and ordered labor evoke a far more complex activity of the mind.

^That the corresponding phrase in Tacitus is "Fades ulcerosa ac plerumque medi-
caminibus interstincta/' is, I think, irrelevant.

Tradition and Ben Jonson 29

the appreciation of his verse: it could start from nothing else; but it does
not seem to be realized how clogging are the discussions of "humours"
which, in histories of English literature, fill up the pages on Jonson. His
plays have the tightness and coherence of a firmly realized purpose,
active in every detail, and a commentary on Jonson's technical achieve-
ments— the weight and vigor of his verse, the intensive scrutiny that it
invites — is only one way of indicating his essential qualities.

Sejanns, like the other greater plays, is the product of a unique vision;
but in stressing the uniqueness one has to avoid any suggestion of the
idiosyncratic. It is not merely that the matter on which the poet works
is provided by the passions, lusts, and impulses of the actual world, the
firmly defined individual spirit which molds that matter springs from a
rich traditional wisdom; it relies, that is to say, on something outside
itself, and presupposes an active relationship with a particular audience.

The point can be made by examining a passage that is commonly
recognized as ''great poetry."

See, behold,
What thou art queen of; not in expectation.
As I feed others: but possess'd and crown'd.
See, here, a rope of pearl: and each more orient
Than that the brave Egyptian queen caroused:
Dissolve and drink them. See, a carbuncle,
May put out both the eyes of our St. Mark;
A diamond, would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels.
That were the spoils of provinces; take these,
And wear, and lose them: yet remains an ear-ring
To purchase them again, and this whole state.
A gem but worth a private patrimony.
Is nothing: we will eat such a meal.
The head of parrots, tongues of nightingales,
The brains of peacocks, and of estriches.
Shall be our food: and, could we get the phoenix,
Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.9

Mr. Palmer, supporting a general thesis that Jonson ''wrote for a genera-
tion which had still an unbounded confidence in the senses and faculties
of man. England had not yet accepted the great negation . . . ," re-
marks: "In the figure of Volpone Jonson presents the splendors of his
theme. Was ever woman so magnificently wooed as the wife of Cor-
vino?" ^^ This is to miss the point completely. The poetic force of Vol-

* Volpone, III, vi (III, 249). ^^ Ben Jonson, pp. x and 175.

30 L. C. Knights

pone's wooing has two sources. There is indeed an exuberant description
of luxury — "Temptations are heaped upon temptations with a rapidity
which almost outstrips the imagination" — and the excited movement
seems to invite acceptance. But at the same time, without cancelling out
the exuberance, the luxury is "placed.'' We have only to compare passages
(from the early Keats, for example) in which the imagined gratification
of sight, taste, and touch is intended as an indulgence merely, to see how
this placing is achieved. It is not merely that the lines quoted have a
context of other swelling speeches (compare Sejanus), so that by the time
we reach them the mode is established, the exaggeration, which reaches a
climax at "phoenix," is itself sufficient to suggest some qualification of
Mr. Palmer's "splendors." The verse demands the usual scrupulous in-
spection of each word — we are not allowed to lapse into an impression of
generalized magnificence — and the splendors, in "caroused," "spoils of
provinces," "private patrimony," are presented clearly enough as waste.
"Though nature lost her kind," at least, implies a moral judgment; and
the references to Lollia Paulina and Heliogabalus (Gifford quotes
''Comedit linguas, pavonum et lusciniarum"), which would not be un-
familiar to an Elizabethan audience, are significant.

The manner of presentation (relying on a response which later criticism
shows is neither obvious nor easy) suggests that the double aspect of the
thing presented corresponds to a double attitude in the audience: a
naive delight in splendor is present at the same time as a clear-sighted
recognition of its insignificance judged by fundamental human, or divine,
standards. The strength of this attitude is realized if we compare it with
a puritanic disapproval of "the world" on the one hand, or a sensuous
abandonment on the other. It is the possession of this attitude that
makes Jonson "classical," not his Greek and Latin erudition. His classic-
ism is an equanimity and assurance that springs — "here at home" ^^
— from the strength of a native tradition.

For Jonson's knowledge, and use, of the native literary tradition there
is, I believe, evidence of the usually accepted kind. One could consider
his references (explicit and otherwise) to earlier poets and prose-writers
from Chaucer onwards; his avowed interest in the Vetus Comoedia;^^
the obvious "morality" influence in such plays as The Devil Is an Ass
and The Magnetic Lady;^^ the popular source of the jog-trot rhythms

^ And make my strengths, such as they are,

Here in my bosom, and at home.

(A Farewell to the World)

^English, not Roman. See Conversations, 16.

^^ An influence that was active in other playwrights. It is some time since Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch suggested that Henry IV was Shakespeare's rehandhng of a morality play
('Contentio inter Virtutem et Vitium de Anima Principis"). The subject generally is
of more than academic interest; those who are interested can consider such different
plays as Troilus and Cressida (Pandarus is demonstrably "the Pander"), Old Fortunatus,
Michaelmas Term, or any of Middleton's comedies.

Tradition and Ben Jonson 31

used for Nano, Androgyne, and the Vice, Iniquity. But when we are
deaHng with a living tradition such terms are hopelessly inadequate, and
exploration can be more profitably directed, in the manner suggested by
the analysis above, toward Jonson's handling of his main themes, lust
and the desire for wealth and their accompanying vanities.

In The Devil Is an Ass the satire is more than usually direct. But the
play provides more than a succession of satiric comments on the first
period of intensive capitalistic activity in England; it formulates an
attitude toward acquisition. The word ''formulates'' is used advisedly.
The outlook is a particular one, is Jonson's own; but it is clear that the
satire presupposes certain general attitudes in the audience, and that it
builds on something that was already there. Fitzdottrel, immersed in his
schemes for making money, believes that he has surprised his wife making
love with Wittipol, and (II, iii) reproaches her:

O bird,
Could you do this? 'gainst me! and at this time now!
When I was so employ'd, wholly for you,
Drown'd in my care (more than the land, I swear,
I have hope to win) to make you peerless, studying
For footmen for you, fine-pace huishers, pages.
To serve you on the knee. . . .
You've almost turn'd my good affection to you;
Sour'd my sweet thoughts, all my pure purposes. . . .

Fitzdottrel is an ass and it is quite unnecessary to say that there is not a
hint of pathos, though it is easy to imagine the temptations of a nine-
teenth century novelist in such a scene. (Compare the exaggerated sig-
nificance that is given to Mrs. Dombey's jewels — ''She flung it down and
trod upon the glittering heap," etc.) The point is that Jonson evidently
relies upon his audience's immediately despising those "pure purposes";
what these are — the way in which the money acquired would be em-
ployed— is magnificently brought out in the Tailbush-Eitherside scene
(IV, i: "See how the world its veterans rewards . . ."). It is, of course, the
tone and manner of presentation that is commented on here. As one
learns to expect, that tone is consistent throughout and one has to be alive
to its implications even in the smallest particulars. The "Spanish lady" is

such a mistress of behaviour.
She knows from the duke's daughter to the doxy.
What is their due just, and no more.

Here the scornful alliteration acts as a leveller (we have seen something
similar in Sejanus): Jonson, that is, takes his stand on a scheme that

32 L. C. Knights

shows duke's daughter and doxy in proper perspective. It was not merely
that Jonson as an individual "never esteemed of a man for the name of
a Lord";^^ his values were a part of the national life. We have only to
turn up Bunyan's account of By-End's ancestry and connections: '*My
wife . . . came of a very honourable family, and is arrived to such a
pitch of breeding, that she knows how to carry it to all, even to prince
and peasant." The tone and method are identical. ^^

In The Devil Is an Ass, in Volpone and The Alchemist Jonson is
drawing on the anti-acquisitive tradition inherited from the Middle
Ages. But this account is too narrow; the tradition included more than
a mere distrust of, or hostility toward, riches. Understanding is, perhaps,
best reached by studying (with Volpone in mind) the speeches of Sir
Epicure Mammon. Each of them, it seems to me, implicitly refers to a
traditional conception of **the Mean." Mammon, wooing Doll, describes
their teeming pleasures:

and with these
Delicate meats set our selves high for pleasure,
And take us down again, and then renew
Our youth and strength with drinking the elixir.
And so enjoy a perpetuity ^

Of life and lust! And thou shalt have thy wardrobe
Richer than nature's, still to change thy self.
And vary oftener, for thy pride, than she.^^

The reference to "nature," which gives the proper angle on "a perpetuity
of life and lust," is important. The accepted standard is "natural," and
although exact definition would not be easy we may notice the part
played by that standard throughout Jonson's work. An instance from
Volpone has been quoted. Mammon's folly is that he expects Subtle to

teach dull nature
What her own forces are.^'^

Similarly in the masque. Mercury Vindicated, the alchemists "pretend
. . . to commit miracles in art and treason against nature ... a matter
of immortality is nothing"; they "profess to outwork the sun in virtue,

^* Conversations, 14. I know that Jonson was capable of writing fulsome dedications:
but before we make much of that charge we need to inquire, in each instance, the
grounds of his praises. Many of the Elizabethan aristocracy had a decent sense of re-
sponsibility, literary and other.

^^Dr. G. R. Owst's Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (pp. 97-109) gives an
admirable account of the long popular and religious tradition behind Bunyan, rein-
forcing the conclusions that one would draw from reading The Pilgrim's Progress itself.

i« The Alchemist, IV, i (IV, 120). ^'^ Ibid. (IV, 116).

Tradition and Ben Jonson 33

and contend to the great act of generation, nay almost creation." ^^ The
obviously expected response is similar to that given to the description of
Mammon's jewels whose light shall "strike out the stars/' Who wants to
strike out the stars, anyway?

The Staple of News, that odd combination of morality play and topical
revue, is generally spoken of as a **dotage"; but, apart from the admi-
rably comic Staple scenes, it contains passages of unusual power, and all
of these, we notice, are informed by the same attitude. In a speech of
Pennyboy Senior's the anti-acquisitive theme (the play is mainly directed
against the abuse of "the Venus of our time and state, Pecunia") is ex-
plicitly related to the conception of a natural mean:

Who can endure to see
The fury of men's gullets, and their groins?
. . . What need hath nature
Of silver dishes, or gold chamber-pots?
Of perfumed napkins, or a numerous family
To see her eat? poor, and wise, she requires
Meat only; hunger is not ambitious:
Say, that you were the emperor of pleasures.
The great dictator of fashions, for all Europe,
And had the pomp of all the courts, and kingdoms.
Laid forth unto the shew, to make yourself
Gazed and admired at; you must go to bed.
And take your natural rest: then all this vanisheth.
Your bravery was but shown: 'twas not possest:
While it did boast itself, it was then perishing.^^

We have seen something of the background that all these passages
imply. That a sense of the mean, an acceptance of natural limitations,
was a part of the inheritance of Jonson and his contemporaries, can be
demonstrated from medieval and sixteenth century sermons and the
writings of moralists. But it was not something imposed from above; it
sprang from the wisdom of the common people, and it was only in-
directly that it found its way into writing.20 The anti-acquisitive attitude
had been more explicitly formulated. It was not only a part of the life
of the small local communities of the Middle Ages, it was the basis of
the Canon Law on such subjects as usury. And although the age of

(VII, 236-238). i» The Staple of News, III, ii (V, 244).

^ An essay by John Speirs on "The Scottish Ballads" {Scrutiny, June 1935) is relevant
here. There it is remarked, for example, that in the Ballads, "The images of finery
. . . possess a symbolical value as profound as in Bunyan (*. . . he that is clad in Silk
and Velvet'). That finery is associated with folly, pride and death. It is Vanity." — The
relation between popular thought and medieval sermon literature is brought out by
Dr. Owst.

34 L, C. Knights

Jonson was also the age of Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir Arthur Ingram
it was still, we remember, a commonplace, accepted by the worldly
Bacon, that **The ways to enrich are many, and most of them foul/' 21

In a well-known passage in Discoveries Jonson speaks of following the
ancients "as guides, not commanders'': *Tor to all the observations of the
ancients, we have our own experience; which, if we will use, and apply,
we have better means to pronounce." 22 That this was not a mere asser-
tion of independence (or a mere translation — see M. Castelain's learned
edition) is shown by every page on which he seems to draw most directly
on the classics. Wherever the editors suggest parallels with Horace or
Catullus, Tacitus or Suetonius, the re-creation is as complete as in — to
take a modern instance — Mr. Pound's Propertius, so complete as to make
the hunt for **sources" irrelevant. When Fitzdottrel is gloating over the
prospect of obtaining an estate on which his descendants shall keep his
name alive, Merecraft, characteristically speaking **out of character,"
reminds him of the revolution of the times:

Fitzdottrel, 'Tis true.

DROWN' D LANDS will live in drown'd land.
Merecraft. Yes, when you

Have no foot left; as that must be, sir, one day.

And though it tarry in your heirs some forty,

Fifty descents, the longer liver at last, yet,

Must thrust them out on't, if no quirk in law

Or odd vice of their own not do it first.

We see those changes daily: the fair lands

That were the client's, are the lawyer's now;

And those rich manors there of goodman Taylor's,

Had once more wood upon them, than the yard

By which they were measured out for the last purchase.

Nature hath these vicissitudes. She makes

No man a state of perpetuity, sir.23

Here is the passage in Horace {Satires, II, 2) that the speech "derives"
from:

nam propriae telluris erum natura neque ilium
nee me nee quemquam statuit: nos expulit ille^
ilium aut nequities aut vafri inscitia juris,
postremo expellet certe vivacior heres,

^Essays, "Of Riches."

^Discoveries, xxi, Non nimium credendum antiquitati,

^ The Devil Is an Ass, II, i (V, 58).

Tradition and Ben Jonson 35

Even in the lines that come nearest to translation there is a complete
transmutation of idiom: ''nequities'' has become "some odd vice," and
"ignorance of the subtle law/' the sardonically familiar "quirk in law/'
But as Horace is left behind the presence of everyday life is felt even
more immediately, in "daily/* "those rich manors there,'* and "goodman
Taylor's,** followed as these are by a kind of country wit about the yard-
stick. The strength of the passage — it is representative — lies in the in-
terested but critical inspection of a familiar world.

In pointing to the idiom we are of course noticing very much more
than "local color**; we are noticing ways of thought and perception.
Jonson's idiom — his vocabulary, turns of phrase and general linguistic
habits — might form a study in itself. It was Coleridge who spoke of "his
sterling English diction" ^^ — which seems a sufficient rejoinder to the
description, "ponderous Latinism," applied by a recent anthologist of
the seventeenth century. It is easy, as Gifford pointed out, to exaggerate
the extent of Jonson's latinized formations when we forget the similar
experimenting of his contemporaries. (And it was not Jonson who tried
to introduce "lubrical," "magnificate," "ventosity," and the rest.) But
whereas these have had too much attention, a more striking character-
istic had had none. Important as Jonson was as a formative influence on
the Augustan age, his English is not "polite**; it is, very largely, the
popular English of an agricultural country. It is not merely a matter of
vocabulary — "ging** (gang), "threaves,** "ding it open**: one could go on
collecting — his inventive habits are of a kind that can still be paralleled
in country life. There is the delighted recognition of those elements of
caricature that man or nature supplies ready made: "It is now such a
time . . . that every man stands under the eaves of his own hat, and
sings what pleases him.** ^s There are those derisive compounds: "Honest,
plain, livery-three-pound-thrum.** There is a predilection for alliterative
jingles:

You shall be soaked, and stroked, and tubb'd and rubb*d.
And scrubbed, and fubb*d, dear don.

And if this kind of clowning is thought unworthy of serious criticism we
can point to the easy alliterative run of "the tip, top, and tuft of all our
family/' or half the speeches quoted from Sejanus.. But even the pleas-
antries reveal a natural bent, and the boisterous coining of nicknames —
"His great Verdugoship** — was more than a rustic habit; "old Smug of
Lemnos,** "Bombast of Hohenhein" (Vulcan and Paracelsus) indicate an
attitude, similar to Nashe's,^^ of familiar disrespect toward textbook

^Lectures on Shakespeare (Bohn edition), p. 397.
^Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (VII, 300).

^"The gods and goddesses all on a row, bread and crow, from Ops to Pomona, the
first applewife, were so dumpt with this miserable wrack . . .'* (Nashe's Lenten Stuff).

36 L. C. Knights

worthies. And the amazing fertility that reveals itself now in a popular
fluency

— our Doll, our castle, our cinque port.
Our Dover pier —

now in Volpone's mountebank oration, now in Mammon's description of
luxury, is an index of a native vigor that we recognize as ^'typically
Elizabethan." The more we study Jonson in minute detail the more
clearly he appears both intensely individual and — the paradox is justi-
fiable— at one with his contemporaries.

The speech last quoted from The Devil Is an Ass has a turther sig-
nificance; it represents an outlook that is present even in such pure
entertainment as The Silent Woman (see Truewit on Time in I, i), and
that combines easily with hilarious comedy, as in Volpone*s ludicrously
inadequate modesty:

Mosca. That, and thousands more,

I hope to see you lord of.
Volpone. Thanks, kind Mosca.
Mosca. And that, when I am lost in blended dust.

And hundred such as I am in succession —
Volpone. Nay, that were too much, Mosca.27

Merecraft's speech, that is, forms part of the permanent somber back-
ground of which we are made aware in all of Jonson's comedies. But the
insistence on mortality has the very opposite effect of the introduction
of a death's head at a feast; it is not for the sake of a gratuitous thrill.

Nature hath these vicissitudes. She makes
No man a state of perpetuity, sir.

It is the tone — the quiet recognition of the inevitable — that is important;
and the clearly apprehended sense of mutability heightens, rather than
detracts from, the prevailing zest.

It is here, I think, that a genuine "classical influence," or at least the
influence of Horace, can be traced.

iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente luna,

junctaeque Nymphis Gratiae decentes
alterno terram quatiunt pede ...

^ Volpone, I, i (III, 178).

Tradition and Ben Jonson 37

pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas
re gum que turris,^^

The potency of the evocation of the nymphs' flying feet is not lessened
because they are also the feet of Time. But even here it is plain that the
Jonsonian attitude is not acquired but inherited. There is no need to
stress the medieval and sixteenth century insistence on wormy circum-
stance (a good deal of.it was pathological), but we need to keep in mind
the way in which, in the popular literature of those periods, death and
life are vividly juxtaposed.

And the ability to see life under two opposed aspects simultaneously
was part of the natural equipment of the poets of the seventeenth century
before the Restoration. It is expressed in Marvell, in the recognition of
conflicting claims in the "Horatian Ode,'' in the concluding lines of the
"Coy Mistress":

And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the Iron gates of Life.

The aspects of experience represented by "the Iron gates" would hardly
be present in a nineteenth century "love poem," or, if present, would
have a totally different intention and effect. It was in connection with
Marvell, we remember, that Mr. Eliot defined Wit: "It involves a recogni-
tion, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of
experience which are possible." ^9 Jonson had not a metaphysic wit and
he was not Donne, but it is a similar recognition, implicit or explicit, of
the whole range of human life, that explains his tough equilibrium.

How little a mere classicizing can produce that equilibrium a final
comparison may show. When Jonson's verse seems to catch an Horatian
inflection it is not because he has assumed it:

dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas^^

becomes, quite naturally,

think.
All beauty doth not last until the autumn:
You grow old while I tell you this.^i

On the other hand there is Landor:

^ Odes, I, iv. ^ Odes, I, xi.

^ Selected Essays, p. 289. ^ The Devil Is an Ass, I, iii (V, 31).

38 L. C. Knights

occidit et Pelopis genitor, conviva deorum,

Tithonusque remotus in auras. . . .

. . . sed omnis una manet nox
et calcanda semel via leti.^^

Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter went before.
. . . There is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated,
of which the echo is not faint at last.^s

In this affected mimicry the Horatian tone (''durum: sed levius fit
patientia"), all, in fact, that gives value to the recognition of a common
night, has completely evaporated, and we are left with as orotund a
piece of self-indulgence as ever found its way into anthologies. Jonson's
tone is that of a man who has seen many civilizations, and is at home in
one.

I have tried to show that, in Jonson's audience, we may postulate a
lively sense of human limitations. When Mammon declared of the elixir
that, taken by an old man, it will

Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle,

To the fifth age; make him get sons and daughters.

Young giants; as our philosophers have done.

The ancient patriarchs, afore the flood.

But taking, once a week, on a knife's point.

The quantity of a grain of mustard of it,

they had a right to laugh as our modern seekers after youth have not.^*
But it was not a sense that incapacitated from living in the present.
One does not need to search for illustration of Jonson's lively interest in
every aspect of his environment. Merecraft's speech comes from a play
which, as we shall see, forms the most striking indictment of the newer
forms of economic parasitism. It would be good to see The Devil Is an
Ass acted; it would be good to see Sejanus — which has a contemporary
relevance not merely because it is a study of tyranny (**We shall be
marked anon, for our not Hail" ^5^^ b^^ {^ would be better if one could
feel assured that they were widely read. Jonson's permanent importance
is beyond question, but the discipline that a thorough assimilation of his

^ Horace, Odes, I, xxviii.

^Imaginary Conversations , "Aesop and Rhodope."

^The Alchemist, II, i (IV, 46). Gifford quotes Hurd (IV, 180): "The pursuit so
strongly exposed in this play is forgotten, and therefore its humor must appear exag-
gerated." It would have pleased Gifford to refute Hurd by quoting from our news-
papers and upper-class periodicals, with their appeals to "Banish middle age," etc.

^Sejanus, V, viii (III, 132).

Tradition and Ben Jonson 39

work imposes is an especial need of the present day. It is not merely that
poets might profitably study his verse as well as Donne's and Hopkins',
Skelton's and **The Seafarer" (I am not suggesting anything so foolish as
direct imitation); not merely that practitioners of "the poetic drama''
might learn something of effective stylization (the result of an emotional
discipline) from his plays: these matters, in any case, are best left to
poets. But for all of us he is one of the main channels of communication
with an almost vanished tradition. That tradition cannot be apprehended
in purely literary terms, but we can learn something of it through litera-
ture, just as to feel our way into the technique of Jonson's verse is to
share, in some measure, that steady, penetrating scrutiny of men and
affairs.

An Introduction to Ben Jonson

by Harry Levin

I. Tradition

In the history of literature, Ben Jonson has gone down as a figure,
rather than as a writer. Critics call him by his first name upon very
slight acquaintance. The strength of this impression is a testimony to
the malice of one of his friends, William Drummond of Hawthornden.
The eighteenth century contributed to the confusion by producing a
Johnson whose opinions were quite as emphatic and even more notori-
ous. The nineteenth century, with its preference for personalities above
achievements, put the final stamp on what was left of Ben Jonson's repu-
tation. His unique personal prestige, the extraordinary number of his
articulate friends and enemies, the fact that we know more about him
than we need to know — these are the accidents that constrain him into
playing the part of eccentric. What is actually eccentric is the develop-
ment of English literature. By the standards of his time, Jonson never
deviates from his defined intentions and assured technique, which con-
stituted the nearest approximation England had yet made to an organized
culture and an academic style. Saint-Evremond expressed the mind of
the Restoration when he singled Jonson out for the select company of
Aristotle, Horace, Corneille, Boileau, and other literary law-givers. A
succession of revolutions has impaired their authority.

For the last two centuries Jonson's principal function has been to
serve as a stalking-horse for Shakespeare. Others abide our question,
Shakespeare transcends it; and if you would understand, point for point,
the limitations he transcends, go read Jonson. Often an attempt is made
to settle the problem on a quantitative basis — Shakespeare's characters
are considered three-dimentional, Jonson's are reproached with in-
curable flatness. The retort to this kind of criticism is a stubborn in-
sistence that, strictly speaking, no literary creation has any dimensions

*'An Introduction to Ben Jonson." (Original title: "Introduction.") From Selected
Works of Ben Jonson, ed. by Harry Levin. Copyright 1938 by Random House, Inc. Re-
printed by permission of Random House, Inc. and the Nonesuch Library. A brief
introductory passage of about two pages has been omitted.

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 41

at all. Another chapter in the history of taste and of studies has been
compiled since the days when Jonson was damned by the canons of
Shakespearean pantheism. Scholarship talks less about nature and more
about the theater. Aesthetics requires a measure of abstraction. The old
impatience with limitation has been replaced by a new appreciation of
convention, which w^e take to be not only the form, but also the essence,
of art.

No dramatist could have strayed very far from the crude psychology
and constricting conditions that hedged in the Elizabethan stage. It is
true that Shakespeare had an artifice against artifice, an unequalled
capacity for conveying the impression that he was not subject to such
limitations. So successful are his occasional touches of nature that we
are still surprised when his personages act according to the exigencies of
the plot, and not according to motives which we ourselves should
acknowledge in their place. But this trick of transcendence is not to be
reckoned with; all that can be said is that it succeeds sporadically, even
in Shakespeare. Webster catches it now and then, Dekker and Heywood
handle it rather inexpertly, and if Jonson is really responsible for the
painter's scenes in The Spanish Tragedy, he had mastered it, too. There
is no reason to condemn his usual method of characterization for dealing
with encounters instead of experiences and appealing to judgment in-
stead of sympathy. Jonson's characters move in the same world as those
of Marlowe and Middleton, Nashe and Donne, lampooning courtiers
and pamphleteering journalists. In this as in other respects, Jonson is
closer than Shakespeare to the literature of his day, and by no means
preoccupied with the literature of the past.

Jonson is commonly conceived as a man who wrote comedies because
he had a theory about why comedies ought to be written. This formidable
misconception is buttressed by Jonson's own words, in a tireless series of
prefaces, prologues, and asides. To accept them is to take an author's
rationalizations about his own work too seriously and to ignore the
historical circumstances that they were designed to meet. The comedy
of humours was not arrived at as a descriptive formulation for purely
critical purposes; it was seized upon as a polemical weapon to answer
the Puritan attacks on the stage. Jonson, Chapman, and other drama-
tists were exploiting a psychological novelty which had appeared at the
turn of the sixteenth century, in order to ward off popular resentment
against the satirical sharpness of their "wormwood comedies." The
induction to Every Man Out of His Humour sets forth the full argu-
ment for comedy as a social purgative. It is perhaps as relevant to Jon-
son's work as psychoanalysis is to the dramas of Eugene O'Neill.

Like Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis which it strikingly resembles,
Jonson's theory of humours is less analytic than apologetic, less a system
of literary criticism than an exercise in ethical justification. Had Jonson
regarded it as more than a convenient metaphor, he would have become

42 Harry Levin

entangled in the contradiction which brought the Spanish philosopher
Huerte before the Inquisition. If you undertake to reform society by
confronting it with its own picture, and that picture is so darkly de-
terministic that it precludes all possibility of reform, what then? Do
you curb your reforming zeal? Do you moderate your behaviorism? Are
you obliged to choose between philanthropy and misanthropy? Or are
you simply a hard-working playwright, with a hardheaded and some-
what doctrinaire view of humanity, trying to protect your vested interests
by beating the moralists at their own game? O cursed spite!

If Jonson's too ample protestations can be construed to show him as
a reformer, he does nothing to discourage the assumption that he is a
pedant as well. Here the incentive may be a private one. We must bear
in mind the bricklayer's apprentice who lived to receive an honorary
degree from Oxford, the second-rate actor and patcher of second-hand
plays who forged for himself the position of arbiter elegantiarum of
English letters. Jonson was a dramatist before he was a scholar. Poetry
was too literally its own reward, and he envied the status of acquaint-
ances who had fallen back on the gospel or the law — Donne and
Bacon, for example. The wars of the theaters, his repeated retirements
from the loathed stage, and the petulance and paralysis of his old age
left him no solace but his books. As his audiences grew smaller, his own
orientation widened; he improved his relations with the ancients and
began to invoke posterity. Practical disappointments could only con-
firm him in the theoretical principles of a self-made humanist.

Gathering manuscripts and accumulating commentaries, enjoying the
friendship of Camden, Cotton, Savile, and Selden, he sought to fit into
a better regimen for a literary life than the Bohemian purlieus of the
theater afforded. The Discoveries are chiefly remarkat>le as an evidence
of this phase of Jonson's activity, as an armory of maxims and a store-
house of ideas, as a link between Jonson and his masters in rhetoric,
Seneca and Quintilian, Vossius and Heinsius. The very titles of his occa-
sional collections of verse and prose — Underwoods., The Forest, Timber
— glance at the Sylvae of the polymaths of humanism. His failures, never
clapper-clawed by the palms of the vulgar, were dressed up in annotated
editions to catch the eye of the learned. The thin quarto of Sejanus, with
its marginal freight of Latin citations, must have formed a curious item
on an Elizabethan bookstall. Derisive echoes make us wonder at Jonson's
presumption in daring to gather his plays into a folio volume and
publish them under the insufferable designation of Works.

The cultivation of these outward and visible marks of erudition ac-
complished far more than its calculated effect. It persuaded readers that
the Works smelled exclusively of the lamp and desensitized their percep-
tion against a swarm of other odors — fragrant, pungent, savory, and
rank, as the case may be. Jonson does speak with much conviction when
he is paraphrasing the classics, but it is doubtful if an indefinite number

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 43

of hours in a library could have taught him to sketch in his detail so
casually as this:

Ha' not I
Known him, a common rogue, come fiddling in
To th' osteria, with a tumbling whore.
And, when he has done all his forced tricks, been glad
Of a poor spoonful of dead wine, with flies in't?

It would be strange if signs of Jonson's vast reading had not crept into
his writing; it would be stranger if the Tyburn brand on his thumb,
his military career in the Low Countries, his religious conversion, his
dubious activities as a spy, and all his duels and amours had not given
him opportunities for observation that are assimilated in the things he
wrote. Next to extreme bookishness, undue realism is the quality for
which Jonson has been most bitterly censured. At Saint John's College,
Cambridge, he was looked down upon as '*a meere Empirick, one that
getts what he hath by obseruation, and makes only nature priuy to what
he indites." He put down everything he read, according to one side,
everything he saw according to the other.

These vicissitudes of opinion are resolved by a single consideration —
Jonson, first and last, was pre-eminently a craftsman, planning and con-
structing his verse and prose as solidly as he had learned to lay bricks.
That is why he has been mistaken for both a pedant and a reformer,
why he has been miscalled an arrant translator and a mere empiric. The
fact is that, like a good workman, he felt the weight of literary tradition
while remaining within the current of contemporary life. He differs from
his fellow writers not in aims and methods, but in being more conscious
of the task of adaptation they jointly performed and in going about it
more systematically. England had, for the first time, a legislator of
Parnassus, to sit in the chair later occupied by Dryden, Pope, and
Samuel Johnson. All of a sudden, it had seemed, there were not enough
forms and concepts, not enough phrases and words, in the native stock,
to express all the possibilities of which people were becoming aware.
There had ensued a stage of borrowing and engrafting, of translation
and experiment. What was now needed, and what Jonson definitely
represented, was a vernacular classicism.

In this light, we are struck by the straightforward and pragmatic
nature of Jonson's classical program. The efforts of scholars at the Uni-
versities, lawyers in the Inns of Court, and friends of the Countess of
Pembroke had failed to revive tragedy in its pristine purity; school-
masters, critics, and divines united to deplore the way in which PauFs
Churchyard flouted the rules of rhetoric; English poets had abandoned
the chase after the chimaera of quantitative meters. Ben Jonson entered
the field as a professional man of letters. As one who thoroughly grasped

44 Harry Levin

and had extensively practiced most of the bastard forms which had
sprung up, he knew how they could be clarified and made supple. As
the first of a line of neo-classicists, he wanted not to surrender to Greece
and Rome, but to rival them, to wed ancient form to modern substance.
He had hoped to achieve a perfect embodiment of this ideal in the
pastoral fragment of The Sad Shepherd, where his proclaimed purpose
was to garner

. . . such wool
As from mere English flocks his Muse can pull,

and therewith to fashion

... a fleece
To match or those of Sicily or Greece.

It is characteristic of the culture of the Renaissance at its ripest, that
it should seek to give classical precedent a local habitation and a name.
Horace's jons Bandusiae is transformed into Ronsard's fontaine Bellerie.
The tropes of Catullus,

Quam magnus numerus Lihyssae harenae

Lasarpiciferis jacet Cyrenis,

Oraclum Jovis inter aestuosi

Et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum;

Aut quam sidera multa, cum tacet nox,

Furtivos hominum vident amores,

suffer a sea-change, in Jonson's paraphrase:

All the grass that Rumney yields.

Or the sands in Chelsea fields.

Or the drops in silver Thames,

Or the stars that gild his streams.

In the silent summer nights.

When youths ply their stol'n delights.

Sedate dignitaries from the pantheon of Natalis Comes are jostled out
of Jonson's masques by English worthies from Captain Cox's library;
the same blend of refined commonplace and homely folklore tinctures
the lyrics of Jonson's disciple, H^errick. The tribe of Ben was responsible
for fastening his favorite measure, the heroic couplet, upon English
poetry, where it prevailed with the tenacity of neo-classicism itself un-
til, further straitened by an enforced sojourn in France, it became the

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 45

cell in which Pope was condemned to pace out his existence, five steps
down and five steps back.

We can distinguish between what is classical and what is native in
the traditions available to Jonson, but we have no means of measuring
the extent to which they make themselves felt in his work. It would be
futile to try to determine the preponderating element or to weigh them
both in the clumsy balance of form and content. The norms of dramatic
structure, in comedy and in tragedy, Jonson had obviously generalized
from Latin models, more precisely from Plautus, Terence, and Seneca.
Of the profound significance of the Roman satirists for the late Eliza-
bethan mentality, particularly after downright imitation had been pro-
hibited and the pent-up gall had burst forth on the stage, Jonson's
**comical satires'' are our main witness. Yet more than the materials of
his plays is indigenous. The conventions of the English morality are re-
spected in Jonson's casts and plots, in the redende Namen of his charac-
ters, in the beast-fable of Volpone or the gaping Hell-mouth of The Devil
Is an Ass. And beneath his writing runs a broad substratum of journal-
ism, of all the tracts, broadsides, and jestbooks that had granted literary
recognition to the London underworld, before Jonson came along.

Finally, there is a plane upon which these opposing forces reach an
equilibrium. The extremes of rhetoric and pamphleteering, the old and
the new, foreign and domestic, and erudite and popular meet in an
illusory half -world, wherein the fallax servus borrows the lath dagger
of the Vice and Cato shakes his finger at Til Eulenspiegel. The whole
farrago of types and themes becomes intelligible, from this distant vantage
point, as the outside of a large, heterogeneous cultural movement. Across
Europe, along the drift from Renaissance to Reformation, from Italy to
Germany, stride two gigantic protagonists, the rogue and the fool. In
the conflicts of humanistic learning and empirical experience, the war
between theology and science, a literature is evolved which has the ex-
pansiveness of the picaresque and the inclusiveness of satire. It is the
age of Erasmus, Brandt, Rabelais, and Cervantes. It is the time to cry
**Ducdame" and call all fools into a circle.

Against the background of the Reformation, then, rather than that of
the Renaissance, Jonson may be seen at his best. He was by birth and
apprenticeship an Elizabethan, but the succeeding years are those he
dominates, and the elegies of his lamenting *'sons" would have been
more impressive if they had not been issued in the year of the Bishops'
War. For it is Jonson's career which most strongly marks the transition
in English literature from sonnet to satire, from comedy of the court to
comedy of the city, from poets who celebrated imaginary mistresses to
poets who dedicated themselves to detraction, from the virtuous conduct
to Castiglione's Courtier to the gross etiquette of Dedekind's Grobian.
Jonson is the legitimate heir of the Renaissance, of the Elizabethan age,
and of Christopher Marlowe — it took a third poetic craftsman, T. S.

46 Harry Levin

Eliot, to discern that. When we come to examine the texture of Jonson's
verse, we shall be grateful for this discernment. We must recognize this
formal continuity, if only to appreciate how sharply it reverses its intel-
lectual bearing. Marlowe belongs to one century and Jonson to another,
and their respective attitudes toward human nature are as far apart as
More's Utopia and Hobbes's Leviathan.

II. Satire

The richness of the Renaissance, about which so much has been said,
is more than a metaphor. In what was, after all, the heroic age of
mercantile enterprise, it should not astonish us to find a luster reflecting
the influx of wealth from the Indies and of gold from the Americas.
We breathe the glittering atmosphere of the Mediterranean, ever the
center of fashion and luxury, in The Jew of Malta^ Othello, and Volpone,
while Eastward Ho, The Tempest, and The Fair Maid of the West have
in them something of the saltier air of British adventure. Economic ex-
pansion, in England, is accompanied by an intensely universal feeling of
nationwide participation, which finds cultural expression in the collec-
tions of the voyagers, in the Tudor translations, in the chronicle plays,
in the idealized figure of the Virgin Queen. This exaltation and confi-
dence, which suggests comparison with the American Dream, seems to
lose its bloom in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, just as the fresh-
ness of our own national ideals withered after the Civil War.

In the latter half of the sixteenth century, there was time for a new
English aristocracy to grow up, and for a popular monarchy to leave off
fostering democratic notions and assume more or less absolute preten-
sions. By the turn of the century, a mercantilist economy had dammed
up the enormous flow of resources, and it was no longer easy to believe
that all things were possible to any man. Patents and monopolies still
changed hands; the great companies were setting out to establish the
new plantations; projectors flourished, and made the court a hotbed of
promotion and intrigue. Step by step, through the literature of these
crucial years, we can watch the sentiment of expectation change to a
sense of wariness, depression, and disillusionment. With increasing in-
trospection, everything is anatomized. Newer and more analytic forms,
such as the character and the essay, are devised; ancient modes, like satire
and epigram, are borrowed to fit modern instances. The native hue of
Elizabethan resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Jacobean
melancholy. Nature, it is felt, is in decay; the times are out of joint;
difficile est satyram non scribere.

That Ben Jonson should have viewed this change in the light of the
historic contrast between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 47

was inevitable. Exasperated by the demands of the groundlings, ex-
hausted by the rivalry of Marston, Dekker, and other poetasters and pro-
fessionals, he was led to adopt the idiom of the Silver Age and to address
himself, in the tone of Martial and Tacitus, to the imperial theme.
Sejanus, with its acid depiction of the caprice of princes and the folly
of favorites, greeted the accession of the leading apologist for the divine
right of kings, the future patron of Somerset and Buckingham. Small
wonder that it brought Jonson to the Star Chamber. It is no accident
that Shakespeare, in his Roman tragedies, and Chapman, in his French
histories, were dwelling upon the problem of authority, or that the issues
of Coriolanus and of Sejanus seem even more pregnant today. The con-
centrated indignation of Jonson's Roman elders, the glimpses of espio-
nage and repression, the episodes of judicial murder, the mood of flattery
and fear evoke as many echoes in our ears as the cry, **Lictors, resume
the fasces!''

Significantly, both Jonson's tragic heroes are villains, so confirmed
in their villainy that they need no motive; Sejanus resolves to debauch
Livia before her husband has struck him, and Catiline does not wait for
the election of Cicero to hatch his plot. If their efforts do not achieve
the fullness of tragedy, it is Jonson's fault, for failing to counterweight
them with anything but appeals to principles and exercises in rhetoric.
Cicero, not Catiline, is remiss. It would be rash to conclude that the
satiric spirit is hostile to tragedy. On the contrary, Jonson's tragedies
come most to life when his courtiers are fawning or when his women,
whose psychology is never more than cosmetic-deep, are gossiping. The
very satire which called the story of Sejanus to Jonson's attention,
Juvenal's tenth, is almost medieval in its stress upon tragic reversal of
fortune. The tragedian of an age of satire, Seneca, was the unavoidable
model for every Elizabethan dramatist who aspired to the buskin. Shake-
speare himself was forced to describe the Trojan War and Homeric
heroes as "Nothing but lechery! all incontinent varlets!" His Cleopatra
gives more than a hint of how Jonson would have treated her:

. . . the quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us, and present
Our Alexandrian revels. Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I* the posture of a whore.

The genius of tragedy is essentially the same as that of comedy, as
someone mumbled through a haze of wine fumes, very early one morn-
ing in the house of Agathon. Of the tragedy of the Renaissance, disposed
as it was to leave so little to fate, this is particularly true. Tragic suf-
fering can be, and in the more remote past has been, blind and passive;

48 Harry Levin

comic matters notoriously involve human agency. The sHngs and
arrows of an outrageous fortune are not to be endured, revenge is sweet,
revenge ripens into conspiracy, conspiracy passes over into intrigue, and
the gap is bridged; the Elizabethans have proved at least that a similar
dramatic technique will serve for tragedy and for comedy. Thus Tiberius
and Sejanus, the Jew of Malta and his blackamoor, the arch-plotter
Volpone and the parasite Mosca, are respectively related.

If tragedy can scoff, comedy can scorn. The comical satires are of the
"biting" variety, not the "toothless." Professing to sport with human
follies, not with crimes, Jonson too often took it upon himself to dis-
pense poetic justice, to regulate his comical satires by a more rigorous
ethic than life itself ever provides, to conjure up an inferno of punish-
ments for his personal enemies. Some high-minded malcontent — an Asper
or a Crites — like the melancholy Jaques and not unlike the sort of mad-
man that Hamlet pretended to be, figures as Jonson's accredited repre-
sentative, and is entrusted with the responsibility of scourging vice, un-
trussing affectation, and reconciling humours all around. Jonsonian
comedy invariably tends in the direction of an arraignment; it must
enact a trial and achieve an official resolution of the comic knot, whether
by royal Cynthia or imperial Augustus, by court or Senate, or merely
by a nonchalant interloper or humane jurist of the Bridlegoose breed.

In the riper comedies, the rules become more flexible. The final court-
room scene in Volpone, it is true, reverses the venal decision of the fourth
act, but by that time our faith in lawyers and judges and Venetians and
human beings has become corroded, and we sense the hollowness of the
categorical imperative. In Epicene, the pretense is acknowledged, and
we are invited to hear a false canon lawyer and a mock doctor of divinity
hold a sham disputation. This discrepancy between law and life is the
condition which governs Bartholomew Fair. "Think to make it as law-
ful as you can," pleads Dame Purecraft, and Rabbi Busy discovers
scriptural sanction for the eating of pig. The bumpkin Cokes, while
being edified by a ballad on the wretched end which befalls pickpockets,
is robbed of his purse. In this select company of gamblers and bawds,
only the half-witted Troubleall would insist upon warrant for what is
done; in the very sink of enormities, the pompous Justice Overdo can
find no one to expose but his own wife; in the topsy-turvy jurisdiction of
Pie-powders, it is the reforming element — Overdo, the puritan Busy, and
the angry man, Wasp — who land side by side in the stocks. Jonson could
go no farther in reducing his own legalism to absurdity, except by
haling into The Staple of News the trial of dogs which Aristophanes had
originated and Racine would improve. These names are worth recalling,
if they convey the generalization that parody of justice has always been
a premise for comedy.

His object all sublime Jonson gradually relinquished to the genuine
doctors and divines. With a more incisive perception of the conflict be-

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 49

tween interests and ideals, "the space between the breast and lips," he
gave up the attempt to discipline his characters and they profited by
their freedom. His uncompromising attitude toward his fellow men
persisted, but he no longer described men as good and bad; they were
simply fools and knaves, or, in Elizabethan parlance, gulls and coney-
catchers. The eschatology of The Alchemist is based on this simplified
scheme; after the three knaves have cozened their victims, one of them
outwits the other two, who thereupon assume the status of fools, while
the arch-knave is pardoned and permitted to baffle the one honest man
of the piece. The Devil Is an Ass, as its name implies, is a study in com-
parative ethics, demonstrating that what is religiously regarded as the
absolute in evil can only bungle along by contrast with what goes on
above ground. *'Hell is a grammar-school to this!" exclaims the chastened
fiend, and departs on the back of the Vice, setting oft an ineffectual fire-
cracker, and leaving the field to Protagoras and Jeremy Bentham.

Because Jonson was enough of an Aristotelian to rank knowledge above
virtue, and enough of a Machiavellian to delight in ingenuity for its
own sake, it does not follow that he ever succeeded in banishing morality
from his stage. In comedy, as well as tragedy, there must be a context of
good and evil, but it can be defined socially rather than theologically.
Pity and terror, accordingly, give way to insouciance and curiosity, and
sometimes to contempt and cynicism. Comic writers start by making
certain devastating assumptions about human nature, by questioning
every man's honesty and every woman's virtue, even though they seldom
push them to such drastic conclusions as Mandragola, The Country
Wife, Turcaret, and Volpone, ''Interpreteth best sayings and deeds often
to the worst," says Drummond. These assumptions inhere in the tradi-
tion of classical comedy, as part of that perfectly Euclidean realm where
there are so many coincidences and no surprises, where old men exist to
leave legacies, clever parasites to get around them, beautiful orphans to
be shipwrecked, and young men to go a-whoring.

Jonson had assimilated the latent antagonisms of this early comedy —
fathers versus sons, philistines against poets, the city as opposed to the
universities. When he came to print Every Man In His Humour in folio,
he heightened the asperity of the elder generation by assigning Old
Knowell a speech out of Juvenal on the depraving of youth through
luxury and trade, and weakened the position of the younger generation
by omitting Lorenzo Junior's defense of poetry. The Ovid of Poetaster
becomes virtually the ''marked man" of later romanticism, con-
demned first by his father to the study of law, and then by the Emperor
to banishment. When Jonson came to composition with his audience,
however, in Epicene and Bartholomew Fair, youth could expect indul-
gence and pantaloons or serious asses might tremble in apprehension of
the fate of Malvolio. His scholars, dropping their academic accent, set
up for wits; the city became the town, and they found their way around

50 Harry Levin

it without difficulty. It might have comforted the banished Ovid to learn
that he had furnished the very language for this elegant new coterie of
Truewits and Clerimonts.

Epicene, the most brittle of Jonson's comedies, was the most likely to
win Pepys's plaudits and fit Dryden's canons. Frankly a thing of veneer,
explicitly discouraging attempts to glance beneath its polished contours,
it stands at an interesting halfway point between Plautine and Restora-
tion comedy. Its courtly air and its emphasis on the relations between
the sexes remind us that it was written for the boy-actors who had per-
formed Lyly's plays, whereas Jonson's apprenticeship was served in the
theater that had employed Marlowe, while Sejanus land Volpone were
produced by Shakespeare's company. But the action of Epicene is not
presided over by any Meredithian comic spirit. If it were not farce, it
would be pathology. Was there ever a more disillusioned cavalier than
Sir Dauphine Eugenie, setting out to win the collective favors of a bevy
of women he totally despises? And in the attitude of the wits toward
their monomaniac victim, there is more than a touch of sadism, of the
''comedy of affliction."

For all its artificiality. Epicene was definitely set in London. From that
time forth, Jonson cast aside the fabula palliata and took up the fabula
togata. The change is merely a matter of nomenclature, since Jonson
always followed the standard comic practice — from Menahder to Minsky
— of conceiving the comic stage as an intersection of city streets. Within
this convention there is dramatic unity, as well as room for considerable
movement. All that is needed are a few doors and windows, which Jon-
son, revising Every Man In His Humour, had no trouble in labelling
**Moorfields" and "The Old Jewry." He never returned to the "fustian
countries" where he had dallied before, or to the Rome which he had
tried to use as a looking-glass for England. Italy, to af^ English eye the
incarnate breeding-place of corruption, had seemed the appropriate
setting for Volpone-, it is a grim chauvinism which insists on laying the
scene for The Alchemist at home:

Our scene is London, 'cause we would make known.
No country's mirth is better than our own.

The demands of realism are most fully satisfied by Bartholomew Fair.
Although the most meticulously local of Jonson's plays, it is also the most
broadly universal; for is not all the world a fair — paraphrasing Seneca,
Jonson develops the conceit in his Discoveries. — and do not men seek
gilded roofs and marble pillars, even as children are attrarted to cockle-
shells and hobby-horses? Under this more genial dispensation, humours
diffuse into vapors, and vapors evaporate in fumo. Like a pilgrimage,
a fair forms a comprehensive natural background against which all types
and classes may be exhibited; like Chaucer, Jonson allows his characters

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 51

to step out of the proscenium. Ursula, the pig-woman, challenges an
odorous comparison with the Wife of Bath herself, let alone Elinor
Rumming or Marion Tweedy Bloom. Here as always, realism thrives
upon the implicit contrast between the way things are presented and
the way literature has been in the habit of presenting those same things.
What, then, could be a crueller falling-off than for Leander, having
swum the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, to let a foul-mouthed ferry-
man row him across the Thames from the Bankside to Puddle Wharf?

The plots of Eastward Ho, Volpone, and The Alchemist are more
highly wrought, but not so farfetched as we might believe. Amid the
traffic and speculation of the Renaissance, treasure-trove, legacy hunting,
and alchemy were considered legitimate alternatives in the general pur-
suit of riches. If this crass afterthought robs Jonson's comedies of their
fantasy, it binds them much more firmly to the life of their time. For
they have a single theme, which may be underscored as the leading-motive
of Jonsonian drama, and which is enunciated by its most authoritative
spokesman in the mystic words, "Be rich!" Even through the disembodied
parables of his final period, Jonson was playing with such subjects as the
pursuit of the Lady Pecunia; and in the projector Merecraft, he created
a prototype for the Mr. Micawbers and Robert Macaires and Mulberry
Sellerses of bourgeois literature.

Gold is the core of Jonson's comedy, getting and spending are the
chains which bind it together, and luxury furnishes the ornaments which
cover its surfaces. It is further stipulated, by Volpone himself, that such
gold must not be the reward of any productive endeavor. Both Volpone
and The Alchemist hinge upon some monstrous device, a will or the
Philosophers' Stone, but Jonson can bring to bear upon almost any
situation a suspiciously circumstantial familiarity with all the ruses of
craft and quackery. Insofar as it would be the nature of Volpone or
Subtle to plot, whether on or off the stage, the motive of chicane becomes
the determining factor in the strategy of Jonson's plays. In Volpone,
perhaps even more than in The Alchemist, he has erected his most im-
posing hierarchies of collusion. In the later play he relaxes the two-edged
ironies of fathers who disinherit sons and husbands who prostitute wives,
in order to admit a procession of more earth-bound appetites, ranging
from the petty desires of a lawyer's clerk to cut a figure, to the in-
transigent gluttony of Sir Epicure Mammon.

This fat knight is a Falstaft who has suddenly begun to babble like
a Faustus. Hankering after fleshpots, his lordly talk is "all in gold";
"Silver I care not for." Out of the boundless opulence which his insatiate
libido has already summoned up, he is even prepared to make an occa-
sional benefaction — "And now and then a church." The limit of his lust
is only measured by his gullibility; he observes Habsburg and Medici
traits in Doll Common, and addresses her in the language which Faustus
reserved for Helen of Troy. 'Tis pity she's a whore! Before he takes her

5^ Harry Levin

upstairs, he is warned not to arouse her fanaticism by introducing topics
of biblical controversy. **We think not on 'em," he replies. And their
departure gives Face and Subtle the excuse to bring experiments to a
fiasco and blame it upon Sir Epicure's impatient sensuality. '*0 my
voluptuous mind!" he cries.

Marlowe consistently presented the voluptuary as a hero; to Jonson, he
is always either a villain like Volpone or a dupe like Sir Epicure Mam-
mon. Taking up, at Eliot's suggestion. Sir Epicure's moist-lipped recital
of the delights he hopes to enjoy, and placing it alongside Gaveston's
announcement of the entertainments he has prepared for Edward II,
we can observe in each case a texture woven with equal richness and a
comparable barrage of sensuous appeal. Jonson's accumulation of images
is even denser and more various than Marlowe's, and its effect is utterly
subversive. Jonson could not have expressed his reservations more ex-
plicitly, nor hit upon a more elaborate contrivance for turning to dust
and ashes all the lovely fruit of the Renaissance imagination. Nothing
has been neglected, but the intonation has changed, for he is consciously
dealing in illusion. Marlowe to Jonson is as Hyperion to a satyr. Sir
Philip Sidney had pimples, Jonson told Drummond, and advanced an
appalling explanation of Queen Elizabeth's best-known trait.

The luxurious trappings of Jonson's verse are to be viewed, but not
touched; they will either vanish away or taint whoever is brash enough
to reach out for them. The limping jig of Volpone's deformed chorus
rehearses the tale of Lucian's cock, whose crowing awoke its indigent
master from dreams of banquets and visions of riches. The plague hangs
over the house in which The Alchemist operates; brightness falls from the
air. Sooner or later, of course, Jonson would rally to the cause of the
expiring Renaissance, and the Ghost of Dionysius would bawl down
Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Leatherhead's puppet-show. He would have
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue in a masque, at any rate. Perhaps Jonson's
asperity was due to the fact that he was a satirist by vocation and a Stoic
by philosophical inclination. But vocation and inclination are the result
of temperament; if Jonson had not been a scholar, he might have called
himself a Puritan. And if he had never existed, there still would have
been the Puritans, and other poets would have found it difficult not to
write satire. Sir Toby Belch's question was a little beside the point.
Malvolio was virtuous precisely because there were no more cakes and
ale.

Jonson raised one question which neither Mandeville nor Rousseau
would settle. Like his author, the miser of The Staple of News is a dis-
eiple of Seneca:

Who can endure to see
The fury of men's gullets and their groins?
What stews, ponds, parks, coops, garners, magazines.

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 53

What velvets, tissues, scarfs, embroideries,
And laces they might lack? They covet things
Superfluous still, when it were much more honour
They could want necessary. What need hath Nature
Of silver dishes or gold chamber-pots?
Of perfumed napkins, or a numerous family
To see her eat? Poor and wise, she requires
Meat only; hunger is not ambitious.

Here, in his Stoic doctrine of nature, he is at variance with King Lear:

O, reason not the need; our basest beggars

Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,

Man's life is cheap as beast's. Thou art a lady;

If only to go warm were gorgeous.

Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,

Which scarcely keeps thee warm.

Jonson takes more for granted than Shakespeare does. He presupposes
that life is fundamentally a compact, rational affair, needlessly compli-
cated by impulse and artifice. To Shakespeare, all experience, however
variegated, is of the same baseless fabric. The two poets, who worked so
closely together, were as far apart as Heraclitus and Parmenides. Jonson
adopts the attitude of society, Shakespeare the viewpoint of the indi-
vidual, which is finally more real. Jonson's instrument is logic, Shake-
speare's psychology; Jonson's method has been called mechanical, Shake-
speare's organic. That is why we must criticize Shakespeare in terms of
movement and warmth, Jonson in terms of pattern and color.

III. Rhetoric

It was an inescapable irony which compelled Jonson to spend his last
twenty years as a purveyor of magnificence to the court. It was ironic
that a Stoic should be a party to such an extreme form of conspicuous
consumption as the masque; that a poet should be forced into competi-
tion not only with Inigo Jones, but — as Neptune's Triumph dramatizes
the issue — with the cook, and at a far lower stipend than the dancing-
master; that Ben Jonson should be called upon to provide what he him-
self ruefully brands

. . . the short bravery of the night,

. . . the jewels, stuffs, the pains, the wit

There wasted, some not paid for yet!

54 Harry Levin

But it was inescapable because Jonson had been overlooked by popular
success; because he had to get what comfort he could from his official
position as poet laureate; because his talent for decoration, his penchant
for symbolism, his command of poetic convention, his play of allusion,
his knowledge of the classics, and his interest in folklore needed an occa-
sion to converge upon. Shakespeare's career proceeded, according to
Edward Dowden's formula, out of the workshop into the world; Jonson's
career went in the other direction.

All of his conscientious craftsmanship was insufficient to impose co-
herence on so synthetic a medium. To gather some slight conception of
what it was all about, we find ourselves trying to envisage an aristo-
cratic revue or an erudite Silly Symphony. Spain and France, in the
persons of their ambassadors, quarrelled over invitations, precedence,
and the King's right ear; Laniere and Ferrabosco contributed galliards
and corrantos; the Queen, the Prince, the Lady Arabella, and other
mummers disguised themselves as gypsies or heathen deities or parts of
speech, and mounted the musicians' gallery to descend in some grandiose
machine. From state papers, viola da gamba scores, and architects' eleva-
tions, we emerge as confused as Pocahontas must have seemed at the per
formance of The Vision of Delight, Thumbing through Jonson's part in
these evanescent entertainments is like visiting a costumer's shop strewn
with a musty assortment of bent farthingales, second-hand armor, faded
wigs, and limp dominos.

If there is any special significance in the masque, it is apparent in the
frequency with which a pastoral note is sounded, with which golden
ages and happier eras are restored, or we are whisked away to unreal
Arcadias and remote Hesperides. Behind the frivolity and superficiality
of the genre lay at least one meaning — that the court and the city no
longer shared any literary conventions, that there was less and less of
the community of interest which had permitted the Globe and Blackfriars
to present the same plays. Structurally, the relation between Jonson's
masques and comedies is close, too close to have pleased the spectators of
his last comedies. Yet Jonson's comedies, from first to last, have a
tendency to crystallize, whenever opportunity offers, into a series of
games, ceremonies, shows, songs, litanies, orations, and every sort of
masque-like invention. The rites conducted by Sejanus, Volpone's medi-
cine-show, Morose's invective against his barber. Dapper's interview with
the Queen of Faery, Justice Clement's merry assizes, Littlewit's redaction
of Hero and Leander — these episodes, besides fulfilling their dramatic
function in the plays to which they belong, are independently reducible
to formal pattern.

Beyond these internal harmonies, Jonson invites scrutiny as an engineer
of plots. We have noticed that the recurrent trials point a moral; we must
recognize that they also adorn a play, by supplying an external frame-
work for the action and a ritual for some of the scenes. If we admit the

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 55

parallel between promoting a confidence game and spinning a comic
intrigue, we can appreciate the way Jonson utilized the get-rich-quick
motive and the scheme of a hoax in his most successful comedies. His
others are less so because they sacrifice situation to character. The lists
of dramatis personae, in Every Man Out of His Humour or The New
Inn, read like pages out of Earle and Overbury. The stage becomes so
overloaded with sharply defined, carefully delineated supernumeraries,
who have been called into being only to have their legs pulled, that it
becomes all but impossible for a plot to get under way.

The difficulty of introducing his characters in a natural sequence of
encounters was met by Jonson with a great deal of ingenuity. The plan
of Volpone, turned to account again in The Alchemist, enables them to
make their entrances one after another, without monotony or stiffness.
The opening scene of The Alchemist, wherein the thieves, having fallen
out, bespatter each other with abuse until the spectators have learned
the past history, crimes, misdemeanors, and unendearing foibles of all
three, is a triumph of exposition. The complicated intermarriages, the
awkward progresses from house to house, and the Mephistophelian ser-
vants that comic dramatists allowed themselves in order to hold their
plots together, Jonson was never quite ready to give up. But he did de-
vise, in Bartholomew Fair, a new unity, which incorporates the three old
ones into a more manageable partnership, based solely upon local color.
The critical dialogue in which he sought warrant for his innovation in
Horace's Art of Poetry did not survive the conflagration of his library,
but we have today in the films ample evidence of the breadth and
diversity of this method. Particularly in the journalistic milieu of The
Staple of News, with his gift for recreating an atmosphere, Jonson seems
to be striving toward a comic institution around which to build his play
— a thinking-shop or a school for scandal.

Occasionally the hand of the puppeteer appears, the situation is ob-
viously manipulated, and we smell a device. If Jonson had been less
fond of those who are witty in themselves, he might have done more
convincing portraits of those who are the cause that wit is in others.
There are not enough fools positive and too many fools contingent. The
dramatist relies upon the assistance of his characters to bring off his
practical jokes. It is the difference between Socrates' basket and FalstafFs;
Socrates is made a fool by Aristophanes, Falstaff by Mistress Ford and
Mistress Quickly. It would not have occurred to Jonson to let well
enough alone and allow circumstances to force Sganarelle to practice
medicine. His ironies must be overseen by his personal representatives,
ever alert to persuade the jealous Corvino to lend his wife to another, or
to stir up a reluctant duel between Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La
Foole. Sometimes his fools are conscious of their folly and have good
reason for persisting. Captain Otter, as a creature of humours, is a pal-
pable fraud; he is a realistically drawn, thoroughly unpleasant broken-

56 Harry Levin

down gambler, who affects certain mannerisms which we have come to
associate with the name of Jonson's pupil, Dickens, to ingratiate himself
with his rich wife and her fine friends.

Because Jonsonian comedy can only succeed by subordinating parts
to whole, its cast of characters is not its outstanding feature. Each has
only his characteristic move, as in chess, and the object of the game is to
see what new combinations have been brought about. Between the ab-
stract idea of the plot and the concrete detail of the language is a hiatus.
Nothing is lacking, but the various components can be distinguished
without much trouble. In Gorvino's phrase, it is too manifest. After the
large masses have been sketched out in baroque symmetry, decoration is
applied to the surfaces. What is said, frequently, does not matter, so
long as something is said, and then Jonson is at special pains to make
what is said interesting for its own sake. Surly's school-book Spanish and
Doll's memorized ravings are simply blocked in. But when Mosca reads
the inventory, or when Subtle puts Face through the alchemists' cate-
chism, they too are saying something where — in the dramatic economy —
they mean nothing, and their speeches take on the aspect of incantation.
It is a trick which reaches its logical limit in Epicene, where everything
spoken has a high nuisance value and the words themselves become sheer
filigree. Beyond that point, they have the force of Moliere's comic re-
frains. Lady Would-be's uncontrollable flow of recipes, prescriptions,
literary opinions, and philosophical speculations, at cross-purposes with
Volpone, demonstrates how conveniently this talking-machine technique
bears out Bergson's theory of laughter.

To linger over the elements of pure design in Jonson's dialogue is to
ignore its expressiveness as representation. The language itself is com-
pletely idiomatic, uninhibited by the formality of plot and characteriza-
tion or the complexity of scenes and speeches. Because "Spenser writ no
language," Jonson refused to tolerate him, and he could spare Marston
nothing but a prescription to purge unnatural diction. His own occa-
sional verse moves, like his drama, on the social plane and speaks in the
familiar tones of human intercourse. Even self-communion, with Jonson,
takes the form of a public address. Ode, epigram, elegy, epistle — nearly
every poem is composed on something or to somebody, brandishing pre-
cepts and eliciting examples in the injunctive mood of Roman poetry.
A poetic style suitable for these purposes had to be fittest for discourse
and nearest prose. Whatever the restraints Jonson chose to accept, his
handling of words never lost its flexibility; throughout the most tor-
tuous stanzas his phrasing remains as English as Purcell's.

It would be hard to derive an inference about Jonson's dramatic verse
from the comedies he wrote in prose, since Epicene and Bartholomew
Fair are farther from one another than from any of the remaining plays.
Neither the enamelled elegance of the one nor the rough-and-ready
realism of the other accomplishes anything that Jonson has not been

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 57

able to achieve in meter with the help of two fertile resources, en-
jambment and the broken line. He is so unwilling to pause every time
five iambs have elapsed, that he now and then revives the classical
stratagem of concluding a line in the midst of a word. And he is so fond
of crisp dialogue that he often divides a single pentameter among three
speakers, as in the staccato asides that punctuate the harangues of
Tiberius or Voltore. Longer speeches strike up a syncopation between
the shifting colloquial rhythms and the sustained stresses of blank verse.
Face's praise of Spaniards is rendered in a string of four-foot clauses, so
that the iterated phrase leaps across the page and then creeps back
again:

Ask from your courtier to your inns-of-court man.
To your mere milliner. They will tell you all,
Your Spanish jennet is the best horse; your Spanish
Stoop is the best garb; your Spanish beard
Is the best cut; your Spanish ruffs are the best
Wear; your Spanish pavan the best dance;
Your Spanish titillation in a glove
The best perfume. And for your Spanish pike
And Spanish blade, let your poor Captain speak.

The cadence is individualized to catch the breathlessness of Celiacs ap-
peal for mercy or reverberate with the finality of Volpone's revelation.

It is typical of Jonson, as of Dryden and the baroque in general, that
rhythmic arrangement should take precedence over actual sound. High,
astounding terms are relatively rare. Already a rationalistic bias is per-
ceptible; writers seem less eager to use words for their own sake and
more anxious to employ them for what they signify. Jonson had the
custom of setting down everything he proposed to say in prose and
versifying it in a subsequent operation. Hence his poetry is primarily
pictorial and only then musical, it addresses the visual rather than the
auditory instincts, it appeals — as the writing of a poet who gave up the
stage for the printing-press — to the eye instead of the ear. Like his per-
sonifications of Fancy and Wonder in The Vision of Delight, Jonson's
eye had the power to summon up an infinite variety of vistas. Like a good
apothecary, he was never without an ounce of civet with which he might
sweeten his imagination at will. *'He hath consumed a whole night in
lying looking to his great toe," — if we are to believe Drummond — **about
which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight
in his imagination.'*

Graphic speech is the generic trait with which even Jonson's ugliest
ducklings are well endowed. The stolid Corvino indulges in unsuspected
flights of conceit and the sullen Ananias reveals a flamboyant strain of

58 Harry Levin

polemical eloquence. Kitely's jealousy of his wife prompts him to de-
liver an exhaustive survey of the wiles of amorous deception. To dismiss
the threat of punishment, Voltore invokes a swarm of luridly ridiculous
tortures upon the prostrate person of his client. In introducing Drugger
as an honest tobacconist, Face cannot resist the temptation to add some
dozen or sixteen lines covering the various sharp practices of dishonest
tobacconists that Drugger utterly eschews. Dramatic action is supple-
mented by the potential drama of these three speeches. In each instance
a set of images picks up the situation where the business leaves off, and
projects it to the most extravagant bounds of possibility. Uniformly
Jonson's style is stamped with the brilliance of his iconoplastic talents.

The imagery surprises us by being so tangible, by presenting its objects
not as fanciful comparisons but as literal descriptions. They are seldom
glimpsed through the magic casement of metaphor, through the inter-
vention of rhetoric. The rich jewel in the Ethiop's ear belonged to
Juliet only by metaphysical parallel; Jonson would have slashed off the
ear, conveyed the jewel to Volpone's coffers, and dangled it before Celia
as the price of her virtue. Heaping up sensuous detail in thorough-
going Elizabethan fashion, he ordinarily contrives to bring it within the
immediate grasp of his tantalized characters. The result is that the theme
of his plays and their poetic realization are more closely knit together.
Examining the content of Jonson's images, Caroline Spurgeon has dis-
covered that the largest single category is drawn from the usages and
conditions of society and that he returns more consistently than any of
his rivals to the subject of money. A further consequence of this restric-
tion of materials is a kind of heightening of the commonplace, more
proper to the humorous than to the lyrical imagination. Deprived of
other figures of speech, Jonson relies much on hyperbole. That is not
the only quality of style he shares with Aristophanes and Rabelais.

The poetry of misplaced concreteness and solid specification is an in-
strument of the satirist; he is adept at mastering the tricks of a trade and
enumerating technical data; his swift, disintegrating glance takes in all
the ingredients of Goody Trash's gingerbread. A profusion of images is
not the best way to communicate feeling. Selection is more likely to
produce the poignant response; accumulation bewilders at first and in-
vites analysis in the end. When Jonson's intention is not satirical, his
**wit's great overplus" dilutes the effect of his verse. In one line,

Ditch-delivered by a drab,

Shakespeare can concentrate an impact that Jonson labored through the
long and learned Masque of Queens without quite attaining. Ultimately
his facility at image-making becomes self-conscious and, as it were, poeti-
cal. It carries him into the region of the conventionally beautiful and
leaves him among the curled woods and painted meads. It ominously

An Introduction to Ben Jonson 59

foreshadows the time when poets will work with a repertory of standard
items and critics will ponder the distinction between imagination and
fancy.

Satirists are well aware that appearances deceive, yet it is with ap-
pearances that satirists are chiefly concerned. Jonson delights in exhibit-
ing facades, because they both impress us and make us uneasy about
what lies behind them. Every once in a while a masochistic fascination
leads him to explore the obverse of beauty, to give way to the fly-blown
fancies of The Famous Voyage, to betray a revulsion worthy of Swift.

Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.

It is never simple for literature to report the senses directly. In the
Renaissance especially, it was hard to reconcile perceptions and prin-
ciples; attempts oscillate from the sheer apprehension of Marlowe to
the sublimated allegory of Spenser. Between these poles there is room
for voluptuousness, scientific curiosity, asceticism, prurience — all the
degrees and mixtures of intellectualized sensibility that we see in Ovid's
Banquet of Sense, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, Nosce
Teipsum, or "The Ecstasy.'' As an Elizabethan, Jonson too had been
perplexed by the problem. As a Stoic and satirist, he was able to make
his own rejection. As a professional man of letters, he had to keep on
writing through a period when immanent emotions and confident atti-
tudes were being reduced to questions of literary technique.

In his fecundity and in his artificiality, in his virtues and in his faults,
Jonson remains the craftsman. When he appraises the idle apprentice
Shakespeare, he speaks with the authority of a fellow craftsman, and —
after a few precise couplets of prefatory remarks, acknowledgments, and
qualifications — deliberately turns on the lyric strain:

I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!

And he proceeds to a workmanlike and reasonably impassioned estimate.
Because he was in the habit of discussing his craft concretely, he could
not fail to be interested in Plutarch's comparison of poetry and painting.
It is no mere chance that any effort to describe his own work falls re-
peatedly into the vocabulary of the fine arts. If we are looking for a
single impression of Ben Jonson, it is of the Flemish painters that we are
finally mindful — of crowded street scenes and rich interiors, of sharp
portraiture and lavish ornament, of the gloss and the clarity and the
tactile values that are the tokens of mastery.

Morose Ben Jonson

by Edmund Wilson

When Swinburne published his study of Ben Jonson hardly sixty
years ago, he indignantly called attention to the fact that English scholar-
ship, which had shown such devotion to the texts of the Greek and Latin
classics, should never, in two centuries and a half, have produced a
decent edition of so important an English writer. That complaint can
no longer be made — though the definitive edition of Jonson by C. H.
Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, brought out by the Oxford
University Press, has been slow in appearing and is not yet complete.
The first two volumes were published in 1925, and the eighth has only
just come out. This, containing Jonson's poems and prose, is the last
instalment of the text Jonson, but it is to be followed by two volumes
of commentaries, which ought to be particularly valuable, since no writer
is more full of allusions, l;>oth topical and learned, than Jonson, and his
work has never been properly annotated. There has not appeared, from
this point of view and from that of clearing up the text, a serious edition
of Jonson since that of William Gifford in 1816. This new one is a model
of scholarship, handsomely printed and interestingly illustrated — in
some cases, with hitherto unpublished drawings made by Inigo Jones for
the decors and costumes of Jonson's masques.

Except, however, for the first two volumes, which assemble biographi-
cal materials and contain historical and critical essays on Jonson's vari-
ous works, the Herford-Simpson edition is not especially to be recom-
mended to the ordinary nonscholarly reader who may want to make the
acquaintance of Jonson. It presents the original text with the seventeenth
century punctuation and spelling and with no glossary and no notes
except textual ones. The books are, besides, expensive, and the earlier
volumes are now hard to get — so the approach to this beetling author
remains, as it has always been, rather forbidding and fraught with as-
perities. The best reprinting of the Gifford edition is also expensive and
out of print. The three volumes of selections in the Mermaid Series are
full of perplexing misprints, which drop out words or substitute wrong

"Morose Ben Jonson." From The Triple Thinkers, revised ed. (Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948), by Edmund Wilson. Copyright 1938, 1948 by Edmund Wilson. Reprinted
by permission of the author.

Morose Ben Jonson 61

ones, and equipped with inadequate notes that turn up often on the
wrong pages. The two volumes in the Everyman's Series include only
Jonson's plays, and they are printed in a small dense type that makes
them uncomfortable reading; there is a glossary, but it is incomplete.
The only breach that I know in the hedge that seems to have sprung up
around Jonson, as if his editors had somehow been influenced by their
bristling and opaque subject, has been made by Mr. Harry Levin in his
Selected Works, of Ben Jonson (published by Random House). Here, in
a clear readable text of his own and with a brilliant introduction, Mr.
Levin has got together most of the best of Jonson for a compact awStNTelP
printed volume. There is an obstacle, though, even here, for he has
furnished no notes and no glossary, and with Jonson, the explanation of
a literary reference or the key to a phrase of slang is often absolutely
indispensable for the understanding of a passage.

But it is not merely that Jonson's text itself has been a little hard to
get at. It is rather that lack of demand has not stimulated popular edi-
tions. Volpone can still hold an audience — though it took a German
adaptation to bring it back into fashion; and The Alchemist has been
recently done both in New York and in London; but, among a thousand
people, say, who have some knowledge and love of Shakespeare, and even
some taste for Webster and Marlowe, I doubt whether you could find
half a dozen who have any enthusiasm for Jonson or who have seriously
read his plays. T. S. Eliot, admitting the long neglect into which Ben
Jonson's work had fallen, put up, in The Sacred Wood, a strong plea
for Jonson as an artist, and thus made a respect for this poet de rigueur
in literary circles. But one's impression is that what people have read
has been, not Jonson, but Eliot's essay. The dramatist himself, a great
master for the age that followed his own, is still for ours mostly a cele-
brated name, whose writings are left unexplored. What I want to do here
is to attack the problem of Jonson's unpopularity from what I believe to
be a new point of view, and to show that his failure as a drawing attrac-
tion, in either the theater or the study, is bound up in a peculiar way
with his difficulties as an artist.

It is a fault of Eliot's essay, so expert in its appreciation of the best-
woven passages of Jonson's verse, that it minimizes his glaring defects.
If you read it without reading Jonson, you will get a most plausible pic-
ture of a special kind of great writer, but this picture is not exactly Jon-
son. What is suppressed is all that Bernard Shaw meant when, telling
off the Elizabethan dramatists, he characterized Ben Jonson as a "brutal
pedant"; and, in grappling with Jonson's shortcomings, we cannot per-
haps do better than begin by facing squarely those qualities which made
it impossible for Shaw — who admired, though he patronized, Shake-
speare— to take seriously the comic writer who had, up to Shaw's own
appearance, achieved the greatest reputation in English dramatic litera-

62 Edmund Wilson

ture. The point is that Shakespeare, like Shaw, however much they differ
in their philosophies, has an immense range, social and moral, in under-
standing a variety of people. To an intelligent and sensitive man of any
school of thought, Shakespeare appears sensitive and intelligent. But Ben
Jonson, after Shakespeare, seems neither. Though he attempts a variety
of characters, they all boil down to a few motivations, recognizable as
the motivations of Jonson himself and rarely transformed into artistic
creations. Shakespeare expands himself, breeds his cells as organic beings,
till he has so lost himself in the world he has made that we can hardly
recompose his personality. Jonson merely splits himself up and sets the
pieces — he is to this extent a dramatist — in conflict with one another;
but we have merely to put these pieces together to get Jonson, with
little left over. In the theater, he aims at several styles, as he tries for a
multiplicity of characters, but the variety here, too, is mainly a mere
technical matter of metrics and vocabulary, where Shakespeare can sum-
mon voices that seem to come from real human throats.

Jonson also lacks natural invention, and his theater has little organic
life. His plots are incoherent and clumsy; his juxtapositions of elements
are too often like the "mechanical mixtures'' of chemistry that produce
no molecular reactions. His chief artifices for making something happen
are to introduce his characters in impossible disguises and to have them
play incredible practical jokes. Nor has he any sense of movement or
proportion: almost everything goes on too long, and while it continues,
it does not develop. Nor is his taste in other matters reliable. His puns,
as Dryden complained, are sometimes of a stunning stupidity; and when
he is dirty, he is, unlike Shakespeare, sometimes disgusting to such a
degree that he makes one sympathetic with the Puritans in their efforts
to clean up the theater. His reading of Greek and Latin, for all the boast-
ing he does about it, has served him very insufficiently for the refinement
and ordering of his work, and usually appears in his plays as either an
alien and obstructive element or, when more skillfully managed, as a
padding to give the effect of a dignity and weight which he cannot sup-
ply himself. He is much better when he lets himself go in a vein that is
completely unclassical.

It is surely, then, misleading for Eliot to talk of Jonson's **polished
surface,'' to call him a "great creative mind," who "created his own
world," and not to warn you of the crudities and aridities, the uncer-
tainty of artistic intention and the flat-footed dramatic incompetence,
that you will run into when you set out to read him. None of his plays,
with the exception of The Alchemist, really quite comes off as a whole.
The three others of the best four of his comedies, though they all suffer
from the faults I have mentioned, have elements of genuine humor and
passages of admirable writing. But the story of The Silent Woman is
revolting in its forced barbarity (Jonson's murderous practical jokes have
their own analogue in literature in the booby-traps of Rudyard Kipling);

Morose Ben Jonson 63

Volpone, which reaches at moments a kind of heroic magnificence in
exploiting its sordid and cruel themes, suffers, also, though somewhat
less, from being based upon practical joking, and it is badly let down at
the end by an improbable conventional conclusion; and, as for Bartholo-
mew Fair, with some terribly funny scenes and a rich pageant of London
low-life, there is in it so much too much of everything that the whole
thing becomes rather a wallow of which the Pig- Woman and her pigs are
all too truly the symbol. Contrast it with Hogarth's Southwark Fair (the
product, to be sure, of a more disciplined age), equally confused and
crowded, but so much better composed, so much sharper and firmer in
outline. With The Alchemist, Jonson did ring the bell. This comedy is
concentrated and well-constructed. There is no element of false morality
to blur Jonson's acrid relish of the confidence games of his rogues: the
cynicism is carried right through. The verse, which invests with style,
which raises to distinction and glitter till it gives a ring almost like
poetry, the slang of the underworld and the jargon of its various chi-
caneries, is an original achievement of Jonson's, which is only sustained
in this one play. And, though there are one or two labored devices, the
invention is more resourceful and the dialogue more spontaneous than
in any of Jonson's other comedies. Yet this play, one of the funniest in
English, is not really an example of high comedy as either a play of
Moliere's or a play of Aristophanes' is. Ben Jonson is not enough of a
critic — that is, he has not enough intelligence — for either Moliere's kind
of interest in character and human relations or Aristophanes' kind of
interest in institutions and points of view. The Alchemist is a picaresque
farce, fundamentally not different from the Marx brothers. And it shows
Jonson's poverty of themes that, when he had earlier attempted a
tragedy, he should have arrived at a similar story. Sejanus, which takes
us to the Roman Senate and inside the court of Tiberius, is also a chron-
icle of the intrigues of rogues who begin by working together but later
sell each other out.

This is a too offhand summary of Jonson's work, but I want to get at
him in another way.

Ben Jonson seems an obvious example of a psychological type which
has been described by Freud and designated by a technical name, anal
erotic, which has sometimes misled the layman as to what it was meant
to imply. Let me introduce it simply by quoting from the account of it
in a handbook of psychoanalysis. The Structure and Meaning of Psycho-
analysis by William Healy, A. F. Bronner and A. M. Bowers. The three
main characteristics of this type are here paraphrased from Freud as
follows: *'(a) orderliness ... in an over-accentuated form, pedantry; (b)
parsimony, which may become avarice; (c) obstinacy, which may become
defiance and perhaps also include irascibility and vindictiveness." Now,
Jonson had all these qualities. He was a pedant, whose cult of the classics

64 Edmund Wilson f

had little connection with his special kind of genius. There is something
of the "compulsive/' in the neurotic sense, about his constant citing of
precedents and his working into the speeches of his plays passages, some-
times not translated, from the Greek and Latin authors (though it was
common for the Elizabethans to stick in scraps from Seneca or Ovid),
as if they were charms against failure. That he always did fear failure
is evident; and the arrogance, irritability, and stubbornness which are
also characteristic of this Freudian type have obviously, in Jonson's case,
their origin in a constant anxiety as to the adequacy of his powers. The
more he defies his audience, vindicates himself against his critics (though
at the same time he puts himself to special pains to propitiate the vulgar
with vulgarity and to impress the learned with learning), in his innumer-
able prologues, inductions, interludes between the acts, epilogues, drama-
tic postscripts, and apologies added to the printed texts — the more he
protests and explains, declaims at unconscionable length his indifference
to and scorn of his detractors, the more we feel that he is unquiet, not
confident. He is offsetting his internal doubts by demonstrations of self-
assertion.

The hoarding and withholding instinct which is the third of the key
traits of this type Jonson also displays to a high degree. This tendency
is supposed to be based on an atttiude toward the excretatory processes
acquired in early childhood. Such people, according to Freud, have an
impulse to collect and accumulate; they feel that doing so gives them
strength and helps them to resist the pressures that their elders are
bringing to bear on them. Sometimes they simply concentrate on storing
up; sometimes they expend in sudden bursts. They are likely to have a
strong interest in food both from the deglutitionary and the excretatory
points of view; but the getting and laying by of money or of some other
kind of possession which may or may not seem valuable to others is likely
to substitute itself for the infantile preoccupation with the contents of
the alimentary tract. Now, Jonson certainly exemplified this tendency,
and he exhibited it in a variety of ways. His learning is a form of hoard-
ing; and allied to it is his habit of collecting words. He liked to get up
the special jargons of the various trades and professions and unload them
in bulk on the public — sometimes with amusing results, as in the case
of the alchemical and astrological patter reeled off by the crooks of The
Alchemist, and even of the technique of behavior of the courtiers in
Cynthia's Revels, but more often, as with the list of cosmetics recom-
mended by Wittipol in The Devil Is an Ass and, to my taste, with the
legal Latin of the divorce scene in The Silent Woman, providing some
of his most tedious moments. The point is that Ben Jonson depends on
the exhibition of stored-away knowledge to compel admiration by itself.
And the hoarding and withholding of money is the whole subject of that
strange play Volpone. Volpone is not an ordinary miser: he is a Venetian
"magnifico," whose satisfaction in his store of gold is derived not merely

Morose Ben Jonson 65

from gloating alone but also, and more excitingly, from stimulating
others to desire it, to hope to inherit it from him, and then frustrating
them with the gratuitous cruelty which has been noted as one of the
features of the aggressive side of this Freudian type. The practical jokes
in Jonson have usually this sadistic character, and the people who per-
petrate them are usually trying either to get something for themselves
or to keep someone else from getting something. The many kinds of
frauds and sharpers — from pickpockets to promoters — who figure in Jon-
son's plays as prominently as the practical jokers are occupied with
similar aims; and Subtle and Face, in The Alchemist^ lurk closeted, like
Volpone, in a somber house, where they are hoarding their cleverness,
too, and plotting their victims' undoing.

I am not qualified to ^'analyze" Jonson in the light of this Freudian
conception, and I have no interest in trying to fit him into any formula-
tion of it. I am not even sure that the relation between the workings of
the alimentary tract and the other phenomena of personality is, as Freud
assumes, a relation of cause and effect; but I am sure that Freud has here
really seized upon a nexus of human traits that are involved with one
another and has isolated a recognizable type, and it seems to me to leap
to the eyes that Jonson belongs to this type. I shall fill in the rest of my
picture with the special characteristics of Jonson, which are consistent
with the textbook description and which in some cases strikingly illus-
trate it.

Ben Jonson's enjoyment of tavern life and his great reputation for wit
have created, among those who do not read him, an entirely erroneous
impression of high spirits and joviality; but his portraits show rather
the face of a man who habitually worries, who is sensitive and holds him-
self aloof, not yielding himself to intimate fellowship. In many of his
plays there figures an unsociable and embittered personage who some-
times represents virtue and censors the other characters, but is in other
cases presented by Jonson as a thoroughly disagreeable person and the
butt of deserved persecution. Such, in the second of these categories, are
Macilente in Every Man Out of His Humour, Morose in The Silent
Woman, Surly in The Alchemist, and Wasp in Bartholomew Fair, The
most conspicuous of these is Morose, and Jonson's treatment of him is
particularly significant. The dramatist, on a visit to the country, had
encountered a local character who gave him an idea for a play. This was
a man who had a morbid aversion to noise. Now, Jonson seems never
to have inquired the reason, never to have tried to imagine what the life
of such a man would be really like; nor could he ever have been con-
scious of what it was in himself that impelled him to feel so vivid an
interest in him. According to his usual custom, he simply put him on
the stage as a * 'humour," an eccentric with an irrational horror of any
kind of sound except that of his own voice, who lives in a room with a
double wall and the windows "close shut and caulked" in a street too

66 Edmund Wilson

narrow for traffic, and who, declaring that "all discourses but mine own"
seem to him *'harsh, impertinent, and irksome," makes his servants com-
municate with him by signs. And the only way that Jonson can find to
exploit the possibilities of this neurotic is to make him the agonized
victim of a group of ferocious young men, who hunt him in his burrow
like a badger, and trick him into marrying a "silent woman," who, im-
mediately after the ceremony — while her sponsors raise a hideous racket
— opens fire on him with a frenzy of chatter, and turns out in the end to
be a boy in disguise. But Morose himself is cruel through meanness: he
has merited the worst he can suffer. He has wanted to disinherit his
nephew, and has consigned him, in a venomous outburst, to the direst
humiliation and poverty. Through Morose and through the characters
like him, Ben Jonson is tormenting himself for what is negative and re-
cessive in his nature. In Volpone, the withholder is punished only after
he has had his fling at the delight of tormenting others. Miserliness, un-
sociability, a self-sufficient and systematic spite — these are among Jon-
son's dominant themes: all the impulses that grasp and deny. In the final
scene of Cynthia's Revels, the last play of Jonson's first period, he makes
Cynthia rhetorically demand:

When hath Diana, like an envious wretch.
That glitters only to his soothed self.
Denying to the world the precious use
Of hoarded wealth, withheld her friendly aid?

Yet Cynthia is Diana, and Diana is a virgin queen, who has herself for-
bidden love to her court; and the attitude which she is here repudiating
is to supply almost all the subjects for the rest of Jonson's plays, among
them all of his best. In these four lines, you have the whole thing in the
words that come to his pen: envy, denial, hoarding, withholding. The
first of these is very important. (Envy then meant hatred and spite as
well as jealousy of what others have, but I am dealing with it here in
its modern sense, which is usually the sense of Jonson.) In several of the
earlier plays, it has been one of the chief motivations. In those you have
had, on the one hand, the worthy and accomplished scholar — Horace of
The Poetaster, Crites of Cynthia's Revels — who is envied by lesser men;
and, on the other hand, the poor and exacerbated wit — Macilente in
Every Man Out of His Humour — who envies lesser men. But both are
aspects of the same personality; both are identified with Jonson himself.
Whether the injury done the superior man consists of being slandered by
fools or by the fools' being better than he, it is the only fulfillment of
the play that he is granted his just revenge, and he scores off his victims
with a cruelty almost equal to that of Volpone frustrating his mercenary
friends.

With this, there is no love in Jonson's plays to set against these nega-

Morose Ben Jonson 67

tive values. The references to seduction, frequent though they are, in
both his plays and his personal poems, suggest nothing but the coldest
of appetites, and often show more gratification at the idea of cuckolding
a husband than at that of enjoying a woman. In the plays, two sexual
types recur, neither of whom finds any satisfaction in sex. Jonson said
of his wife, from whom he separated, that she had been **a shrew, yet
honest"; and the only women in his plays that have even a semblance of
life are shrews of the most pitiless breed. The typical wife in Jonson is
always ready to doublecross her husband, and she does not want to allow
him a moment of self-confidence or tranquillity: whatever the man does
must be wrong; yet she may cherish at the same time an illusion that
there waits for her somewhere a lover who can give her what she desires
and deserves, and the appearance of a tenth-rate courtier may be enough
to turn her head. The recurrent male type is a man who is insanely jeal-
ous of his wife but, paradoxically, is willing to prostitute her. The rival
of the obsessive jealousy is always an obsessive greed either for money,
as in the case of Corvino of Volpone, or, as in the case of Fitzdottrel of
The Devil Is an Ass, for some other material advantage which the hus-
band will enjoy by himself: Fitzdottrel likes to dress up and be seen on
public occasions, but he never takes his wife with him. We may suspect,
reading Jonson today, a connection between the impotence of these hus-
bands to spend any real love on their wives and their fears that they are
going to lose them. We may reflect that the self-centered husband might
produce the shrewish wife, or that, living with a shrewish wife, a man
might grow more self-centered, if he did not, as usually happens with the
unfortunate husbands of Jonson's plays, become totally demoralized. But
Jonson had nothing of Shakespeare's grasp of organic human character
or situation. It is interesting to contrast these bitches with the heroine
of The Taming of the Shrew, Katharina's bad temper with men is accom-
panied by a deep conviction that no man can really want to marry her:
it is a defiant assertion of self-respect. And so the jealousy of Othello (if
not of Leontes) is explained by his consciousness, as a Moor in Venice,
living among cleverer people who feel his color as a bar to close fellow-
ship, of being at a disadvantage with the race to which his wife belongs.
Whereas Jonson's two depressing stock figures do not afford very much
insight into the causes of the traits they exemplify. Turning up again
and again with a monotony of which Shakespeare was incapable, they
obviously represent phenomena which Jonson has known at first hand
and on which he cannot help dwelling: two more aspects of that negative
soul that he is impelled to caricature. Yet sometimes, with his special
experience, he can make them reveal themselves — as in the self-torturing
Proustian soliloquies of Kitely in Every Man In His Humour — in a way
that strips off the skin to show, not what is in the depths, but what is
just below the surface.

Jonson's positive ideal of womanhood may be summed up in the well-

68 Edmund Wilson

known lyric that begins, **Have you seen but a bright lily grow,/ Before
rude hands have touched it?," and ends "O so white! O so soft! O so
sweet is she!" It is something quite remote and unreal which he is un-
able— when he tries, which is seldom, as in the Celia of Volpone — to
bring to life in his plays, and, though the poems inspired by it are neat
and agreeable enough, they have no human tenderness in them, let alone
human passion. The touches in Jonson's poetry that come closest to lyric
feeling are invariably evocations of coldness: "Like melting snow upon a
craggy hill . . . Since nature's pride is now a withered daffodil," or *'Ex-
cept Love's fires the virtue have/ To fright the frost out of the grave,"
(from a poem in which the same stanza begins with the incredibly
prosaic couplet: **As in a ruin, we it call/ One thing to be blown up or
fall . . ."). And we may cite from the masque called The Vision of De-
light the lines that remained in the memory of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus:
"I was not wearier where I lay/ By frozen Tithon's side tonight . . .";
as well as the passage from the prose Discoveries which Saintsbury se-
lected for praise: "What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend the
better part of life in! — in scattering compliments, tendering visits, gath-
ering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making a little winter-
love in a dark corner." At the end of Cynthia's Revels, Cupid tries to
shoot Cynthia's courtiers and make them fall in love with one another,
but he finds that his bow is powerless: they have been drinking from the
fount of Self -Love, in which Narcissus admired himself, and they are
impervious to his shafts. When Diana is told of his presence, she sends
him packing at once. Few lovers are united by Jonson. Is there indeed a
case in all his work? And in Jonson's latest plays, the heroines undergo
a transformation that makes Cynthia seem relatively human. The Lady
Pecunia of The Staple of News, surrounded by her female retinue. Mort-
gage, Statute, Band, and Wax, is simply a figure in a financial allegory;
and so is Mistress Steel, the Magnetic Lady. Both are heiresses, kept close
by guardians and sought by baffled suitors. The feminine principle here
has been turned by the instinct for hoarding into something metallic,
unyielding. The woman has lost all her womanhood: she is literally the
hoarded coin. This evidently appeared to Ben Jonson a perfectly natural
pleasantry, but it is quite enough to account for the failure, in his
time, of these pieces, and for the distaste that we feel for them today.

To these stock characters of Jonson's theater should be added another
that evidently derives from the playwright's social situation as wxll as
from his psychology of hoarding. Ben Jonson, from his own account, was
the son of a Scotch gentleman who had possessed some little fortune, but
who had been thrown into prison, presumably for his Protestant lean-
ings, in the reign of Bloody Mary, and had had his property confiscated.
He died before Ben was born, and Ben's mother married a master brick-
layer. Young Ben went to Westminster school, under the patronage of
one of the masters, whose attention had been attracted by the boy's ex-

Morose Ben Jonson 69

ceptional abilities, and may have started in at Cambridge on a scholar-
ship; but he was obliged, apparently through poverty, to give up his
studies there, and was set to learn the bricklayer's trade, which he
loathed and from which he escaped by enlisting to fight in Flanders.
Now, one of Jonson's favorite clowns, who varies little from play to
play, is a young heir who is an utter numbskull and who, just having
come into his money, begins throwing it away by the handful and soon
finds himself fleeced by sharpers. This figure, too, in a different way from
the envied or the envious man, is obviously the creation of Jonson's own
envy, stimulated, no doubt, from two sources — first, the grievance of the
man of good birth unjustly deprived of his patrimony, and, second, the
sulky resentment of the man who can only withhold against the man who
can freely lavish.

Jonson's hardships and uncertainty in his earlier years — when he can
never have known anything but poverty — must have spurred him to
desperate efforts to ballast and buttress himself. (For, as I have said, I do
not necessarily accept the view of Freud that the training of the excreta-
tory functions must precede the development of other traits which ex-
hibit resistance through hoarding, though it seems certain that, in per-
sonalities like Jonson's, these various traits are related.) He had acquired
classical learning where he could not acquire money; and it was to re-
main for him a reservoir of strength, a basis of social position, to which
he was to go on adding all his life. But his habit of saving and holding
back — did his Scotch ancestry figure here, too? — had an unfortunate
effect on his work, as well as on his personal relations, in that it made
it very difficult for him fully to exploit his talents. It is not that the
audiences of Jonson's day, the readers who have come to him since, have
been unwilling to give themselves to his talents, but that his talents,
authentic though they were, have not given themselves to us — or rather,
that they were able to give themselves for only a limited period and then
only at the expense of much effort. Ben Jonson, at his best, writes bril-
liantly; he has a genuine dramatic imagination. But it is hard for him
to pump up his powers to work that will display their capacities. His
addiction to wine — **drink," Drummond said, "is one of the elements in
which he liveth" — was, I believe, bound up with the problem of getting
himself to the point of high-pressure creative activity. He explained the
strength of Volpone on the basis of its having been written at the time
when he had just received a gift of ten dozen of sack; asserted that a
passage in Catiline had suffered from having been composed when he
was drinking watered wine; and apologized for the weakness of his later
plays on the ground that he and his "boys" — by which he meant his
drinking companions — had been getting bad wine at their tavern. This
shows that he drank while he was writing; and it is possible that liquor,
though effective in helping him to keep up his high vein, may also have

70 Edmund Wilson

been to blame for the badness of some of his work. There are at times
a peculiar coarseness in the texture of Jonson's writing, a strained false-
ness in his comic ideas, which, intolerable to a sober mind, may very
well have seemed inspired to a constipated writer well primed with sack.
What Jonson was aiming at — from Cynthia's. Revels, say — was a
majesty and splendor of art which should rival the classics he venerated
and the work of his more dashing contemporaries, with their rhetoric,
color, and spirit. But it is hard to be noble and grand with material so
negative, so sour, as that which Jonson's experience had given him. To
write in blank verse that is also poetry of the imbecile ambitions and the
sordid swindles which furnish the whole subject of The Alchemist was a
feat that even Ben Jonson was never to achieve but once. When he at-
tempts a Roman tragedy, as in Catiline or Sejanus, his Romans are
mostly the envious rogues, the merciless prigs, and the treacherous sluts
with whom we are familiar in his comedies, and they make a more un-
pleasant impression for not being humorously treated. When Jonson at-
tempts Renaissance splendor, he always gives it an element of the factiti-
ous as well as an element of the vulgar, which, as Mr. Levin says, have
the effect of making it look ridiculous. The dreams of Sir Epicure Mam-
mon bring a kind of hard glow to the writing, but his banquets and his
beds and his mirrors are imaginary like the gold that is to buy them:
they never get on to the stage as does the "alchemist^s" fusty lair. And
with Volpone, the great difficulty is that the mean motivations of the
characters have no intimate connection with the background, the house
of a rich Venetian. Volpone is simply another of Jonson's hateful and
stingy men, who behaves as if he were envious of others, without being
provided by Jonson with any real reason for envy. The magnificence of
Jonson's grandees, like the purity of his women, is a value that is always
unreal and that can never make a satisfactory counterweight to a poverty
and a squalor that are actual and vividly rendered. One has to go to the
later French naturalists who were influenced by both Flaubert and Zola
to find anything comparable to the poetry which Jonson was able to
extract from all the cheap and dirty aspects of London: the "poor spoon-
ful of dead wine, with flies in't"; the gingerbread made of "stale bread,
rotten eggs, musty ginger and dead honey"; the rogue out of luck,

at Pie Corner,
Taking your meal of steam in, from cooks* stalls.
Where, like the father of hunger, you did walk
Piteously costive, with your pinched horn-nose.
And your complexion of the Roman wash
Stuck full of black and melancholic worms.
Like powder-corns shot at th' artillery-yard;

Morose Ben Jonson *ji

the theater pick-ups, *'lean playhouse poultry," as described by fat Ursula
of the pig-roasting booth, "that has the bony rump sticking out like the
ace of spades or the point of a partizan, that every rib of 'em is like the
tooth of a saw; or will so grate 'em [their customers] with their hips and
shoulders as — take 'em altogether — they were as good lie with a hurdle/'
It is the peculiar beauty of The Alchemist that the visions of splendor
here are all, frankly, complete illusions created out of sordid materials
by rogues in the minds of dupes. The poor stupid whore Doll has to
impersonate the Queen of Faery and a great lady in romantic circum-
stances. A more humane writer might have extracted some pathos from
this; but Jonson does get an esthetic effect that is quite close to the Flau-
bertian chagrin.

But, in Volpone, where real gold is involved, we are never allowed to
see it. The German adaptation of this play made by Stefan Zweig and
done here by the Theater Guild, which has also been used as a basis for
the current French film, is an improvement on Jonson's original in one
very important respect. It shows us what we want to see, what, subcon-
sciously, we have come to demand: the spending, the liberation of Vol-
pone's withheld gold — when Mosca, to everyone's relief, finally flings it
about the stage in fistfuls. But Ben Jonson cannot squander his gold, his
gold which he has never possessed; he can only squander excrement. Karl
Abraham, one of the psychologists quoted in the book referred to above,
**cites, in proof of the close association between sadistic and anal im-
pulses instances in his experiences with neurotics when an explosive
bow^l evacuation has been a substitute for a discharge of anger or rage,
or has accompanied it." Certainly Jonson seems to explode in this fash-
ion. The directness with which he gives way to the impulse is probably
another cause of his chronic unpopularity. The climax of The Poetaster
is the administering of emetic pills, the effects of which take, in this case,
the form of a poetic joke. The comic high point of The Alchemist comes
with the locking of one of the characters in a privy, where he will be
overcome by the smell. This whole malodorous side of Jonson was given
its fullest and most literal expression in the poem called The Famous
Voyage which was too much for even Gifford and Swinburne, in which
he recounts a nocturnal expedition made by two London blades in a
wherry through the roofed-over tunnel of Fleet Ditch, which was the
sewer for the public privies above it. A hardly less literal letting-go is
the whole play of Bartholomew Fair, which followed the more preten-
tious work (from Sejanus through Catiline) that we have just been dis-
cussing. It is Ben Jonson's least strained and inhibited play, and one of
his most successful. He drops verse for colloquial prose; he forgets about
classical precedents. He dumps out upon his central group of characters,
for the most part pusillanimous examples of the lower middle class, puri-
tan parsons and petty officials, with, of course, a young spendthrift from

72 Edmund Wilson

the country, what must have been a lifetime's accumulation of the bill-
ingsgate and gutter practices of the pickpockets, booth-keepers, peddlers,
pimps, ballad-singers, and professional brawlers of the Elizabethan under-
world. This comedy, novel in its day, anticipates both Hogarth and
Dickens; but Jonson's impulse to degrade his objects is something not
shared by either. Hogarth and Dickens both, for all their appetite for
rank vulgarity, are better-humored and more fastidious. The flood of
abusive language let loose by the infuriated Pig-Woman, well-written
and funny though it is, is outpouring for outpouring's sake: it effects no
dramatic move and has in itself no rhetorical development; and the even
more filthy travesty of Marlowe's Hero and Leander in terms of bankside
muck has an ugliness which makes one suspect that Jonson took an
ugly delight in defiling a beautiful poem which he could not hope to
rival. Yet we cannot but succumb — in certain scenes, at least — to the
humor of Bartholomew Fair. The tumult of Ursula's booth and her de-
votion to her roasting pigs, the monumental pocket-picking episode that
moves to its foreseen conclusion almost with the inevitability of tragedy
—these somehow create more sympathy (always for the characters outside
the law) than anything else in Jonson's plays.

And Ben Jonson is somehow a great man of letters, if he is not often
a great artist. His very failure to make the best of his gifts had the result
of his leaving a body of work full of hints — unrealized ambitions, un-
developed beginnings — which later writers were able to exploit in a way
that it was hardly possible for them to do with the work of Shakespeare,
which was realized, consummate, complete. The most astonishing variety
of writers owe quite different kinds of debts to Jonson. It is as if they
had found means to deliver, in viable forms of art, the genius that Jon-
son had had to withhold. Gifford was certainly right in supposing that
Milton owed something to such passages as the opening of Volpone, in
which the hoarder invokes his gold. The whole comedy of Congreve and
Wycherley seems to have grown out of the cynical men-about-town, with
their bravura-pieces of wit, in The Silent Woman; and Swift must have
picked up from Jonson, not only the title of A Tale of a Tub, but also
the style and tone of his series of poems to Stella, which are so much like
certain of those in Jonson's series, A Celebration of Charis, as well as
his general vein of morosely humorous realism, exemplified in "The
Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Description of a City Shower." The
comedy of humours eventually led to the one-idea characters of Peacock,
which led, later, to those of Aldous Huxley; and it must have contributed
to the novels of Dickens, who loved to act Bobadill in Every Man In His
Humour. Though Tennyson was under the impression that he himself
had invented the stanza-form that he made famous in In Memoriam,
it had already been used by Jonson in his Elegy (XXII of Underwoods),
the tone of which is quite close to Tennyson in his elegiac vein, and in

Morose Ben Jonson 73

the second of the choruses to Catiline, which suggests such weightier use
of the meter as one finds in the dedication to Queen Victoria or in the
dedication of Demeter to Lord Duflerin. And there are touches in Lewis
Carroll that seem reminiscent of Jonson: "I passed by the garden and
marked with one eye/ How the Owl and the Panther were sharing the
pie/' recalls a long nonsense speech in The Vision of Delight: "Yet
would I take the stars to be cruel/ If the crab and the rope-maker ever
fight duel/' etc.; and Sir Politic Would-be of Volpone, with his succes-
sion of ridiculous inventions, of which he likes to boast, *'Mine own
device," is a forerunner of the White Knight. In the first decades of our
own century, that very first-rate comic writer, Ronald Firbank, with how
little direct contact one cannot tell, represents a very late development
of Ben Jonson's typical methods — eviscerated personalities and monstrous
motivations labeled with bizarre names — which, though it shows perhaps
a certain decadence, keeps also a good deal of vigor. And James Joyce,
who told his friend Frank Budgen that Ben Jonson was one of the
only four writers that he had ever read completely through, seems to
have had in common with Jonson some of the traits of his psychological
type, and may be said to have followed his example — failing, sometimes,
from faults like Jonson's — rather, perhaps, than to have exploited to
better effect any special aspect of Jonson's work. Joyce, too, hoarded
words and learning and attempted to impress his reader by unloading
his accumulations; he, too, has his coprophilic side and his husbands
who acquiesce, at the same time that they torture themselves, in the
sleepings-abroad of their wives; he, too, is defiant and arrogant, self-con-
sciously resistant to pressures, and holds himself apart and aloof.

It would be interesting, from this point of view, to compare Ben Jon-
son at length with Gogol as well as with Joyce. Undoubtedly Gogol is
a case even more narrowly developed than Jonson of the type in ques-
tion here. He, too, likes to store up words — his note-books were full of
the jargons of special trades and milieux; and he voids them in long
dense sentences that agglutinate as massive paragraphs. His characters,
in Dead Souls, are themselves almost always collectors, and they some-
times collect sheer rubbish — like Manilov, who saves all his old pipe-
ashes. Gogol loves to write about eating, he has little sensual interest in
women. His comedy The Inspector General, farcical, at once gross and
inhuman, has something in common with Jonson's comedies; and, like
Jonson, he is powerless to lift himself — in the unfinished later instalments
of Dead Souls — out of the satirical comedy of roguery into a sterner and
less turbid medium. The virtuous judge and the altruistic landowner of
the second part of Dead Souls are as obviously maniacs as the misers and
boors of the first part — as the senators, conspirators, and emperors of
Jonson's Roman plays are just as much "compulsive" one-track minds
as the characters of his comedy of "humours." So Joyce, with greater
genius and wider range than either Jonson or Gogol, cannot seem to

74 Edmund Wilson

function comfortably and freely except when he has given himself, as in
his two most ambitious books, the latitude of a comic frame: his pro-
tagonists are comic figures, humiliated, persecuted, rueful, and their epics
are systematic ironies, in which their heroic pretensions never wholly
emerge from the mud. Gogol and Joyce, too, both share with Jonson his
ideal of feminine sweetness and purity — seen only in wistful glimpses —
that floats somewhere above and divorced from the smelly and dirty
earth. With this motif Gogol succeeds least well: the lovely face fleetingly
seen in the coach by Chichikov of Dead Souls, the maidenly pensionnaire
who strikes him dumb at the ball; Jonson, a little better in the lyrics
mentioned above; Joyce, with triumphant success in the vision of the
wading girl that makes the climax of A Portrait of the Artist.

Later years did not mellow Jonson. When he visited Drummond at
forty-five, with most of his best work behind him, he was still running
down his contemporaries and asserting his own merits as peevishly as
in the days when he had written The Poetaster; and at a supper given
for him by his younger admirers the year before his death, he painfully
embarrassed his friends by inordinately praising himself and vilifying his
fellow poets. He could never afford to be generous, because he had never
achieved what he wanted; and one suspects that, even in the case of such
a lesser contemporary as Marston, Jonson's hateful hostility toward him
had in it an element of envy of that touch of sublimity and magic which
Marston was able to manage and which was quite beyond Jonson's reach.
To Drummond he even grumbled about Shakespeare; and his reference
to The Tempest in Bartholomew Fair betrays how much it must have
irked him to see his friend, a much older man, find suddenly a new field
for his genius in a form so close to that of the masque, in which Jonson
had worked for years without ever striking more than an occasional
spark from his pedantic made-to-order prettiness. It is therefore all the
more a proof of the deep devotion he cherished for the art that they
both practiced that he should have put on record so roundly his high
opinion of Shakespeare — and not only of Shakespeare, but also of Donne.
In his elegy on Shakespeare especially, in estimating him above all their
contemporaries and setting him beside the greatest of the ancients, he
does justice to all that is noblest in his own aspiring nature, which had
to drag so much dead weight, all that is soundest and most acute in his
own cramped but virile intellect. The one thing he really loved was
literature, and, having served it as well as he could, no touchiness of
personal pride could keep him from honoring one who had been fitted
to serve it better precisely by the qualification, among others, of possess-
ing, as Jonson said, "an open and free nature,'' so that he "flowed with
that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped."

Introduction to
Every Man In His Humour

by Arthur Sale
Date and Text

Every Man In His Humour was first acted in 1598 by the Chamber-
lain's men, the company to which Shakespeare belonged: according to
the list of actors in the Folio text, Shakespeare acted in the play, ap-
parently taking the part of old Knowell. The play appeared in Quarto
in 1601, and in the Folio of Jonson's works in 1616. There is so great
a difference between the two texts that one might almost call them dif-
ferent plays.i But there is none of the mystery that surrounds the rela-
tionship between the Quarto and Folio texts of many plays of the Shake-
speare canon; the Folio text is plainly a careful revision of the Quarto,
and the only mystery is — when was the revision carried out? The most
natural conclusion is that Jonson rewrote the play when preparing for
the press the edition of his Works which appeared in 1616. The maturity
of style points to a late date and the changes and omissions nearly all
point to an enlarged knowledge of dramatic technique and a more as-
sured genius. The care expended on the revision is consonant with the
care devoted to the publication of his Works, which extends down even
to the actual printing — a very rare thing for a dramatist of that age.

This evidence is all circumstantial, but Percy Simpson has been able,
with sufficient plausibility, to assign a likely date — 1612, when, probably,
Jonson first set about the great operation of preparing a definitive edi-
tion of his works, amid the jeers of those who thought it characteristic
of Ben's arrogance that he should dare to include plays under the honor-
able title of Works. However chary one may be of fixing an actual date,
it is at least sufficiently clear that the revised version belongs to the

"Introduction to Every Man In His Humour." From Every Man In His Humour, ed.
Arthur Sale, Second Edition, pp. x-xviii. Copyright 1949 by University Tutorial Press
Limited. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. The excerpt reproduced here omits
a few pages of biographical preface, and several concluding paragraphs.

^ The Everyman reprint of Jonson's plays has both texts.

76 Arthur Sale

period of Jonson*s greatest plays, and if the play ... is not among these
plays in respect of greatness, it is not the reviser's fault, but the inherent
limitations in situation and range of the 'prentice play.

To compare the two texts would be at first an interesting, then a
laborious, and finally a nightmare task. The conclusions are evident
from the first and are rarely challengeable; ... in general the revised
version is superior to the original. The latter is of a similar quality to
Jonson's next play. Every Man Out of His Humour, though it is bet-
ter in plot and situations than that pot-boiling attempt to exploit the
Humours vogue stimulated, if not initiated by Every Man In His
Humour. Nevertheless, although detailed comparisons would be, in the
last resort, academic, a number of well-chosen ones would form the
material for useful exercises in literary evaluation. For comparative
studies in dramatic technique such exercises would be valuable as well
as useful; but for calling attention to the underrated excellence of Jon-
son's mature verse, they are of less value, partly because the most typical
humour of the play lends itself best to prose, and partly because the
revised verse is, naturally, still within the magnetic field of the early
verse.

Position in the Jonson Canon

The play continues to be the best known (if only by name) of Jon-
son's plays. There are several reasons for this odd persistence of acclama-
tion, none of which has any real connection with the merits of the play
— which one would expect to be the only valid test of popularity. These
reasons are part and parcel of that fatal process by which, as Mr. T. S.
Eliot acutely points out in his study of Jonson in The Sacred Wood,
Jonson has remained great in name and unread in fact — a victim of his
own massive reputation.

Jonson liked to blow his own trumpet. It is possible that this was less
a form of exhibitionism than a showman's device for raising interest in
his little act. Another dramatist, Mr. G. B. Shaw, has exploited the device
far more systematically and persistently than did Jonson, and with, if
anything, greater effect. At all events, an unknown and unsuccessful
dramatist writes a play in which certain catchy conceptions floating
through the inconstant air of the public consciousness are regularized
and given a local habitation and a name. The play is successful and the
astute author makes haste to have his name prominently and exclusively
fixed to these notions: he writes another play in which he defines these
Humours, contemptuously rejecting all imitations, and says, in effect,
*Tatent applied for." Further, he employs a character-spectator and his
"feed" to point out the dramatic beauties of the various Humoured char-

Introduction to Every Man In His Humour 77

acters, and the wonderful way in which a classical theory of comedy is
adapted to the English stage.

In the last sentence we may have a clue to the inordinate attention
Every Man In His Humour has received. Jonson makes his name via
the Humours. He also has a classical theory of comedy, which the critics
and editors far too easily assume to be the same as his humours theory.
E.M.I.H.H., having the advantage of illustrating both theories, is espe-
cially convenient for the literary historian. As a result, everyone begins
his or her study of Jonson, almost inevitably, with this play, whereas, it
might be fitter, in the interest of a just perspective, to read it last — of
the important plays at least.^ Hence the falsely significant position it has
acquired in the Jonson canon.

Constituents

In Jonson, everything is subdued unto the quality of the play. The
play's the thing. This is vague enough to be true of all good drama, but
it is true of Jonson in a special way. Nothing in the play has any reality
apart from its position in the play. To use an analogy which is exact
enough up to a point, the play is a completed jigsaw puzzle, each bit
of which is coherent only in its relation to the whole. Here, as in so many
other ways, the contrast with Shakespeare is inevitable and illuminating.
Each part of a Shakespeare play may have a separate dynamic of its own,
which may, or may not, have its proper relationship with the whole. The
conception of Falstaff is an obvious example. Whether one feels he is a
sort of genial cancer into whose mighty bulk most of the lifeblood of
the play is drained, or whether one takes him as a separate and equal
organism to the rest of the play, representing another, contrasting, set of
values to those of the main plot — it will be agreed that he gives at least
the illusion of being able to exist apart from the circumstances and con-
ditions of the plays in which he appears. But one is not likely to feel
this of any of Jonson's deliberately fiat pieces. In his eyes it would be a
breach of decorum — that decorum which is the real conditioning factor
of his dramatic theory, whereas the Humours, by comparison, are only
the advertisement bills. Jonson maintains this decorum (crippling or not,
as you please) more strictly than any of those who were influenced by
some aspects of his works. Massinger's best comedy is in the Jonsonian
tradition, and owes its characteristic excellence to that tradition, but
Overreach is on the way to having that third dimension which Shake-

^"EMJ.H.H. is the first mature work of Jonson and every student of Jonson must
study it, but it is not the play in which Jonson found his genius: it is the last of his
plays to be read first." (T. S. Eliot)

78 Arthur Sale

speare has and which Jonson rejects, even in such dominating figures as
Sir Epicure Mammon or Volpone.

It is not, then (if we can trust the jigsaw analogy far enough), very
profitable to discuss such supposedly-separate elements of a play as char-
acter and plot in isolation from the play itself. It is true that the pieces
have to be put together in a certain order (which is not true of a jigsaw
puzzle, and so the analogy fails at this point), in order to assemble the
whole, but it is not true that this order has any significance apart from
its being the key to the construction. In Shakespeare the players act upon
one another; motives are working, explicitly or behind the scenes; the
plot develops accordingly. In our play, Brainworm is the plot; he is the
key to the right ordering of the pieces of the puzzle, but it is useless to
talk of motive in connection with him; the plot is one of the Humours
in action: the Humour, by finally overreaching itself, is put out of
action. Which is exactly the dramatist's purpose for the play as a whole.
But it is absurd to talk of Brainworm's motive apart from his Humour.
His Humour is the one and only motive. And this applies to the whole
play. How, then, can we hope to give a full account of plot and of char-
acter, separate from each other? Kitely's jealousy, for example, although
ultimately based on observations of its operations in real life, is purely
conditioned by the play's total demands. However intensely manifested,
it is not a study of jealousy, so much as a use of it as an ingredient in
the recipe of the play. As such, Kitely is unlike Othello, and like Ford.
It is significant that the latter appears in a play (The Merry Wives of
Windsor) which is prevailingly farce. Jonson's method is akin to that of
farce.

But where farce (in the interests of mirth) consistently sacrifices even
such stock and ready-made characterizing as it possesses, to the situation,
Jonson would condemn such a breach of dramatic decorum; the situa-
tion in Jonson reveals character, and is specially contrived to this end.
In this sense, farce is opposite to the Jonsonian method. And whereas the
aim of farce is solely to awaken laughter, such irresponsibility is repug-
nant to Jonson. There is a good deal more in even an early comedy like
E.M.I.H.H. than there is in a farce, dramatic craftsmanship and other
technical features being equal. What this something extra is, is not too
easy to analyze. It is usually said to be Jonson's realism and satire. Jon-
son, it is said, is a dissector rather than a creator, and it used even to be
said that his "critical spirit" was ultimately a cause of the decadence of
this period of drama.

Realism and satire are both present in Jonson's comedies, but there
is no difficulty in showing that the former at least is merely incidental.
Except in Bartholomew Fair, there is no faithful picture of real life as
there is in, say, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday , or in The Roaring Girl.
In our play, the realism consists largely of local touches and references,
mostly added in the revised version. The original setting was Italian,

Introduction to Every Man In His Humour 79

names as well. The model is too much that of Roman comedy to allow
realism as an end in itself.

As for satire, there is, in any case, very little overt satire in EM.LH.H.,
but such satire of contemporary men and manners and institutions — sat-
ire such as Pope practiced it — as is to be found in Jonsonian comedy, is
not integral to his greatest masterpieces. Some of his "dotage" plays con-
sist almost entirely of attack on the false standards of capitalism, and of
such of its enterprises as the press, company-floating, etc. But within the
limits of E,MJ.H.H.y Volpone, The Alchemist, The Silent Woman, Bar-
tholomew Fair, such contemporary satire is detachable. It is no doubt of
these plays that Mr. Eliot was thinking when he wrote: "But satire like
Jonson's is great in the end not by hitting off its object, but by creating
it; the satire is merely the means which leads to an aesthetic result, the
impulse which projects a new world into a new orbit."

Whether or not this last is true of all great satirists, it at least calls
attention to the uniqueness of Jonson's comic world, and corrects the
usual view that his plays are heavy transcripts of contemporary life,
chopped into an arbitrary shape by a rigid application of the classical
unities, of which the sole end is rather pedantic ridicule. Such a reputa-
tion has effectually killed him as a dramatist transcending the limits of
space and time and having that element of "permanent modernity"
which is necessary for his plays to be still acted as living theater and not
as museum pieces to illustrate the history of drama.

In the other sense of satire, the Swiftian sense whereby man himself
is castigated, independent of his local ties, Jonson cannot be seriously
considered a satirist. His morality in the large sense reveals itself mainly
in an unsentimental sympathy for, and delight in, roguery, provided it
be unhypocritical and frank. This may indeed be implicitly a satire on
the hypocrisy of respectability, but it makes Jonson a thoroughly un-
orthodox moralist; it is the morality of the enemies, not of the pillars,
of society. Brainworm is a faint dawning of this Villon strain. . . •

Pattern

If, as has been maintained, it is of little use to consider plot and
**character" {type would be more appropriate) separately for the purpose
of literary criticism, one has to fall back on considering what one ven-
tures to call the total pattern of the play, traced by the various constitu-
ents. Jonson is often called heavy-handed and costive. In the matter of
pattern these attacks will not hold. Dryden's analysis of The Silent
Woman in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy is one way of demonstrating the
trimness and sound structure of Jonson's watertight vessel of comedy. It
is the way of the classical comedy, and Jonson would have paid at least

8o Arthur Sale

lipservice to it. But although it establishes the shapeliness of the skeleton,
it does not trace the shapely lines of the finished boat. The workman
may have been "heavy-handed" and may have taken an unconscionable
long time over the building, but the launched vessel does not look the
worse for having had a good riveter and a careful attention to detail.

That this pattern is rigid may be admitted, but the association of
heaviness is misleading; iron is rigid and heavy, but pressed into girders
and used with glass it forms the lightest structure known, as architects
of the Crystal Palace and the big railway stations first realized. It is a
perfect and easily realized whole, however complicated its parts, whereas
to the Elizabethan manor, one wing the more or one storey the less
seems to matter little in terms of symmetry and of stresses and strains.
But here the metaphor breaks down, and we must resort to another, for
Jonson's structure is also independent of the ground; it is a separate
world. It has the perfect structure, the surface tension and iridescence,
of a large bubble, but a bubble so constructed that by the laws of its
own dynamic it must explode the second it becomes a whole. Jonson's
plays blow themselves out of existence; their resolution is necessarily
their end. This is true of his 'prentice bubble-blowing in E.M.I.H.H,
The characters are in their Humour and then out, and there is nothing
more to be said. The purpose for which the parts were assembled is
achieved, and not a wrack is left behind. In this play, it is true, the
dynamic is more feeble, and the progress rarely deviates from the
horizontal; Brainworm's worming is along the ground. But the concep-
tion is there.

To conclude, then: although these things are tangible only in the
guise of metaphors, which are bound to be partly misleading, it should
be evident that though the much-vaunted Humours, and the debt to
classical comedy both in structural theory and in aim, do together t3
some extent determine the shape and limits of E.M.I.H.H., they tell us
little about the dynamic of the play, or of the effect it produces. In the
latter respect they may be positively misleading. In particular, the
Humours have too much and too unprofitably attracted the attention
of the more recent critics.^ Gifford hardly mentions them. He claims
originality for Jonson almost entirely because of his reforms in aim and
plot, based on his study of Latin and Greek comedy and of centuries of
criticism of these. But the critics have continued to confuse Humours,
which belong to method, with his supposed didacticism, which belongs
to the ends, of comedy. This confusion is not so important in the
Humours plays themselves as in plays like The Alchemist, in which the
Humours method of presenting character is absent. In any case, the stock
characters of Roman comedy and of the Italian improwisatori (the
Commedia delVArte) are sufficiently close to Jonson's method to serve

®A notable exception is H. Levin's introduction to the Nonesuch Jonson.

Introduction to Every Man In His Humour 81

as models. Besides these he had the galvanized abstractions of the
Morality plays in his own country to help him; the influence on him
of the Morality tradition, which was still strong in his youth, among the
people at least, has been underrated in favor of the catchword
"Humours/' In some of his last plays he goes straight back to the Morality
for his characters {e.g., the goddess Pecunia in The Staple of News) and
for his didactic attitude. There seems, then, no reason to believe Jonson
was not sensitive to this tradition when he was closer to it in time and
touch. If it could be demonstrated that Jonson had made an important
contribution to comedy with his Humours, one could understand the
usual insistence on them, even though they do not account for much in
the practice of his middle period of drama. But when did satiric comedy
ever cease to isolate the follies of mankind, for ridicule and castigation?
Jonson attempted the illusion of novelty by giving them a topical name
and a topical dress.

Introduction to

Every Man Out of His Humour

by C. H. Herford

The title of Every Man Out of His Humour appears to announce it
as a companion piece to its immediate predecessor; — a sister comedy with
an inverted motive, somewhat as Love's Labors Won may have been a
converse to Love's Labors Lost, or as Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed
turned the tables upon The Taming of the Shrew. It is clear, however,
that the relation between the two Humour plays is not of this kind at all.
Every Man Out of His Humour is neither a counterpart nor a contrast,
neither a companion piece nor a sequel, to Every Man In His Humour.
It is a second handling of the same theme, with a more direct satiric
purpose and a more uncompromising and defiant originality of method.
Jonson had won his spurs; and less than the success of his first great
comedy would have sufficed to remove any restraint imposed by regard
for the stage tradition upon his unfledged genius. Whether the earlier
play was already introduced to its first audience with the haughty
declarations of the Prologue is, as has been said, very doubtful. It is
certain that, however sharply Every Man In His Humour traversed
certain romantic proclivities of the stage, it powerfully appealed to the
engrained realism of the Elizabethan audience. It did not give them all
that they wanted; but it gave them, with a vigor and brilliance paralleled
as yet only in the contemporary glory of FalstafFs Eastcheap, what they
wanted most. It was put forward, explicitly or not, as a model or a
standard play, towards which it was desirable the Elizabethan practice
should gravitate; and Elizabethan practice did in fact so gravitate. No
such claim can ever have been advanced or entertained in regard to Every

"Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour.*' From Ben Jonson: The Man and
His Work by C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, I, 375-398. Copyright 1925 by The
Clarendon Press, Oxford. Reprinted by permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Roughly two pages *of prefatory comment concerning the dating and printing of the
play are here omitted, and the subsections renumbered accordingly.

Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour 83

Man Out of His Humour. Jonson himself, entirely confident as he was
of its merits, well knew that they did not lie in conformity to any
school of drama, new or old. The play was "strange, and of a particular
kind by it selfe'*; to be approved possibly by the humanists of the Inns
of Court, but *'how it will answere the generall expectation, I know not/'
If he claims that it is **like Vetus Comoedia," the likeness lies in its
vigorous independence of tradition, and he puts into the mouth of
Cordatus a sketch of the history of ancient comedy in which the entire
development of the genre is exhibited as a series of innovations in dra-
matic method. In Aristophanes "this kind of Poeme appeared absolute,
and fully perfected"; nevertheless, his successors, Menander, Plautus,
and the rest, had wholly changed its character.^ If classical comedy was
thus built upon the defiance of precedent, "I see not then, but we should
enjoy the same licence, or free power, to illustrate and heighten our in-
vention as they did; and not bee tyed to those strict and regular formes,
which the nicenesse of a few (who are nothing but forme) would thrust
upon us.'' This, far more than the peremptory classicism of the Prologue
to Every Man In His Humour expresses the inner mind of Jonson. It is
the spirit which years later speaks ("albeit by adoption") in the sinewy
prose of the Discoveries under those notable rubrics ''Natura non effoeta"
and ''Non nimium credendum antiquitati/' — "Truth lyes open to all; it
is no mans several^; "For to all the observations of the Ancients, wee
have our owne experience." ^ This haughty confidence in innovation
can never have been altogether strange to Jonson: in the present play we
see it for the first time let loose without reserve upon the traditional
structure and method of the comic drama.

Close and continuous as was Jonson's connection with the drama,
immense as were his services to it, drama as then or at any previous
time practiced was not an instrument perfectly fitted to serve his aims
in literature. He did not approach the stage "as wishing to delight," but
with the imperious bent of a critical and scornful nature, to inveigh, to
instruct, to eradicate, to amend. His natural gift for drama was moreover
probably matched by his gift of analytic and epigrammatic description.
To reduce these powerful conflicting faculties to the service of the drama
is commonly a slow and difficult process. The exuberant poet of Brand
and Peer Gynt had sternly to transform his whole artistic method before
he achieved the terrible reticence of Ghosts. But Ibsen's dramatic instinct
was from the outset surer and stronger than Jonson's; he thought in
drama where Jonson thought in epigram and invective; his social satire
never crushes or starves his action, hardly ever overlays or retards it.

^ Vetus Comoedia in this passage necessarily means Greek and Roman Comedy. But
there was no inconsistency, as Baskervill, English Elements in Jonson's Early Comedy
(Austin, 1911), p. 212, suggests, in his use of the phrase "Comoedia Vetus in England" to
Drummond {Conv. xvii. 410) for the ancient native drama.

^Discoveries, Folio, p. 89.

84 C. H. Herford

The most directly polemical aim does not relax his grip upon plot, or
the grip of his plot upon us. In the masterpieces of his maturity Jonson
was to find a dramatic expression no less potent for the Juvenal that
chafed within him. But at the present stage that consummation was still
remote, and the impatient Juvenal has forged for himself a satire roughly
accommodated indeed to the forms of the traditional drama, but funda-
mentally inspired and controlled by the purpose of "stripping the ragged
follies of the time, naked, as at their birth." His description of the play
as a ^'Comical Satire'' emphasizes this purpose, and justifies us in regard-
ing the play, with Baskervill, as a deliberate extension to the theater of
the literary fashion of satire set going by Lodge, Davies, Marston, and
Hall in the later nineties. At the same time, Jonson was convinced that
he had both provided satire with fresh and potent weapons and in effect
struck out a fresh and potent type of play. And the result must always
have extraordinary interest as a dramatic experiment. Few dramatists
have so boldly refashioned the instrument they found to fit it to say
what they wanted. Jonson knew the hazards of the experiment, but had
no misgivings as to its merit:

Onely vouchsafe me your attentions.
And I will give you musicke worth your eares.

while,

if we faile.
We must impute it to this onely chance,
Arte hath an enemy cal'd Ignorance,^

The effect of this satiric aim upon the drama is apparent in every point
of dramatic plan. It affects the plot-structure, the choice of characters,
the dramatic business, the presentment of the entire piece.

Jonson declared in the Induction that he would

to these courteous eyes oppose a mirrour,
As large as is the stage, whereon we act:
Where they shall see the times deformitie
Anatomiz'd in every nerve, and sinnew.

* Introduction, 11. 62-3, 214-16.

Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour 85

The figure is that used by Hamlet to express the aim of drama in general;
but Jonson's application of it betrays too clearly the havoc wrought upon
his plays by his fierce dissection of his material. He, like Shakespeare,
holds up "a mirror" before his audience; but what their "courteous
eyes" see in it is not breathing nature, the very age and body of the time,
his form and pressure, but a collection of pathological specimens, labeled
and classified. He did not start, as the master of those who know and of
those who criticize had laid it down that ''drama" ought to start, with ac-
tion, or the imitation of a piece of life; but with a set of persons singled
out for their representative obliquities. The "Humours" of the personages
in Every Man In His Humour are mostly the amusing foibles of estimable
men; even the gulls are ridiculed in a gayer temper than their counter-
parts here; harmless women like Bridget give place to foolish pretenders
like Saviolina; and the Jonsonian Falstaff, Clement, who distributes re-
ward and punishment at the close, is attenuated into the lean and bitter
Macilente. Yet Jonson claimed complacently, through the mouth of
Cordatus, to be restoring the comedy founded upon imitatio vitae. He
thought he was putting a comedy of real life — "neere, and familiarly al-
lied to the time" — in the place of the comedy of fantastic intrigue, "cross
wooing" with a clown for serving man (ni.vi). But what he "imitated"
in life was above all its heterogeneous sequence, its motley kaleidoscopic
disarray. Few Elizabethan plays ministered so richly to the Elizabethan
appetite for profusion of material as this work of the doughty advocate
of classic art. It was assuredly no desire to conciliate that here over-
powered the classical instinct for order and unity. It was simply that
Jonson gave the rein to the impulses of a temperament censorious and
aggressive in unsurpassed degree; a temperament in which the critical
severity which discovers misdoers everywhere was combined with the
militancy which relishes the battle the more the greater the numbers of
the foe, and the rigor which suffers no fault to go without its meed of
punishment. That a play so inartistic in composition should be the
deliberate production of the most self-conscious artist among the Eliza-
bethans strikingly illustrates the complexity of the forces which actually
molded and shaped his work. The man of letters remained supreme, im-
posing the form of literature on everything he wrote. It was a bold, and
for a writer so deeply imbued with classical ideals of art a noteworthy,
experiment; one, however, of which he himself finally recognized the
futility, and which even a generous criticism, admitting to the full the
power and brilliance of the writing, is forced to class with the literature
which we admire but hardly enjoy.

Jonson was, in effect, applying his dramatic instrument in a fashion
familiar enough in medieval and sixteenth century satire, and not un-
known to the Greeks. For nearly a hundred years before him The Ship
of Fools, in Barclay's version, had supplied a homely picturesque figure

86 C. H. Herford

for the damnatory formula of a satirist as stern as Jonson: ''stultorum
plena sunt omnia." Sebastian Brandt, like Jonson had seriously attempted
to "anatomize the time's deformity'' in his catalogue of fools, and his
ship's crew comprehends in effect representatives of all that he thought
noxious in the German society of his time. That Jonson knew the
analogous collection by Theophrastus of the "fools" of Athens, we have
already seen. Neither Brandt nor Theophrastus, however, appears to have
had any influence upon Jonson's choice of representative "humours." His
anatomy of society reflects, even more than theirs, the bias of the anato-
mist's own character, time, and place. Brandt's fools are, above all, people
who offend the prudential instincts of a sober, timid, German scholar of
the later fifteenth century. Theophrastus' types are, above all, people
who offend an Athenian's nice sense of social tact and good breeding. To
Jonson, a powerful and militant nature, careless of conventions, and
holding his own in all societies, like his great namesake, by force of
mind and character little aided by nice observance of proprieties, the
most offensive kind of "humour" sprang rather from lack of character
than from lack of manners. His "humorists" are not, in general, the men
of blunt, discourteous self-assertion, but those who, like the Thackerayan
"snob," are lost in some mean or fatuous admiration; — fools of fashion,
like Fastidious Brisk, the twin fops Clove and Orange, Puntarvolo, whose
foppery, like Jaques' melancholy, is a subtle concoction of his own brain;
and in yet more desperate case the rustic Sogliardo, who will have the
name of a gentleman, though "he buys it," and Fungoso, Brisk's luckless
ape. Or they are infatuated lovers, like Deliro who dotes on Fallace, and
Fallace who dotes on Brisk. Saviolina is the dupe of her intellectual
vanity, and Sordido of his faith in almanacs. Shabbiest and shadiest of
pretenders, but clever enough to play his game for awhile and by no
means the worst drawn, is Shift, the professor of "skeldring and odling,"
an inferior variant of Bobadill. His name was used again in Epigram XII.
The mean or fatuous ambitions loomed larger to Jonson's critical eye. Of
the failings of the critical temper itself, on the other hand, this most
critical of Elizabethan intellects was perhaps but imperfectly aware. But
he was acutely alive to, and deeply resented, the infirmities which
simulate the severity of criticism — the uncritical malignity of the ribald
and the envious man. The "scurrilous, and prophane Jester" that "with
absurd simile's will transforme any person into deformity" was as ab-
horrent to Jonson as the unprincipled railer habitually is to the con-
vinced satirist. Macilente, the "man well parted, a sufficient Scholler, and
travail'd," approaches Jonson on another side, and more nearly. Jonson
was too haughtily self-conscious for envy; but the bitter gibes with
which Macilente seeks to correct the blind injustice of Fortune have an
unmistakable affinity with those leveled by Jonson's masterful but not
malignant criticism. Both men, however Jonson might take sides against
them, resembled him to the popular eye. And both, though in the play

Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour 87

primarily as victims and objects of the satirist's dramatic exposure,
gravitate, as if by natural congeniality, to the satirist's side, and become
his agents and executants. The fact, however, that Macilente undoubtedly
speaks much of Jonson's mind, and that his voice often elusively re-
sembles the familiar accents of his creator, readily leads to the surmise
that the victims of the "comical satire" may be of similarly personal
origin or even simply stand for particular persons in Jonson's milieu.
Mr. Fleay even postulates this as self-evident; but his actual attempts at
identification in detail betray obvious embarrassment, and do not seem
to have been convincing even to himself.

Ill

Jonson was, it is true, if we may trust his own dates, already the object
of literary attacks. For three years, he wrote in the ''Apologetic Dialogue"
to the Poetaster in 1601,

They did provoke me with their petulant stiles
On every stage.

And, if again we may trust him, he had forborne to retort until "at last,
unwilling," he resolved to try what shame could do, and wrote Poetaster.
It is tolerably certain that his forbearance had not been completely
maintained so long; but the statement justifies a presumption against a
purely personal interpretation of the intervening plays, only to be over-
borne by strong evidence. Marston and Dekker, the poets who bore
the brunt of Poetaster^ cannot be shown to have attacked Jonson before
the date of Every Man Out of His Humour; and Marston had even, in
Histriomastix, introduced a portrait of Jonson with evidently compli-
mentary intention, an intention for which Jonson was probably far from
grateful, but which he can hardly have met by pillorying his admirer.^
And there is no character in the play who can be plausibly "identified"
with either. Critics who take for granted that they must be in the play
somewhere discover them, respectively, now in Brisk and Carlo, now in
Clove and Orange. The only ground for connecting Marston with Brisk
is that Hedon and Crispinus, in the two following plays, where they
clearly point to Marston, are generically akin to Brisk, while Clove's
affected speech includes various words used by Marston. But Small has
shown that the Marston traits of Crispinus are almost entirely those
which he does not share with Brisk, and that of Clove's affected words
only six out of thirty-nine occur in Marston too. With Dekker-Buffone-

^ Cf. F. G. Fleay, A Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, i^^g-1642 (London,
1891), ii. 71.

88 C. H. Herford

Orange, the case is still more hopeless. The whole assumption does im-
perfect justice to the serious and even lofty aims of Jonson in this second
Humour play. With whatever success, his aim v^as to expose the "time's
deformity,'' the characteristic vices and follies of the day, not to ridicule
individuals. Living examples of these humours have assuredly been en-
countered by Jonson in plenty; Fastidious Brisk was to be met at every
fashionable ordinary and on the stage of every theater; and features
caught from particular individuals and noted on particular occasions
assuredly mingled with others drawn from his vast reading to furnish
forth the prodigious wealth of characteristic traits by which the several
"humorists" with such unflagging pertinacity exhibit themselves. In this
sense a particular dandy or simpleton may be said to be glanced at, if we
choose; but he is only an insignificant part of the object at which it is
leveled. In general the portrayal is much more liable to the charge of
being too generic than of being too individual; artificial and unreal
invention is a peril much more in question than a too photographic
realism; how stiff and "made-up," for instance, is the figure of Sogliardo
set beside his counterpart in the previous play. Master Stephen! In two
or three cases it seems possible to connect incidents in the play with real
or traditional events of Jonson's time; but we must beware of assuming
that because he borrowed the incidents he also identified the persons.
Thus Brisk's duel with Luculento so closely resembles that of Emulo with
Sir Owen in Patient Grissel that both are plausibly regarded as founded
upon an actual duel for which Mr. Fleay has confidently provided com-
batants and a cause of quarrel.^ Aubrey has, again, preserved the tradi-
tion of a calumnious bully, Charles Chester, whom Sir W. Ralegh "once
beat in a tavern and sealed up his mouth, i.e. his upper and nether beard,
with hard wax," which doubtless suggested the sealing of Buflone's lips
by Puntarvolo (V.vi). So neat a retribution was necessarily rare in actual
life, and overtook, by a happy accident, only a single member of the
Chester-Buffone tribe. But its symbolical appropriateness to the offense
exactly fitted it to serve as comic Nemesis for an offender in whom the
whole tribe was embodied.

Whatever personal elements may be interwoven in the intricate tex-
ture of the plot and characters, these must then be regarded as pre-
dominantly typical in intention. Certainly if we regard them as a com-

^ His speculations are acutely dissected by Small, R. A., The Stage-Quarrel between
Ben Jonson and the So-called Poetasters (Breslau, 1899), p. 188.

Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour 89

plete expression of what Jonson took to be the "deformity" of the time,
we cannot credit him with a very deep or comprehensive scrutiny. They
represent chiefly the foibles incident to jealously emphasized class dis-
tinctions, and fierce ambition for place and wealth. Some of the gaps in
his picture Jonson was himself subsequently to fill in. Cynthia's Revels^
The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, to go no farther, lay bare "nerves
and sinews" of the time's deformity which are either not at all or but
very slightly "anatomized" here. Inadequate as it is, however, to the com-
plexity of a great and growing civilization, this collection of "humorists"
was yet motley and individual enough for their characteristic activities
to resist ready inclusion in any straightforward and coherent plot. The
several Humours become so many centers of action among which the
interest, such as it is, is scattered. There is no common business in which
all the persons or any considerable group of them take part; and the
private business on which each is bent is palpably contrived with a view
to the one business which absorbs the dramatist — that of exhibiting and
"curing" Humours. Besides its effect in thus scattering the interest over
a number of detached or slightly connected operations, the satiric aim
has affected the quality of much of these detached actions themselves.
The whole content of each of these miniature plots is of elementary
simplicity. The "humorist" has, normally, but two things to do: to
exhibit his humour, and to be tricked, jostled, or persuaded "out" of it.
Both processes lead easily to developments of doubtful dramatic value.
When Macilente enters explaining that he is possessed with envy, or
Sogliardo announcing that he means to be a gentleman at all costs, we are
reminded of the "program" speeches of the primitive Elizabethan stage.
When Sordido hangs himself on the stage we are reminded of its crude
violence.^ The poisoning of Puntarvolo's dog is a trick worthy of a pre-
Shakespearean clown. There is little trace as yet of that predilection for
symbolic and allusive incident — the idolon of the study — which was soon
to be so unsparingly indulged. The Fountain of Self-Love, and the forced
eructations of Crispinus, in the following plays, were foreshadowed at
most in the stopping of Carlo's mouth, a piece of "symbolism" not too
recondite, as we saw, to have been actually carried out. Yet this, like
Puntarvolo's farcical dialogue with his own gentlewoman, and the Sor-
dido and Saviolina scenes, already mentioned, from Castiglione, still
more the original conversion of Macilente referred to below, has little
claim to be an example of imitatio vitae. The invention, even when

®Both this incident and Sogliardo 's scene with Saviolina (V.ii) were suggested, as
Bang has shown (Eng. Stud, xxxvi. 340 f.), by Castiglione's Courtier. Jonson was con-
scious of the objection and vainly attempted to rebut it by the example of Plautus*
Alcesimarchus in the Cistellaria. Alcesimarchus puts his sword to his breast in the
presence of his mistress, and is restrained from using it: Sordido actually hangs him-
self. And even had Alcesimarchus carried out his purpose, the legitimacy of a death by
the sword on the stage does not warrant that of a death by the halter.

go C. H. Herford

brutally realistic, smells indefinably of the lamp, so rarely suggested in
the fresh homely atmosphere of the earlier play.

The comic "catastrophes" are otherwise of varying degrees of dramatic
merit. No complex or subtle psychology is involved or applied. The
*'cure" is usually of the rough practical kind which teaches fools who
cannot be taught otherwise, but teaches them rather caution than wis-
dom. Sordido's "conversion'' by the curses of the rustics who have un-
wittingly cut him down is powerfully conceived, but far too summarily
handled to be psychologically convincing; Sordido, accustomed to trample
with brutal cynicism upon the interests of his neighbors, can hardly have
been so deeply moved at the discovery that they hate him, or have dis-
covered it now for the first time. Two only of the "catastrophes'' stand
out, as examples of high comedy, and one of them is worthy of the stage
which within the next two years was to witness the production of Twelfth
Night and Much Ado about Nothing. The catastrophe of which Deliro
and his wife are the subjects is ingeniously contrived to cure two humours
at the same time; for Fallace's discomfiture is Deliro's disillusion; and if
Fallace's cure is but of the external kind, if she is only taught to be more
cautious in her entertainment of Fastidious Brisk's successor, Deliro is
radically healed of "doting" for ever. Still better both in design and
execution is Saviolina's discomfiture (V.ii), which at the same time ex-
plodes the pretensions of Sogliardo. The plot laid by Macilente and the
rest for her exposure is admirably adjusted to her dominant foible, as it
is to Sogliardo's, and has the air of providing them both with what they
most desire. It may seem that Saviolina is too easily taken in; for a
clown trying to play a gentleman is not in reality at all like a gentleman
trying to play a clown. Sogliardo bungles his French and Italian; the
gentleman would have dropped his French and Italian altogether, and
bungled his dialect. Saviolina betrays her quality as an observer of men
in concluding Sogliardo's social rank from the mere trappings of phrase
which may be donned and doffed like any other suit. It is reserved for
her tormentors to point to the ci-devant farmer's horny palm — an argu-
ment which its owner's naive explanation, "Tut, that was with holding
the plough," immediately clinches beyond appeal.

Two of the Humours, Buffone and Macilente, hold a position apart in
so far as they are the principal agents in the "cure" of the rest. Others
have incidental parts in the "surgery." Saviolina, who snubs Fastidious
Brisk, shares to that extent in his ultimate cure, as Brisk himself does in
that of Fungoso, and the Hinds in that of Sordido. But in the main it is
Buffone and Macilente, types of the reviling tongue and the malignant

Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour 91

eye, who, simply in the exercise of these "humours" of their own, discover
and expose the humours of the rest. The contrast between these sharp
correctors and gay mischief-makers, like Brainworm or Lemot, measures
the distance traversed by Jonson in passing from comedy touched with
satire to satire under comic forms. The exceptional position thus assigned
to these two is highly characteristic. The satirist is too convinced of the
need for sharp chastisement of folly to deal hardly with those who
chastise it from questionable motives. He might have exhibited them
sapping innocent happiness and blasting just reputation; he chooses to
employ them in the salutary business of pricking bubbles and dispelling
dreams. Hence they figure virtually in a double capacity, as the objects
of the dramatist's satire and as his executants, and Macilente, at least,
does not escape the ambiguous air which this double function involves.
They stand between the common herd of victims, the numerus infinitus
stultorum, whom they chastise, and the solitary embodiment of indignant
virtue and his friends, being allied in dramatic function to both. Hence,
though finally cured themselves also, their cure is reserved till the very
end, when their surgery upon others is virtually complete. And their
"cure" when it comes seems to be the most superficial and external im-
aginable: a temporary pause is induced in the maladies, with every pros-
pect of their breaking out again in undiminished virulence when Buffone
releases his lips from the wax, and when fresh fuel has arrived to re-
plenish the fading fires of Macilente, whose

humour (like a flame) no longer lasts
Then it hath stuffe to feed it.

Macilente was played by the same actor as Asper, and speaks the Epilogue
significantly in Asper's place. In spite of his hint that "the shift" (to
Asper's dress) would have been somewhat long, Macilente and Asper are
distinguished rather to the intellect than to the imagination; Macilente's
animosity against those more fortunate than himself assumes, as it goes
on, more and more the complexion of Asper's intolerance of folly, until
at the close we find that the "fuel" for lack of which his "humour" flags
is not the prosperity of which his and Carlo's victims have been relieved,
but the "folly" of which they have "repented."

In the original text, Jonson had, it is true, provided a kind of explana-
tion for Macilente's abrupt conversion. He comes to the Court bent on
maligning whatever he encounters there. But the wonder of the Queen's
presence strikes the personification of envy suddenly dumb; then, re-
covering heart, he addresses her in glowing eulogy, his "humour" com-
pletely changed. Dramatically, this is a dangerous approach to the deus
ex machina; but it at least avoided the blank unreason of Macilente's
conversion in the [revised] text.

9^ C. H. Herford

The intellectual scorn toward which Macilente approximates is the un-
alloyed passion of Asper. In Asper, Jonson for the first, but by no means
for the last, time drew his ideal poet. If Asper bears an unmistakable
resemblance to Jonson himself, it is because Jonson, like other men of
massive personality, on the whole was what he wanted to be, and did,
in literature, what he desired should in literature be done. Through
Asper's lips Jonson utters, with a passionate eloquence, the lofty and
vehement scorn which was one of the driving and shaping forces of his
art, and one of the moods in which he most nearly approached poetry.
As a character, Asper is a notable creation, more human and sympathetic
than any other figure in this drama of eccentrics. In his rugged Jonsonian
fashion, he has something both of the grandeur and of the pathos of
Moliere's Alceste. No mere prologue sufficed for an exposition of what
was in effect Jonson's apologia for his own prospective policy and
practice as an artist, and in particular a defense of the present play. He
laid hands, accordingly, on a device which may be best described as a
compromise between the traditional Induction and the classical chorus
or Grex."^ The preliminary debate of Asper with his friends, and the inter-
vening discussions of the two latter, contain admirable dialogue and not
ineffective byplay. But their dramatic vivacity is subordinate to the
business of exposition and self-defense. The two friends Cordatus and
Mitis serve at first, like Pope's Arbuthnot and Horace's Trebatius, to give
the poet occasion, by their prudent or timid warnings, vigorously to indi-
cate his action and expound the object of his campaign. Then, after
Asper's withdrawal, Cordatus, ''a man inly acquainted with the scope
and drift of the Plot," learnedly expounds the doctrine on which it rests,
while the gentle Mitis grows yet more obviously a mouthpiece for the
difficulties likely to be occasioned in the conventional hearer by Jonson's
**strange" and "particular" comic methods. His pertinacity in raising
objections is as remarkable as his facile acquiescence in Cordatus' re-
plies. *Tou have satisfied me, sir," he rejoins, like Master Stephen, but
without the motive and cure of Master Stephen's embarrassing situation.
It was not for nothing that Jonson refused to ''afford character" to a
person whose whole dramatic existence consists in alternate exercise and
surrender of the critical spirit. But Mitis' loss of "character" is only an
extreme instance of the general impoverishment of drama in the in-
terest of rhetoric and satiric quality which marks this play as a whole.

"^ The affinities of Jonson's Inductions to earlier Elizabethan examples in the work of
Peele, Greene, and Nashe, are described by Baskervill, English Elements, p. 14.6L

The Double Plot in Volpone

by Jonas A. Barish

For more than two centuries literary critics have been satisfied to
dismiss the subplot of Volpone as irrelevant and discordant, because of
its lack of overt connection with the main plot. Jonson's most sympathetic
admirers have been unable to account for the presence of Sir Politic
Would-be, Lady Would-be, and Peregrine any more satisfactorily than
by styling them a ''makeweight" or a kind of comic relief to offset the
"sustained gloom" of the chief action.^ Without questioning the orthodox
opinion that the links of intrigue between the two plots are frail, one
may nevertheless protest against a view of drama which criticizes a play
exclusively in terms of physical action. What appears peripheral on the
level of intrigue may conceal other kinds of relevance. And it is on the
thematic level that the presence of the Would-be's can be justified and
their peculiar antics related to the major motifs of the play.

John D. Rea, in his edition of Volpone, seems to have been the first
to notice that Sir Politic Would-be, like the characters of the main plot,
has his niche in the common beast fable i^ he is Sir Pol, the chattering
poll parrot, and his wife is a deadlier specimen of the same species.
Rea's accurate insistence on the loquaciousness of the parrot, however,
must be supplemented by recalling that parrots not only habitually

"The Double Plot in Volpone'' by Jonas A. Barish. From Modern Philology, \X
(1953), 83-92. Copyright 1953 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission 1
of the University of Chicago Press.

^ The quoted phrases are from George Saintsbury, A History of Elizabethan Litera^
ture (New York, 1912), p. 181. For substantially the same view see John Addington \
Symonds, Ben Jonson ("English Worthies" series [New York, 1886]), p. 86; Maurice '
Castelain, Ben Jonson (Paris, 1907), p. 301; G. Gregory Smith, Ben Jonson ("English
Men of Letters" series [London, 1919]), p. 111; C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson
(eds.), Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925-50), II, 64; and Arthur Sale (ed.), Volpone (London, '■
1951), pp. vii, 176. Recent studies of Jonson by Townsend, Sackton, and others inti-
mate some uneasiness about the canonical view of the subplot in Volpone but do not
seriously challenge it.

^ (New Haven, 1919), p. xxxiii. The further possibility, advanced by Rea (pp. xxx-
xliii) and sharply challenged by the Simpsons (IX, 680-82), that Sir Politic was intended
as a caricature of Sir Henry Wotton need not be dealt with here. The identification is
by no means certain, and if it were, it would not materially affect the present analysis
of Sir Politic, whose role transcends mere personal satire.

94 Jonas A. Barish

chatter, they mimic. This banal but important little item of bird lore
offers a thread whereby we may find our way through the complex
thematic structure of the play. For Sir Politic and Lady Would-be func-
tion to a large extent precisely as mimics. They imitate their environ-
ment, and without knowing it they travesty the actions of the main
characters. In so doing, they perform the function of burlesque tradi-
tional to comic subplots in English drama, and they make possible the
added density and complexity of vision to which the device of the bur-
lesque subplot lends itself.

His effort to Italianize himself takes the form, with Sir Politic, of an
obsession with plots, secrets of state, and Machiavellian intrigue. His
wife, on the other hand, apes the local styles in dress and cosmetics,
reads the Italian poets, and tries to rival the lascivious Venetians in their
own game of seduction.

Further, and more specifically, however, Sir Politic and Lady Would-be
caricature the actors of the main plot. Sir Pol figures as a comic distor-
tion of Volpone. As his name implies, he is the would-be politician, the
speculator manque, the unsuccessful enterpriser. Volpone, by contrast,
is the real politician, the successful enterpriser, whose every stratagem
succeeds almost beyond expectation. Sir Pol, like Volpone, is infatuated
with his own ingenuity, and like Volpone he nurses his get-rich-quick
schemes; but none of these ever progresses beyond the talking stage.
While Volpone continues to load his coffers with the treasures that pour
in from his dupes. Sir Pol continues to haggle over vegetables in the
market and to annotate the purchase of toothpicks.

Lady Would-be, for her part, joins the dizzy game of legacy-hunting.
Her antics caricature the more sinister gestures of Corvino, Voltore, and
Corbaccio. She is jealous, like Corvino, as meaninglessly and perversely
erudite as Voltore, and like Corbaccio, she makes compromising pro-
posals to Mosca which leave her at the mercy of his blackmail. But, like
her husband. Lady Would-be is incapable of doing anything to the
purpose, and when she plays into Mosca's hands in the fourth act, she
becomes the most egregious of the dupes because she is the blindest.

We do not learn of the existence of the Would-be's until the close of
the first act,^ and then only in a scrap of dialogue between Mosca and
Volpone. Mosca's panegyric on Celia, following his sarcasms about Lady
Would-be, serves to initiate a contrast which prevails throughout the
play, between the households of Corvino and Sir Politic. If Corvino's
besetting vice is jealousy, that of Sir Pol is uxoriousness, and the contrast

' ^ For the sake of brevity, this discussion will confine itself as closely as possible to
the scenes actually involving the Would-be's. Jonson's sources, which are legion for this
play, have been assembled both by Rea and by Herford and Simpson in their editions
but will not be considered here. AH citations to Volpone are from Herford and Simp-
son, Vol. V.

The Double Plot in Volpone 95

enlarges itself into a difference between the brutal, obsessive passions of
Italy and the milder eccentricities, the acquired follies or humours, of
England. The contrast continues to unfold in the opening scene of Act II,
where Sir Politic talks to his new acquaintance. Peregrine. Peregrine, it
should be mentioned, probably belongs to the beast fable himself, as the
pilgrim falcon. A case for this possibility would have to be based on the
habits of hawks, commonly trained to hunt other birds. One then might
find propriety in the fact of the falcon's hunting the parrot in the play.
In Jonson's Epigram LXXXV (Herford and Simpson, VIII, 55), the
hawk is described as a bird sacred to Apollo, since it pursues the truth,
strikes at ignorance, and makes the fool its quarry. All these activities
are performed by Peregrine vis-a-vis Sir Politic.

In the initial scene between them, three chief ideas are developed, all
of cardinal importance to the play and all interrelated. The first is the
notion of monstrosity. Monstrosity has already made its spectacular ap-
pearance in the person of Androgyno and in the passage on Volpone's
misbegotten offspring. We are, thereby, already familiar with the moral
abnormality of Venice and its inhabitants. The present passage, with its
reports of strange marvels sighted in England — a lion whelping in the
Tower, a whale discovered in the Thames, porpoises above the bridge —
introduces us to an order of monsters more comic than those to be met
with in Venice, but to monsters nonetheless, in the proper sense of the
word. Sir Pol's prodigies are distant echoes of the moral earthquake rock-
ing Venice, a looking glass for England whereby that country is warned
to heed the lesson of the Italian state lest its own follies turn to vices
and destroy it.

The enactment of the interlude in the first act, by placing the soul of
the fool in the body of the hermaphrodite, has already established an
identification between folly and monstrosity.^ Appropriately enough,
then, having discussed monsters. Peregrine and Sir Pol turn to speak of
the death of a famous fool, thus reinforcing the link between the two
ideas. Sir Pol's excessive reaction to the event prompts Peregrine to in-
quire maliciously into a possible parentage between the two, and his
companion innocently to deny it. The joke here, that Sir Pol is kin to
the dead fool through their mutual folly if not through family, merges
into a larger reflection on the ubiquity of folly, picking up that sugges-
tion by ricochet, as it were, from the interlude in Act I. When Peregrine
asks, "I hope/You thought him not immortall?" (Act II, scene 1, lines
55-56), the question implies its own Jonsonian answer: Master Stone, the
fool, is not immortal, but his folly lives on incarnate in hundreds of fools
like Sir Politic, much as the soul of Pythagoras, in the interlude, in-

* For an analysis of the first interlude and its importance to the play as a whole see
Harry Levin, "Jonson's Metempsychosis," PQ, XXII (1943), 231-39.

96 Jonas A, Barish

vested the body of one fool after another for thousands of years, only to
reach its final and most fitting avatar in the person of Androgyno.

The colloquy concerning the Mamuluchi introduces the third chief
motif of the scene, that of mimicry. This passage, where baboons are
described in various quasi-human postures,^ acquires added irony from
the fact that it is recited by the parrot, the imitative animal par excel-
lence, and also from the fact that the activities of the baboons, like those
of Master Stone, the fool, consist chiefly of spying and intriguing and
therefore differ so little from the way Sir Pol himself attempts to imitate
the Italians.

The arrival of Volpone disguised as a mountebank produces the ex-
pected confrontation between the archknave and the complete gull, the
latter hopelessly hypnotized by the eloquence of the former. Volpone
commences by disdaining certain imputations that have been cast on him
by professional rivals. By way of counterattack, he accuses them of not
knowing their trade, of being mere ''ground Ciarlitani," or spurious
mountebanks. If there is any doubt about the application of the passage
to Sir Politic, it is settled by that individual's cry of admiration: ''Note
but his bearing, and contempt of these'' (II, 2, 58). Sir Politic thus plays
charlatan to Volpone's mountebank as, within the larger frame of the
play, he plays parrot to Volpone's fox. But Volpone has brought along
his own misshapen child, the dwarf Nano, as an accredited imitator.
Nano, who fills the role of Zan Fritada, the zany, is the domesticated
mimic, the conscious mimic, as Androgyno is the conscious fool, while
Sir Pol remains the unconscious mimic and the unconscious fool.

Volpone, pursuing his attack on imitators, assails them for trying to
copy his elixir: "Indeed, very many have assay'd, like apes in imitation
of that, which is really and essentially in mee, to make of this oyle" (II,
2, 149-50). What is "really and essentially" in Volpone we know already
to be monstrosity, so that to imitate Volpone (as Sir Politic does) is to
imitate the unnatural, and therefore, in a sense, to place one's self at two
removes from nature. But Volpone believes himself, not without justifica-
tion, to be inimitable. The wretched practitioners who try to duplicate
his ointment end in disaster. "Poore wretches!" he concludes, "I rather
pittie their folly, and indiscretion, then their losse of time, and money;
for those may be recovered by Industrie: but to bee a foole borne, is a
disease incurable" (II, 2, 157-59). At this moment all that would be
needed to drive home the application of Volpone's sententia would be a
pause on his part, followed by a significant look from Peregrine to Sir

^Rea quotes from Edward Topsel's chapter "Of the Cynocephale, or Baboun" in
The Historie of Fourfooted Beastes (1607): "It is the error of vulgar people to think
that Babouns are men, differing only in the face or visage. . . . They will imitate all
humane actions, loving wonderfully to wear garments . . . they are as lustful and
venerous as Goats, attempting to defile all sorts of women" (Rea, p. 178).

The Double Plot in Volpone 97

Pol.^ But the situation conceals a further irony. Volpone's aphorism
apphes to himself. Before long, he, the archknave, will have proved the
greatest fool, and this despite the versatility which enables him to trans-
cend for the moment his own preferences, in order to cater to the preju-
dices of the public. Paradoxically, in this scene, speaking out of character,
Volpone utters truths which reverse the premises of his former behavior.
In Act I, gold, the great goddess, served him as sovereign remedy and
omnipotent healer. For the saltimbanco Scoto of Mantua, peddling his
fraudulent elixir, newer and relatively truer axioms celebrate the treasure
of health: "O, health! health! the blessing of the rich! the riches of the
poore!'' (II, 2, 84-85). But with the application of this facile maxim, error
descends again. The new truth proves to be only a distorted half-truth.
In place of gold, Volpone offers only his humbug ointment as the "most
soveraigne, and approved remedie'* (II, 2, 103-4). The real point, and he
has made it himself, escapes him: to be a fool born is a disease incurable,
and it is this disease to which he himself is destined to succumb.

The "little remembrance" which Volpone now presents to Celia proves
to be a cosmetic powder with virtues more miraculous than those of the
oglio itself. It is the powder "That made venus a goddesse (given her by
APOLLo) that kept her perpetually yong, clear'd her wrincles, firm'd her
gummes, fiU'd her skin, coloured her haire; from her, deriv'd to helen,
and at the sack of Troy (unfortunately) lost: till now, in this our age, it
was as happily recover'd, by a studious Antiquarie , . . who sent a
moyetie of it, to the court of France . . . wherewith the ladies there,
now, colour theire haire" (II, 2, 235-43). Thus the history of the powder
parallels the metempsychoses of Pythagoras. Like Pythagoras' soul, the
powder began its career as a gift from Apollo, and in its transmigrations
through the goddess of love, the whore of Sparta, and the court ladies
of France, it serves to underline the ancient lineage of vanity as a special
case of the folly rehearsed in the interlude.

Mosca's opening soliloquy in Act III shows that this excellent counter-
feiter is himself, like his master, obsessed by the notion of imitators. His
contempt for ordinary parasites suggests that there is a hierarchy of
counterfeits, ranging from those who are deeply and essentially false (like
himself) to those who practice falsity out of mere affectation, who are, so
to speak, falsely false and therefore, again, at two removes from nature.
The shift of scene back to Volpone's house produces still another varia-
tion on the theme of mimicry. In order to beguile their master from his
boredom, the trio of grotesques stage an impromptu interlude, dominated

® A proper staging of the scene would involve, I think, placing Sir Pol fairly close to
Volpone, so that the two stare each other in the face, the one collecting with ardor
every flower of rhetoric that falls from the other. At this moment, Volpone himself
might stop to gaze into the infatuated countenance before him: by now Sir Pol's
credulity is as apparent to him as it is to Peregrine.

gS Jonas A. Barish

by Nano, who claims that the dwarf can please a rich man better than
the eunuch or the hermaphrodite. The dwarf, explains Nano, is little,
and pretty:

Else, why doe men say to a creature of my shape.

So soone as they see him, it's a pritty little ape?

And, why a pritty ape? but for pleasing imitation

Of greater mens action, in a ridiculous fashion

[III, 3, 11-14].

The first interlude, it may be recalled again, established an identifica-
tion between folly and the unnatural. The present fragment confirms a
further identity between mimicry and deformity, already hinted at in the
mountebank scene where Nano appeared as the zany, or mimic, to
Volpone's Scoto. At this point one may represent some of the relation-
ships in the play diagrammatically as follows:

(Scoto of Mantua) j Volpone ■

(Zan Fritada) Nano 8c Castrone & Androgyno

(Imitation and (Sterility) (Folly and
Deformity) j Monstrosity)

(Ground Ciarlitani, etc.) I T I

I •• Sir Politic -• '

Since Volpone has (presumptively at least) sired both Nano and Andro-
gyno, and since Sir Pol combines the chief attributes of both, one may,
with the aid of the diagram, infer what is already emerging plainly in
context, that mimicry itself is something monstrous and abnormal. It is
unnatural for baboons and apes and parrots to counterfeit human be-
havior. It is equally unnatural for men to imitate beasts. It argues a per-
version of their essential humanity. It is not for nothing, then, that the
chief characters of the play fit into one zoological classification or another.
As men, they duplicate the habits of beasts; as beasts, they brutishly
travesty humanity. They belong to the genus monster — half man, half
brute — that order of fabulous creatures whose common denominator is
their unnaturalness, their lack of adherence to whatever category of being
nature has assigned them.

The arrival of Lady Would-be, fuming and fussing over her toilet, and
snapping at her servingwomen, provides still a further object-lesson in
falsity. Here, as so often in Jonson, face physic symbolizes the painted
surface hiding the rotten inside; the cosmetic care of the face signifies
the neglect of the soul. It signifies equally an attachment to appearances,
an incapacity to look beyond the superficies of life or truth. The powder

The Double Plot in Volpone 99

which Volpone offered to Celia and which Celia did not need, since her
beauty was of the platonic sort that revealed the purity of her soul, might
with more justice have been given to Lady Would-be, and it is Lady
Would-be who deserves the epithet of "lady vanitie' (II, 5, 21) with
which Corvino, in his jealous tantrum, has stigmatized Celia.

The scene between Lady Would-be and Volpone serves partly as a
burlesque of the parallel scenes in Act I between Volpone and the other
captatores. All the essential ingredients of those scenes reappear, but
scrambled and topsy-turvy. Once again Volpone feigns sickness, but this
time it is in self-defense against the terrible oratory of Lady Would-be.
Once again remedies are prescribed, but these are neither Corbaccio's
deadly opiate nor his aurum palpabile offered as pump-priming, but the
fantastic assortment of old wives' restoratives dredged up from Lady
Would-be's infernal memory. She rains down the hailstones of her learn-
ing on the helpless Volpone, until the archrogue, anticipating the judg-
ment to be rendered on him in Act V, cries out in despair: ''Before I
fayned diseases, now I have one" (III, 4, 62). The whole episode is a rich
application of the principle of comic justice. If in the final denouement
Volpone suffers the penalty of vice, here he reaps the more ludicrous re-
ward of his own folly. Trapped by Lady Would-be's rhetoric, itself a
consequence of his own scheming, he is finally driven to pronounce him-
self cured. But the talking machine grinds on, and only Mosca's happy
notion of exciting her jealousy, as he has previously aroused Corvino's,
and for the same purpose, succeeds in getting rid of her. As her contribu-
tion to Volpone's coffers, she leaves behind a wrought cap of her own
making; this forms a suitably ridiculous contrast to the treasures earlier
offered by Corvino, Corbaccio, and Voltore.

The same scene serves as introduction and comic distortion of the
scene immediately to follow between Volpone and Celia. Celia's un-
earthly purity is made to seem even more unearthly by its contrast to
Lady Would-be's lecherousness, this latter apparent in the lady's addic-
tion to cosmetics, in her slips of the tongue, and in her barely disguised
sexual overtures. Lady Would-be's attempted seduction of Volpone hav-
ing been thwarted, the stage is set for Volpone's attempted seduction of
Celia. Volpone commences his wooing with a characteristic boast: "I,
before/I would have left my practice, for thy love," he swears, "In vary-
ing figures, I would have contended/With the blue proteus, or the
horned floud'' (III, 7, 150-53). Justifiably proud of his powers of dis-
guise, Volpone emphasizes them further by citing a past occasion on
which he masqueraded in the ambiguous role of Antinous, Nero's
favorite. Embarking on an enumeration of the exotic splendors in store
for Celia, he reserves as his final inducement the promise that she will
participate, with him, in transmutations without end: "Whil'st we, in
changed shapes, act ovids tales" (the Metamorphoses, of course).

lOO Jonas A, Barish

Thou, like europa now, and I like JOVE^

Then I like mars, and thou like erycine,

So, of the rest, till we have quite run through

And weary'd all the fables of the gods.

Then will I have thee in more moderne formes.

Attired like some sprightly dame of France,

Brave Tuscan lady, or proud Spanish beauty

[III, 7, 221-28].

We have already witnessed, in the first interlude, the metempsychosis of
folly and, in the powder offered to Celia in Act II, the transmigrations
of vanity. Now, as a climax to his eloquence, Volpone rehearses the
metamorphoses of lust. Jonson thus endows his central themes with
vertical depth in time as well as horizontal extension in space. Folly,
vanity, lust, have been, are, will be. At any given moment their prac-
titioners are legion, and often interchangeable.

It is at this point that Celiacs refusal crystallizes into a repudiation of
folly, vanity, and lust combined and that her behavior contrasts most
sharply with that of Lady Would-be. The recollection of Lady Would-be
lacquering her face and making indecent advances to Volpone brings
into sharper focus Celiacs sudden horror at her own beauty, and her plea
that her face be flayed or smeared with poison, in order to undo the lust
she has aroused. If, for Lady Would-be, the cosmetic art is a necessary
preliminary to sexual conquest, its opposite, the disfigurement of the
face, becomes for Celia the badge of chastity. Where Lady Would-be
strives to adopt Italian vices for her own, Celia's gestures as well as her
name demonstrate her alienation from the moral and spiritual province
of Venice.

Act IV carries us back into the open street, where Sir Pol, ignorant of
the plot developing at Volpone's house, continues babbling of plots in
terms which ordinarily have one meaning for him and another for the
audience. After a patronizing recital of ^'instructions" to Peregrine on
methods of deportment in Venice, he confides suddenly that his money-
making projects need only the assistance of one trusty henchman in order
to be put into instant execution. Evidently he is hinting that Peregrine
undertake that assignment and thus play Mosca to his Volpone. But
Peregrine contents himself with inquiring into the particulars of the
plots. The most elaborate of these proves to be a way to protect Venice
from the plague by using onions as an index to the state of infection on
ships entering the harbor. This mad scheme, with its echo of Volpone's
claim to have distributed his oglio under official patent to all the com-
monwealths of Christendom, serves chiefly to remind us again of the
moral plague prevailing in Venice and of the incomprehension of that
fact on the part of those characters who prattle most about disease and
cure.

The Double Plot in Volpone loi

The ensuing scene parodies the episode in Act II where Corvino dis-
covers his wife in conversation with the mountebank. Just as Corvino
interrupts Volpone while the latter is advertising his medicine, so Lady
Would-be bursts in on Sir Politic as the knight is dilating on his schemes
and projects. As Corvino babbles jealously of lechers and satyrs, so Lady
Would-be jabbers of land sirens, lewd harlots, and frica trices. Corvino
beats away the mountebank. Lady Would-be rails at Peregrine. Both
harp on "honor," and both discard that term as soon as it becomes an
inconvenience, Corvino when it becomes an obstacle to his plan of in-
heritance, Lady Would-be when she discovers that Peregrine is no harlot
in disguise, but a young gentleman. As for Sir Politic, though he too
plays his part in the little impromptu from the commedia delVarte, he
remains, unlike Volpone, quite oblivious to the fact. Actually, Sir Pol
re-enacts not the role of "Signior flaminio," the lover in disguise — that
part, however reluctantly assumed, belongs to Peregrine — but the female
role, the "franciscina," guarded by a jealous ''pantalgne di besogniosi'
(II, 3, 3-8). The confusion of sexes symbolized in Androgyno, in the in-
discriminate journeyings of the soul of Pythagoras, in Volpone's masque-
rade as Antinous, in Lady Would-be's error, as well as in the reversed
masculine-feminine roles of Sir Pol and Lady Would-be, contributes its
own kind of abnormality to the deformity of the moral atmosphere
chiefly figured by the metamorphoses of beasts into men. And if one re-
gards Sir Politicks uxoriousness as a kind of metaphoric emasculation,
one may then equate him with Castrone, as he has already been equated
with Nano and Androgyno, to make the pattern of mimicry complete.'^

The fourth-act trial starts with justice and concludes with a perver-
sion of it. The monsters begotten by Volpone, the prodigies and portents
that exercised such a hypnotic effect on Sir Pol, now make a lavish and
climactic reappearance in the language of the scene. First they designate
their proper objects. But as Voltore begins to exercise his baleful
rhetoric, the parlance of unnaturalness, appropriate to the guilty, be-
gins to turn against the innocent. Corbaccio disavows his son for "the
meere portent of nature"; he is "an utter stranger" to his loins, a
"Monster of men, swine, goate, wolfe, parricide" (IV, 5, 108-12). Finally
Lady Would-be arrives, the eternal parrot, to give testimony which
virtually clinches the case against Celia:

Out, thou chameleon harlot; now, thine eies
Vie teares with the hyaena

[IV, 6, 2-3].

''Actually, Florio's Worlde of Wordes (1598) defines Castrone not only as "a gelded
man/' but as "a noddle, a meacocke, a cuckold, a ninnie, a gull" (quoted in Rea, p.
144). Any of these will serve as accurate epithets for Sir Pol, with the possible excep-
tion of "cuckold," and if that designation does not fit it is not owing to any lack of
effort on Lady Would-be's part.

102 Jonas A. Barish

The beast characters in the play display an unerring faculty for describ-
ing the innocent as beasts. Corvino has already called Celia a crocodile,
referring to that animal's notorious ability to imitate human tears, and
Lady Would-be, though she has her unnatural natural history somewhat
confused, invokes another creature famous for its powers of mimicry,
the hyena, as well as the even more versatile chameleon.

The juxtaposition of the hyena and the chameleon reminds one that
there is a point at which the ideas of metamorphosis and mimicry
coalesce. The chameleon, shifting its colors to blend itself with its en-
vironment, indulges in a highly developed form of protective mimicry.
Volpone carries the principle a step further. He goes through his restless
series of transformations not as a shield but in order to prey on his own
kind, to satisfy something in his unnatural nature which demands in-
cessant changing of shape and form. But knavery and credulity, mimicry
and metamorphosis, alike reflect aspects of one basic folly: the folly of
becoming, or trying to become, what one is not, the cardinal sin of losing
one's nature. Only Bonario and Celia, of all the creatures in the play,
never ape others, never change their shapes, never act contrary to their
essential natures. And in the unnatural state of Venice it is chiefly they,
the unchanging ones, who are attacked as hyenas and chameleons.

Volpone, in short, may be read as a comic restatement of a theme
familiar in Shakespeare's plays of the same period, the theme of disorder.
Order figures here not as social balance or political hierarchy, but as a
principle of differentiation in nature whereby each species, each sex,
maintains its separate identity. With the loss of clear-cut divisions be-
tween man and beast, between beast and beast, between male and female,
all creatures become monsters. The basic structure of nature is violated.
The astronomical portents discussed earlier by Sir Pol and Peregrine in
connection with animal prodigies reflect the upheaval of the cosmos it-
self following the degeneracy of man.

But by this time, justice has become as monstrous as its participants,
and the avocatori close the session piously intoning their horror at the
unnaturalness of Celia and Bonario. Volpone's last and greatest hoax is
destined to set the balance of nature right again. It starts, however, with
one more act of unnaturalness. Volpone, a monster, who therefore oc-
cupies no fixed place in the order of created beings, feigns death and thus
symbolically demonstrates his lack of status. One by one the inheritors
file in for the legacy, only to find that they have been duped by Mosca.

The first to receive her dismissal is Lady Would-be. Having made over-
tures to both Mosca and Volpone, she is in a position to be summarily
blackmailed. "Goe home," advises Mosca, "and use the poore sir pol,
your knight, well;/For feare I tell some riddles: go, be melancholique"
(V, 3, 44-45). Thus the learned lady who knew so many bizarre ways of
curing Volpone's melancholy now has the opportunity to treat herself
for the same ailment, and so do her colleagues. The value of this scene

The Double Plot in Volpone 103

consists partly in its inflicting comic justice on the legacy-hunters before
the avocatori render their sterner legal judgments, just as Volpone has
already, in Lady Would-be, met a comic foretaste of the retribution
which overtakes him at the Scrutineo. But since the parrot, for all its
shrillness, remains less venal than the crow or vulture, the untrussing of
Lady Would-be goes no further. In the realm of the severer truths, vice
and folly may appear as different aspects of a similar spiritual malaise. In
the realm of poetic justice, however, a distinction continues to be prac-
ticed. Vice, which is criminal and attacks others, must suffer public cor-
rection, whereas folly, a disease essentially self-destructive, may be dealt
with in private and without the assistance of constituted authority. For
Lady Would-be it is sufficient that, awakened to some sense of her own
folly, she vows to quit Venice and take to sea *'for physick.*'

And so with her preposterous knight. Sir Politic, whom we now en-
counter for the last time, the victim of a private plot which performs
the same service of mortification for him that the final trial scene does
for Volpone. The mercatori enlisted by Peregrine perform the office of
the avocatori who pronounce sentence on Volpone, and the divulging of
the pathetic notebook, with its scraps from playbooks, becomes the
burlesque substitute for the exposure of Volpone's will, in bringing on
the disaster. Peregrine, echoing Voltore's suggestion that Volpone be
tested on the strappado, warns Sir Pol that his persecutors will put him
to the rack. Whereupon the knight remembers an **engine" he has de-
signed against just such emergencies, a tortoise shell. And to the disgust
of three hundred years of literary critics he climbs into the ungainly
object, playing possum after the fashion of his model, Volpone, who has
feigned death in the foregoing scene. The arrival of the merchants brings
on the catastrophe:

Mer. 1 : What
Are you, sir? Per: I' am a merchant, that came heere
To looke upon this tortoyse. Mer. 3: How? Mer. 1: S*. marke!
What beast is this? Per: It is a fish. Mer. 2: Come out, here.
Per: Nay, you may strike him, sir, and tread upon him:
Hee'll beare a cart

[V, 4, 62-67].

Eventually, by stamping and poking, they goad Sir Politic out of his
exoskeleton. The scene thus rephrases in a vein of broadest tomfoolery
the essential question of the play: "What kind of creatures are these?"
Throughout the action one has seen beasts aping men and men imitating
beasts on the moral and psychological levels. Here the theme of mimicry
reaches its literal climax in an episode of farce, where the most imitative
of the characters puts on the physical integument of an animal and the
hired pranksters stand about debating its probable zoological classifica-

104 Jonas A. Barish

tion. The final unshelling of the tortoise, a parallel to the uncasing of
the fox in the last scene, arouses further comment from the merchants:

Mer. i: 'Twere a rare motion, to be seene, in Fleet-street!
Mer. 2: I, i'the terme. Mer. 1: Or Smithfield, in the faire

[V, i. 77-78].

Sir Politic, thus, so inquisitive about prodigies, has finally become one
himself, a specimen fit to be housed among the freaks of Smithfield or
amid the half-natural, half-artificial curiosities of Fleet Street. With the
knowledge that he is destined to become a victim of the kind of curiosity
he himself has exhibited, his disillusionment is complete and his chastise-
ment effected. He and Lady Would-be, the only survivors, in this play,
of Jonson's earlier humour characters, are now "out of their humour,"
purged of their imitative folly by the strong medicine of ridicule.

Public punishment, however, awaits the actors of the main plot. Jonson
is not sporting here with human follies like those of the Would-be's, but
dealing grimly with inhuman crimes. The names of fabulous monsters,
basilisks and chimeras, continue to echo in our ears as the catastrophe
approaches, fastening themselves at last onto their proper objects, the
conspirators in the game of captatio. Voltore's spurious fit spells out in
concrete theatrical terms his unnatural status and the lesson pointed by
the avocatori: ''These possesse wealth, as sicke men possesse fevers,/
Which, trulyer, may be said to possesse them" (V, 12, 101-2). The delivery
of Volpone's substance to the Incurabili places a final and proper valua-
tion on the medicinal powers of gold. The imprisonment of Volpone is
specifically designed to give him the opportunity to acquire in reality
the diseases he has mimicked and the leisure to ponder the accuracy of
his own text: to be a fool born is a disease incurable. Voltore and Cor-
baccio are henceforth to be secluded from their fellow-men like the un-
natural specimens they are, while Corvino's animality is to be the ob-
ject of a public display more devastating than Sir Politic's brief mas-
querade as a tortoise.

Thus on successive levels of low comedy and high justice, the monsters
of folly and the monsters of vice suffer purgation, exposed as the sort of
misshapen marvels they themselves have chattered about so freely. The
relative harmlessness of Sir Pol's downfall serves to differentiate his folly
from the viciousness of the Venetians, but the many parallels between
his catastrophe and theirs warn us that his kind of folly is sufficiently
virulent after all, is closely related to graver sins, and, if it persists in
imitating them, must ultimately fall under the same condemnation.

If these observations are accurate, it should be clear in what sense the
subplot of the Would-be's is relevant to the total structure of Volpone.
Starting from a contrast between Italian vice and English folly, Jonson
personifies the latter in two brainless English travelers, makes their folly

The Double Plot in Volpone 105

consist chiefly in mimicry of Italian vice, and Italian vice itself, in its
purest form, consist of the more comprehensive form of mimicry we have
termed "metamorphosis,'* thus bringing the two aspects of evil together
into the same moral universe and under a common moral judgment;
with the use of the beast fable he binds the two together dramatically,
and by the distribution of poetic justice he preserves the distinction
between them. Each of the episodes involving the Would-be's, including
the much despised incident of the tortoise, thus serves a definite dra-
matic purpose, and one may conclude, then, that the subplot adds a
fresh dimension and a profounder insight without which Volpone,
though it might be a neater play, would also be a poorer and a thinner
one.

Comic Plots; The Alchemist

by Paul Goodman

Let us take comedy ... as a relation, a *'deflatable accidental con-
nection/' among the parts. Consider a farce: again and again the intrigue
is reversed, and the intentions of the agents come to naught; yet we do
not feel pity or fear, but we laugh. We do not feel it tragically because
the actions are "of no account," the agents are "not seriously involved'*
or are "completely worthless anyway," and they do not win our sympathy;
we do not suffer. So Aristotle (in Poetics v) puts the laughable in the
class of the deformed whether of behavior (ato-xo?, disgraceful, ugly) or
thought (afiapTTjiia, error). Yet not every deformity is laughable, for
Oedipus is certainly in error and, by Greek standards, Philoctetes' wound
would be disgraceful; but only such cases as are "painless and harmless"
(avd)Svvov Kal ov (jiOapriKov), Kant, similarly, says that laughter is an ex-
pectation that comes to "absolutely naught"; he must mean while
we ourselves remain secure in our faculties; what is comically destroyed
is not like us. (So, for Kant, comedy is the direct contrary of the sublime,
where it is our intellectual faculties that break down.)

Psychologically, in this comedy of Aristotle and Kant, the positive feel-
ing is malicious pleasure in the destruction and the flooding release from
the strain of attending to an improbable or trivial connection and con-
temptuously dismissing it. But we may also find an underlying ground
of laughter in what is left after the destruction and the dismissal; this
is pointed to in the theories of comedy of, for instance, Bergson and
Freud. For Bergson the complicated and mechanical are destroyed; the
simple vitality explosively asserts itself. For Freud it is the inhibited
more infantile drives that return — laughter is a kind of freeing from
embarrassment. Thus, pervasively under the deflatable accidental con-
nections of comedy there is an abiding simpler attitude: infantile ani-
mality, lubricity, malice, etc.; and at the end there is often a philosoph-
ical (abiding) thought springing from the same source — for example,
"Good food is better than battles" (The Acharnians). Most popularly
the ending of comic plays is a wedding, but this usually means that a

"Comic Plots: The Alchemist*' From The Structure of Literature by Paul Goodman.
Copyright 1954 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of the Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.

106

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 107

nondeflatable romantic strand has been a part of the plot, and the whole
is not pure comedy but a mixed genre, arousing sympathy and apprehen-
sion as well as laughter.

There are two special difficulties, which did not arise for serious plays,
in writing out the structure of a comedy. ... In a serious plot, where
everything converges to the same meaning, it does not much matter if we
notice small details of acting, inflection, timing; but it is of course just
these things that set off the loudest laughter in comedy, when the tiniest
touch deflates the biggest balloon. Thus our criticism may quite ac-
curately lay bare the rough structure of what is happening, yet leave the
reader in the dark as to why it is funny, for that must be seen and heard
in detail performed by a good comedian. Samuel Johnson pointed this
out by saying that tragedies may be read in books but that comedies
must be experienced on the stage. The second difficulty of exposition
comes from the fact that the pervasive underlying drives I have men-
tioned, that are the energy of loud laughter, cannot be too directly pre-
sented, for that would freeze the embarrassment: they exist allusively in
the play and dormantly in the audience.

As the chief example for this chapter, I have chosen The Alchemist^
because among English plays Ben Jonson's are the purest comic actions,
as pure deflation, and The Alchemist is the most fully worked out, so
we can touch on the most points. (Further, a structural analysis of a
comedy by Jonson brings out with striking clarity the peculiar delight
of this poet, unfunny but very glorious.) . . .

Douhleness of Comic Characters

In the last chapter we started from "seriousness" as an essential rela-
tion between the character and his action; let us now explore the rela-
tion between a base character and his action. This is "comic" when the
intrigue can be reversed or even be deflated (come to nothing), and still
the character is not destroyed; yet the intrigue is the intrigue of the char-
acter in the sense that in part it follows from him and follows from a
part of him. This is what I mean by an "accidental" connection. It will
be seen at once that a character of comedy has two aspects: that which is
destroyed and that which survives in, let us say, "normalcy." Most of the
possibilities of this comic relation occur in The Alchemist,

1. The character may be composed simply of a comic trait necessary
for the intrigue and of the normal trait of being a man, as when a man
persists in a single illusion and then awakes from it. When a play is
made mainly of such characters, we have a comedy of situation, and we
sympathize with the persons in their return to normalcy. In broader
kinds of farce such a character is a straight man, brought into the

io8 Paul Goodman

comedy by his accidental connection with the broader comedians and
afterward of no further interest.

2. On the contrary, the disposition to comic intrigues, whether as a
butt or as an initiator, may be strongly developed, so that, even after the
deflation, the mask survives as a name of ridicule. We think of the mask
and not the normal man. These are the humours, and the Jonsonian
comedy is mainly comedy of humours, as here the simpleton Abel, Sir
Epicure Mammon, the stormy Kastril, the materialistic Puritan.

3. Or not only the comic but also the normal may be strongly de-
veloped, as when the deflation of the intrigue purges the normal man of
an error or humour.'^So Surly comes to recognize in himself that "same
foolish vice of honesty." Honesty and the need to expose rogues, these
are of course humours among the Jonsonian Lovewits and Truewits. For
Jonson the flawless normal man is urbane; he knows his way around.
But we can see how this same combination of the comic and normal may
easily verge on the tragic, as in Le Misanthrope^ where the disposition to
a comic intrigue is really a tragic flaw for a man who is not urbanely
normal but serious.

4. On the contrary again, what seems to be a merely comical disposi-
tion, such as gluttony, knavery, deviltry, may be so apt for any eventuality
that it survives every deflation and proves in the end to be a lively way
of normal life. Let us call these traits Wits, like Face, Falstaff (at the end
of the first part of Henry IV), Figaro, Scapin, or Schweik. In relation to
these witty knaves, the other characters are dupes and butts.

5. Or it may be the normal or even heroic part of the character that
is most developed and that, in detachment, permits or enjoys or profits
by the comedy, like Lovewit or Prince Hal or even Theseus in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream. This is the Urbane.

6. A completely deflatable trait is a Buffoon. Mostly this would occur
in passing.

Buffoonery and the Underlying Drives

Comic traits are base because they generate superficial or accidental
relations that in the end do not make any difference. But they are not
completely absurd, because they generate determinate probable intrigues.'
A character completely absurd could enter at any time, and from him
anything could be expected; he would be the object merely of indifference
or contempt.

Yet, since the comic intrigue is combined of the accidental relations of
accidental relations, when the combination reaches the utmost limits of
accidentality, all the comic characters and their actions tend to become

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 109

ad libitum, at sea. There is a pervasive buffoonery. Consider Kastril, for
example: at the climax he might do or say anything.^

What is it, at such a moment, that makes the comedy most delicious
and not merely contemptible, since it is apparently so devoid of sense?
Obviously it is the emergence of the more elementary but by no means
formless underlying drives, wanton destructiveness and^^ animal lubricity.
Compared with the intricacy of the plot, this underlying part is a dim
background, everywhere suggested in the incidents, gestures, language,
innuendo, but never given a plot. But, when the plot itself turns to
chaos, this part abides and makes sense. A comedy where all * 'human
values" are absolutely deflated proves to be a fertility ritual of the
highest human value.

So we shall see that the normalcy that survives the explosion of the
comedy, as a resolution, is not the normalcy of everyday but is a lively
normalcy, man in a wanton mood. The comic and normal parts of the
comic characters are integrally related for this lively function.

Comic Intrigue

Expansion. The combination of incidents probably from the wits,
dupes, and humours is, as a whole, the comic intrigue. And it is im-
mediately evident that such an intrigue, unlike the serious plot, is more
than the acting-out of the characters, for some comic events befall the
characters not as they choose or as is in their disposition but simply be-
cause, with quite other ends in view, they have entered the situation.
Since the situation is accidentally related to some, it can be accidentally
related to others, and, by a compounding of accidents, characters who
originally have nothing to do with one another are thrown together.
Thus, Surly comes disguised as the amorous Don; Dol, the appropriate
bawd, is occupied elsewhere; the Don must have some woman, and Dame
Pliant, who has come on other business, happens to be the only other
woman; so Surly is thrown with Dame Pliant. Here indeed we have a
case not merely of comic probability but of comic necessity (for it de-
pends on the exhaustion of the possibilities), yet it is absurd. In extreme
cases mere juxtaposition is a sufficient generator of comic incidents, as in
the famous tradition of multi-occupied closets.

^ Such an intrigue is naturally divergent and expansive, freely introduc-
ing new complications, whereas the tragic plot converges to remove just
the complexity that it has. Thus one might diagram the action of The
Alchemist as a kind of expanding balloon. In general, as the strands of

^ Compare this moment of general buffoonery with the "tragic recklessness" of the
complex protagonist. . . .

no Paul Goodman

action are more numerous, the unity among them all becomes more
accidental to each — the characters become more distracted, the pace more
dizzy, the probability more heady and tenuous. (This explains why melo-
drama, the climactic coming-together of many serious plots — the attack of
the Indians, the attempt on the heroine, the coming of the soldiers from
the post — is likely to become uproariously funny.)

Probability and Reversal The strands of a comic action may cross by
normal probability, as when a character plans to do something and
does it. Or by a comic probability: the characters are thrown into new,
unmeant, and still more accidental situations that they have to cope with.
Then the comedy is heightened if these new situations surprisingly pro-
voke new traits of characters that have a comic compatibility with the
previous traits and intentions. Thus, disappointed at the explosion of
the stone. Sir Epicure is provoked to the remorseful outcry, "O my
voluptuous mind! I am justly punished" (IV, 5).

This is a comic reversal. But we must make an important distinction.
The new situation may be one of continuing comedy or of the return to
normalcy (deflation to absolutely naught). Unlike the reversals of tragedy,
comic reversals are not brought on by discoveries; rather, they compound
the errors. Tragic reversals are apprehensive and fearful, but these
heighten daring and bewilderment, or the daring to be bewildered.

In this context we may make a further distinction of the characters in
plays like The Alchemist. The humours and dupes are subject to con-
tinual comic reversals; but the Alchemist himself is the agent of reversals.
He knows what is going on; therefore, he is not reversed; he is, however,
exposed in the general deflation to normalcy. But Face and Lovewit, the
witty and the urbane, are not subject to the deflation either.

Obviously it is the hallmark of Jonsonian comedy to fill out this whole
line: humours, knaves, wits, and the urbane. Jonson gives us a hierarchy
of malicious intelligence. In The Alchemist the hierarchy is kept neat,
and the effect is pleasant throughout; Lovewit, the urbane, is not in-
volved in the comedy as an agent, and so he may pleasantly profit from
the spoils set free by laughter, namely, sex and an heiress. But perhaps
Volpone is more profoundly Jonsonian: the Fox is both onlooker and
agent; he lusts in the malicious intelligence itself, not in the profits: "Oh
more than if I had enjoyed the wench: the pleasure of all womankind's
not like it." This is cruel.

(Correspondingly, in Jonson's comedies the underlying suggestiveness
is rarely very warm. There is plenty of lubricity but little pornographic
excitement. A typical verse: 'Tor she must milk his epididymus." We
have the remarkable case of great comedy that is not funny; we are not
invited to let go to belly laughter.)

License and Deflation. Ordinarily we expect normal thoughts and feel-
ings to be effective causes, for mistakes and misunderstandings to. right

Comic Plots: The Alchemist iii

themselves, etc. Thus, special comic conditions are prerequisite for comic
probability, the compounding of ^accidents and errors. In a sense every
humour provides such conditions. Mammon wills to believe anything that
will make him rich. Dame Pliant wants any husband, and the gull wants
to be gulled. (And, philosophically considered, no special conditions are
required for comic complication; the ordinary illusions of people are
obviously self-compounding. To a disinterested view, life is at least as
comic and serious as it is ^'normal.")

Often, however, the poet provides a special comic license to compound
errors, in a special place and for a limited time. One is licensed to be
mad on St. John's Day or to play tricks on April Fools'. Wine and the
party spirit give a license for dirty jokes. In The Alchemist the master of
the house is away, and this gives a license; the comic complication de-
pends on the erroneous belief that he will be gone for a fortnight. Then
we may simply define for plays like The Alchemist: Normalcy is the
part of the play after the revoking of the comic license (return of Lovewit
at the end of Act IV). The reversal to normalcy is the deflation. (Revok-
ing the license is, of course, analogous to discovery and the deflation to
the tragic reversal.)

Many comedies are not deflated to normalcy. The Clouds, for example,
ends with the establishment of the Cloud-Cuckoo Utopia; what need for
a deflation? The Acharnians is not deflated for the opposite reason; the
proposition of the end is witty and true. Comedies that can end unde-
flated have a peculiar heady glory (and socially are more aphrodisiac).

On the other hand, sentimental comedies, those in which we sympa-
thize with the romantic couple (socially, a vicarious outlet), require the
removal of the comic conditions, the revoking of license, in order that
the lovers may be no longer anxious. In such cases there is often a comic
miracle to clear up the difficulties. This may be a windfall, like the in-
heritance that falls to Leandre in Le Medecin malgre lui and nullifies
the old man's objection to the marriage (for his humour is stubborn; he
could not be made urbane). A windfall is the removal of comic condi-
tions that are not deflatable; and there are likely to be such stubborn
conditions in sentimental comedies because the sympathetic (noncomic)
lovers are not likely to be involved for only comic reasons — they would
avoid merely comic complication and go off by themselves. The structure,
the gratuitous probability, of such windfalls is analogous to the deus ex
machina: the comic complication has come to a threatening impasse, but
the lovers are deserving of better than deflation, etc.

The formal comic license issued and revoked by Jonson is characteris-
tic of his art: he is the controlling comic master who will neither allow
a sympathetic plot strand nor, on the other hand, let the comic malice
release a libido that carries everything before it.

112 Paul Goodman

The Beginning

We may now speak of the beginning, the middle, and the ending.

The beginning is the comic Hcense and the agents who generate the
intrigue, not subject to comic reversals but subject to revoking of the
license. In The Alchemist, Act I, scene i, could be regarded as a sufficient
beginning: the trio who generate the intrigue, the dupes they practice on,
the likelihood of a later disruption within the trio because of their
quarrels and rivalry (making probable the deflation), and the possible
return of the master of the house (revoking the license). The rest follows
from this.

But comedy is expansive, and it may be said also that each new humour
introduces new comic conditions. Thus in a comedy of this type the
effect depends not on a distinction between the beginning and the
middle but rather on the continual expansion of the possibilities of
accident. This is different from tragedies like Oedipus, where each new
entrance (e.g,, the Messenger from Corinth) eliminates an alternative in
the converging plot strands.

The Middle

In the middle the intrigue is enlarged (i) by the introduction of new
humours (start of Acts II and III) and (2) by the combination of the
previous combinations. The new humours are introduced with a certain
probability from what has preceded, as Tribulation enters because he has
lead roofing to sell to Sir Epicure for projection; yet each humour has
peculiarities that serve as starting places for new trails.

But what principle, then, determines the magnitude of a play so en-
larged? For the principle of tragedy, "just what is necessary to produce
the reversal," has no place here. Why should not the balloon expand
indefinitely, introducing ever new humours and their complications? This
question may be answered by two related considerations drawn from the
limits of the comic intrigue in itself and from the relation of the intrigue
to normalcy.

First, the compounding of accidents cannot be indefinitely comic; after
a while it reaches the random or trivial. This occurs when the poten-
tiality of the humours to operate in new reversals has been exhausted. If
new humours are introduced with which the previous humours can no
longer react, we would no longer have one play. Thus, the plight of
Surly when the bellicose Kastril turns on him as the cheat is near the
limit; it is only because Kastril has been developed as such a buffoon

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 113

that this climax of buffoonery is sensible. And that Ananias should now
turn on the Spanish fiend with his ruff of pride and his idolatrous
breeches is simply wondrous. The next moment would be absurd, but
Jonson, of course, allows no next moment. (We might think of a sequence
of expansion somewhat as follows: the comic, the buffoon, the absurd,
the trivial.)

Second, the probable return of normalcy sets a limit to the comic
expansion. But this is integrally probable from what is happening to the
intrigue; for we must remember that all the characters have a normal
component, and, as the intrigue becomes too tenuous and absurd, the
characters must return to normalcy, for otherwise they would be de-
stroyed completely: they would be madmen and not characters of comedy.
Thus, we must expect Surly to call the police; but the police and the
crowd have not been handled at all, so they need not now be dupes.
Another aspect of this is that the comic expansion begins to touch themes
that by convention are only normal; thus Jonson cannot allow the
chastity of Dame Pliant to be actually comic but only to threaten to be
so; so in the comic crisis at the end of Act IV we are near the deflation.
Again, from previous to the expansion, there is the probability of the re-
turn of normalcy: Lovewit must return, for the possibility was men-
tioned in the beginning; the license is for a limited time and place. To
give another example, at the beginning of A Midsummer Night's Dream
we are told that "Four nights will quickly dream away the time [of
waiting]"; but these nights pass in due course, and then the dreamlike
probability is over. And, as with the limited time, so with the place:
when the madness becomes so violent that it overflows among the neigh-
bors, there is a deflation. Thus in Les Precieuses ridicules the spectacular
motion, noise, and crowding of the dance (scene 12) is a sufficient infla-
tion and makes probable the entry of the irate suitors with their sticks.

The Ending: Comic Feelings

The d,^flation of the comic intrigue is the beginning of the ending.
The humours are destroyed. The incidents of the ending comprise the
salvaging of what survives in normalcy.

Let us choose this turning point in the plot to discuss the kinds of
laughter. (The kinds of comic laughter fit in the spectrum between the
giggling of embarrassment on one extreme and the gurgling of animal
satisfaction on the other.)

The deflation of the humours is malicious laughter, energized by re-
leased destructiveness and made safe by contempt or indifference. The
succession of the normal person to the humours is the belly laughter of

114 Paul Goodman

the released underlying drives. And the resolution is a kind of happy
smiling and chuckling.

We have argued above that the audience identifies not with this or
that particular character but with the world of the work as a whole, a
space and time and drama. In discussing the feelings of comedy, it is
essential to bear this in mind. With tragedy, everything centers in the
end in the protagonist, so that what is felt for him is not far from what
is felt during the work. But with comedy, no such thing.

Malicious laughter is roused in a titillating or embarrassed way by the
forethought of the reversals; it is roused restrainedly by every reversal;
and it is aroused unrestrainedly at the deflation or reduction of the
comedy to absolutely nought. This is the moment of greatest absurdity:
**A11 goes up in fume." Obviously this laughter is not identification with
what is deflated; usually it is explained as a laughter of superiority
(identification with the author?), that we are not that; it is base, we are
superior. But I think the case is simpler; it is that we are, we are left,
even in the dangerous activity of mocking, destroying, childishly laying
about us. No superiority or contempt need be inferred; when it is strongly
present, the comedy passes over into satire and invective. The energy of
ordinarily suppressed destructiveness bursts out laughing. It is as though
the base intrigue that we have been following has become a burden, and
we are glad to annihilate it.

But then why have we involved ourselves in it from the beginning? It
is because of the suggestion of the more elementary animal drives that
accompanies the intrigue of base aims and vices. We do not identify with
the characters, knaves, and humours, but we identify with their world,
which is after all compact of simple childish wants. At the deflation the
comic characters are destroyed; they carry off with them the shame and
the base imputation. But the point is that what is left is not nothing, but
normal persons, we ourselves — nobody has been hurt. Then comes the
loud laughter of the released instincts that have all along been suggested;
we have allowed ourselves successfully to be seduced. Toward this end
the comic reversals and the absorption in the increasingly absurd are
capital, for they surprise and distract us, and we find ourselves out further
than we intended to go, or even than we knew. We are astonished to be
laughing from our bellies. There is no sense to it; it is never "so funny as
all that"; but that's just the point.

J orison's Comic Feelings

Jonson is extremely malicious (and satiric), but he is weak in deep
laughter. There is not enough suggestiveness. He presents gluttony but
little gusto, and lechery but almost no pornography; only the scatological

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 115

part is strongly felt, and this expresses itself not so much in excretion as
in hostility. (Compare the good nature of a really dirty comedy like
Ubu.)

On the other hand, Jonson, especially in The Alchemist^ is glorious in
the smiling and chuckling of the resolution, the satisfaction of the cat
that has lapped up the cream. We are left with a normalcy that is lively
indeed. For other poets liveliness means mainly a wedding, and Jonson
nods in this direction by assigning the pretty rich girl to Lovewit: it is
the prize of urbanity; there is no romantic nonsense. But what he is
mainly concerned with is that poetic justice be given to intelligence and
skill, and he works this out in the nicest detail.

Face gets off free. In the beginning. Face and Subtle seemed almost
formally identical; but, as the intrigue progresses, we find Face infinitely
various, while Subtle is handled more and more as an expert in one line;
therefore. Subtle is deflatable, but Face is not. (So in Gogol's "Gamblers"
the master-cardsharp is taken by the all-round crooks.) Face is a wit;
he can operate in normalcy, where normalcy belongs to a Lovewit, not
a Surly who has the vice of honesty. Subtle is not punished, for he was so
skillful. The surprising adequacy to normal conditions of what seemed
to be a deflatable trait (knavery) is glorious. Glory is the survival, and
reward, of a comic trait in the resolution. Glory is the discovery that a
deflatable talent is a wit.

I have said that the officers and the crowd are not handled as dupes.
Yet surely there is a sense in which they, and a fortiori the normal Sir
Epicure and Surly, are made ridiculous by Lovewit and Face. But this is
the comic world of everyday, not of accident. Herein one may get ''Happi-
ness . . . though with some small strain of his own candour" (V, 5, 1.
483). We may take this as the comic thought of the resolution; it is a
philosophical truth. (Note that the poet has to apologize for it, for it is
not quite the morality of the audience.)

Characters as Aspects of the Plot

In a rough way the characters are introduced as foils: the intrigue
is expanded by the interplay of contraries. Dapper and Drugger are
dupes, the simpleton and the fool; they make no long speeches. Sir
Epicure and Tribulation, the contrary vices, are heroic humours; they
make long speeches; and, in the mutual dealing between lust and puri-
tanism, each is secretly subject to the vice of the other. The foil between
the friends. Sir Epicure and Surly, expresses an important structural
moment, the humorous-normal; it is a probability within the intrigue
for the ultimate deflation. Surly and Lovewit, again, are foils in that
both aspire for the normal prize, the rich marriage; here the lively-nor-

ii6 Paul Goodman

mal or urbane has succession over the humorous-normal. Lastly, Face
and the Alchemist are foils. Subtle is the comic genius who gives his
name to this particular intrigue, but Face is a wit who can survive for
any Jonsonian sequel. Thus Face and Lovewit, the witty and the urbane,
are universal characters, not involved in a particular intrigue; and this is
expressed by having these two appear together before the curtain (V, 5,
11. 484 ad fin.). They can address the audience directly, since they are no
longer "in" the play.

The humours are ''unsympathetic"; that is, they are completely de-
flatable without reconstitution. Thus the comedy of humours tends to be
a little cruel; and where the humour is involved with a person's happi-
ness and station, as in Volpone or in Le Misanthrope^ L'Avare, and
Tartuffe, we pass easily from comedy to tragic satire, from the heroic
humour to the tragic flaw. The comic talents, the knaves or shrewd fools,
on the other hand, are in a certain sense "like the audience"; they have a
cleverness that anyone might wish for himself. Thus their deflation calls
for such reconstitution as is possible in normalcy. (We might say this
formally as follows: The fact that these talents survive so many comic
reversals creates a presumption of permanence also in the deflation,
which is the last reversal; whereas the fact that the humours are always
being reversed implies that they will be reversed out of existence.)

Spectacle

Spectacular disguises and hiding places imply a comic intrigue, acci-
dental connections. In serious plays the disguises are for the most part
natural, deep-going traits, as that Orestes does not recognize Iphigenia be-
cause of the lapse of time. And hiding places are not serious, because it
is not the local place of the actor but his character and thought that
must save or destroy him. A disguise on the scene, for instance Surly as
the Don, presents us with two traits at once; it is the foretaste of a
comic reversal. And, in general, the ability to assume different disguises
is a comic talent; it sets intrigues in motion. To be named "Face" is to
be a universal wit and to survive. In the setting of The Alchemist there
are many rooms, from each one of which threatens to emerge a fatal
secret, and, of course. Dapper is waiting in the privy.

Further, the spectacle of many persons engaged in heterogeneous occu-
pations is comic; it promises accidental connections. So the Don is
pleasure-bound, the Alchemist busy with his retorts, Dol as the Queen of
Faerie is waving her wand. Face has his medals, and the carriers are
bringing on the leaden roofs of the churches of the elect. Out of this
potpourri the disguised actors frequently make asides and out-of-character
grimaces, which may be in some other character or "real" and out of the

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 117

play, normalcy. But the **reality'' of the actor is itself comic in the
ideality of the theater.

By means of spectacle there are quick reversals and deflations, un-
maskings. To be hit with a soft pie is a quick reversal of superficial
dignity. When the intrigue is thickly starred with such spectacular re-
versals, not much prepared, we have the effect of slapstick.

On the other hand, a very effective expression of normalcy is the
presence of the normal crowd as opposed to the comic company, for
the anonymous crowd is not a humour. Bergson remarks on this well
when he says that monstrosities develop in private and are destroyed by
publicity. The crowd is active and vociferous but homogeneous and
anonymous; it is lively and normal. The crowded comic company is
active, vociferous, and heterogeneous. And, following the convention
of Roman comedy, we see in The Alchemist the contrast of Inside the
House, where there is comic license, and Outside, normalcy pounding
at the door.

The Time, nearly continuous with the drama, is exhilaratingly
crowded. The relation between continuous time and the comedy of
juxtaposition is obvious, for where there are many actions, and all of
them must be carried on at once, accidental relations are inevitable.
Jonson makes good use also of the neo-classical acts, the entrances and
curtains: the end of Act I, scene 1, is the end of the formal beginning;
Act II, scene 1, and Act III, scene 1, introduce the major heroic humours;
and Act V, scene 1, is the entrance of the normal crowd, lively and noisy
enough to avoid a letdown after the climax.

Diction

The dramatic irony of comedy is jokes. In serious plays ironic speech
makes even the sparse lines of the plot more fatally simple; but jokes fly
off in every direction, and each one is a reversal of thought and a defla-
tion of intention. Slapstick is the multitudinous and unprepared de-
flation of comic appearance, jokes of comic thought. So the feeling of the
whole becomes heady and unpredictable. (But, if once the jokes become
predictable, the whole falls like a wet cake.)

In an important class of cases it is pointless to distinguish comic
thought from comic diction, namely, where laughter is roused by the
deflation of sense to sound, as in puns. Speech is sound significant by
convention; the comedian breaks the convention. Puns are usually trivial
(e.g., Drugger's ''angels" are also coins), but Jonson is a master of the
sophisms that turn on form of sentences rather than the composition of
meanings, what sounds like sense (e.g., Face on Dapper's birth caul:
**How! swear by your fac, and in a thing so known unto the Doctor? how

ii8 Paul Goodman

shall he then believe you i' the other matter?'*). The matter-of-fact tone,
the wild absurdity, the careful logic; it is a kind of fun that is as rich
as can be, and yet we are not invited to let go but to keep pent up and
finally mellowing within us the philosophic wine of how ridiculous the
world is. Then a whole character may be deflated to a sound, as we are
assured that Dapper is no "chiaus.''

The scientific arguments of a Subtle or a Sganarelle are, of course,
the same comedy of sophisms. But Moliere on the physicians is not
savorous but sharp (it is mere folly); he turns the comedy outward in
persistent satire; whereas the learned Jonson savors and dreams of
learned men, and it is mere folly.

The reduction of character and plot to sound is very marked in those
plays (not The Alchemist) that employ elaborate comic rhythms; for
example, in The Acharnians the cretics of the Chorus are so warlike
and striking that the soldiers become singers and chorus boys. Gilbert
and Sullivan are English masters in this kind and also in the patter
songs of individuals.

In general, when the rhythm is kept subordinate to the thought and
action, regular rhythm dignifies and ennobles. A simple smooth rhythm
that does not call attention to itself makes the speech serious; iambic
rhythm elevates colloquial speech. The tack that Jonson takes, however,
is to handle the iambics roughly, to bring the music down to colloquial
speech, and this is a comic diction. Compare an excited moment in
Oedipus with one in The Alchemist: in the tragedy the verse is cli-
mactically cut to hemistichs, but in the comedy to six speeches to a
pentameter (e.g., I, i, 1. 107). Naturally the audience cannot hear such
a meter, but that too is one of Jonson's learned jokes. Also, the crowded
heterogeneous scene fits with broken rhythms.

We must not overlook the long speeches in The Alchemist, those that
most directly give the heroic humours. They are of the lineage of Horace
and Martial and just as good. Thus, the marvelous characteristic rhapso-
dies of Sir Epicure: ''Come on, sir. Now you set your foot on shore . . .''
(II, 1, 11. iff.); "I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft . . ." (II,
2, 11. i45ff.); "We'll therefore go with all, my girl, and live / In a
free state . . ." (IV, 1, 11. i56ff.); or Tribulation's "The children of
perdition are oft-times / Made instruments . . ." (Ill, 1, 11. i5ff.). These,
with their compactness of idea and firm march of sound, are truly heroic.
They are laughable, not part by part but as wholes; this is epic comedy.
At the other extreme the dupes do not express themselves at all, as if
speech were too grand for them, but the adaptable Face speaks up for
them: *' 'Slight, I bring you no cheating Clim-o'-the-Cloughs . . .'' (I, 2,
11. 244ff.), or ''This is my friend Abel, an honest fellow . . ." (I, 3, 11.

396ff.).

Insults and obscenity belong to comedy, both for their malice and to
create the suggestive atmosphere of the deep laughter. In the first seven

Comic Plots: The Alchemist 119

lines of The Alchemist we have farting, shitting, and pissing; and we
proceed thence to uncomplimentary personal remarks. (I have previously
suggested that the cruel use of the excretory is the characteristic libido of
Jonson.)

The so-called speech of low characters and any other emphasis on in-
dividual tricks of speech (e.g.^, the dialect of Lucas in Le Medecin malgre
lui) may or may not be comic, depending on the structure. If the thought,
and especially the sentiment, is strongly developed, as in Wordsworth,
then the speech appears as a halting attempt to be serious with inadequate
means, and the effect is pathetic; but if, by the emphasis, the character
is reduced to the mere eccentric use of words, the effect is comic. The
particular Jonsonian mixture of base speech and Marlovian high rhetoric
is quite his own. He does not mean it to be bombastic and satiric, and
it is not; it is not comic but simply strange, the soaring dreams of a gross
animal body (indeed, the daring comparison that comes to mind is
UApres-midi d'un faune!). And this gross beauty, again, he involves with
a matter-of-fact naturalism and an acutely intelligent appraisal of the
types of the town.

Finally, there is a good deal of actual "topical reference": to the actual
statute of sorcery, to a real highwayman, a current 'Tersian" incident,
etc. Such random actual reference tends to trivialize tragedy, reducing it
to the level of news, *'his tragedy has become a fait divers" — unless, of
course, there is one great unified reference to an important current event,
in which case the tragedy becomes a kind of tract for the times. In
comedies like The Alchemist, however, the references to actuality pro-
vide a ballast, a comic normalcy of reality continuous with the normalcy
of the humours. Such comedy verges into social satire. (Quite different is
the effort to use the topical reference as a joke, like a radio comedian;
the laughter is then often embarrassed, for the audience is unwilling to
deflate the actual world to nought.)

A Note on Sentimental Comedy

As a form of experiencing — as in the Rorschach analysis of appercep-
tion— a comic intrigue is a structure of "wholes'* and "small details.'' As
in seeing together two wholes of characters-and-their-intentions some
small detail suddenly assumes prominence and compels a reorganization;
and the new structure is again reversed by a small detail; and so on, until
we become heady and expect anything whatever to occur. Concretely, we
have seen, every such comic reversal is grounded in resentment, malice,
and lubricity; and in the sudden change these are released with increas-
ing laughter and glory.

Comic experience is universal, yet it is quite extraordinary. It requires,

120 Paul Goodman

on the one hand, a considerable intellectuality, to make sudden connec-
tions through small details rather than through the large parts; thus
small children have no comic sense; they take everything seriously and
cannot abstract. Yet, on the other hand, it requires a tolerance of the
underlying forbidden drives. Comedy is the art of hyperintelligent
monkeys, and Jonson was apt for it.

In the average person, however, such a form of experience is likely
to rouse anxiety. Comedy in which both the intellectual and the animal
elements are strongly developed is rare in literature. Far more common,
as pure comedy, are farces, slapsticks, strings of gags, where no large
whole is developed and not much of the ordinary world is destroyed. And
the most popular kind of whole play is sentimental comedy, a mixture of
a comic intrigue with a sympathetic love story; this is the so-called "New
Comedy'' (e.g., of Terence), a kind of descendant of the Old Comedy
tamed and of the tragedy-with-a-happy-ending.

In sentimental comedy the romantic plot persists from the beginning
to the end; it is not deflated. The romantic plot is not noncomic in the
sense of being merely normal (outside the comic license); the love story
excites an independent interest, with feelings of desire, anxiety, fulfill-
ment; it gives the audience something to latch on to. This sympathetic
line, with which the audience can identify, is crossed by the malicious
and resentful accidents of the comic intrigue — and the whole is an ac-
curate imitation of the insecurities of adolescent sexuality.

Epicene

by Edward B. Partridge

Harry Levin claims that Jonson's trick of making his characters
say something which frequently has little explicit meaning reaches its
logical limit in Epicene, *Vhere_e\^erjthi.ng„„spok^ high^nuisance \

value and the words^themselvesjjecome sheei^JSlagree/' iTrKere~i& .same I
tS*efcIg]|thisclaim, though not so muchas jLgyin^ and Alexander Sackton /
(who elaboratedon it in Rhetoric^as^ja^LjDxaznMic Language j,n ^IS^tx-^t
Jo72SQii),^m^ke^^oY it. At filrSt glance the language of Epicene seems re-
markably direct and unequivocal; much of it, of course, remains so after
repeated glances. But to think that ''everything spoken" has primarily
a nuisance value is likely to make one ignore the subtle allusiveness of
much that is spoken.

Allusive language is one ofjhe^ slier ways^of tjhrowing di_scourse into
the parallel engagement of metaphorical language. Allusions suggest an-
o'tTier area of experience — af^series of concepts or a set of emotions —
which can be seen juxtaposed, for a moment, to the rest of the dis-
course. This juxtaposition of the two worlds--the world of the charac-
ters in action and the world sjugg£si£d-hy.lhe„.allusiiHiS:;^^ some
of the^omic effect of JonsonVg^

-WeiTiigHt Begin with the allusioTETs to epicene. As a substantive, epicene
means_onejwho partakes of the characteristics of Both sexes. As an ad-
jective, it carries this iSeamnglarid, by transference, also means "adapted
to both sexes." An example of this meaning, according to the OED, is
Fuller's use of the word in his Worthies, where he described "those
Epicoene, and Hermaphrodite Convents wherein Monks and Nuns
lived together." i^i^v^^hn^^^^^ ^pim^^ ^y^jc^ ^ciopiptimps used in the seveik^
teenth century to mean "effeminate," though its use in Jonson's "Epi-

"Epicene." From The Broken Compass: A Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jon-
son by Edward B. Partridge (New York, 1958). Reprinted by permission of the
Columbia University Press.

^ Levin, ed., Ben Jonson: Selected Works (New York, 1938), 30.

121

122

Edward B. Partridge

gram on the Court PucelF' does not seem to carry this meaning, as the
OED claims it does. The lines are:

What though with Tribade lust she force a Muse,

And in an Epicoene fury can write newes
Equall with that, which for the best newes goes.

As aerie light, and as like wit as those? 2

"Epicoene'' can not properly mean ''effeminate" here: a woman does not
do things in an "effeminate'' way. It seems rather to carry the meanings
already explained and to imply something unnatural. This suggestion of
the unnatural is emphasized by both "Tribade" and "force," "Tribade"
referring to a woman who practices unnatural vice with other women,
and "force" suggesting a sexual assault. Thus, "Epicoene fury" has more
a coloring of the masculine or the hermaphroditic than of the effemi-
nate. In short, ^^thg.^ main point about allseventeenthcentury uses of

epicene i£^^StjLJ^i,^ZM^S^

wom:^n s land^ toQ) -hf fwppn the norni

^and the normal female.
IS meaning is, I think, ^cenTTalToJZI/j^i^ffen^
The title. Epicene] refers to much more than me^central twist of the
plot in which Morose's wife turns out to be a boy. Npmjy pyprynnpjri
the^j^y is epicene in some way. Note, for example, Truewit's descrip-
tion oTntEe^epirSie^omen^

oun dationT ^r7^"trere i' the towne, of ladies, that call themselves the
Collegiates, arr'''imTfer"^bet^ ana'''n:;5untrv-^^

liyeJ^omjU^^ gJTC^egt^rtainment to^

Braveries_o' thetime, as they call 'hem: crie downe..^r up, what they
li^ke, or dislike in a braineToOLJa^on, wjtJxJXiQs^ masculi^^ or rather
h^XP^aplifddf[icUTr^ . . .'' (L^iT 73-80). A.s Tru"ewit describes

thesetlollegiates, they seeiirto belong to some intermediate sex between
courtiers and women. Though "courtiers" then could be used for both
sexes, it is generally used in this play to refer to men. Truewit seems
dubious about their exact nature when he tells how they criticize wit
and fashion, at first thinking them "masculine" — that is, too bold to be
feminine — then amending it to ''hermaphroditicalV apparently because
they look like women but act like men. Though "College" was used
loosely for "company," "Collegiates" might have suggested something
unfeminine in an age when only men gathered in colleges and, above all,
only men criticized authoritatively. Jonson emphasizes the educational
sense of the term by alluding to the learning, grammar, honors, and
heraldry of their College.

Lady--Ceiilauj;e_seems the most clearly epicene of these Collegiates.

^Herford and Simpson, VIII, 222.

Epicene 123

Ch^X^cteristically, Jonson suggests her abnormal nature in her name. In
the ElTzaSethan Age "centaur'" reterred not merely to the fabulotis^crea-
ture with the head, trunk, and arms of a man, joined to the body and
legs of a horse, but also, by a figurative extension, to an unnatural hybrid
creation or to the intimate union of diverse natures (OED). Dekker's use
of the word in 1606 reveals this second meaning: **Sixe of these Cen-
taures (that are halfe man, halfe beast, and halfe divell)/' ^ In classical
literature the centaur is typically goatisIi^.jBisjchieY^ous, andjjastful; in
so far as it has any single sexual nature, it is male (a female centaur is
possible, but extremely rare). A centaur and a satyr may really be the
same.^ In this play Lady Centaure looks like a woman, and in part acts
like one, but the masculine side of her nature is implied by Haughty's
remark that Centaure *'has immortaliz'd her selfe, with taming of her
wilde male" (IV. iii. 27-28), apparently by forcing her husband to give
her the requisites of a fashionable lady.

All of these Ladies appear so far from the feminine — or what is gen-
erally considered the feminine — that M^rnsp^ on hearing their loud
threats to have him blanketed, cries_out^^'0, mankind ^geixeiajjon!'' (V.
iv. 22). I take mankind to mean masculine or mannish, thus disagreeing
with Percy Simpson who says that it comes from mankeen and means
infuriated.^ Possibly Jonson plays with both meanings, but the primary
meaning seems to me to be masculine. In two plays written about the
time of Epicene Shakespeare used mankind to mean masculine: see The
Winter's Tale, II. iii. 86, and Coriolanus, IV. ii. 24. Johnson's comment
on the Coriolanus passage managed to combine both ideas: "A mankind
woman is a woman with the roughness of a man, and, in an aggravated
sense, a woman ferocious, violent, and eager to shed blood." ^ In Beau-
mont's The Woman Hater (1607), III. ii, the woman hater, running away
from a lady who pursues and tries to seduce him, asks, "Are women
grown so mankind? Must they be wooing?" In all of these passages, as
well as in Morose's exclamation, mankind is best understood, I think, to
mean primarily masculine or mannish. The mannishness of these women
is suggested by other remarks. For instance: after being solicited by
Haughty, Centaure, and Mavis in turn, Dauphine says, "I was never so
assaulted" (V. ii. 52). Assaulting the opposite sex is generally thought to
be a male privilege. Again: note the comment of the Ladies on Dau-
phine's neatness. Though "judiciall in his clothes," he is "not so superla-
tively neat as some. . . . That weare purer linnen then our selves, and
prof esse more neatness then the french hermaphrodite!'' (IV. vi. 26-31).

^ The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. A. B. Grosart (1884), II, 79.
* See the chapter on centaurs in John C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient
Greek Religion (Cambridge, 1910), 192-253.
^ Herford and Simpson, X, 45.
® See the notes in the Shakespeare Variorum edition of these plays.

124 Edward B. Partridge

Neatness is often thought, not always justifiably, to be more characteris-
tic of women than men. The effeminate man has long been associated
with a too careful attention to his face and dress, just as the woman who
is careless about her neatness seems less feminine. The Ladies thus un-
consciously reveal both their own deviation from the feminine and the
deviation of their suitors from the masculine. Epicene adds a remark
to this conversation which suggests the inverted sexual customs of their
epicene lives. These neat men, according to her, **are the only theeves
of our fame: that thinke to take us with that perfume, or with that
lace. . . /' Men have managed sometimes to interest women, sometimes
even to "take" them, but customarily they have used other means than
perfume and lace. True, we ought to remember that men in Jacobean
London did wear lace and use perfume in a way that modern men do
not. Yet excessive attention to dress was continually satirized by the
dramatists, because it was both irrational and unmanly. The more
normal way of attracting women — and as comic as the epicene way — is
dramatized in the physical conquest of La Foole and Daw by Dauphine,
who is, as a result, besieged by the Ladies. Finally, the sterility of these
women makes them less feminine. They have **those excellent receits"
to keep from bearing children: "How should we maintayne our youth
and beautie, else?" (IV. iii. 57-60).

The "most masculine, or rather herriiaphroditicall authoritie" of these
Ladies Collegiate is best shown by the only one of them whom we see
with her husband — Mistress Otter. Perhaps because she is only a "pre-
tender" to their learning, she takes their instruction most seriously. Cap-
tain Otter is first mentioned as an ''animal amphibium'' because he has
had command on land and sea, but we learn from La Foole that his
wife "commands all at home." Clerimont then concludes that "she is
Captaine Otter?" (I. iv. 26-30). Just before the third act when we first
see the Otters, Truewit prepares us for the comic view of their trans-
posed marital relationship. Captain Otter, Truewit says, "is his wifes
Subject, he calls her Princesse, and at such times as these, followes her
up and down the house like a page, with his hat off, partly for heate,
partly for reverence" (II. vi. 54-57). Modern listeners might not appre-
ciate the full reversal implied in "his wifes Subject," but anyone who
lived before women achieved the legal right to own property and the
possession of great financial power (which is the power to subjugate man)
must have been aware that the usual relation of husband and wife is
reversed, so that she is Captain Otter and he is "like a page."

The first scene in Act III carries out this reversal. Captain Otter begs
to be heard; Mistress Otter rails at him and asks him, "Do I allow you
your halfe-crowne a day, to spend, where you will. . . . Who gives you
your maintenance, I pray you? who allowes you your horse-meat and
man's meat?" (III. i. 36-40). Clerimont, who witnesses this feminine

Epicene 125

usurpation of the role of the male, observes, "Alas, what a tyrannie, is
this poore fellow married too" (III. ii. 10-11). The ultimate reversal of
roles appears in the fourth act scene when, according to the stage direc-
tion, Mistress Otter ''falls upon him and beates him."

But more important than the epicene nature of Mistress Otter is the
epicene nature of Epicene herself (or, rather, himself). When first seen.
Epicene is quiet enough to please even Morose. Then, as soon as the
wedding is over, complaining loudly, she turns on Morose, who laments,
*'0 immodestie! a manifest woman!" Since ^'manifest" implies a display
so evident that no other proof is needed. Morose seems to be saying that
a loud, demanding voice is woman's most characteristic feature. (Morose
previously praised Epicene for not taking pleasure in her tongue "which
is a womaris chief est pleasure" [II. v. 41-42]). A moment later Epicene
tells Mute that she will have none of his "unnaturall dumbnesse in my
house; in a family where I governe." The marriage is a minute old, and
the wife governs. Morose's answer reveals his awareness of their strange
marriage and Epicene's peculiar nature: "She is my Regent already! I
have married a Penthesilea, a Semiramis, sold my liberty to a distaffe"
(III. iv. 54-58). The allusions are revealing. Penthesilea, the daughter of
Ares, was the queen of the Amazons who fought in the Trojan war.
Semiramis, the wife of Ninus, the mythical founder of the Assyrian em-
pire, ruled for many years after the death of her husband. Like Pen-
thesilea, she was especially renowned in war. Soon after. Morose alludes
again to the Amazons, those curiously epicene beings from antiquity,
when he cries out, "O Amazonian impudence!" (III. v. 41). Her impu-
dence seems Amazonian to others than Morose. Truewit, for instance,
describes how all the noise and "her masculine, and lowd commanding,
and urging the whole family, makes him thinke he has married a furie*'
(IV. i. 9-11). When Epicene is changed from a demure girl to an Amazon,
she takes on a new name. Haughty tells her, "I'll call you Morose still
now, as I call Centaure, and Mavis" (IV. iii. 14-15). From then until she
is revealed to be a boy, she is called by this masculine name. It is only
just that, since she has taken over the authoritative power of Morose,
she should also take over his name.

Just as Captain Otter becomes epicene as his wife becomes Captain
Otter, so Morose loses or is willing to lose his male dominance after
Epicene's "masculine, and lowd commanding." The first sign of a change
in Morose comes after he has frightened Mistress Otter with a "huge
long naked weapon."

MOR. Would I could redeeme it with the losse of an eye (nephew), a hand,

or any other member.
DAY. Mary, god forbid, sir, that you should geld your selfe, to anger your

wife.
mor. So. it would rid me of her! (IV. iv. 8-12)

126 Edward B. Partridge

This willingness to become a eunuch so long as it rids him of his epicene
wife prompts him later to plead impotence as a reason for divorce. "I
am no man," he tells the Ladies, "utterly unabled in nature, by reason
of frigidity^ to performe the duties, or any the least office of a husband"
(V. iv. 44-47). When this ruse of declaring himself *'no man" fails, he
welcomes even that reflection on virility which the Elizabethans thought
the most comic — being a cuckold. "O, let me worship and adore you,"
he cries to La Foole and Daw after they swear that they have lain with
Epicene (V. iv. 120). Castration, impotence, and being a wittol — all sug-
gest that Morose would even lose his own maleness to get rid of a wife
who at first seemed feminine but proved epicene.

The epicene natures of the women throw the masculine natures of
the men out of line. When one sex changes, the other is likely to change.
Otter's nature is dislocated by his wife's masculinity, so that the descrip-
tion of him as ''animal amphihium" alludes to his divided nature as well
as to his amphibious command. Jonson was fond of this sort of word
play. In the masque, Neptune's Triumph^ there is ''Amphibion Archy/'
who is described as the chief *'o the Epicoene gender, Hees, and Shees." '^
The Broker in The Staple of News is called ''Amphibion" because he is
a ^'creature of two natures" (II. iv. 132). The adjective amphibian (or
amphibious) meant having two modes of existence or being of doubtful
nature. Browne's statement — **We are onely that amphibious piece be-
tween a corporall and spirituall essence" — is the best known example of
this use in the seventeenth century. Otter is an amphibious piece in this
play — a being of doubtful nature who looks like a man, but does not act
like one.

Another epicene man is La Foole, who is spoken of first as "a precious
mannikin" (I. iii. 25) — that is, a little man or a pygmy. When he speaks,
lie^apparently speaks iji an effeminate manner— rapidly and all in one^
breatErTTalEing also characterizes Sir JohrTlTaw whom^TrnTewrrTallsT
"""'TTienonely talking sir i' the towne!" (I. ii. 66). As we have seen already,
to Morose *'womans chief est pleasure" is her tongue. That the audience
is apparently expected to associate women and talking can be inferred
from the ironic subtitle — The Silent Woman, Who ever heard of a
silent woman? Daw's barely sensible poem reflects this same assumption:

Silence in woman, is like speech in man,
Deny't who can.

Nor, is't a tale,
That female vice should be a vertue male,
Or masculine vice, a female vertue be.

(II. iii. 123-128)

^ Herford and Simpson, VII, 689.

Epicene 127

There is little sense to this in itself, but from the context we gather
that, though Daw means it one way, we should take it another way. Daw
seems to mean that speech is a defect ("vice" = defect) in a woman just
as it is a virtue in a man. '7 know to speake/' he says in the last line of
the poem, ''and shee to hold her peace/' Silence, which Daw considers
woman's crowning virtue, would then be man's great defect. Daw's dis-
tinction between the sexes is so extreme and so unsupported by facts
that it is comic to most normal people. The normal Elizabethan feeling
about silence and women was probably voiced by Zantippa in Peele's
Old Wives' Tale, 11. 731-732: "A woman without a tongue is as a soldier
without his weapon." The whole play suggests that both a silent woman
and a talkative man are, if anything, inversions of the normal. The
tendency of Daw and La Foole to gossip maliciously suggests the inver-
sion of their natures which their actions reveal. Their feminine or at
least nonmasculine natures are implied ialso by their lack of courage.
One thinks, perhaps erroneously, that men are usually courageous and
that women are usually frightened. Helena in A Midsummer Night's
Dream, III. ii. 302, says, "I am a right maid for my cowardice." Sir
Andrew Aguecheek's fear makes him ridiculous, but Viola's fear seems
only normal to the spectator, though it makes her ridiculous to the other
characters who do not know that she is really a woman. Similarly, when
Daw and La Foole prove themselves so frightened that they allow them-
selves to be publicly humiliated rather than act on their valiant words,
we think of them as somewhat less than the men they appear to be. The
Ladies Collegiate are loud, demanding, and aggressive. All, like Cen-
taure, try to tame their wild males. All, in short, are Amazons. Of the
men only Clerimont, Truewit, and Dauphine are not warped by the
Amazonian natures of these epicene women.

Yet even these apparently normal men are somewhat ambiguous, sex-
ually. Truewit's first speech in the play suggests the epicene quality of
their sexual experience when he remarks that "betweene his mistris
abroad, and his engle at home, Clerimont can melt away his time." Since
an **engle" was a young boy kept for erotic purposes, Truewit is explain-
ing how Clerimont enjoys the pleasures of both sexes. There had already
been an allusion to the homosexual relationship of the Boy and Cleri-
mont in the latter's fourth speech in this first scene. The sexual am-
biguity of the characters in this play is nowhere better suggested than in
the Boy's remark that the Lady "puts a perruke o' my head; and askes
me an' I will weare her gowne; and I say, no: and then she hits me a
blow o' the eare, and calls me innocent, and lets me goe" (I. i. 16-18).
She calls him innocent because he (who is unconsciously feminine in his
relationship to Clerimont) refuses to be consciously feminine in his rela-
tionship to the aggressive Lady. To be sophisticated (as opposed to
innocent) apparently means to be quadri-sexual: a man to both men and
women, and a woman to both women and men.

128

Edward B. Partridge

This interest in beings who have the characteristics o£ both sexes sug-
gests that the play is fundamentally concerned with deviations from a
norm. Like all of Jonson's major comedies. Epicene explores the question
of decorum — here, the decorum of the sexes and the decorum of society.
We recognize that niosL_D£-^Uie_chaTajct^^ are epicene because we ^,il,L
Jiavj^^^^^ey^IinllEis^ emancipated woman, a senseof^jvhjj;.J[^

normal for the sexes. We may Ta^ Jo"rison's strong sense of decorum,
perttapHberatr^e''we can not entirely agree with his concept of what is
natural. Jonson clearly anticipated that sense of ''nature" which became
\ a central dogma in the neo-classic age: thatjs, the natural is the normal
I and the universal. Norrn^lly, nien are brave Mdr"'aggresSt^^e^aiid "womm
jire passTve" and reserved — or are supposed to be. A cowardlyinan^ and
.an aggressive woman become, in a comedy, ludicrous, ^^n? o^ jnnrr^n'c
I rigid SgTlse of the "decol'Uiii of n^lUie lic^s been lost in an a.g^e which, like
V / the fies^TYToneTlgoKs op deviations^ jrom nature aspathological — thaTTsT
I ^^ pi'tiFul . " F^^^xample, Morose. Tojinany, the spectacle of indolent men
f ^erfflring a manJii^Jily sensitive to^oise is cT^^ to sadijm^tKanTo p
"rom^dy. The reviewer for ^rhe 7^zmg^ in iq24 thjougB^
PKopnJx Society production of the play. Morose was a ''tragic figure''
tormented by "bounders.'' ^ But to previous a^^esjuch "comedy of affli^
tion" was a-SOciaJUrather thai^'^lmedical matter. Morose is-Xomic, rather
than psychopathic, because he is^ selfish and vain. When Ji^^a.y^,,.^ll dis-
rn^^r9^9^^\^u^ mine owne, atllict mee, they seem^ h?^^^, nTp^'^ti^^^^ ^^
irKsome'^II. 1.4-5^ we hg^r, the voice, of a^oud, not a sick man. j3r, j
r^iTT^x.^Mar:os£/s^^ is a dispnsp^ bnj; a, fjdJMilrvnwjj^sP^ Note /^

that Truewit asks Clerimont, "But is the diseaseso ridiculous in him.

)

as it is made?" (I. i. 148-149).

us no

seems ridicvilous, not
-venereal

even those which^re ostensibly the tault of the diseased person

.Qt^rp Rnf^r tlyj'^^?^gve^^ cenTuTy^'-mmiV sicknesses

were ridiculous. Bedlam Was a comedy, and Dj\venant's disposed nose.
the^ntrrcg^ot countless jibes. The laugh^^iv-eaiH-tQ^^^l^^^^ tough-

mmdeSlLo earlier a^^es, apparently came Jrpi»-a sensp ^f ^^c^rnm so r\^\d
tlCTT^even the deviations of sickness became ludicrous. No healthy, ra-
^^''^^f ^^^ — thp trrmii oyrrlnpprd/for JonsQTr''''^'yTir^ |7^ gp^ sensi^tivFlo^ lg<
noise as Morose. He should be "cured," as Truewit suggests in the last '
line of the play — that is, brought in line with what Truewit thinks is
normal. "Cure" is borrowed from medicine, as the whole theory of the
comedy of humours is, and both keep something of their medical sense

The Times, November 19, 1924, p. 12, col. 3.

Epicene 129

even when used as Jonson used them; but they are applied to social
rather than physical troubles — to hypocrisy, not heart trouble.

One way to observe how Jonson explores the question of what is
natural is to note the allusions to deviations from nature — to prodigies
and to the strange, the unnatural, and the monstrous. A prodigy to the
Elizabethans was something out of the ordinary course of nature, some-
thing either abnormal or monstrous. Because Morose is so ridiculously
sensitive to noise, Truewit thinks, ''There was never such a prodigie
heard of" (I. ii. 3). MorosgJiimseHJias a contrary view of prodigies^-
When someone winds a horn outside oFTiisTR[ntr?r,'-4i:e^^^^
villaine? what prodigie of mankind is that?'' (II. i. 38-39). just as Moros^
thinks rhnf ?^nyon^ (i^vr^pt himsp1f)___who makes noise is a prprligy^^so
TruewU-thinks complete silence is unnatural. To him the silent Morose"
anS Mute are ''fishes! Pythagoreans all! This is strange" (II. ii. 3). Pytha-
goreans were noted for their secrecy as well as for their belief in metem-
psychosis. Speechless men may look human, but they have the souls of
fishes: they are "strange." "Strange" and its equivalents are crucial words
to everyone in the play. "Strange sights," according to Truewit, can be
seen daily in these times of masques, plays, Puritan preachings, and mad
folk (II. ii. 33-36). He then proceeds to tell Morose the "monstrous
hazards" that Morose shall run with a wife. Among these hazards is the
possibility of marrying a woman who will "antidate" him cuckold by
conveying her virginity to a friend. "The like has beene heard of, in
nature. 'Tis no devis'd, impossible thing, sir" (II. ii. 145-147).

The relationship between Epicene and Morose appears to others and
to themselves as strange, even monstrous. At their first meeting Morose
tells her that his behavior, being "rare," may appear strange (II. v. 23).
Truewit had previously complimented Epicene on "this rare vertue of
your silence" (II. iv. 91). Epicene has another idea about silence which
appears when she calls Mute down for his "coacted, unnaturall dumb-
nesse" (III. iv. 54). Speechlessness apparently seems a deviation from na-
ture to the Ladies Collegiate too because they come to see Epicene,
thinking her a prodigy, but they find her normal — that is, loquacious.
Her loquacity, so natural to them, later seems only a "monstrous" im-
pertinency to Morose (IV. iv. 36). Just as she seems a monster to him,
so he seems a "prodigious creature" to Mavis when he pleads impotence
(V. iv. 48). The spectators, who stand outside of this created world, meas-
ure its prodigies against their own concept of what is normal and nat-
ural, and find, presumably, that most of its strange creatures are comic.

Connected with this question of what is natural is another question,
a favorite in the seventeenth century — what is the relation of art and
nature? This question is brought up early in the opening scene when
Clerimont curses Lady Haughty's "peec'd beautie" — pieced, apparently,
from her washings, patchings, paintings, and perfumings. Because her

150 Edward B. Partridge

artificial beauty offends him, he writes the famous song, "Still to be neat,
still to be drest/' In this song Clerimont upholds simplicity and nature
because, so he thinks, the artifices of powder and perfume may only con-
ceal what is not sweet and not sound. Such pretenses are ''adulteries'' —
that is, adulterations or debasings of what should be natural. The natural
to him is simple, careless, and free. To be natural a woman must be
unpinned, uncorseted, and unadorned. Truewit declares himself to be
"clearly o' the other side": he loves "a good dressing, before any beautie
o' the world.'* "Beautie," one gathers, is only nature; "a good dressing"
is art. A well-dressed woman is "like a delicate garden" to Truewit, ap-
parently because nature in her is trimmed, artificially nurtured, and art-
fully arranged; its delicacy comes deliberately, not naturally. Art, as he
uses it, means the technique of revealing what is naturally attractive and
of concealing what is naturally ugly; thus, if a woman has "good legs,"
she should "wear short clothes." Nor should a lover wish to see his lady
make herself up any more than one would ask to see gilders overlaying
a base metal with a thin covering of gold: one must not discover "how
little serves, with the helpe of art, to adorne a great deale." A lover
should only approach his lady when she is a "compleat, and finished"
work of art.

Because clothes afe the most common of all artifices by which the
natural is concealed, the relation between art and nature is suggested
most clearly in allusions to dress. Clerimont seems swayed from his earlier
disdain for the artifices of women when he sees Lady Haughty in all her
finery. Truewit assures him that "Women ought to repaire the losses,
time and yeeres have made i* their features, with dressings" (IV. i. 35-37).
In the conversation that follows this observation, art takes on an added
dimension: it comes to mean social decorum. Truewit repeats his former
point that a woman should artfully conceal her natural limitations.
Then the talk slips over into what is socially acceptable when Clerimont
ridicules some women whose laughter is rude because it is loud, and
Truewit ridicules women whose walk is offensive because it is as huge as
that of an ostrich. Characteristically, Truewit says, "I love measure i'
the feet" — "measure" meaning moderation as well as rhythm. Decorous
behavior, then, is to the whole person what careful dressing is to the
body: an artistic way of repairing the defects of an offensive nature. Even
the uncourtly Morose shares the courtly conviction that art can serve and
rival nature. He tells Epicene that he longs to have his wife be the first
in all fashions, have her council of tailors, "and then come foorth, varied
like Nature, or oftner then she, and better, by the helpe of Art, her
aemulous servant" (II. v. 73-75). On a lower social plane Otter reveals
that he too is aware of how women can use the artificial to gild or trans-
form the natural. When he is drunk enough to be brave, he begins to
curse his wife for being naturally vile. She makes herself endurable only
by the most ingenious artifices. "Every part o* the towne ownes a peece

Epicene 131

of her/' Otter claims. "She takes her selfe asunder still when she goes to
bed/' and the next day, "is put together againe, like a great Germane
clocke" (IV. ii. 94-99).

But clothes do not merely artificially conceal nature or repair the
losses that the years have made; at times the artistic can take the place of
the natural: a person's dress can become the person. Thus, in this play
as in other comedies of Jonson, knighthood is thought to be largely a
matter of clothes. Clerimont, speaking of Sir John Daw, asks, "Was there
ever such a two yards of knighthood, measur'd out by Time, to be sold
to laughter?" (II. iv. 151-152). In a bitter arraignment of knighthood
Morose implies that the artificial can become the natural when he says
that knighthood "shall want clothes, and by reason of that, wit, to
foole to lawyers" (II. v. 125-126). The most striking reference to the way
that dress can change man's nature is Truewit's remark about the dis-
guised Otter and Cut-beard. After he fits them out as a divine and a
canon lawyer, he tells Dauphine, "the knaves doe not know themselves,
they are so exalted, and alter'd. Preferment changes any man" (V. iii.
3-5). Dress can so alter what a man is thought to be that his own nature
is changed accordingly.

Epicene, then, is a comedy about nature, normality, and decorum. Its
various scenes explore comically and searchingly a number of questions
to which, since it is a play, it does not offer any final answers. What is
natural and normal for the sexes? What does society expect of men and
women? Are women normally gossipy and men normally courageous?
What is the relation between the natural and the artificial in social inter-
course? But, though the play offers no final answers, it suggests through-
out that the various answers dramatized in the physical and verbal action
of the play are comic in so far as they violate certain standards of what
is masculine and what is feminine, as well as what is natural and what is
artificial in dress, behavior, and beauty — standards which, presumably,
the spectators bring to the theater with them.

Comparing Jonson's text with any of the many adaptations of the play
may reveal how effective its allusive language is in bringing these stand-
ards to the attention of the audience. For instance, George Colman's
acting version in 1776. Colman had a good eye for emphasizing the
farcical element in the plot, but apparently little feeling for what Jon-
son's language might suggest. The 1776 acting version is a simpler and,
by eighteenth century standards, a more genteel play, but its comedy is
thinner and more obvious because Colman (who said in his prologue
that Jonson's farce was "somewhat stale") cut out much of the play's
allusive language. Though he kept in the speech about the Collegiates
who speak with masculine or hermaphroditical authority and Morose's
reference to "mankind generation," he generally shifted the emphasis
away from the comedy of sexual deviations by cutting out the references
to the bisexual boy, the Collegiates' living away from their husbands, and

132 Edward B. Partridge

Morose's castration, impotence, and cuckolding. The result is what is
known as a "cleaner" play, but a tamer and less searching one. In the
same way the theme of art versus nature is mangled: the song, **Still to
be neat," is kept, though transferred to an earlier passage in the play, but
Truewit's first act remarks are cut out, along with most of the crucial
references to clothes. In short, for all its deceptive likeness to the play
that Jonson wrote in his unrefined age, Colman's version is a far less sug-
gestive comedy about nature, artifice, and not particularly epicene
people.

Colman's treatment of Epicene is typical of most adaptations, and
prophetic of many modern readings of it. But unless one is aware of the
allusiveness of Jonson's language, which adapters like Colman have
mangled and which modern readers often disregard, one can not entirely
understand Dryden's comment that there is "more art and acuteness of
fancy in [Epicene'] than in any of Ben Jonson's [plays]." ^

^ The Works of John Dry den, ed. Scott and Saintsbury (London, 1892), XV, 351.

v-^

Unifying Symbols in the
Comedy of Ben Jonson

by Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

Critics since the seventeenth century have agreed that Ben Jonson
Is a master of comic structure, but there has been serious disagreement
as to just what kind of structure it is in which he excels. To Dryden,
Jonson was pre-eminent among EngHsh dramatists because he obeyed the
neo-classic rules of unity of time, place, and action. Of the three, unity
of action is fundamental, and it is Jonson's plotting that Dryden found
most praiseworthy. He preferred The Silent Woman above all other
plays because he found it an ideal combination of the scope, variety, and
naturalness of the English drama with the control and careful organiza-
tion of the French. And the examen of that play in the Essay of Dramatic
Poesy emphasizes that there is immense variety of character and incident
but that the action is "entirely one.'' ^ Critics in recent years, however,
have disputed Dryden's picture of a regular, neo-classic Jonson, especially
in the matter of plot structure. Freda L. Townsend, for example, argues
persuasively that none of Jonson's great comedies has the unified action
characteristic of Terentian comedy and enjoined by neo-classic precept. ^
She compares Jonson's art with that of Ariosto and the baroque painters,
and she sees Bartholomew Fair rather than The Silent Woman as the
culmination of his development away from a simply unified comedy to-
ward one which involves the intricate interweaving of as many different
interests as possible. T. S. Eliot perhaps best sums up this "modern" view
of Jonson's technique when he says that his "immense dramatic construc-
tive skill" is not so much in plot as in "doing without a plot," and adds:

The plot does not hold the play together; what holds the play together is
a unity of inspiration that radiates into plot and personages alike.^

"Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson," by Ray L. Heffner, Jr. From
English Stage Comedy, ed. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., English Institute Essays 19^4, pp. 74-97.
Copyright © 1955 by the Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the
Columbia University Press.

^Essays of John Dryden, ed. by W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), 1, 83.

^ Apologie for Bartholmew Fayre: the Art of Jonson's Comedies (New York, Modem
Language Association, 1947), passim, especially pp. 91-97.

^"Ben Jonson," Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), p. 77.

133

134 Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

The views of Eliot and Miss Townsend seem to me substantially more
correct than that of Dryden on this matter. In this paper I shall try to
define more precisely the "unity of inspiration'' which Eliot and others
have found in Jonson's comedy and to describe the dramatic devices by
which it is expressed. Briefly, I believe that the essential unity of Jonson's
comedy is thematic. In each of his major plays he explores an idea or
a cluster of related ideas through a variety of characters and actions. And
the central expression of the unifying idea is usually not in a fully de-
veloped plot but in a fantastic comic conceit, an extravagant exaggera-
tion of human folly, to which all of the more realistically conceived char-
acters and incidents have reference.

For such an investigation the crucial cases are The Silent Woman and
Bartholomew Fair, Dryden's ideal "regular" comedy and Miss Town-
send's ideal "baroque" comedy. If I can show that, despite the very evi-
dent differences in superficial structure, a similar kind of thematic unity
underlies each of these and that it is expressed in similar symbolic de-
vices, my analysis may have some claim to inclusiveness.

In the case of The Silent Woman, I must first undertake to show that
it is not, even at the level of action, held together by the "noble intrigue"
as Dryden analyzes it. Dryden's spokesman Neander, accepting the defini-
tion of unity of action given earlier in the debate by Crites, tries to show
that at least one English comedy adheres to the rule. Crites' principles
are those derived by Renaissance and neo-classic criticism mainly from
the practice of Terence. The emphasis is on the single, clearly defined
aim of the action, which should be announced in the protasis or begin-
ning of the play, delayed by all sorts of complications and counter-in-
trigues in the epitasis or middle, and finally brought to completion by
the catastrophe or denouement. Neander discusses The Silent Woman
as if it follows exactly this formula. "The action of the play is entirely
one," he says, "the end or aim of which is the settling of Morose's estate
on Dauphine." And he continues:

You see, till the very last scene, new difficulties arising to obstruct the action
of the play; and when the audience is brought into despair that the business
can naturally be effected, then, and not before, the discovery is made.^

If we consider the play in retrospect, after we have seen or read the
last scene, we may agree with Neander that the securing of Morose's
estate is the central aim of the whole. Dauphine's sensational revelation
of the true sex of Epicene does indeed finally and irrevocably secure for
him the estate, and after the play is over we can see that all the intrigues
of Truewit and Clerimont, no matter what their intended purpose, have

*Ker, Essays of Dryden, i, 88.

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 155

aided Dauphine's scheme by exhausting his uncle's patience and thus
making the old man desperate enough to sign the settlement. But the
fact that the true nature of Dauphine's scheme is concealed until the very
end makes a great difference in the kind of unity which can be perceived
by the audience during the course of the play. The settling of Morose's
estate on Dauphine is not the ostensible aim of the action after Act III,
for the audience as well as the other characters have been led to believe
that Dauphine's purposes have been fully accomplished by the marriage
of Morose and Epicene. No new difficulties arise to obstruct this action in
Acts IV and V: we assume it has already been settled and our attention
has turned to other matters. Even in the early acts the course of Dau-
phine's intrigue is remarkably smooth, and little suspense of the kind
Dryden describes is generated. By the last scene, far from being brought
into despair that the business of the estate can naturally be effected, we
have forgotten all about it and are surprised to see it reintroduced.

As the play unfolds, the settling of Morose's estate upon Dauphine is
but one among several aims which give rise to action, and it is dominant
only in Act 11. It is much more accurate to consider The Silent Woman
as consisting not of a Terentian plot depending upon the delayed com-
pletion of a single, well-defined objective but of a number of separable
though related actions which are initiated and brought to completion
at various points in the play and which are skillfully arranged to over-
lay and interlock. Each of these actions is essentially a trick played on
a dupe or a group of dupes, and each has four fairly well-defined stages:
(1) the exposition of background material, including the characterization
of the dupe; (2) the planning of the trick by the intriguer; (3) the actual
execution of the trick; and (4) the reminiscence of the trick as a source of
continued laughter. The general plan is that a different major action
occupies the center of attention in each act except the first, which con-
sists of exposition of material for all the actions to follow. Act II is thus
centered on Dauphine's scheme to marry his uncle to Epicene, Act III
on Truewit's scheme to torment Morose by moving Sir Amorous La
Foole's dinner party to Morose's house. Act IV on the double scheme to
discredit the foolish knights and make all the Collegiate Ladies fall in
love with Dauphine, and Act V on the tormenting of Morose through
the mock discussion of marriage annulment by the pretended canon
lawyer and divine.

This basic plan is complicated by the introduction of several minor
actions, notably the one precipitating the disgrace of Captain Tom
Otter, and by the overlapping previously mentioned. At almost every
point at least three actions are under simultaneous consideration: one
is at the peak of fulfillment, a second has passed its climax but is still
producing laughter, and the groundwork for a third is being carefully
prepared.

These sundry intrigues are connected in a number of different ways.

136 Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

The peculiarities of the various dupes which make them fit objects of
ridicule are all described in the course of an apparently aimless con-
versation in Act I, so that the jokes played on them later in the play,
though they seem to arise spontaneously out of particular situations,
nevertheless are not unexpected. All the tricks are planned by the same
group of witty companions, most of them by Truewit, and every charac-
ter has some part in more than one intrigue. Often one intrigue depends
on the completion of another, as the transferring of the banquet on the
completion of the marriage. And the final revelation of Epicene's sex,
as Miss Townsend points out, has some relevance to all the major
actions^; it not only accomplishes Morose's divorce and gains the estate
for Dauphine, it also shows the foolish knights to be liars and discomfits
the Collegiate Ladies, who have had to depend on a despised male for
the vindication of their honors.

Such an elaborate intertwining of episodes demonstrates great techni-
cal skill in what Renaissance criticism called disposition and economy,^
But we are still entitled to ask, is this the only kind of structure the play
possesses? Are there no more fundamental relationships among these
various characters and actions, of which the mechanical interconnections
we have been discussing are but the external evidences? The thematic
structure of the play will be clearer if we consider that its real center is
not in any of the tricks or schemes but in the ridiculous situation in
which Morose finds himself. My argument is not genetic, but a brief look
at the probable sources of the play may help to confirm this impression.
The sources of the separable parts are extremely varied. Passages of
dialogue come from Juvenal and Ovid, many of the characters belong in
the series of satiric portraits stretching back through Jonson's early plays
and through contemporary nondramatic satire; the aborted duel between
the two knights seems to come from Twelfth Night, the conflict between
Dauphine and his uncle bears some resemblance to A Trick to Catch the
Old One, and the device of trickery through concealed sex may come
from Aretino's comedy II MarescalcoJ But the center around which all
this material is arranged is clearly the comic conceit which Jonson took
from a declamation of Libanius — the ludicrous plight of a noise-hating
man married by fraud to a noisy woman.

^ Townsend, Bartholmew Fayre, p. 64.

®In his Discoveries (lines 1815-20 in the Herford and Simpson edition) Jonson speaks
slightingly of Terence's skill in these matters, though it was much praised by most
Renaissance critics. For the meaning of the terms, see Marvin T. Herrick, Comic
Theory in the Sixteenth Century ("Illinois Studies in Language and Literature," Vol.
xxxiv, Nos. 1-2 [Urbana, 1950]), pp. 94-106.

"^ For these and other sources see C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Ben
Jonson (Oxford, 1925-52), II 72-79 (1925), and the notes in Vol. x (1950); also the
edition by Julia Ward Henry ("Yale Studies in English," No. xxxi [New York, 1906]),
pp. xxviii-lvi, and O. J. Campbell, "The Relation of Epicoene to Aretino's // Mares-
calco," PMLA, xlvi (1931), 752-62.

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 137

Herford and Simpson observe that, "The amusing oration of Libanius
offered but slender stuff for drama/* ^ This is true enough, in that it con-
tained only a situation and not a complete plot, and the implications of
that situation were but little developed. The Morosus of Libanius merely
describes the horrors of his noise-ridden existence and pleads with the
judges for permission to commit suicide. The oration could not simply
be translated to the stage without the addition of much extra material.
But it is, nevertheless, an admirable idea for a comedy. For one thing,
it epitomizes the eternal battle of the sexes for supremacy, including the
hypocrisies of courtship and the wrangling after marriage. And then also,
in its opposition of noisy people to noise haters, it suggests another
eternal theme, the debate between the active and the quiet life. In con-
structing a play around the conceit of Libanius, Jonson greatly compli-
cates both these latent themes, through his interpretation of the Morose-
Epicene relationship and through the addition of other characters and
actions.

Jonson's interpretation of the central situation is summarized in the
scene in which Morose interrogates his intended bride (IL v.). There
we learn that the old man's hatred of noise is the outward manifestation
of two allied character traits. First, he has been at court and has recoiled
in horror from all forms of courtliness. He tests his bride-to-be by point-
ing out to her that if she forbear the use of her tongue she will be unable
to trade "pretty girds, scoftes, and daliance" with her admirers; she can-
not, like the ladies in court, "aflFect ... to seeme learn'd, to seeme judi-
cious, to seeme sharpe, and conceited"; and she will be manifestly unable
to "have her counsell of taylors, lineners, lace-women, embroyderers, and
sit with 'hem sometimes twise a day, upon French intelligences" so as
"to be the first and principall in all fashions." The meaning of the
play's central symbol of noise is thus considerably developed in this
scene; a noisy woman is a woman given over to all the vanity, hypocrisy,
and affectation to which her sex and the courtly society of her age are
prone. Morose can concentrate his hatred of all these things by hating
the inclusive and concrete symbol, noise itself.

The second important aspect of Morose's idiosyncracy is his passion
for having his own way in all things. In his first soliloquy he admits that
"all discourses, but mine owne, afflict mee" (II. i.). He admires the abso-
lute obedience which oriental potentates command from members of
their households; and the silence of his own servants indicates their com-
plete subservience to his will, for they can answer perfectly well by signs
so long as their judgments "jump" with his. Epicene thus throws him
into ecstasies of happiness when she answers to all his questions, "Judge
you, forsooth," and "I leave it to wisdome, and you sir."

Morose's attitude towards his nephew illustrates both these aspects of

^ Ben Jonson, 11, 76 (1925).

138 Ray L. Hefner, Jr,

his character. After putting his intended bride successfully through the
test, he breaks into a scornful tirade at the notion of Sir Dauphine's
knighthood:

He would be knighted, forsooth, and thought by that meanes to raigne over
me, his title must doe it: no kinsman, I will now make you bring mee the
tenth lords, and the sixteenth ladies letter, kinsman; and it shall doe you
no good kinsman. Your knighthood it selfe shall come on it's knees, and
it shall be rejected. (ILv.)

By the coup of his marriage. Morose hopes to express his contempt for
all the world of lords, ladies, and courtly society, as well as his complete
dominance over all members of his family. The comic irony in his situa-
tion is that he inevitably brings all his troubles on himself, because his
two desires, to command and to live apart, though so closely related,
cannot both be fulfilled on his terms. An ascetic hermit might live apart
and rail against the court; a great lord might command absolute obedi-
ence from all around him. But Morose will make no sacrifice; he will be
the ultimate of both at once. In seeking to extend his circle of dominance
beyond his servant and his barber to include a wife, he brings in upon
himself the torrent of courtly commotion from which he has fled. In
leeking to make his power over his nephew absolute, he loses all. When
Dauphine says to him at the end of the play, "Now you may goe in and
rest, be as private as you will, sir," his sarcastic words may seem more
than a little cruel, but it is the logic of the world that decrees Morose's
sentence. He can be "private" only when he gives up all pretense of
being an absolute autocrat, and this he has just done by submitting him-
self humbly to his nephew's will and judgment.

The other material in the play consists largely of a set of mirrors
which, by reflecting various aspects of this central situation, extend its
significance. The Collegiate Ladies, for example, are embodiments of all
the courtly vices and affectations which Morose lumps under the heading
of "female noise." The most prominent feature of their composite por-
trait is, in Morose's words, that they "affect to seem judicious." As True-
wit says in the first act,

[They are] an order betweene courtiers, and country-madames, that live
from their husbands; and give entertainement to all the Wits^ and Braveries
o' the time, as they call 'hem: crie downe, or up, what they like, or dislike
in a braine, or a fashion, with most masculine, or rather hermaphroditicall
authoritie. (Li.)

The Collegiates are thus an appropriate part of the flood of noise that
pours in upon Morose after the wedding through which he had hoped to
assert his masculine dominance and to declare his independence from all
courtliness. The ladies' pretense to authority is just as absurd as Morose's.

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 139

This is demonstrated in Act IV by the disgrace of the two knights whom
they had cried up as wits and braveries, and especially by the ease with
which the ladies can be turned from one opinion to its exact opposite,
from idolizing the two knights to despising them, from despising Dau-
phine to being infatuated with him. As Truewit says, his tricks prove
that

all their actions are governed by crude opinion, without reason or cause;
they know not why they doe any thing: but as they are inform'd, beleeve,
judge, praise, condemne, love, hate, and in aemulation one of another, doe
all these things alike. (IV.vi.)

Sir John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole are the male representatives
of the affected courtliness which Morose despises. In contrast to the
three ladies, these two have separate identities at the beginning, though
they are merged into a composite portrait as the action progresses. Sir
John is the **wit'* or fool intellectual. Sir Amorous the ^'bravery" or fool
social. Jonson had treated varieties of both in earlier plays, but he fits
these into his present scheme by emphasizing in both cases the noisiness
of their folly. Sir John is the "onely talking sir i'th' towne*' whom True-
wit dares not visit for the danger to his ears. His conversation is noise
not only because it is verbose but also because it is inopportune and dis-
orderly. He insists upon reading his wretched verses, whether or not the
company desires to hear them; he pours out the names of authors in an
undisciplined stream. The garrulity of Sir Amorous has similar charac-
teristics though different subject matter. Clerimont emphasizes that this
knight's pretentious courtesy respects neither place, person, nor season:

He will salute a Judge upon the bench, and a Bishop in the pulpit, a
Lawyer when hee is pleading at the barre, and a Lady when shee is
dauncing in a masque, and put her out. He do's give playes, and suppers,
and invites his guests to 'hem, aloud, out of his windore, as they ride by in
coaches. (I.iii.)

When Sir Amorous appears on the scene, he does, as Clerimont has pre-
dicted, "tell us his pedigree, now; and what meat he has to dinner; and,
who are his guests; and, the whole course of his fortunes," all in one
breath.

The two knights thus give a wider meaning to the notion of a noisy
man in much the same way as the Collegiates and Morose's interrogation
of Epicene widen the meaning of a noisy woman. Noise is ungentlemanly
boasting about one's poetic and critical powers, about one's family,
friends, and hospitality, and, toward the end of the play, about one's
sexual powers and conquests. The one gentlemanly attribute to which
the two do not conspicuously pretend is courage on the field of battle.

140 Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

We may therefore be somewhat puzzled when the main trick against
them seems to turn on their cowardice, and we sympathize with Mrs.
Doll Mavis when she defends her judgment of them by saying, **I com-
mended but their wits, madame, and their braveries. I never look'd to-
ward their valours'' (IV.vi.). But what has been exposed in the mock
duel is not only cowardice but pliability. Like the ladies who admire
them, the knights have no real standards for judging either books or
men, but are governed entirely by rumor and fashion. Therefore it is
ridiculously easy for Truewit to persuade each knight that the other,
whose pacific disposition he should know well, is a raging lion thirsting
for his blood. If either knight had been made more on the model of the
swaggering miles gloriosus, the point about how easy it is to make a fool
believe the exact opposite of the obvious truth would have been blunted.

The themes of courtly behavior, the battle between the sexes, and the
pretense to authority are intertwined with that of noise versus silence
wherever one looks in the play, even in the foolish madrigals of modesty
and silence written by Sir John Daw. In the action involving Captain
and Mrs. Tom Otter, all these subjects are invested with an atmosphere
of comedy lower than that of the rest of the play. For the salient fact
about the Otters is that they are of a lower social class than any of the
other main characters. Mrs. Otter is a rich China woman struggling for
admission to the exclusive Ladies' College; Captain Tom is at home
among the bulls and bears but unsure of himself in the company of
knights and wits. Here again the citizen-couple who welcome instruction
in the courtly follies are familiar figures from Jonson's early comical
satire, but the portraits are modified to fit the thematic pattern of this
play. The Collegiate Ladies may pretend to a nice discernment in brains
and fashions, but Mrs. Otter comprehends fashionable feminism rather
differently and expresses her ''masculine, or rather hermaphroditicall
authority" more elementally by pummeling her husband. And Captain
Tom's noises are his boisterous but rather pathetic drinking bouts, ac-
companied by drum and trumpet, by which he hopes to gain a reputa-
tion among the gentry and to assert his independence from his wife. This
is the comic realm of Maggie and Jiggs, the hen-pecked husband sneak-
ing out to the corner saloon to escape his social-climbing wife, but the
relationships between this farcical situation and the central one of
Morose and Epicene are clear and are emphasized at every turn. Like the
characters in most Elizabethan comic sub-plots, the Otters burlesque the
main action while at the same time extending its meaning toward the
universal.

As the clumsy, middle class Otters contrast with the more assured aris-
tocrats, so all the pliable pretenders to courtliness contrast with the true
gentlemen and scholars, Truewit, Clerimont, and Dauphine. Within this
group of intriguers, however, there is a further important contrast. Cleri-
mont is relatively undeveloped as a character, but the differences be-

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 141

tween Truewit and Dauphine are stressed. Truewit is boisterous and
boastful about the jokes he contrives. He must have the widest possible
audience; as Dauphine tells him, "This is thy extreme vanitie, now: thou
think'st thou wert undone, if every jest thou mak'st were not published"
(IV.v.). Dauphine, on the other hand, moves quietly about his purposes
and keeps his own counsel. Truewit characteristically invents his fun on
the spur of the moment, out of the materials at hand, and is apt to
promise to do something (like making all the Collegiates fall in love with
Dauphine) before he has the slightest idea how it can be brought about.
Dauphine's plans have been months in preparation, and he betrays little
hint of his purposes until they actually have been accomplished.

The rivalry of these two for the title of master plotter runs as a sub-
dued motive through all the action. It is most prominent in the first
two acts, when Truewit's rash and suddenly conceived scheme to dis-
suade Morose from marrying almost upsets Dauphine's carefully laid
plot. It might seem that the contrast is all in favor of the quiet, modest,
but in the end more effective Dauphine. Truewit assumes too readily
that he can read the entire situation at first glance, and that he can easily
manipulate the stubborn Morose. He becomes almost a comic butt him-
self when he ridiculously tries to pretend that he has foreseen from the
first the really quite unexpected consequence of his action. The denoue-
ment especially would seem to prove that Dauphine is the real master at
playing chess with characters and humours, and Truewit just the bungling
amateur. But Jonson is not writing a treatise after the manner of Plu-
tarch on the virtue of silence and the folly of garrulity. Dauphine and
Truewit share the honors in the closing scene, and there is more than
a little to be said throughout the play for Truewit's engaging love of
good fun for its own sake as against Dauphine's colder, more practical
scheming. Instead of arguing a simple thesis, Jonson is investigating an-
other aspect of his central symbol of noise. Just as he holds a brief nei-
ther for the noise of courtly affectation nor for Morose's extreme hatred
of it, so he argues neither for the noisy wit nor for the quiet wit but is
content to explore the differences between them.

The essential movement of The Silent Woman, then, is the exploration
of themes implicit in the central comic conceit of a noise-hating man
married to a noisy woman. Noise and the hatred of noise take on the
proportion of symbols as they are given ever-widening meanings by the
various particulars of social satire. The play's realism and its fantastic
caricature can hardly be disentangled, for they are held together firmly
in the same comic structure.

Much the same things can be said of Bartholomew Fair, despite its
even greater complexity and its different kind of surface plan. In this
play, characters, actions, interests are all multiplied. If in The Silent
Woman there are usually three separable intrigues in motion at the same

142 Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

time, they all have a similar pattern of development and are under the
control of no more than three intriguers. But in Bartholomew Fair five
or six actions seem always to be ripening simultaneously, there are more
than a dozen intriguers, and no single pattern of development will fit all
the kinds of action which the fair breeds. Jonson, however, adheres to a
firm if complicated plan in devising the apparent chaos of his fair, and
this play has a thematic structure much like that of The Silent Woman.
Here again Jonson is not arguing a thesis but is investigating diverse
aspects of a central problem; here again the various parts of his play are
used to mirror each other; and here again the ''unity of inspiration'' is
best expressed by a character who is a fantastic caricature, in an ex-
tremely absurd situation which is reflected by all the more "realistic"
figures in the play.

The central theme is the problem of what "warrant" men have or pre-
tend to have for their actions. The problem touches both epistemology
and ethics — the questions of how we know what we think we know, and
why we behave as we do. Stated thus, it is very broad indeed, but it is
brought into focus by several concrete symbols of legal sanction. The
Induction, for example, is built on the device of a formal contract be-
tween the playwright and the audience, giving the customers license to
judge the play, but only within specified limits. The play itself opens
with Proctor John Littlewit discussing a marriage license taken out by
Bartholomew Cokes and Grace Wellborn, and the possession of this
document becomes of central importance not only in gulling the testy
''governor" Humphrey Wasp but also in the "romantic" plot involving
Grace, the two witty gallants, and Dame Purecraft.

The most important symbol of this basic theme, however, is the "war-
rant" which the madman Troubleall demands of almost all the char-
acters in the fourth act. This demented former officer of the Court of Pie-
Powders, who has neither appeared nor been mentioned earlier in the
play, is obsessed with the necessity of documentary sanction for even the
slightest action. As the watchman Bristle explains, Troubleall will do
nothing unless he has first obtained a scrap of paper with Justice Over-
do's name signed to it:

He will not eate a crust, nor drinke a little, nor make him in his apparell,
ready. His wife, Sirreverence, cannot get him make his water, or shift his
shirt, without his warrant. (IV.i.)

In Troubleall's absurd humor we have the same kind of grand, extrava-
gant comic conceit as that provided by Morose's hatred of all noise. It is
the ultimate extreme, the fantastic caricature of the widespread and not
unnatural human craving for clearly defined authority, and it serves as
the most significant unifying device in the play. Troubleall intervenes
crucially in several of the threads of plot, settling the dispute between

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 143

Grace's lovers, freeing Overdo and Busy from the stocks, and enabling
Quarlous to cheat Justice Overdo and marry the rich widow Purecraft.
But beyond his service as a catalyst of action. Troubleall's main function
is, as his name suggests, to trouble everybody as he darts suddenly on and
off the stage with his embarrassing question, *'Have you a warrant for
what you do?'' This leads to a re-examination of the motives of all the
characters, a new scrutiny of what warrant they really have and what
they pretend to have for their beliefs and their deeds.

Neither the outright fools nor the outright knaves are much troubled
by the great question. The booby Cokes, who has never sought a reason
for anything he did, exclaims scornfully, "As if a man need a warrant
to lose any thing with!" And Wasp, who pretends to ''judgment and
knowledge of matters" but who really is just as much motivated by irra-
tional whim as his foolish pupil, cries out during the game of vapors, "I
have no reason, nor I will heare of no reason, nor I will looke for no rea-
son, and he is an Asse, that either knowes any, or lookes for't from me"
(IV.iv.). Among the knaves, Edgeworth the cutpurse is jolted for a mo-
ment by Troubleall's question, thinking that his villainy has been found
out, but he quickly returns to planning his next robbery. Most resolute
of all is the pimp Knockem, who immediately sits down and forges Trou-
bleall a warrant for whatever he may want. As Cokes is motivated by
sheer whim, so the sharpers of the fair are motivated by sheer desire for
gain, and neither feels the need for further justification.

The watchmen Haggis and Bristle, however, who are on the fringes of
the fair's knavery, are led to reflect that Justice Overdo is **a very
parantory person" who can get very angry indeed when he has a mind
to, *'and when hee is angry, be it right or wrong; hee has the Law on's
side, ever" (IV.i.). In other words, "warrant" for the watchmen is con-
tained entirely in the unpredictable personality of the judge whom they
serve; they have no concern with the guilt or innocence of those whom
they incarcerate, and if there is ethics behind the law, they do not com-
prehend it.

Justice Overdo himself has a double function in the play. For the
watchmen and for Troubleall, his name stands as a symbol for the ulti-
mate authority which requires no rational understanding. But as a char-
acter in the action. Overdo has his own "warrants" for his conduct, and
they are neither irrational nor hypocritical. His motives — to protect the
innocent and reprehend the guilty — are beyond reproach; nor is his
reliance for his general ethics upon Stoic philosophy as expounded by
the Roman poets in itself anything but admirable. And he has the fur-
ther laudable desire to base his judicial decisions on exact information;
he will trust no spies, foolish constables, or sleepy watchmen, but will
visit the fair in disguise, to search out enormities for himself at first
hand. But for all this the Justice is completely ineffectual, because he
cannot interpret correctly what he sees, and because he fails to differen-

144 I^ciJ L' Hefner, Jr.

tiate between the minor vanities and major iniquities of the fair. Many
are the yearly enormities of the place, as he says, but he concentrates on
the evils of bottle-ale, tobacco, and puppet shows and fails to see the rob-
bery and seduction going on under his nose. Even when he taxes the
right knaves, it is for the wrong crimes. Through the characterization of
Justice Overdo, Jonson seems to me to add the warning that even the
best of warrants is not in itself sufficient to insure right action; Overdo
is reminded at the end that his first name is Adam and he is but flesh
and blood, subject to error like the rest of us. Even such admirable prin-
ciples as reverence for the classics and reliance upon the facts of evidence
can, if adhered to blindly, become fetishes almost as ludicrous as Trou-
bleall's trust in a signature.

The application of the theme of warrant to Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land
Busy, who pretends to find authority for everything he does in the words
of scripture but who really is motivated by the most elemental greed and
gluttony, and whose ingenious discovery of theological reasons for the
consumption of roast pig by the faithful is perhaps the funniest scene in
the entire play, need not be further elaborated. The most interesting
effects of TroublealFs persistent questioning are those upon Dame Pure-
craft and upon Quarlous. The Puritan widow is seized with a frenzied
desire to reform; the witty gentleman comes close to becoming an out-
right knave.

For Dame Purecraft, TroublealFs madness seems the only possible
alternative to the life of double dealing she has been leading. She ex-
claims:

Mad doe they call him! the world is mad in error, but hee is mad in truth.
. . . O, that I might be his yoake-fellow, and be mad with him, what a
many should wee draw to madnesse in truth, with us! (IV. vi.)

"Madness in error'* in the specific case of Dame Purecraft means reliance
upon the Puritan interpretation of Biblical authority. In the first scene
of Act IV she had replied confidently to TroublealFs question, **Yes, I
have a warrant out of the word." But now she admits freely that her
adherence to scriptural authority was but subterfuge for wicked self-
seeking, and she wants to exchange her hypocritical Puritanism for the
absolute and ingenuous madness which Troubleall represents. The final
irony is that she gains for a husband not a real madman but a gentle-
man-rogue disguised as a lunatic, Quarlous tricked out for his own selfish
purposes in the clothes of Troubleall. Even the search for pure irration-
ality thus turns out to be futile; Dame Purecraft is yoked with the image
of her former self, and her glorious repentance and conversion have been
in vain.

Quarlous comes to a similar conclusion that the only choice is between
knavery and madness, but he has little hesitation in choosing knavery.

Unifying Symbols in the Comedy of Ben Jonson 145

As he stands aside to deliberate Dame Purecraft's proposal, he reasons
thus:

It is money that I want, why should I not marry the money, when 'tis
offer'd mee? I have a License and all, it is but razing out one name, and
putting in another. There's no playing with a man's fortune! I am
resolv'd! I were truly mad, an' I would not! (y-u)

And so he proceeds not only to marry the rich widow but also to extract
money by fraud from Justice Overdo, from his erstwhile friend Winwife,
and from Grace, the girl for whom he has so recently declared his love.
The warrant which Quarlous abandons is the code of a gentleman, in-
cluding the chivalric ideals of loyalty to one's friend and undying devo-
tion to one's mistress. But the movement of the play here as elsewhere
is toward the discovery of true motives rather than toward change of
character, for though Quarlous has loudly protested both love and friend-
ship, he has never really been governed by either.

Quarlous' mode of thinking and of acting approaches more and more
closely that of those absolute rogues, the inhabitants of the fair. And
Quarlous is just as loud in protesting his difference from the fair people
as Humphrey Wasp is in protesting his difference from his foolish pupil.
Quarlous resents being greeted familiarly by such rascals as Knockem
and Whit, and in a very revealing passage he first lashes out at the cut-
purse Edgeworth for treating him like one of "your companions in beast-
linesse." He then proceeds to find excuses for having been accessory be-
fore and after the fact to a robbery:

Goe your wayes, talke not to me, the hangman is onely fit to discourse with
you. ... I am sorry I employ'd this fellow; for he thinks me such: Facinus
quos inquinatj, aequat. But, it was for sport. And would I make it serious,
the getting of this Licence is nothing to me, without other circumstances
concurre. (IV.vi.)

This is a piece of rationalization worthy of the master, Rabbi Busy; and
we observe with some amusement that Quarlous immediately starts
taking steps to make the other circumstances concur through fraud.

The emphasis in Bartholomew Fair is thus on the narrow range of
motives that actually govern men's actions, in contrast to the wide variety
of warrants which they pretend to have. Notable prominence is given
to primitive motivations: Busy scents after pork like a hound, both Mrs.
Littlewit and Mrs. Overdo are drawn into the clutches of the pimps by
the necessity for relieving themselves, and the longing of a pregnant
woman is the ostensible reason which sets the whole Littlewit party in
motion towards the fair. As the many hypocrisies are revealed, the only
distinction which seems to hold up is that between fools and knaves.

146 Ray L. Heffner, Jr.

between Cokes and the rogues who prey on him. The other characters
are seen as approaching more and more closely to these extremes, until
all search for warrant seems as absurd as TroublealFs, since all authority
is either as corrupt as the watchmen or as irrational as Wasp or as blind
as Justice Overdo. Whim, animal appetite, and sordid greed have com-
plete sway over men's actions without as well as within the fair; the
fair merely provides the heightened conditions under which disguises fall
off and the elemental motivations become manifest.

In both the plays we have been considering then, fantastic exaggera-
tions like Morose's hatred of noise and TroublealFs search for a warrant
provide the lenses through which the behavior of more realistically con-
ceived characters can be observed and brought into focus. It is chiefly in
his grand comic conceits that Jonson's "unity of inspiration" resides, for
in them the interplay of realistic satire and fantastic caricature is most
highly concentrated, and from them it does truly "radiate into plot and
personages alike."

It is this interplay between realism and fantasy which seems to me
the very essence of Jonson's comedy. To decry, as Herford and Simpson
do, the prominence of the "farcical horror-of-noise-motive" in The Silent
Woman, and to regret the "deepseated contrarieties in Jonson's own artis-
tic nature, where the bent of a great realist for truth and nature never
overcame the satirist's and humorist's weakness for fantastic caricature" ^
is, I believe, seriously to misunderstand Jonson's art. His purpose was al-
ways to hold the mirror up to nature, but not simply to present the world
of common experience, uncriticized and unstructured. Without the ex-
travagant caricatures which he develops into organizing symbols, Jonson's
comedy would lack not only the unity but also the universality of great
art.

If Jonson's comedy is of the sort here suggested, then a comparison
with Aristophanes may not be amiss. Here again we have a mingling of
fantasy and realism, and here again we have a comic structure centered
not on a plot but on the exploration of an extravagant conceit. Jonson
has almost always been discussed as if he belonged in the tradition of
Menander, Plautus, and Terence — of New Comedy. I believe that we
might gain more insight into his art if we considered him instead in
the quite different tradition of Old Comedy. Perhaps Jonson meant more
than we have given him credit for meaning when he said of the comedy
he was working to develop that it was not bound by Terentian rules but
was "of a particular kind by itself, somewhat like Vetus Comoedia." ^^

^ Ben Jonson, 11, 76-78 (1925).

^^ Induction to Every Man Out of His Humour.

Catiline and the Nature
of Jonson's Tragic Fable

hy Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr.

Although the principal subject of this paper is Ben Jonson's second
tragedy, Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), a good deal of what I have to
say is equally applicable to his earlier and somewhat more ambitious
Sejanus His Fall (1603).^ The two plays are alike in many ways. For one
thing, neither of them has ever been popular. Even among professed
admirers, very few have been willing to praise them as highly as Jonson
thought they deserved to be praised, and fewer still have seen any
genuine tragedy in them. In fact, most criticism, favorable as well as un-
favorable, has centered on such interesting but essentially peripheral
matters as Jonson's use of the Senecan ghost and chorus (in Catiline), his
portrayal of character, his reconstruction of the Roman scene, and, of
course, his rhetoric. Discussions of Jonson's plots have scarcely gone be-
yond the problem of identifying his sources, and almost no one has
touched upon the question of whether any real importance attaches to
the use he made of those sources. This would not be particularly surpris-
ing, perhaps, if we were dealing with some competent journeyman, like
Thomas Heywood for example, whose selection and use of sources is a
matter of mainly academic interest; but in Jonson we have a playwright
who not only aimed at something more than a popularly successful play
but also set unusually great store by authenticity of fable — or "truth of
argument," as he called it — where tragedy was concerned (Works, IV,
350). His manipulation of material, therefore, especially at points where
the disagreement of authoritative sources about a major issue forced him
to make a choice, becomes a matter of considerable interest. It is certainly
of interest to the historian, for it shows the sort of interpretation of
history an intelligent and well-informed classical student of the seven-
teenth century might reasonably hold. My point, however, is that it is

"Catiline and the Nature of Jonson's Tragic Fable." From PMLA LXIX (1954),
265-277. Reprinted by permission of the Modern Language Association.

^ Citations from Jonson in my text are to Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy
and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Oxford, 1925-50) — hereafter referred to as Works. Sejanus
and Catiline appear in Vols. IV and V, respectively.

147

148 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr,

also a matter of literary interest. It can be shown, I think, that Jonson's
ordering of his fable, rightly understood, gives the clue to why and how
he expected these plays to be judged as tragedies rather than merely as
serious history plays. In other words, it lets one see the conception of
tragic drama that he worked by.

Nevertheless, any adequate criticism of Jonson's tragedies must begin
with a consideration of thera as history plays; for, as I shall explain later
in more detail, the basic and distinctive fact about Jonson's tragic fable
is that it depends upon a verifiable historical context. That is, it comes
to us as verifiable historiography in dramatic form and consequently
derives at least part of its authority from the authority of recorded
history. We hardly need Jonson's pronouncement about ''truth of argu-
ment" to tell us this much about his tragic fable. Ample evidence that he
wanted us to accept his plays both as history and as drama lies in the
careful documentation that he provided for the quarto of Sejanus, which
was almost equivalent to an announcement that he wanted his dramatic
segment to retain its identification with the larger "true" story from
which it had been taken. Catiline, of course, is equally capable of such
documentation, as subsequent scholarship has shown, though Jonson did
not actually provide footnotes for any printed version of the play.^ Here,
too, he drew upon recognized authorities, Plutarch, Dio Cassius, Cicero,
and Sallust — sometimes directly and sometimes through the intermediary
of a compendium called Historia Conjurationis Catilinariae, by the
Renaissance scholar Constantius Felicius Durantinus.^ His principal
source, however, was Sallust's Bellum Catilinae, from which he took the
main outline of his plot, some of his important dialogue, and numerous
hints for developing his characters.^ We can best begin the examination
of Jonson's Catiline by comparing it with that.

In both works the story concerns Lucius Catilina, a profligate and un-
scrupulous young nobleman who sought to seize complete control of the
government and become a second Sulla; and Jonson's play begins, as does
the main portion of Sallust's account, with Catiline's second attempt to
snatch the power. In Act I we see the meeting of the conspirators at
which Catiline announced his plan, promising Rome itself as a prize to
those who would support him and compelling all present to attest their
allegiance by drinking a mixture of wine and human blood. In Act II we
see how Catiline's conspiracy was doomed when the patriotic Fulvia
elected to barter what little virtue she had for such information as the
garrulous conspirator Curius was able to give her. Acts III and IV show

^See the discussion of sources in Works, X, 117-119, and passim in the notes to the
play, pp. 121-161.

'See Ellen M. T. Duffy, *'Ben Jonson's Debt to Renaissance Scholarship in Sejanus
and Catiline," MLR, XLII (1947), 24-30.

*In preparing this paper, I have used the Loeb ed. of Sallust's works, trans. J. C.
Rolfe (London, 1920).

Catiline and the Nature of Jonson's Tragic Fable 149

us how Cicero, having defeated Catiline for the consulship, used Fulvia's
information to frustrate Catiline's attempt to have him assassinated; then
how he brought the whole conspiracy into the open, addressing Catiline
in the Senate and calling upon him to leave the city; and, finally, how
he managed to forestall the attempt of Catiline's adherents to turn the
warlike Allobroges against Rome, their nominal ally. The last act shows
the complete collapse of the conspiracy; we see there how the conspirators
remaining at Rome were apprehended and executed, and we hear how
Catiline and the remnant of his two legions met destruction in the
desperate stand at Fesulae. For this much of his plot, certainly, Jonson
could have cited the authority of Sallust; and, indeed, one can say
that he did effectually cite it by the way he allowed most of his charac-
ters to develop and by the things he had them say. At any rate, one who
knows his Sallust at all well must immediately recognize Sallust's mark
on Jonson's play.

Sallust's mark on Catiline is evident in still another respect. One way
of looking at Bellum Catilinae is to regard it as a political sermon on the
pitfalls of prosperity and power with the narrative serving as a rather
well-developed exemplum. The best single statement of theme in it is
perhaps the following one from Chapter X:

. . . when our country had grown great through toil and the practice of
justice, when great kings had been vanquished in war, savage tribes and
mighty peoples subdued by force of arms, when Carthage, the rival of
Rome's sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were
open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all
our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers,
anxiety and adversity, found leisure and wealth, desirable under other
circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for power first, then
for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils. For
avarice destroyed honor, integrity, and all other noble qualities; taught in
their place insolence, cruelty, to neglect the gods, to set a price on every-
thing. ... At first these vices grew slowly, from time to time they were
punished; finally, when the disease had spread like a deadly plague, the
state was changed and a government second to none in equity and excel-
lence became cruel and intolerable.

What we have here is really something more than a statement of theme.
It virtually amounts to a statement of Sallust's philosophy of history,
according to which everything that man achieves — institutions, cities,
states — partakes of the corrupt nature of man's physical body and has
"an end as well as a beginning . . . rise and fall, wax and wane" {Bellum
lugurthiniim , ii.3). Unlike the Greek historian Polybius, from whom he
probably derived his cyclic view of history, Sallust regarded the inevita-
bility of decline in man's political structures as the consequence not of
some natural order but of man's own willful depravity and his inability

150 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr.

to live by reason.^ According to his view, reason, virtue, and immor-
tality, in man and in man's commonwealth, are inseparable. "If men had
as great regard for honorable enterprises as they have ardor in pur-
suing what is foreign to their interests," he wrote in his Bellum lugiir-
thinum, '\ . . they would control fate rather than be controlled by it,
and would attain to that height of greatness where from mortals their
glory would make them immortal'' (i.5). Yet Sallust was pessimistic
about the ability of mankind, either individually or collectively, to live
for very long by the light of reason, especially if subjected to the tempta-
tions of power, luxury, and ease. Rome herself, as he saw it, was re-
sponsible for Catiline and would in time produce others like him unless
she saw the error of her ways. For these sentiments Jonson also found
a place in his play. His best statement of them, one which is none the
less Sallustian for having been translated in part from Petronius' Satyri-
con J comes in the Chorus to Act I:

Rome, now, is Mistris of the whole
World, sea, and land, to either pole;
And even that fortune will destroy
The power that made it: she doth joy
So much in plentie, wealth, and ease.
As, now, th'excesse is her disease. ...

Hence comes that wild, and vast expence.
That hath enforc'd Romes vertue, thence.
Which simple poverty first made:
And, now, ambition doth invade
Her state, with eating avarice.
Riot, and every other vice. . . .
Such ruine of her manners Rome
Doth suffer now, as shee's become
(Without the gods it soone gaine-say)
Both her owne spoiler, and owne prey.

In spite of all these similarities, however, Jonson's work in import is
so different from Sallust's that one may easily imagine that Sallust, had
he been able to read the play or see it performed, would have rejected it
utterly. The reason for the difference lies in one group of additions which
Jonson made to the plot as he found it in Sallust. I do not mean here such
essentially minor additions, or elaborations, as the introduction of Sylla's
ghost at the beginning of the play, the detailed representation of what
went on in Fulvia's boudoir, or the inclusion of the blood-drinking scene
in Act I. Of such additions as these Sallust doubtless would have ap-

^This was the view of most Stoics; see Eduard Zeller, The Stoics, Epicureans and
Sceptics, trans. O. J. Reichel (London, 1892), pp. 249ff.

Catiline and the Nature of J orison's Tragic Fable 151

proved, for they support admirably his own interpretation and evalua-
tion of the events in the story.^ What I have in mind is the additions that
concern the supposed complicity of Julius Caesar in Catiline's plot. In
these Jonson made use of material that he found in the other sources I
have mentioned — particularly in the accounts of Plutarch and Dio,
which Durantinus had accepted and used — together with a few details
from his own fertile imagination. The net product was a plausible ver-
sion of Catiline's conspiracy, but one considerably different from any that
had gone before it and vastly different from the one that Sallust had
written.

According to Sallust, Caesar was accused of complicity with Catiline
by Quintus Catulus and Gains Piso, both of whom were bitter enemies
of Caesar (Bellum Cat,, xlviii); but the charges of these two were mani-
festly false and failed to influence Cicero. Caesar's only direct participa-
tion in the affair was his address to the Senate, in which he urged that the
conspirators be punished with confiscation of property and imprisonment
rather than with death. Sallust reports this speech in full, as he does the
reply of Marcus Cato, who urged successfully that the guilty ones be
executed (li-lii); but he tries to forestall any adverse criticism of Caesar
that the speeches might suggest, by appending to his report a pair of
character sketches which present the two men as equal in merit. Cato
and Caesar, he declares, are the only two of **towering merit" that Rome
has produced in his lifetime. Cato is the representative of those virtues
by means of which Rome managed to survive a specific peril; Caesar, of
those virtues which enabled her somewhat later to weather a stormy
period of change and emerge a great and enduring power. By contrast,
Cicero, who holds a central position in Jonson's version of the story, is
called merely the "best of consuls" (xliii).

The interpretation of Caesar that one gets from Catiline His Con-
spiracy is, of course, anything but sympathetic. Jonson lets us see Caesar
first in the opening scene of Act III, in which Cicero addresses the people
for the first time as consul. Caesar, standing in the background, makes
such disgruntled remarks that Cato accuses him of being envious. Im-
mediately afterward, he greets the defeated Catiline and by means of
side-whispers makes arrangements to meet him privately. Later, at
Catiline's house, he gives his friend some memorable instruction in the
principles of worldly success. All this, fictitious as it is, can be justified
as legitimate use of what some have called "the historical imagination,"
provided one takes as fact the reported suspicions of such anti-Caesareans
as Plutarch and Dio. Similarly justifiable, but equally fictitious, are

^Sylla's soliloquy, which opens the play, may be taken as a dramatic representation
of one of Catiline's motives as given in Bellum Catilinae v.6; and the scene in Fulvia's
boudoir (all of Act II) is worked up from bare suggestions in Bellum Catilinae xxiii-
XXV. Sallust mentions the rumor of a blood-drinking episode (ibid., xxii) but admits
that he has no proof that it ever took place.

152 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr,

Caesar's asides to Crassus during Cicero's first oration against Catiline
(most of which Jonson uses)^; Caesar's interruption of Cicero to protest
what he regards as the viHfication of Catihne; and Caesar's greeting to
CatiHne as the latter makes his fateful entrance into the Senate. Yet
these details, all from Act IV, make it impossible to view Caesar's pro-
posal to the Senate in Act V — faithful as it is to Sallust's account — in the
light that Sallust put upon it. Instead of being the wise counsel of a man
conscious that great states should put aside petty vindictiveness and
exercise clemency whenever possible, it has now become the shrewd
maneuver of a Machiavellian villain to protect the weapons in his private
arsenal and keep them in readiness for another attempt to assassinate the
body politic. The conspiracy, we see, is not really Catiline's after all, but
Caesar's.

If we were judging Jonson's play as history, we should probably have
to say that here he has gone a bit too far. It is true that his portrayal of
Caesar as an ambitious, unscrupulous machinator was one that a genera-
tion nourished on several editions of North's translation of Plutarch
might reasonably accept; yet it was not the only portrait of Caesar then
current; nor is it one that historiaus unanimously incline toward today.
Furthermore, even Plutarch had admitted that Caesar's complicity in
this affair was only rumored, nbt proved (Caesar, vii); and of Caesar's
speech in the Senate, he had said only that it was the action of a brilliant
opportunist with political ambitions.^ Indeed, from what Plutarch and
the other anti-Caesareans have to say ^bout Caesar's behavior during
Catiline's conspiracy, one can conclude at most that at this point in his
career he was still only potentially dangerous to the commonwealth.
Jonson, of course, unequivocally represents him as a very real and pres-
ent danger. This immediately calls to mind the primary criterion by
which Jonson expected a tragedy to be judged, "truth of argument,"
and the fact that for him that criterion seems to have demanded pri-
marily an argument which could be verified, or at least supported by the
testimony of reliable witnesses.^ In Jonson's defense, one can say that
as a dramatist-historian he was almost bound to represent everything

''Jonson also makes considerable use of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Catilinarian orations,
the Pro Sulla, the Pro Murena, and the Pro Caelio. His borrowings from Cicero, how-
ever, are designed mainly to give authority to Cicero's own speeches. For a convenient
tabulation of these borrowings, see Catiline, ed. Lynn Harold Harris, Yale Studies in
Eng., LIII (New Haven, 1916), p. xx.

* Cato the Younger, xxii. Plutarch makes it clear, however, that even here Caesar had
his ultimate goal of absolute rule in mind. North translates the passage as follows:
**Caesar being an excellent spoken man, and that rather desired to nourish than to
quench any such stirrs or seditions in the Common-wealth, being fit for his purpose
long determined of, made an Oration full of sweet pleasant words." Lives of the Noble
Grecians & Romans (Cambridge, 1676), p. 644.

•See my "The Significance of Ben Jonson's First Requirement for Tragedy," SP,
XLIX (1952), 195-213-

Catiline and the Nature of Jonson's Tragic Fable 153

concretely, his own opinion as well as reported fact. Moreover, his opinion
about Caesar's part in the conspiracy, concretely represented as it is, does
not affect his representation of the main action, for which he has ample
authority to back him up. There, even by our own standards, he shows a
respect for the business of the historian that is matched by few of his
contemporaries, historians as well as dramatists. In fact, it is difficult to
see how a dramatist-historian in any age could have done much better.
Where reliable sources all declare something to be true, Jonson reports it;
where reliable sources disagree, he exercises the historian's prerogative
to act as judge; where reliable sources are silent, he exercises the drama-
tist's prerogative to fill in the gaps as his own judgment and understand-
ing of the facts seem to direct him. The resulting reconstruction of
history is, to be sure, a distortion; but it is necessarily so — ^just as all re-
constructions of the past, whether dramatic or nondramatic, are neces-
sarily distortions, contrived compounds of fact, judgment, and imagina-
tion. Jonson's large ^'distortion" — that is, the main action of the play
— has the advantage of being one that the average modern reader with
a historical consciousness can accept.^^ His lesser distortion about Caesar's
part in the conspiracy, a matter upon which no Roman historian would
venture to commit himself with any finality, does not have that advan-
tage. It comes as something of a shock and immediately (though, of
course, vainly) begs proof. Defending Jonson again, one can say it prob-
ably came as a much milder shock to the Jacobeans, who were more ac-
customed to unflattering characterizations of Caesar than we are. Even
Bacon, who has won the praise of modern historians for his scholarly
study of Henry VII, was not averse to saying positively of Caesar that
he "secretly favored the madnesses of Catiline and his conspirators." ^^
This does not mean that Jonson's expansion of the part of Caesar is
without special significance for Catiline. On the contrary, it is of very
great significance. What it does is to set Caesar and Catiline on the one
hand against Cato and Cicero on the other, thus altering the balance of
the original narrative and converting a relatively simple story of the dis-
covery and suppression of one man's plot into a study of the complex

^°He does not, e.g., shuffle events, introduce patent anachronisms, or irresponsibly
invent parts of the action to suit his purposes. In fact, Jonson's sequence of events
does not differ materially from that in the account by M. Gary, Cambridge Ancient
History (1932), IX, 491-504.

^ Imago Civilis Julii Caesaris, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding
et al. (London, 1858-59), VI, 337. The tone of Bacon's portrait is aptly illustrated by
the following selection (Spedding's trans., p. 342): "He sought reputation and fame
not for themselves, but as instruments of power. By natural impulse therefore, not by
any moral gulling, he aspired rather to possess it than to be thought worthy of it: a
thing which gave him favor with the people, who had no dignity of their own; but
with the nobles and great persons, who wished also to preserve their own dignity,
procured him the reputation of covetousness and boldness. Wherein assuredly they
were not far from the truth.**

154 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr,

Struggle between such forces as make for disintegration in a state and
those forces which tend to preserve its integrity. The original narrative
is still there, of course: Cicero still detects the villainy of Catiline and
leads the way to his removal and destruction. But in the context that
Jonson gives it, this action is roughly analogous to a sick man's detection
and treatment of an annoying symptom while the fatal cancer eats
patiently away at a vital organ. Cato, the representative of all those
virtues which have made Rome rich and powerful, is the surgeon in the
case. It is he who sees the truth writ large in Jonson's choruses, that *'the
excess is her disease,'* who descries the genuinely rebellious cell in the
body politic and would cut it out before it is too late. But Cato, unfor-
tunately, is a surgeon who receives more praise than attention from his
patient, and his diagnosis goes unheeded. Thus the play ends, with
Cato's warning lost, Caesar temporarily checked but still free to plan
and act, and Cicero naively comforted at the destruction of Catiline.
At this point the critical reader, or spectator, may reasonably ask:
But where is the tragedy in this curiously incomplete thing that Jonson
has made out of Sallust's story? Who in it, for that matter, can be called
a tragic hero? or who even a tragic villain? Caesar and Cato appear too
little and too late to qualify. Cicero, though he enjoys after Act III the
brightest light that Jonson chooses to throw, performs no action that we
could call tragic; and Catiline after that act holds only the occasional
focus of our attention. To answer such objections as these, we need to
return to what I referred to in the beginning as the basic and distinctive
fact about Jonson's tragedies, that they require a historical context. The
reader cannot begin to understand either Catiline or Sejanus unless he is
willing to bring a knowledge of history with him to the play and look
before and after what he finds there. For Catiline, this means he must
have, in addition to a familiarity with the story of Sallust, a private
knowledge of at least Plutarch's treatment of Caesar, and preferably
some knowledge of Suetonius' and Dio's as well; that is, he needs to have
clearly in mind the character of Caesar as these three portray it and be
prepared to see in Caesar, as Sallust does not, the primary threat to the
Roman Republic.^^ For Sejanus, it means having in mind the first six

^ Plutarch's recognition that Caesar was a threat to the commonwealth almost from
the outset of his career is illustrated by the following observation near the beginning
of his Caesar (trans. North, ed. cit., p. 592): **. . . he ever kept a good board, and
fared well at his Table, and was very liberal besides: the which indeed did advance
him forward, and brought him in estimation with the people. His enemies judging
that this favour of the common people would soon quail, when he could no longer
hold out that charge and expence, suffered him to run on, till by little and little he
was grown to be of great strength and power. But in fine, when they had thus given
him the bridle to grow to this greatness, and that they could not then pull him back,
though indeed in sight it would turn to the destruction of the whole state and Com-
monwealth of Rome: too late they found, that there is not so little a beginning of
any thing, but continuance of time will soon make it strong, when through contempt

Catiline and the Nature of Jonson's Tragic Fable 155

books of Tacitus* Annals and, once more, corresponding portions from
Dio. If the reader brings less than this to Jonson's tragedies, he risks his
chances of understanding what they are about. Consider, for example,
the significance of Jonson's introducing a full-blown Machiavellian
Caesar in the midst of a play ostensibly based on Sallust. It is, to say the
least, a rather striking departure from a well-established norm, and
Jonson expects us to recognize it as such. Without a knowledge of Sallust,
however, we miss the shock completely and fail to notice, as the play
proceeds, that the author has not only levelled out whatever tragic
potentialities his original narrative had within its own limits but has
thrown open the shutters, as it were, to let that original action serve as
an illuminating symbol for an action of much greater scope: the whole
rise and fall of the Roman Republic. I do not propose to defend Jonson's
use of such an allusive technique in a play intended for the public
theater. He should have known better. Yet the fact remains that if we
disappoint Jonson in his expectations, either through lack of learning or
through failure to grasp what he is trying to do, we get from Catiline
only the moderately interesting melodrama that so many have seen in it;
the play remains essentially a conflict of personalities that is terminated
abruptly with the death of one of the villains but is never really satis-
factorily resolved.

Discussion of Jonson's Roman plays almost inevitably suggests a com-
parison with those of Shakespeare; yet the resemblances are for the most
part superficial. We find a similar respect for order in both, a similar
contempt for the fickle mob, and a similar belief in the workings of
Providence. Both men, in short, were essentially aristocratic in tem-
perament and essentially religious; but Shakespeare's monarchism and
his belief in the divine right of kings set him apart from Jonson, whose
inclination toward what might be called classical republicanism is dis-,
cernible in both of his tragedies, but especially in Catiline, Shakespeare
was more apt to emphasize rebellion and disorder as overt manifestations
of man's innate proclivity to disobedience; Jonson, to emphasize them
as symptoms of civil decay, which he interpreted as the result of man's
unwillingness to live by reason and to assume responsibility. More sig-
nificant in a discussion of Jonson's tragic fable, however, is the fact that
his plots, in comparison with Shakespeare's, seem incomplete and incon-

there is no impediment to hinder the greatness." Dio's general opinion of Caesar fol-
lows the same line; of Caesar's unscrupulousness he writes: ". . .he showed himself
perfectly ready to serve and flatter everybody, even ordinary persons, and shrank from
no speech or action in order to get possession of the objects for which he strove." —
Roman History, xxxvii.37, trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library (1914), iii, 159.
Suetonius, of course, goes farther than either Plutarch or Dio toward establishing
Caesar's complete lack of scruple, moral or otherwise; see especially Divus lulius^,
Iii, Ixxvi. Harris (p. xix) has asserted that Suetonius was Jonson's principal source for
the character of Caesar; but Jonson could have found all he needed for that in
Plutarch.

156 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr.

elusive. Coriolanus gives us a full study of the tragedy of Coriolanus;
Julius Caesar gives us such a study of Brutus; but neither Jonson's
Sejanus nor his Catiline gives us a well-rounded tragedy of any single
character. In this connection it is worth noting, I think, that one could
make a play remarkably like Catiline out of the first eight scenes of Julius
Caesar — that is, a play that would end with Brutus and Antony standing
together, still not declared enemies, at the scene of Caesar's murder.
Possibly Jonson had something like this in mind when he complained
that Shakespeare's version could have stood considerably more "blot-
ting." Perhaps he had in mind a play that would show Brutus, like
Cicero, taking desperate steps to rid the commonwealth of an obvious
danger and succeeding in his effort, all the while neglecting to appreciate
the far greater danger at his right hand. In any case, such a Julius Caesar
could show us next to nothing of Shakespeare's tragic hero: we should
not see the consequences of Brutus' blindness; we should not see his
fall. In fact, Brutus would never really command the focus of our atten-
tion. The figure in our eye would almost certainly be, as in Catiline, the
commonwealth itself — the commonwealth which lapsed so far into decay
that even its would-be saviors were necessarily afflicted to some extent
with the blindness of degeneracy. But, again, that figure would be in our
eye only if we were prepared to see it, prepared to bring to the play a
context that would both give meaning to and derive meaning from the
dramatized segment.

Shakespeare, of course, never wrote anything remotely like this. Even
in his plays dealing with English history, the focus of interest is always
on human personalities and human conflicts; and the state as a meta-
physical entity, if it appears at all, appears only intermittently, as the
ground for action and not as a leading participant in the action. For
example, no one on seeing Richard II would doubt for a moment that
what happens there is symptomatic of conditions in that *'sea-walled
garden" of which both Gaunt and the unhappy Gardener speak. One
can, if one wishes, read the play as a political sermon, or rather as an
exemplum for one. Yet for all that, Richard II remains a self-contained
play about Richard and Bolingbroke; it requires no sequel and very little
commentary to make it intelligible. When Shakespeare came to write
tragedy, he continued to make his work intelligible in terms of the repre-
sented action alone. All his tragedies deal with historical subjects, but
history does not contribute very much to our understanding of them; nor
do they, in turn, contribute very much to our understanding of the
historical events with which they deal. They provoke commentary, to be
sure, but they require no context; for the commonwealth in Shake-
spearean tragedy is indifferently Rome, England, or Denmark. What
holds our attention is always the complete representation of a single
action of a single tragic protagonist — a Hamlet, a Lear, a Macbeth, or
a Coriolanus- — and as such Shakespearean tragedy is self-sufficient.

To appreciate Jonsonian tragedy, on the other hand, we have to begin

Catiline and the Nature of J orison's Tragic Fable 157

by recognizing the fact that the representation of the Roman scene in it
is as accurate as contemporary historical scholarship could provide. We
have to be keenly aware that here no seventeenth century clock could
possibly strike the hour and no English watch walk the streets at night.
The scene we see is literally Rome, and the event portrayed is one that
actually took place there at a definite point in time. In short, it is im-
portant to recognize that Jonson's Roman plays superimpose their claim
to tragic stature upon a solid initial appeal to history; and, whatever
else they may be, they fall within the limits of a definition of the history
play that is strict enough to exclude everything that Shakespeare ever
wrote. For Shakespeare, history was only a means to an end, a source of
material from which he could fashion a fable to reveal something of that
true substance which is only faintly and imperfectly reflected in mundane
affairs. For Jonson, history was an end in itself; it was man's best source
of truth outside the realm of supernatural revelation. In fact, Jonson's
attitude toward history does not differ materially from that held by
many of his Puritan foes, who placed secular history next to sacred as a
guide to the ways of Providence. Had they been dramatists, they, too,
would probably have declared it the dramatist's function first of all to
respect the facts transmitted to him and to reveal his chosen segment of
history accurately, both in outline and in detail.

Fidelity to history, however, does not alone make a tragedy; and
Jonson's Roman plays, if they are to be called tragedies, must justify
their title by some other means. They do that, I think, by virtue of the
context to which the plays, as history, implicitly allude. As we have al-
ready seen, Jonson's practice in both Catiline and Sejanus indicates that
he recognized a second function for the dramatist-historian: if it was his
function to cast his light upon the segment of history, it was also his
function to reveal with the penumbra of that light the broad movement,
the larger action, from which the chosen segment should draw its full
significance. And in both of Jonson's Roman plays that larger action
turns out to be a tragic action, with the state itself taking the role of
tragic protagonist. Jonson, of course, was not the first to see that states
as well as men may grow prideful in the prosperity that humility, work,
and simple virtues bring them to; nor was he the first to see that civil
pride is a state of blindness and goes before a fall; but it may be said, I
believe, that he was the first to make drama serve as a medium for pre-
senting the tragedy of a whole state; such a tragedy, certainly, could not
be presented entire within the limits of a five-act play without sacrificing
the concreteness and particularity that are the essence of the dramatic.
Jonson's method was to select for representation recognizable segments
of tragic patterns that he found in the verified history of the Roman
commonwealth. What he gives us in Sejanus^ as I have shown elsewhere,^^

^^"The Nature of the Conflict in Jonson's Sejanus/* Vanderbilt Studies in the Hu-
manities, I (1951), 197-219.

158 Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr.

is a representation of that part of the pattern of civil tragedy in which
the virtuous element of the commonwealth, in this case the remnant of
all that is essentially Rome, has been reduced to inactivity and near im-
potence as a consequence of its own complacence and blindness.^^ The
activity in the play is largely confined to that of the evil forces which
Rome has blindly let grow until they have all but destroyed her. Yet this
spectacle, sorry as it is, is not altogether depressing; for we see by it that
evil, freed of restraint, becomes in time its own punisher and destroyer;
and we also see, in the last scene, that something of the Old Rome still
remains, that she has at last learned humility and patience, and that she
may contemplate at least the distant future with some hope. The ac-
tivity of Jonson^s Catiline presents a different, yet equally recognizable,
selection from the pattern of tragedy. Here we have the picture of a state
at the peak of its prosperity and power and pride, capable of detecting
a symptom but incapable of interpreting the significance of that symp-
tom, confidently and blindly taking the first step toward disaster. One
might almost say it is a detailed picture of the climax of the tragic pat-
tern. Jonson has achieved this picture — and, one should add, achieved
it without sacrificing verisimilitude — partly by striking a balance among
those characters with tragic possibilities in order to let the figure of res
publica stand clear as a protagonist in its own right, and partly (though
less importantly) by underscoring that figure as tragic protagonist in his
choruses. Catiline the symptom, Caesar the disease, Cicero the will of
the state, Cato its all but submerged conscience — all these are elements
in a body politic that is outwardly flourishing but spiritually doomed.
In Jonson's image of that body politic we see at once the source of its
greatness and the disintegration that lies ahead, both amply confirmed
by the verifiable context to which the play implicitly alludes. In no other
play, not even in Sejanus, is the tragedy of a whole state indicated so
movingly, so subtly, and yet with such terrifying clarity. In short, Catiline
His Conspiracy is a remarkable dramatic accomplishment, one effected
with amazing economy and with no violence to fact save the anachronis-
tic representation of Caesar's character. And even in this Jonson has done
nothing more reprehensible than to sketch in qualities which most seven-
teenth century readers would have been willing to admit Caesar possessed,
at least in potentia, at the time of the Catilinarian conspiracy.

I have already suggested that Jonson was at fault for writing plays
that ask too much of his audience. Some may argue, too, that his under-
standing of tragedy was at fault: that in pushing back the limits of
tragedy he wrote plays which were really the measure of his limitations.
Yet it is futile, I think, to argue about what Jonson might have done;
and, in any case, that is beside the point. Most people would agree that

"Cf. Shakespeare's representation of this point of low ebb among the forces for
good in King Lear, IV.

Catiline and the Nature of J orison's Tragic Fable 159

Shakespearean tragedy is infinitely preferable to the Jonsonian variety.
The point is that Jonson did not try to write Shakespearean tragedy.
What he did try to write, whether he should have tried to write it or not,
represents an extension rather than a restriction of the scope of tragedy.
We have, as a result, two early examples of that extension which, in the
dramas and novels of the twentieth century, was later to become com-
monplace. Within this broader field, of his own choosing and partly of
his own creation, Jonson's achievement bears comparison with that of
any other artist, early or late. This much, at any rate, cannot safely be
disputed.

The Jonsonian Masque
as a Literary Form

by Dolora Cunningham

Jonson's masques have generally been considered as fanciful mixtures
of spectacular and dramatic elements, characterized by a heavy display of
learning and, for modern democratic taste, a troublesome flattery of the
king. They have seldom been accorded the dignity of serious literary
efforts; and yet if one looks twice at the author's own comments upon his
work, one is struck by the unusually wide discrepancy between what
Jonson thought he was doing and what critics have told us he was doing.^
A masque, as Jonson himself conceived it, is a form of dramatic enter-
tainment in which the logical working out of a central idea or device
provides the action. The particular kind of action proper to the form
resides in the symbolic representation of contrasted conditions, usually of
order or virtue as opposed to disorder or depravity. It consists of **one
entire body or figure,'* as Jonson puts it, comprising distinct members,
each expressed for itself, yet harmonized by the device so that the whole
is complete in itself. The nature of the device is explained by language
at times dramatic and at times narrative, and the whole is further
illustrated by music, spectacle, and symbolic characters in a sequence of
dances. Each member is brought in separately, for its own sake, in the
parts of the work, but each contributes to the illustration of the whole.
Each has meaning in terms of the device, which turns on a sudden change
— involving discovery of the masquers, transformation of the entire scene,
and recognition of the virtues embodied in the king — and arouses wonder
and respect in the spectators. By these means, a masque accomplishes its
purpose of honoring magnificence, in the ethical sense, and of inciting in
the beholders a conscious moral imitation of the virtues embodied in
kingship.

"The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form/' From ELH, A Journal of English
Literary History, XXII (1955), 108-124. Reprinted by permission of the Johns Hopkins
Press.

^ For a summary of the criticism, see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson,
and Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925), Vol. II, pp. 2491?. The
two basic books on the English masque are Rudolf Brotanek, Die Englishchen Masken-
spiele (Leipzig, 1902) and Paul Reyher, Les Masques anglais (Paris, 1909).

160

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 161

This definition has been derived from Jonson's remarks about his aims
and methods in writing masques and, of course, is modeled on Aristotle's
famous definition of tragedy. The relevance of the formal definition to
Jonson's masques can, perhaps, be clarified by calling to mind the three
broad principles on which he based his whole theory and practice of the
masque: the principle of decorum, the principle of hierarchical unity,
and the principle of profit conjoined with pleasure — all familiar in
various ways to students of Renaissance literature.

Although the notion of decorum is variously complicated, there are
certain obvious applications which bear directly upon a proper under-
standing of Jonson's intentions. Most important of these, perhaps, is
the stern precept that the device, the central idea of the masque, must
express what is proper to the occasion:

The nature and proper tie of these Devices being, to present alwaies some
one entire bodie, or figure, . . . where also is to be noted, that the Sym-
boles used, are not, neither ought to be, simply Hieroglyphickes, Emhlemes,
or Impreses, but a mixed character, partaking somewhat of all, and pecul-
iarly apted to these more magnificent Inventions: wherein, the garments
and ensignes deliver the nature of the person, and the word the present
office. Neither was it becomming, or could it stand with the dignitie of these
shewes (. . .) to require a Truch-man, . . . but so to be presented, as upon
the view, they might, without cloud, or obscuritie, declare themselves to the
sharpe and learned,^

Again in his notes to The Masque of Queens, Jonson explains:

To whome they all did reverence, and she spake, uttring, by way of ques-
tion, the end wherefore they came: which, if it had bene done eyther before,
or other-wise, it had not bene so naturall. For, to have made themselves
their owne decipherers, and each one to have told, upon their entrance,
what they were, and whether they would, had bene a most piteous hearing,
and utterly unworthy any quality of a Poeme [11. gSff].

Decorum, then, motivates both the selection of the central idea and the
manner of working it out, determining also the kind of dialogue and
action and the type of decoration to be used. The device together with
its illustrative parts must be appropriate to the dignity of poetry in itself
and to the dignity of the royal audience whose honor is the primary con-
cern of every court masque.

Since the masque, as Jonson practiced it, is a form having its own
purposes and conventions, to impose the techniques of the regular drama
would be improper. It is true, however, that Jonson introduced the

^ The Entertainment at Fenchurch, 11. 247ff. In all references to Jonson's masques,
including his prefaces and commentaries, I shall refer to lines only; all of the references
are to Volume VII of the Herford and Simpson Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1941).

i62 Dolora Cunningham

materials of comedy into several anti-masques and that the established
order of progression in his masques is from disorder to order as in
comedy. But he did not confuse the two forms. We know from his
prefaces and commentaries and from the masques themselves that he
kept certain distinctions clearly in mind. He used comic materials and
characters in the anti-masque, for example, to give variety and to act as
foils to the noble persons who performed the main masque. In Oberon,
The Faery Prince, where the Satyrs of the anti-masque are opposed to
the Fairies of the main masque, the connection lies in their being op-
posites, as in the Masque of Queens Ignorance is the opposite of Fame.
In Oberon, Silenus strengthens the connection by intervening in both
anti-masque and masque: as "prefect*' of the Satyrs, he rebukes their
goings-on, and after they have been silenced, he speaks the praise to the
state which marks the beginning of the solemn main masque (11. 335-57).

Love Restored is the first of Jonson's masques where the comic actions
and dialogue, which originally introduced the grotesque dance, have
taken over entirely; it is also the first in which the characters of the anti-
masque speak in prose, as though Jonson would emphasize the contrast
between what is proper to these undignified personages and what is
proper to the persons of high estate who perform the main masque and
speak in verse. Although the grotesque dance was not to be entirely
excluded from future anti-masques, in other respects the anti-masque
did become much like a scene of prose comedy.

In Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court , Jonson adapts to
the masque material he had already used in comedy. In The Alchemist ,
he had satirized the alchemists' pretensions to make gold and had mocked
the illusions of their dupes; here he satirizes, primarily, the imperfect,
mutilated creatures of the alchemists' laboratories, who are contrasted
with the excellences of nature. To handle this varied material, which
paralleled the various types of extravagant people often found in his
comedies, the formal device of the double anti-masque dance was at
hand. This made it possible for Jonson to present separate grotesque
dances, first, the "troupe of threadbare Alchymists" and, then, their
"imperfect creatures, with helmes of lymbecks on their heads." His con-
tempt for the two is conceived and presented within the convention of
the masque, and what in The Alchemist was material for comedy is
here found to be as aptly material for a masque.

- Jonson's originality in developing the anti-masque is, nevertheless,
/ guided by the three principles which he explained in the preface to The
Masque of Queens: contrast, continuity, and variety. The anti-masque
is not a masque but a spectacle of strangeness; it is not magnificent,
where the main masque is by definition magnificent, but it is strictly
accordant with the device of the main masque. Its main function is to
provide a purposeful variety within a given masque and the variety of
novelty with respect to past entertainments:

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 163

I was carefull to decline not only from others, but mine owne stepps in
that kind, since the last yeare I had an Anti-Masque of Boyes: and there-
fore, now, devis'd that twelve Women, in the habite of Haggs, or Witches
. . . , should fill that part (IL 14-19).

In Oberon he will have Satyrs; in Love Freed, a brood of Follies; in
Mercury Vindicated, alchemists and their creatures. By adapting the
comic induction to the purpose of anti-masque, he avails himself of new
materials to support the demand for variety.

If we think, as many of us apparently do, that the comic induction
endangered the masque and that by comparison the main masque is a
colorless rudiment,^ it is because we cannot see the latter. Literature
bulks larger in the first part, and we have thereby a clearer picture of
the induction, whether comical or otherwise, than we have of the cere-
monious main masque. We must reconstruct its movements from Jonson's
descriptions, which were written for precisely this purpose. But such
necessity does not justify our taking a part for the whole in order to
condemn the author for writing comedy instead of masque or masque
instead of comedy. Where in a comedy can we find the equivalent of the
main masque, which concludes with the unique dance participated in
by the audience? The simple fact that the induction is more vivid to
us does not prove that it was so to Jonson's audience, and, indeed, most
of the contemporary references are largely devoted to the dancing and
beauty of the main masque.^ It does, however, seem to support Jonson's
point that literature is the formative principle and soul of masque and
alone can give it life.

In a comedy, moreover, there is not necessarily a pattern whereby one
set of characters representing the violation of accepted standards is fol-
lowed by another set representing their observance. In a masque it is
not enough that fools and monsters be vanquished or held up to scorn;
they must be both vanquished and supplanted by the representatives of
virtue and order.

For the characters in Jonson*s masques are symbolic rather than dra-
matic. They are means of illustrating the general device, so that any
change in character is dependent upon transformation, as, for example,
in Lethe, where the lovers only think they have died for love when they
have simply lost their wits. The Fates insist that they are not dead, that
Love, though he often subdues other states, cannot subdue the Fates.
Mercury bids the lovers to drink of Lethe's stream that they may forget
Love's name, and then to rise up and shake off the shadows which made
them mistake themselves for dead (11. 118-21). Or, a change of character
might depend upon a complete change of setting and persons, as in

^ Herford and Simpson, Vol. II, p. 297.

*See, for example. Bacon's remarks on "Masques and Triumphs'* in A Harmony
of Lord Bacon's Essays, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1871).

164 Dolora Cunningham

Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, where legitimate Pleasure must banish
Comus before it can be reconciled with Virtue; and in the second anti-
masque Virtue must defeat the degenerate Pigmies before the princes
can profit from the reconciliation. In other words, the forces of chaos
must be defeated before the representatives of order can be displayed to
complete the contrast. The lesson seems to be that before we can have
a sane and ordered society, we must get rid of the enemies of reason and
virtue. Although such an undertaking necessarily implies conflict, it is
here different from ordinary dramatic conflict.

The hierarchical structure which Jonson sought in the masque is con-
cisely defined in his notes to the Entertainment at Fenchurch:

The nature and propertie of these Devices being, to present alwaies some
one entire bodie, or figure, consisting of distinct members, and each of these
expressing it selfe, in the owne active spheare, yet all, with that generall
harmonic so connexed, and disposed, as no one little part can be missing to
the illustration of the whole (11. 247!!.).

The various formal elements should be carefully arranged around the
central device, for the whole must have the unity of a work of art and
uphold in all its various parts the current and fall of a single device.
The function of spectacle, for example, is to make known whom a person
represents and the function of speech to explain his place in the whole
scheme. The parts do not blend into each other to form an organic unity;
each part exists rather for its own value and expresses itself in its own
sphere but is so disposed and connected as to make a clearly defined
contribution to the illustration of the whole.

Although carefully distinguished from the main masque, the anti-
masque is always in accordance with the idea which controls both. Jon-
son makes sure of the anti-masque in Lethe, for example, by having the
same persons assume the roles of frantic lovers and intelligent lovers.
This identity of persons quite naturally makes for continuity between
the two main parts, but more than this, it involves progression of charac-
ter, which is something quite different from modern notions of charac-
ter development. Mercury and the Fates discover, through dialogue, the
condition of the lovers and are responsible for their transformation.
The conflict between Mercury and Cupid and their reconciliation are
responsible for the final restoration of the lovers to a condition of
balanced humanity, and this change in condition is motivated by de-
finable external causes. In the process of restoration, all of the diverse arts
are used, each of them contributing something to the ultimate end. The
anti-masque dance expresses the way the lovers had lived in love and is,
as Mercury states, the means of shaking off the shadows they had moved
in before drinking from Lethe's stream. Their transformation is brought
about through the joint efforts of poetry and dancing and not by a

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 165

sudden change of costume or scene. Their return to an harmonious
exercise of their human facuhies is encouraged by the Chorus, so that
the music expresses their conversion from disorder to harmony as it
introduces the ordered dances of the main masque. When Cupid appears
to praise the refined motions of the first dance, his speech is expressive
of the dance, which in turn is expressive of the lovers' changed condi-
tion and therefore of the idea on which the entire invention turns.^

A corollary of hierarchical unity is Jonson's law that no one element
is to infringe on the duties proper to another. This corollary is derived
by the principle of decorum, and maintains that spectacle should not try
to do the work of poetry, or poetry of spectacle, for this is to violate
order and destroy the unity of the masque. In the preface to the Masque
of Blackness, Jonson explains:

The honor, and splendor of these spectacles was such in the performance,
as could those houres have lasted, this of mine, now, had been a most un-
profitable worke. But (when it is the fate, even of the greatest, and most
absolute births, to need, and borrow a life of posteritie) little had beene
done to the studie of magnificence in these, if presently with the rage of
the people, who (as a part of greatnesse) are priviledged by custome, to
deface their carkasses, the spirits had also perished (11. 1-10).

The dignity of poetry must be given due recognition; the literary part
must not be forced to yield place to other elements, particularly the
spectacle of Inigo Jones; the poet must not be the mere servant of the
carpenter and scene-painter. For these things are mortal and fade away,
and literature alone can keep the masque alive. The description of the
spectacle and the explanation of the various devices are important, also,
because they make it possible for posterity to reconstruct the actual
performance, to reproduce those elements of scenery, dance, and music
which make a direct appeal to the senses and are in large measure re-
sponsible for the desired effect of magnificence.

But Jonson was very jealous of the dignity of poetry and, if it were
to have anything to do with the masque, it must have a higher role than
that of mere reporting. Conversely, the masque form, to be worthy of
poetry, must be stabilized and improved. This improvement, Jonson
firmly believed, could be realized only through the contribution of the
poet, who would furnish the soul of the form:

It is a noble and just advantage, that the things subjected to understanding
have of those which are objected to sense, that the one sort are but

^Jonson's comment on the dance in Hymenaei (11. 310-15) supports the interpreta-
tion: "Here, they daunced forth a moste neate and curious measure, full of Subtilty
and Device; which was so excellently performed, as it seemed to take away that Spirit
from the Invention, which the Invention gave to it: and left it doubtfull, whether the
Formes fiow*d more perfectly from the Authors braine, or their feete/'

i66 Dolora Cunningham

momentarie, and meerely taking; the other impressing, and lasting: Else
the glorie of all these solemnities had perish'd like a blaze, and gone out, in
the beholders eyes. So short-liv'd are the bodies of all things, in comparison
of their soules . . . This it is hath made the most royall Princes, and
greatest persons (who are commonly the personaters of these actions) not
onely studious of riches, and magnificence in the outward celebration, or
shew; (which rightly becomes them) but curious after the most high, and
heartie inventions, to furnish the inward parts: (and those grounded upon
antiquitie, and solide learnings) which, though their voyce be taught to
sound to present occasions, their sense, or doth, or should alwayes lay hold
on more remov'd mysteries,^

The theory of literature set forth here rests upon the familiar Christian
dualism — of physical and spiritual, transitory and eternal — which is
reflected in the two levels of literal and symbolical meaning which should
be present in a masque. For Jonson clearly regarded the masque as a
literary form in much the same way as he regarded tragedy as a literary
form. He carefully distinguished the various elements and specific pur-
poses of the traditional masque and attempted to make each of these
cooperate in a final unified structure, the central hinge of which is the
idea having its basis in a philosophical-ethical concept. Consequently,
the particular nature of the device must be such that the shift of scene
in the spectacle would have meaning in terms of the device and that it
would be capable of being illustrated by a sufficient number of symbolic
figures who could reasonably be supposed to enter into a sequence of
dances. All of this is to contribute to a certain definable effect: respect
for magnificence, which is the ethical virtue especially appropriate to
royalty.

It was by way of magnificence that Jonson's masques achieved the
traditional goal of profit conjoined with pleasure. In his preface to the
Masque of Queens^ Jonson explains:

For which reason, I chose the Argument,*. . . : observing that rule of the
best Artist, to suffer no object of delight to passe without his mixture of
profit, and example (11. 5-9).

And again in the preface to Love's Triumph:

Whereas all Repraesentations especially those of this nature in court,
publique Spectacles, eyther have bene, or ought to be the mirrors of mans
life, whose ends, for the excellence of their exhibiters . . . ought alwayes
to carry a mixture of profit, with them, no lesse then delight; Wee, . . .
resolved on this following argument (11. 1-15).

^ Hymenaei, 11. 1-20.

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 167

The invention should exhibit moral truth and be grounded solidly on
learning, by which Jonson meant largely, though not wholly, the learning
of antiquity. It is fairly obvious, for example, that his conception of
magnificence owed a good deal to Aristotle's definition of the virtue:

The magnificent man is like an artist; for he can see what is fitting and
spend large sums tastefully. For ... a state of character is determined by
its activities and its objects. Now the expenses of the magnificent man are
large and fitting. Such, therefore, are also his results; for thus there will be
a great expenditure and one that is fitting to its result. . . . And the mag-
nificent man will spend such sums for honor's sake; for this is common to
the virtues .... And he will consider how the result can be made most
beautiful and most becoming rather than for how much it can be produced
and how it can be produced most cheaply. It is necessary, then, that the
magnificent man be also liberal. . . . The most valuable possession is that
which is worth most, . . . but the most valuable work of art is that which
is great and beautiful (for the contemplation of such a work inspires
admiration, and so does magnificence); and a work has an excellence — vis.
magnificence — which involves magnitude. Magnificence is an attribute of
expenditures of the kind which we call honourable, e,g., those connected
with the gods . . . and all those that are proper objects of public-spirited
ambition (Ethics. ii22ai9-ii22a2o).

The effect of contemplating magnificence is admiration, which in turn,
according to Jonson's directives, should give rise to such activities as
understanding, respect, and moral imitation. The masque is intended to
arouse in the spectators respect for the king and the traditional virtues
of kingship, respect for and faith in the established social order. Since
the aspect of kingship most often honored is magnificence, the means of
honoring royalty must, according to the principle of decorum, be mag-
nificent; they must be proper to their end. The masque, in order to
praise this virtue adequately and gain the desired end, must be mag-
nificent in all its parts. Jonson tells us explicitly, in his preface to the
Masque of Blackness^ that the end proposed for the whole is mag-
nificence:

But (when it is the fate, even of the greatest, and most absolute births, to
need, and borrow a life of posterite) little had bene done to the studie of
magnificence in these, if presently . . . the spirits had also perished (11. 3-9).

And in Love Restored the contrast on which the device turns is actually
between niggardliness and magnificence, between the meanness of mind
represented by Plutus and the largeness of mind symbolized by Love
and his followers. But all of the various mean characters in Jonson's
anti-masques are made to contribute, by contrast with the nobles of the
main masque, to the magnificent purpose of the whole.

i68 Dolora Cunningham

Since James I was pre-eminently the man of high birth, great expendi-
ture on public occasions was becoming' to him J To spend lavishly for the
production of a masque was virtuous in these circumstances, and such
expenditure, both in its activities and its objects, met all of Aristotle's
requirements for magnificence. By definition an attribute of royalty, mag-
nificence is expressed and honored in the Jonsonian masque so as to
achieve the specific effects of admiration and respect, which, though
clearly related, are nevertheless distinct.

Admiration is, of course, a technical term in Renaissance ethics and
literary criticism. The complex history of the term with special reference
to tragedy has been traced by Professor J. V. Cunningham, who sum-
marizes the traditional notion of wonder as an end of poetry:

Wonder in Shakespeare is the effect of tragic incident and tragic style, as
well as of the marvellous turn in events. But this does not exhaust the
complexity of the notion of wonder; one more strand at least remains to
be unravelled. For the notion derives not only from the tradition of
literary criticism, as the proper effect of marvellous events, and the tradition
of rhetoric, as the proper effect of marvellous eloquence, but it derives also
from the tradition of philosophy, in which wonder is the primary cause of
learning.8

Speaking in the role of spectator, Jonson describes the effect of Hymenaei:

Such was the exquisit performance, as (beside the pompe, splendor, or what
we may call apparelling of such Presentments) that alone (had all else beene
absent) was of power to surprize with delight, and steale away the spectators
from themselves. Nor was there wanting whatsoever might give to the
furniture, or complement; eyther in riches, or strangenesse of the habites,
delicacie of daunces, magnificence of the scene, or divine rapture of musique
(11. 568-76).

Surprise, delight, and self-forgetfulness are all effects proper to wonder,
which, Jonson characteristically emphasizes, depends not so much upon
splendor in '*the apparelling*' as upon grace in the execution, effective
speech, and harmony of all the parts.

Although Jonson was not the only writer of masques who aimed at
wonder, his means of securing it helps us to distinguish the Jonsonian
masque from the work of others who, in general, depended largely upon
spectacle. Campion, for example, relied upon fantastic transformations
and music, and in his Lords Maske, Prometheus, the patron of mankind,
is asked to

'^ The Masque of Queens, according to E. K. Chambers' account, cost the Exchequer
three thousand pounds: The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923), Vol. I, p. 384.

^ Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (University of
Denver Press, 1951), p. 96.

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 169

... fill the lookers eyes

With admiration of thy fire and light,

And from thy hand let wonders fly tonight.^

Prometheus promises that the stars, which he has stolen from heaven
to contribute to "this night's honor," will be transformed into human
figures — that is, he will "let wonders fly" — and that he will have Orpheus
apply his music, "for it well helps to induce a Courtly miracle." Where
Campion used music to achieve these spectacular miracles, Jonson, al-
though placing considerable faith in the unifying force of a central
device, insisted that each element must contribute to the over-all effect.
Directives to the spectators, as in Elizabethan drama generally, are to
be found throughout Jonson's masques. In the Masque of Blackness,
Oceanus' amazement at the appearance of the Ethiopian river is the cue
to the audience:

My ceaseless current, now, amazed stands!

To see thy labour, through so many lands (11. 115-16).

They are to be amazed at Niger's presence and their amazement is to be
an incitement to knowledge; as they wonder at the sight and how it came
about, so Jonson fulfills his general purpose of letting no object of de-
light pass without its due mixture of profit.

Hymen's first speech in Hymenaei is preceded by "some signs of ad-
miration" which lead him to question the cause of "the more than usuall
light" inspiring his admiration. After Reason has banished "The foure
untemp'red Humors," they retire "amazed" while Hymen orders the
ceremonies of the main masque. Toward the end, as the champions of
Truth and Opinion prepare for battle, "a striking light seem'd to fill
all the hall," and an angel appears to exhort the hearers:

Princes, attend a tale of height, and wonder.
Truth is descended in a second thunder (11. 880-81).

In Oberon the dance of the lesser Fairies is preceded by a Song which
embodies an explicit list of wonder's causes and effects:

Seeke you majestic, to strike?

Bid the world produce his [James'] like.

Seeke you glorie, to amaze?

Here, let all eyes stand at gaze.
Seeke you wisedome, to inspire?

Touch, then, at no others fire.

® Campion's Works, ed. P. Vivian (Oxford, 1909), 11. 30-32.

170 Dolora Cunningham

Seeke you knowledge, to direct?

Trust to his, without suspect.
Seeke you pietie, to lead?

In his foot-steps, only, tread.
Every virtue of a king.
And of all, in him, we sing. (11. 370-81)

The magnificence of King James strikes and amazes all eyes, and this
wonder, in turn, incites the spectators to contemplate the other kingly
virtues of wisdom, knowledge, and piety, by which they are to be in-
spired, directed, and led.

This relationship between wonder and its virtues is further clarified in
The Vision of Delight^ where Wonder speaks to describe the beauties of
the main masque and Phant'sie's reply proposes pleasure and knowledge
as the two effects proper to wonder:

How better then they are, are all things made

By Wonder! But a while refresh thine eye.

He put thee to thy oftner, what, and why? (11. 167-69)

After the masquers are discovered as the glories of the spring, Wonder
again inquires into the causes of so much glory: * 'Whose power is this?
What God?" And Phant'sie gives the promised explanation:

Behold a King
Whose presence maketh this perpetuall Spring,
The glories of which Spring grow in that Bower,
And are the marks and beauties of his power (11. 200-04)

In this recognition scene, the masquers are directed by the Choir to ex-
press their homage in a dance; their knowledge of the source of wonder,
that is, leads to an expression of respect. Nothing could be more explicit
than this personification of the effect which Jonson sought for the
masque.

The proper response of the audience is, moreover, governed by the all-
pervasive principle of decorum. In Oberon, after a song in which James
is called *'the wonder ... of tongues, of eares, of eyes," the Sylvane re-
bukes the Satyres of the anti-masque (11. 310-22); although their antics
have been delightful, they are not properly respectful and must give way,
because they are incapable of experiencing the respect which the main
masque should arouse in them. The Sylvane goes on to say that Oberon
with his knights have come to "give the honor of their being" to the
king, and Silenus, the moderator of the Satyres, replies:

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 171

And may they well. For this indeed is hee,

My boyes, whom you must quake at, when you see ....

He is the matter of vertue, and placed high.

His meditations, to his height, are even. (11. 336-42)

Jonson obviously took great care to remind his audience that the
wonderful was to lead them not merely to a fatuous delight but to
knowledge and respect. In the closing songs of News from the New Worlds
he speaks complimentarily but precisely:

How ere the brightnesse may amaze.
Move you, and stand not still at gaze.

As dazeled with the light;
But with your motions fill the place.
And let their fulnesse win you[r] Grace,

Till you collect your sight.
So while the warmth you doe confesse.
And temper of these Raies, no lesse

To quicken then refine:
You may by knowledge grow more bold.
And so more able to behold

The bodie whence they shine.

[The first Dance followes.]
Now looke and see in yonder throne.
How all those beames are cast from one.

This is that Orbe so bright.
Has kept your wonder so awake;
Whence you as from a mirrour take

The Suns reflected light.
Read him as you would doe the booke
Of all perfection, and but looke

What his proportions be;
No measure that is thence contrived.
Or any motion thence derived.

But is pure harmonic. (11. 320-45)

The dancers are not to be stupefied at the vision of majesty: even though
temporarily blinded by the light, as Dante in Paradise, they are not to
neglect those acts of respect which will win them grace. By the perfection
of their motions, they confess the power of this grace in them, which is
also the means by which they may achieve knowledge of its source and
the strength to emulate the perfection embodied there.

Admiration, or wonder, as an effect of a Jonsonian masque has, then,
four aspects: it gives pleasure; it is a motive to knowledge; it is an in-

172 Dolora Cunningham

citement to respect; it is a basis of moral imitation. As spectators we
admire and so understand; we respect and so imitate the king as the
model of perfection. Wonder and respect, as specific effects, are to masque
as pity and fear are to tragedy.

When I accord the praise of royalty this central position in the masque,
I realize that I am asking for disagreement; for most critics seem certain
either that we must look upon the complimentary element as inexcusable
flattery or that we must patronize Jonson for it by citing historical cir-
cumstances to excuse his bad taste. Among the commentators, Professor
D. J. Gordon is to my knowledge practically alone in taking seriously
these characteristic passages. Writing of The Masque of Blackness and
The Masque of Beauty, he very rightly concludes that there is profound
substance within the convention of praising royalty:

The central idea of these two masques is clear and simple: The King's
presence turns Blackness into Beauty. . . . Compliments in this vein were,
of course, quite in order. . . . But more is involved here than the formal,
stereotyped gesture of the panegyrist; we are dealing here with notions
more "remov'd" than the everyday apotheosis of the Crown. A grander
apotheosis is adumbrated, in which James is given the position and func-
tion assigned to the Sun in the theory of Beauty held by the Florentine
Platonists.io

Since I am chiefly concerned here with the fact that Jonson defined and
practiced the masque as a literary form, I am not able to undertake a
detailed analysis of recurrent imagery. Certainly the concept of kingship
is frequently worked out in terms of the Sun-light symbolism, and Pro-
fessor Gordon is altogether correct in recognizing its importance. For the
present, however, I should simply question the wisdom of interpreting
this symbolism solely in terms of neo-Platonic doctrines. Is it necessary
to posit a strict parallelism with the Platonic commentaries of Pico della
Mirandola and Ficino? Such terminology as "most formall cause of all
dames beauties," for example, is not exclusively Platonic; and even if it
were, was Jonson altogether dependent upon the compilations of Pico
or Ficino for such knowledge? My brief analysis of the compliment to
the king in News from the New World indicates what seems to me a
more historically sound approach to the interpretation of the Sun-light
imagery. With respect to the masques of Blackness and Beauty, it can,
I think, be profitably argued that the transformation process is analogous
to that Christian transformation of fallen human nature which was
traditionally accomplished by the grace of God, whose special agent the

^°"The Imagery of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of
Beautie/' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VI (1943), 129. See also
his article, ''Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union," Ibid., VIII (1945), 107-45.

The Jonsonian Masque as a Literary Form 173

ruling monarch was generally acknowledged to be in Medieval-Renais-
sance political theory. ^^

But whether or not one agrees with Professor Gordon's interpretation
of particular passages, one must applaud his service to Jonson criticism
in undermining the unhistorical and altogether unsupportable prejudice
against those praises of kingship which provide the ethical substance of
the masque. For it may be said that the virtue of princes is to masque as
the fall of princes is to tragedy.

To emphasize another very likely point of disapproval: I have argued
that Jonson's use of comic materials was carefully regulated by the specific
conditions of masque and was governed by clearly defined formal
principles. I know it has been fashionable to see only another expression
of Jonson's arrogance in his spirited defense of poetry against the de-
mands of Inigo Jones's scenery and, consequently, to blame Jonson for
the decay of the masque.^^ g^t I believe such an approach to be only
another attack of critical arrogance upon Jonson's character. His prefaces
and descriptions prove that he was fully alive to the respective beauties
of spectacle, dance, and music; and his insistence upon the supremacy of
poetry in the hierarchical arrangement of the several elements, far from
breaking down form, was literally the only means of controlling the
various materials and of shaping them into a meaningful and coherent
whole. Jonson's preference for poetry is quite simply the logical outcome
of what the masque is, for the appropriate effects of wonder and respect
obviously cannot be achieved by spectacular stage sets. And, of course,
Jonson thought highly of poetry in itself, though his critics often have
not.

It is impossible for me to do battle here against the post-Romantic
conviction that the truly poetical can have nothing to do with mere
learning or with morality. Certainly neither Jonson nor his contempo-
raries shared this irrational view of poetry or this contempt for learning.
And, in common with most of his old-fashioned compatriots, Jonson took
for granted the ultimately moral purpose of all literature. To accuse
him of pursuing the moral at the expense of the literary is only to reveal
one's own confusion of ethical substance with overt didacticism and
one's own failure to perceive that Jonson remained true to his form
through symbolic development of a central theme.

It is certainly in order to urge that many currently held notions of the
masque be subjected to careful study and revision in the light of what
Jonson himself had to say. If we are to have a body of Jonson criticism
worthy of its subject, the historical and aesthetic principles on which he

^ See, among many discussions of this subject, L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in
the Age of Jonson (Chatto and Windus, 1937) and Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the
Homilies (Melbourne University Press, 1934).

^Herford and Simpson, Vol. II, pp. 297 and 311.

174 ' Dolora Cunningham

worked must be taken seriously. For these principles — of decorum, of
hierarchical unity, and of ethical purpose — are the principles of most
Elizabethan literature and, according to his evidence, form the theory
which Jonson followed in his efforts to establish the masque as a literary
form.

Chronology of Important Dates

1572 Birth of Jonson.

c. 1583-89 Education at Westminster School, London.

c. 1589 Apprenticeship to his stepfather, a bricklayer.

c. 1595 Marriage.

1597 First recorded connection with the theater, as actor and playwright
in the service of Philip Henslowe. Imprisonment for his share in a
lost satiric comedy. The Isle of Dogs.

1598 Every Man In His Humour, played by the Lord Chamberlain's
Company, with Shakespeare in a leading role. Arrest and imprison-
ment of Jonson after a duel in which he kills a fellow actor.

1599-1601 "The war of the theaters" between the select playhouses in the
City and the public playhouses on the Bankside, to which Jonson
contributes experimental plays labelled by him "comical satires."

1603 Death of Elizabeth I and accession of James I. Beginning of the era

of court masques and entertainments, composed by Jonson for great
state occasions.

1605 Imprisonment once again. Jonson this time voluntarily joins in
prison his collaborators in the comedy Eastward Ho, found offensive
for its mockery of the Scots.

1606 Volpone, acted at the Globe and at both Universities. Summons of
Jonson and his wife — Roman Catholics at the time — before the
authorities for failure to take communion in the Church of England.

1609 Epicene, or The Silent Woman, performed by the Children of the
Queen's Revels.

1610 The Alchemist, at the Globe.

1614 Bartholomew Fair, at the Hope Theater.

1616 Publication of Jonson's collected plays in a folio volume entitled

The Works of Benjamin Jonson, the first such collection in the
history of English printing.

1618 Journey to Scotland on foot. Visit to the Scottish poet Drummond

of Hawthornden, whose jotted record of Jonson's conversations is
published in abridged form in 1711, and in its entirety in 1833.

1623 Destruction of Jonson's library by fire. Contribution by Jonson of

commendatory verses to the first folio collection of Shakespeare's
plays.

175

176 Chronology of Important Dates

1625-32 Period of later masques and entertainments under Charles I and
Henrietta Maria, and in circumstances of turbulent rivalry with the
court architect, Inigo Jones.

1628 Jonson stricken by paralysis and confined to his chambers. Visited

henceforth by a cotdtie of younger disciples, "The Sons of Ben."

1637 Death of Jonson. Burial in Westminster Abbey, under the epitaph,

"O Rare Ben Jonson."

Notes on the Editor and Authors

Jonas A. Barish, the editor, is Associate Professor of English at the University
of California, Berkeley. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and
has taught at Yale. He is the author of articles on Jonson, and of Ben Jonson
and the Language of Prose Comedy (i960) .

T. S. Eliot^ perhaps the most distinguished man of letters in the English-speak-
ing world today, makes his home in England.

L,. C. Knights, of the University of Bristol, is Visiting Professor of English at
the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of a celebrated essay on
Shakespeare, "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?" and of Explorations^
An Approach to Hamlet, and Some Shakespearean Themes.

Harry Levin is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard
University. He has published on a wide range of subjects, including James
Joyce in ^n Introduction to James Joyce, Christopher Marlowe in The Over-
reacher, Shakespeare in The Question of Hamlet, and American literature in
The Power of Blackness,

Edmund Wilson, America's most brilliant journalist-critic, has published hun-
dreds of essays on literaure. His most important compilations include Axel's
Castle (a study of symbolist literature). The Wound and the Bow, The Triple
Thinkers, and Classics and Commercials (a collection largely of book reviews).

Arthur Sale is Lecturer at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He has edited
Volpone, All for Love, and Crabbe's The Village, and published essays on
Melville, Crabbe, and Emily Dickinson.

C. H. Herford^ the senior editor of the Oxford edition of Jonson's works, also
edited Jonson for the Mermaid Series, and wrote the entry on Jonson for
The Dictionary of National Biography, He died in 1931.

Paul Goodman, writer, has taught at the University of Chicago, Sarah Lawrence
College, and New York University. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Gestalt
Therapy, and the author of The Empire City, Communities, Growing Up
Absurd, and Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals,

Edward B. Partridge is Associate Professor of English at Bucknell University.

Ray L. Heffner, Jr., is Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of the
Faculties at Indiana University.

Joseph Allen Bryant, Jr., is head of the Department of English at The
Women's College of the University of North Carolina.

DoLORA Cunningham is Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State
College, San Francisco, California.

177

Selected Bibliography on Ben Jonson

General:

Enck, John J. Jonson and the Comic Truth. Madison: The University of Wis-
consin Press, 1957. An idiosyncratic, frequently perplexing, but nonetheless
acute and original study of Jonson as playwright.

Hays, H. R. "Satire and Identification: An Introduction to Ben Jonson,"
Kenyon Review, XIX (1957), 257-283. An essay which combats certain senti-
mental prejudices, particularly damaging to Jonson, likely to be brought
into the theater by playgoing audiences.

Herford, C. H., and Simpson, Percy. Ben Jonson: The Man and His Work,
Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925. These two volumes of prefatory matter —
biographical, critical, and documentary — to the complete edition of Jonson's
works form an irreducible minimum for any serious study of their subjects.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Study of Ben Jonson, London: Chatto and
Windus, Ltd., 1889. Despite numerous eccentricities of judgment, and Eliot's
unflattering opinion, this remains a highly attractive record of its author's
enthusiasm for Jonson.

On Particular Aspects and Individual Works:

Barish, Jonas A. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy, Cambridge:
The Harvard University Press, i960. A study of Jonson's prose style, and what
it implies for his practice as a dramatist.

Bryant, Joseph Allen, Jr. ''The Significance of Ben Jonson's First Requirement
for Tragedy: 'Truth of Argument,* *' Studies in Philology, XLIX (1952), 195-
213. A lucid analysis of Jonson's theory of history, and its effect on his
practice as a tragic playwright.

Campbell, Oscar J. Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,
San Marino, California: The Henry E. Huntington Library & Art Gallery,
1938. The most important study so far of Jonson's early comedy, and of the
plays relating to the War of the Theaters.

Gordon, D. J. "Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel
between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones," The Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, XII (1949), 152-178. A learned, rewarding account of the
philosophical background to the rivalry between Jonson and Jones in their
capacities as masque-makers to the court.

179

i8o Selected Bibliography on Ben Jonson

Hollander, John. Introduction to Ben Jonson, The Laurel Poetry Series. New
York: The Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1961. An attractive and suggestive essay
on Jonson's nondramatic poetry.

Levin, Harry. "Jonson's Metempsychosis," Philological Quarterly, XXII (1943),
231-239. An explication of the interlude in Act I of Volpone, becoming a wide-
ranging discussion of Jonson*s evolution as a comic playwright.

Ornstein, Robert. "Ben Jonson," in The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy.
Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, i960, pp. 84-104. A sensitive
critical estimate of Jonson's two tragedies.

Waith, Eugene. "The Poet's Morals in Jonson's Poetaster,'* Modern Language
Quarterly, XII (1951), 13-19. An acute discussion of some problems of in-
terpretation raised by the play.

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S-TC-25 Hardy, edited by Albert Guerard

S-TC-26 Jane Austen, edited by Ian Watt

S-TC-2 7 F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Arthur Mizener

S-TC-2 8 Emily Dickinson, edited by Richard B. Sewall

S-TC-29 Ezra Pound, edited by Walter Sutton

S-TC-30 Mark Twain, edited by Henry Nash Smith

S-TC-3 1 Byron, edited by Paul West

S-TC-32 Dryden, edited by Bernard N. Schilling

S-TC-33 Wallace Stevens, edited by Marie BorroflE

S-TC-34 Henry James, edited by Leon Edel

S-TC-35 Swift, edited by Ernest Tuveson

S-TC-36 Thomas Mann, edited by Henry Hatfield

S-TC-37 Malraux, edited by R. W. B. Lewis

S-TC-38 AuDEN, edited by Monroe K. Spears

S-TC-39 O'Neill, edited by John Gassner

S-TC-40 Shakespeare: The Tragedies, edited by

Alfred Harbage

S-TC-41 MoLiERE, edited by Jacques Guicharnaud

S-TC-42 Flaubert, edited by Raymond Giraud

S-TC-43 Keats, edited by Walter Jackson Bate

S-TC-44 Marlowe, edited by Clifford Leech

S-TC-45 Shakespeare: The Histories, edited by

Eugene M. Waith

S-TC-46 Dante, edited by John Freccero

S-TC-47 Shakespeare: The Comedies, edited by Kenneth Muir

S-TC-48 Samuel Johnson, edited by Donald J. Greene

S-TC-49 Shelley, edited by George Ridenour

S-TC-50 G. B. Shaw, edited by R. J. Kaufman

Forthcoming Titles

Beckett, edited by Martin Esslin
Blake, edited by Northrop Frye
Cervantes, edited by Lowry Nelson
Chekhov, edited by Robert L. Jackson
Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn
Conrad, edited by Marvin Mudrick
Dickens, edited by Martin Price
Faulkner, edited by Robert Penn Warren
E. M. FoRSTER, edited by Malcolm Bradbury
Goethe, edited by Victor Lange
Hawthorne, edited by Norman Pearson
Hopkins, edited by A. N. Kaul
Ibsen, edited by Rolf Fjelde
Joyce, edited by Cleanth Brooks
Milton, edited by Louis Martz
PoE, edited by Robert Regan
Sophocles, edited by Thomas Woodard
Tennyson, edited by Marguerite M. Sussman
Dylan Thomas, edited by Charles B. Cox
Tolstoy, edited by Ralph E. Matlaw
Virgil, edited by Steele Commager
Voltaire, edited by William L. Bottiglia
W. C. Williams, edited by J. Hillis Miller
Wqrdsworth, edited by M. H. Abrams

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