Ben Jonson: A Literary Life

249 Pages·1995·27.363 MB·English

by  W. David Kay (auth.)

BEN JONSON
Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English
Lancaster University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the
most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes
follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of
traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional,
publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. The
role and status of 'the author' as the creator of literary texts is a
vexed issue in current critical theory, where a variety of social,
linguistic and psychological approaches have challenged the old
concentration on writers as specially gifted individuals. Yet
reports of 'the death of the author' in literary studies are (as Mark
Twain said of a premature obituary) an exaggeration. This series
aims to demonstrate how an understanding of writers' careers can
promote, for students and general readers alike, a more informed
historical reading of their works.
Published titles
Cedric C. Brown Michael O'Neill
JOHN MILTON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Richard Dutton Leonee Ormond
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ALFRED TENNYSON
Jan Fergus George Parfitt
JANE AUSTEN JOHN DONNE
Kenneth Graham Gerald Roberts
HENRY JAMES GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Paul Hammond Felicity Rosslyn
JOHN DRYDEN ALEXANDER POPE
W. David Kay Tony Sharpe
BEN JONSON T.S.ELIOT
MaryLago Gary Waller
E. M. FORSTER EDMUND SPENSER
Alasdair D. F. Macrae Cedric Watts
W. B. YEATS JOSEPH CONRAD
Joseph McMinn Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham
JONATHAN SWIFT CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE
Kerry McSweeney John Worthen
GEORGE ELIOT (MARIAN EVANS) D. H. LAWRENCE
JohnMepham
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Ben Jonson
A Literary Life
W. David Kay
Associate Professor of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-0-333-46447-2 ISBN 978-1-349-23778-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23778-4
© W. David Kay 1995
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-46446-5
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1995
ISBN 978-0-312-12451-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kay, W. David, 1939-
Ben Jonson: a literary life I W. David Kay.
p. em. - (Literary lives)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-12451-9
1. Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637-Biography. 2. Authors, English-Early
modern, 150Q-1700-Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Literary
lives (New York, N.Y.)
PR263l.K39 1995
822' .3--dc20
[B] 93-34481
CIP
To Marilyn
Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
1 Fathers 1
2 The Actor-Playwright 12
3 The Emerging Classicist 27
4 Comical Satire and the War of the Theatres 43
5 Matters of State 63
6 Learned Inventions 78
7 Jonson and London Life 94
8 The Poet and His Patrons 114
9 The King's Poet 136
10 The Beleaguered Muse 160
Epilogue: Sons 184
Suggestions for Further Reading 190
Notes 194
Index 227
vii
Preface
Although modern estimates of Ben Jonson's art rank him decidedly
below his rival and contemporary William Shakespeare, at his death
in 1637 many readers considered him to be the pre-eminent English
poet and playwright. The magnificent folio edition of his Works in
1616 had given dramatic poetry a new dignity and set a precedent
followed in the Shakespeare folio of 1623. His comedies, though
lacking the romantic interest of Shakespeare's or Beaumont and
Fletcher's, seemed through their comical satire to fulfil the Horatian
office of poetry - to instruct and to delight - more thoroughly than
those of his great peers. His tragedies Sejanus and Catiline were
admired for their presentation of Roman history as a mirror of
Jacobean politics. His graceful lyrics provided a pattern for the next
generation of Cavalier poets, and his imitation of Latin models in his
poetry of praise and blame helped to shape the neo-classic poetics of
Dryden and Pope.
The eminence and influence which Jonson attained in the world of
seventeenth-century letters are the result not only of his artistic gifts,
but also of his powerful personality and his ability to exploit the
medium of print. The impulse toward rivalry was a fundamental
motivation for Jonson; when we look closely at his literary milieu we
discover that he was often reacting very particularly to works by his
competitors or seeking to surpass them in some way. Yet by
suppressing many of his plays and publishing others with
dedications and commendatory poems in a format more customary
for serious non-dramatic verse, he created an illusory sense of
himself as a writer who swam against the dramatic currents of his
age, defying popular taste and championing classical principles.
Moreover, his public persona was a paradoxical mixture of the
prophetic and the familiar. On the one hand, he was a poetic high
priest, nobly celebrating virtue and satirising vice while exalting the
role of letters in the ideal commonwealth. On the other hand, he was
the waggish 'Ben' - the irrepressible character whose known
idiosyncrasies helped to excuse his unbridled ridicule, egotism,
and irreverent familiarity with the great.
viii
Preface ix
Jonson's skill at manipulating his image poses special problems for
the biographer. As Alexander Leggatt has shrewdly observed, his
mask, like Shaw's, 'could be a way not of embodying but of
concealing the essential man'.1 We must continually probe behind
the public figure for what can be deduced about his personal
behaviour and compare the actual facts of his literary development
with the shape imposed on his career by print. Much of his
biographical record has been lost to time, but the survival of some
records, letters, and manuscript poems gives us a fuller picture of
his relationships with his contemporaries and supplements the
'authorised' version of his career suggested by the arrangement of
the 1616 Folio. Most revealing, though not without its biases and
interpretive challenges, is the manuscript 'Informations by Ben
Jonson to W[illiam] D[rummond] when he came to Scotland upon
foot, 1619', a transcript of remarks made by Jonson to his host, the
Laird of Hawthornden, during Jonson's two or three week visit in
the Christmas season of 1618/19. Now generally known as the
Conversations with William Drummond, it provides a first-person
account of Jonson's life as he cared to tell it in 1619 and frank
judgments about his poetic rivals and patrons. Even here, Jonson is
partly on stage - boasting of his intimacy with English poets and
courtiers and reciting his poems or criticising those of others to
impress his provincial host, whose private opinion of his guest's
character is reserved for a final blistering summation.
The Jonson who emerges from a full reading of the record is
therefore much more complex than the figure he would like us to
see, a Jonson often troubling in his contradictions, but always
fascinating. Dependent on the theatre in his early years and
grounded in its conventions as an actor-playwright, he adopted
an air of lofty scorn for popular taste even as he exploited popular
dramatic formulas in new ways. Given to espousing norms that
were opposed to his own deep-seated tendencies, he denied
behaviour that contradicted his principles. Gifted (or cursed) with
an irreverent wit and a stubbornly assertive character, he chose to
write in forms such as the court masque and the poetry of praise
that invited flattery. Alienated from the corruption and extra
vagance of the Jacobean court, he was gradually drawn into its life
and became dependent on its rewards. Yet even though he did not
perfectly conform to his own ideals, Jonson's life is an instructive
example of the challenges faced by a Renaissance humanist
committed to a programme of moral and artistic reform. More-
Preface
X
over, the very contradictions of his personality are expressed in the
varied qualities of his art: social tact, ethical seriousness, learned
inventiveness, lyric grace, playful self-criticism, comic irony, satiric
wit, vivid realism - the list is impressive in its range.
Every biographer of Jonson stands greatly indebted to the
monumental edition of his works by C. H. Herford and Percy and
Evelyn Simpson. Their Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), brings
together, in addition to the texts, most of his life records, early
commentary on his works, stage and publication history, and a mass
of helpful annotation on literary sources, contemporary allusions
and the persons he addresses. Serious students of his work should
become thoroughly acquainted with its resources. Herford's brief
biographical sketch has recently been updated by two studies:
Rosalind Miles' Ben Jonson: His Life and Work (London, 1986), offers a
lively survey of the biographical record, while David Riggs' Ben
Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) synthesises much recent
critical and historical scholarship into an intricate psychoanalytic
interpretation of Jonson's life and work. In accordance with the
focus of this series, the present volume aims at a literary life which
emphasises Jonson's efforts to maintain his independence from the
conditions of theatrical production and court patronage and
considers how his works are influenced by and yet positioned
against those of his competitors.
Since I have written with a student audience in mind, I have
chosen modernised texts of Jonson's works. Quotations from his
Epigrams, The Forest, Underwoods, Miscellaneous Poems, Timber: or
Discoveries and Conversations with Drummond (abbreviated respec
tively in citations and notes as Epig., For., Und., M.P., Disc. and
Conv.) are from George Parfitt (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems
(Harmondsworth, 1988), which retains Jonson's expressive punc
tuation. Quotations from the plays and masques are from G. A.
Wilkes (ed.), The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1981)
and Stephen Orgel (ed.), Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques (New
Haven, 1969), abbreviated as Plays and Masques respectively. In the
interests of consistency, I have modernised the spelling and
orthography of all other texts and titles, even when I have quoted
from old-spelling texts. I have, however, retained the spelling
humourous to indicate the Jonsonian sense of 'affected or
temperamental behaviour like that understood to be caused by an
imbalance of the four bodily fluids or humours' (see Chapter 2).
Latin titles are given in English translation with the original Latin in