Jonson and Shakespeare

236 Pages·1983·20.395 MB·English

by  Ian Donaldson (eds.)

JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
The comparison of Shakespeare and Jonson has for some
time been looked upon with disfavour, no doubt because in
former times the practice was discredited by over-use and
over-simplification. Since the time of Dryden it had been a
familiar literary game to match Shakespeare and Jonson
against each other in order to praise the one and express
critical reservations about the other - Jonson almost always
coming off worse.
This collection, which derives from a conference held in
the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, considers the
two writers independently and in the context of each other
and seeks to set the record straight, not only on the value of
comparison, but also on the relative merits of each of the
playwrights. Scholars from Australia, New Zealand, the
United Kingdom and the USA have written essays ranging
over many topics, including studies of individual plays by
Jonson and Shakespeare, special themes in their work, and
staging and theatre audiences. The essays reveal the distinct
and varied nature of each writer's dramatic genius.
Ian Donaldson is Professor of English and Director of the
Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National
University, Canberra. He is the author of The World
Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding and The
Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations and the
editor of Ben Jonson: Poems and Transformations in
Modern European Drama.
The Humanz"tz.es Research Centre/Macmillan Series
General editor: Professor Ian Donaldson, Director of the
HRC
This series is designed for publications deriving from the
Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National
University, Canberra. The series, which is an occasional
one, will include monographs by the academic staff and
Visiting Fellows of the Humanities Research Centre, and
collections of essays from the Centre's conferences and
seminars.
Ian Donaldson (editor): JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE
Ian Donaldson (editor): TRANSFORMATIONS IN
MODERN EUROPEAN DRAMA
J.
E. Flower: LITERATURE AND THE LEFT IN
FRANCE
Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandie and Pauric Travers
(editors): IRISH CULTURE AND NATIONALISM,
1750-1950
JONSON AND
SHAKESPEARE
Edited by
Ian Donaldson
in association with
Palgrave Macmillan
© Australian National University 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-32388-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1983 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Distributed in Australia by
Australian National University Press
PO Box 4, Canberra ACT 2600
ISBN 978-1-349-06185-3 ISBN 978-1-349-06183-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06183-9
Contents
Proeface vii
Notes on the Contr'ibutoros xiii
1 The Fool as Clergyman (and Vice-versa):
an Essay on Shakespearian Comedy
Timothy G. A. NeLson
2 Hal and Hamlet: the Loneliness of Integrity 18
Der'ick R. c. Marosh
3 Remembrance and Revenge: HamLet, Macbeth and
The Tempest 35
MichaeL NeiLL
4 TrooiLus and Croessida 57
F. H. Langman
5 Shakespeare's and Jonson's View of Public
Theatre Audiences 74
A Z.vin B. Ker>n.an
6 The Idea of the Play in A Midsummer' Night's Droeam
and BarothoLomew Fairo 89
D. H. Croig
7 Comic Procedures in Shakespeare and Jonson:
Much Ado About Nothing and The ALchemist 101
F. H. Maroes
8 'Sportful Malice': Duping in the Comedies of
Jonson and Shakespeare 119
Ann
B~ake
9 The Rusticity of Ben Jonson 135
J. B. Bamboroough
10 Staging Jonson 156
Peter' Bames
v
vi Contents
11 Stage Perspective and Elevation in CoPioLanus
and Sejanus 163
Fru.ncis BePPY
12 The Roman State in JuLius Caesar' and Sejanus 179
Anthony MiZ LeY'
13 Insubstantial Pageants Preserved: the Literary
and Musical Sources for the Jonsonian Masque 202
PeteY' WaUs
Index 219
Preface
The papers in this volume derive from the Humanities
Research Centre's conference on Jonson and Shakespeare held
at the Australian National University, Canberra, from 14 to
18 May 1979. Not all of the papers delivered at the confer
ence are printed here, nor (alas) is it possible for a book
of this kind to capture all of the conference's livelier
exchanges and events. The week's activities included a pro
gramme of Shakespearian and Jonsonian films (introduced by
Neil McDonald), leading to an animated discussion on the
problems of filming Shakespeare's plays; a concert of
Shakespearian and Jonsonian music presented by Hartley
Newnham and his Melbourne-based group, La Romanesca; a
demonstration at the conference dinner of Elizabethan danc
ing by Alan and Elizabeth Brissenden, culminating in a pavan
danced by members of the conference; and a number of dis
cussions on the staging of Shakespeare's plays, including a
talk by one of Australia's leading Shakespearian directors,
John Bell of the Nimrod Theatre, Sydney. Three of the papers
published here were not delivered at the conference: those
of Peter Barnes and Peter Walls, who were unhappily pre
vented from travelling to Canberra to give them in person,
and that of Francis Berry, which was written and discussed
in the Centre in the weeks immediately following the confer
ence. All of the published papers, however, were written in
response to the general stimulus of the HRC's 'Drama Year',
which brought together scholars and lovers of the theatre
from several different countries, and saw the staging of six
different drama conferences as well as many related
activities.
The aim of the Jonson and Shakespeare conference was tc
encourage discussion of the two writers' work both indepen
dently and, more especially, comparatively. At one time, tht
practice of comparing Jonson's and Shakespeare's work waf
looked upon with some disfavour. The reason was quitE
simple: the practice had become discredited through over-usE
and over-simplification. Since the time of Dryden, it hac
been a familiar literary game to match Shakespeare anc
Jonson against each other in order to praise the one anc
vii
viii PPeface
express critical reservations about the other. ' •••
naming him with his great cotemporary', wrote Francis
Gentleman of Jonson in 1770, 'is pairing authors as poult
erers do rabbits, a fat and a lean one'.[1] Yet paired they
inevitably were, and Jonson -great in bulk and in repu
tation in his own lifetime - was now inevitably cast as the
lean rabbit, the writer whose powers and proportions so
regrettably failed to measure up to those of Shakespeare.
Just how damaging these set-piece comparisons might be is
apparent in Hazlitt's treatment of Jonson in his ~ectuPes on
the EngLish Comic WPitePB in 1819. 'The superiority of
Shakspeare's natural genius for comedy cannot be better
shewn than by a comparison between his comic characters and
those of Ben Jonson', Hazlitt begins ominously, and proceeds
at once to itemise the two writers' characteristic strengths
and weaknesses. Jonson is a grub, not a butterfly; his works
are derivative, and read like translations; they are
cramped, laboured, dry, literal, meagre, repulsive, un
amiable, leaden, obtuse, obscure, forced, tedious, cut and
dried, cross-grained, mean, mechanical, extravagant, improb
able, scholastic, crabbed, clogged, far-fetched, pedantic.
Worst of all, says Hazlitt himself now seemingly un
stoppable, as he warms to the pleasurable task of compara
tive denigration Jonson never knew when he should stop:
'ALiquando suffLaminandus e~t, is as true of him as it was
of Shakspeare, but in quite a different sense.' Shakespeare
for Hazlitt is indeed quite different: fantastical, delight
ful, full of spirit, felicity, and mastery over his subject,
exuberant, liberal and unrestrained, touching the springs of
nature.[2] The entire comparison reads more like an exhi
bition of fixed critical prejudices than a genuine explor
ation of the two writers' different styles of imaginative
apprehension and creation. That Jonson is routinely dis
advantaged by comparisons of this sort - that his more
positive qualities are indeed sometimes scarcely admitted to
exist - is obvious. What is less obvious but no less import
ant is that Shakespeare too may suffer through the perpetu
ation of certain simple comparative ideas about the nature
of his, and Jonson's, art and genius.
For Hazlitt, like others before and after him, was the
inheritor of a well-established set of neatly-contrasted
ideas about Jonson and Shakespeare, ideas which were in many
cases first formulated in the seventeenth century, hardening
into critical commonplaces in the course of the eighteenth
century. One regular way of contrasting the two writers, for
example, was in terms of art and nature: Jonson's writing
was seen as an instance of laboured and learned art, while
Shakespeare's was the product of wild and untutored nature.
PY'eface ix
The contrast may have originated in the lifetime of the two
men: Jonson himself notoriously reported to William Drummond
of Hawthornden 'That Shaksperr wanted Arte' - though he was
later to modify this verdict in his affectionate poem to
Shakespeare's memory. By the mid-century, the contrast was
well established. 'Comparing him with ShakespeaP', wrote
Richard r'lecknoe of Jonson in 1664, 'you shall see the
difference betwixt Nature and Art.' The verdict is repeated
throughout the eighteenth century. Shakespeare, wrote Lewis
Theobald in 1733, 'owed all to his prodigious natural
Genius', while Jonson owed 'all his Excellence to his Art,
by which he sometimes strain'd himself to an uncommon
Pitch'. 'Nature in him was almost lost in art', William
Collins concurred. Jonson's merit, wrote David Hume, 'has
been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude
genius prevailed over the rude art of his cotemporary'. As
Pope, with understandable tartness, wrote: 'Not one but
nods, and talks of Johnson's Art, I Of Shakespear's Nature
••• '.[3] And there were other, similar, contrastive com
monplaces about the two writers. Jonson's work, for example,
was constantly said to exhibit the quality of judgement,
while Shakespeare's exhibited the power of fancy, in which
Jonson was thought to be sadly deficient. Jonson was a
servile imitator, while Shakespeare was a true original,
beholden to no-one for his ideas. Jonson was cold and en
vious and spiteful in his remarks about Shakespeare, who
fortunately was warm and generous and bore no grudges to
anyone.[4]
Few of these generalisations will survive close scrutiny.
One only needs to glance at the eight large volumes of
Geoffrey Bullough's NaY"Pative and DY'amatic SouJ"ces of
ShakespeaJ"e to realise that Shakespeare was not so wholly
original as once was imagined; while the comparatively
meagre source materials for Jonson's comedies show that
Jonson was not always a mere imitator. The work of such
scholars as T. W. Baldwin and, more recently, Emrys Jones
has scotched once and for all the myth that Shakespeare's
genius was in some mysterious sense 'untutored'; and we now
know (conversely) that Jonson was in all probability less
formidably learned than once was imagined, and that he prob
ably picked up some at least of his classical learning at
second hand from Renaissance encyclopaedias and other di
gests of knowledge.[S] The contrast between Shakespeare's
luxuriant fancy and Jonson's prosaic rationality is equally
difficult to sustain. Much of Jonson's work (The Sad Shep
hePd and The Vision of Delight, for example, or the speeches
of Volpone or Sir Epicure Mammon) is more startlingly im
aginative and lovingly fantasticated than the traditional