Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

-the Induction on the stage to the London comedy Bartholomew Fair (1614,
1631) states that comedy should be ‘merry, and as full of noise as sport, made to
delight all, and to offend none’; based on the interaction between illusion and
reality, actor vs. non-actor
- criticises the taste for revenge tragedies cultivated by Kyd and Shakespeare, as
well as the later vogue for the tragic-comical mixed drama of Shakespeare’s last
phase of problem plays/tragicomedies (The Tempest) – Jonson expresses his
dislike for ‘Tales, Tempests and such drolleries’, which he considers to contain
a ‘concupiscence of jigs and dances’
- Shakespeare seems to have submitted to the public demand for romantic
escapism and happy endings for tragic drama – combining the elevated and the
ordinary
- Jonson favours urban comedies – exuberant, aggressive, subversive
- he also provides royal entertainments, masques, poems to prominent
aristocrats, proving his deference for monarchic rule and aristocratic patronage,
but remains an unthinking respecter neither of persons nor of authority
- the comedies are characterised by extravagance of characterisation and
neatness of plotting, exposing ridiculous absurdities, anomalies of behaviour,
inconsistencies of character (‘humours’)
- his crafted plays of the early 1600s exploit patterns of power and
manipulation; characters evinced pride in their native genius, but fall prey to
flawed ambitions – confounded by language
- The Alchemist – comedy of character whose egocentricity, self-centredness
and pride in professional jargon preclude his listening and responding to others;
the characters are divided by their voices, idiolects, expressions – everyone gets
lost in words; the professional trickster as exposer of folly and maker of fools;
noisy quarrels: ‘I fart at thee, I’ll strip you, I’ll gum your silks/With goodstrong
water’; engineered schemes in motion, but the inevitable catastrophe is averted;
action in Blackfriars house; Subtle, the alchemist, vanishes to gull clients sent
by Face; Subtle and Face gull urban suckers (Mammon Knight, Drugger
(tobacco dealer), Surley (gamester), Puritans (Tribulation Wholesome and
Ananias)
- Jonson is given to manifestoes and declarations of literary intent, expressed at
length in Timber or Discoveries Made upon Men and Manners (1640); comedy
is proclaimed as equal to tragedy since ancient Greek drama; comedy offers
moral instruction ‘no lesse than the Tragicks’; ‘the moving of laughter’ is as
essential to comedy as ‘equity, truth, perspicuity, candour’
- the Prologue to the 2nd version of Every Man in his Humour (1616 volume);
dislike for plays which make ‘a child now swaddled, to proceed Man, and then
shoot up, in one beard and weed /Past threescore years’; he will have no
apologetic choruses, no scenic effects, no ominous noises;
...deeds and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as comedy would choose,
When she should show an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.
Except we make them such, by loving still
Our popular errors, when we know they’re ill.
I mean such errors as you’ll all confess
By laughing at them, they deserve no less’

-disposes of artifice for plain words, which subvert rather than confront; the
plays represent a shared and deficient humanity rather than elevated and
isolated heroes
- revision of Every Man in his Humour of 1598 (Shakespeare) – the Florentine
setting is reworked in 1616 as a London play – Lorenzo-Knowells, Musco-
Brainworm; Bobadill(a) as a Paul’s man, a lounging, professional flaneur who
sports with human folly; study of whimsical excess disturbing the steady,
reasoned development of human affairs
- excess determines Volpone (1605-6) – most subtle, various, energetic; Epicene
or The Silent Woman (1609-10, 1616), The Alchemist (1610-12), Bartholomew
Fair (1614, 1631)
- Epicene or The Silent Woman – the obsessions of Morose, ‘a gent that loves
no noise’; his absurd hate of city life sounds makes him withdraw: ‘All
discourses but mine own afflict me, they seem harsh, impertinent and irksome’;
an eccentric misanthropist exposed to public ridicule; to spite his nephew, he
marries a silent woman, who proves to be a nagging shrew, then a boy in
disguise; the play ends in ambiguity, divorce and the financial justification of
the disinherited nephew
- Bartholomew Fair is set in London’s great August Fair: side-shows, eatery,
brothel (Ursula’s pig tent), privy – a carnivalesque city populated by Justice
Adam Overdo, Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, the gallants Quarlous and
Winwife; draw in into reversals, ambiguities, surprises, role changes –
acceptance of frailty
- Volpone (The Fox) reveals a savage Italienate menagerie: Fox, Felsh-fly,
Vulture, Crow, Raven; characters not reduced to concepts; Celia (Heavenly) and
Bonario represent morality in a naughty world
- Venice – a setting of unscrupulous, corrupt merchants, mercenary husbands,
corrupt lawyers, visitors who mistake dissimulation for sophistication
- all values are reversed or redefined; Volpone glories more ‘in the cunning
purchase of my wealth than in the glad possession, since I gain no common way
– gold over nature, love heaven; no Marlowian outsider, no aspiring intellectual
or clever upstart; an aristocratic insider, with a flair for mercantile acquisitions;
acts roles with creative energy (plutocrat, invalid, mountebank, musician, poet,
lover); obliged to become invalid; faulty Venitian justice
- Jonson distrusts romance and political ideals, unlike his beloved Shakespeare
‘Good morning to the day; and next my gold
Open the shrine, that I may see my saint
Hail the world’s soul, and mine
More glad than is the teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep trough the horns of the celestial Ram
Am I, to view thy splendour darkening his;
That lying there, amongst my other hoards,
Show’st like a flame by night, or like the day
Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled
Unto the centre. O, thou son of Sol
But brighter than thy father, let me kiss
With adoration, thee and every relic
Of sacred treasure in this blessed room.’