Jonson’s Large and Unique View of Life

Abstract

“Dryden lacked what his master Jonson possessed, a large and unique view of life; he lacked insight; he lacked profundity.”¹So wrote T. S. Eliot fifty years ago in that magisterial way of his. We don’t talk much any more, thank heaven, about what Dryden lacked, not after all we have discovered about how much he has to say and how consummately he says it. But we can still talk confidently, I trust, about what Jonson possessed, though I had better begin by making two admissions about his reputation, past and present. One is that not everyone would agree with Eliot even today. Alfred Harbage, for instance, thinking that satire offers only a minority report on human nature and that Jonson wrote satire only for a coterie, would apparently deny his view of life largeness, though he might grant it uniqueness — of a repellent kind.² Even J. B. Bamborough, who has done much for Jonsonian studies, wondered in 1959 whether Jonson was a minor genius or only a man of great talent, and still felt in 1970 that he lacked the uniqueness of vision Shakespeare had.³ The other admission is that for part of the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries many readers and critics considered Jonson’s view narrow or obscure or laboured or coarse—to choose some of the quieter terms of dismissal.