Jonson and his Contemporaries

Abstract

Although Shakespeare’s use of the overheard drama and the drama of direct audience address not only pervaded his work but was developed in particularly subtle ways, it will be apparent from the references made to other dramatists of his time that he was not alone in drawing on the popular tradition. Although the influence of the popular comedic tradition is most easily recognised in the clown acts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, often what had originated in the comedy of direct address was transmuted into something more complex. The debt that Aaron, Richard III, Iago and Falstaff owe to the Vice has frequently been commented upon. This is not just a matter of Aaron’s comic thrusts such as his response to Chiron’s ‘Thou hast undone our mother’, when the blackamoor Child is revealed: ‘Villain’, says Aaron, ‘I have done thy mother’ (Titus Andronicus iv.ii.76–7). Nor direct allusions to the Vice, such as Hal’s description of Falstaff as ‘that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years’ (I Henry IV, iv.ii.505–7). Nor Richard III moralising two meanings in one word like the formal Vice, Iniquity (iii.i. 82–3). Iago, even when he speaks of pluming up his will in double knavery (Othello, i.iii.400), is not as patently based on the Vice as is Richard III when he explains in the soliloquies which open and close i.i the way in which he will prove a villain by setting Clarence against the king, for example, ‘In deadly hate the one against the other’ (l.35).