Abstract
In this chapter, Line Cottegnies examines how, in his 1640 edition of Jonson’s ‘Englished’ Ars Poetica, the bookseller John Benson included several pieces praising the poet as a second Horace, an outstanding writer and dramatist, and an accomplished translator. Comparing Benson’s paratexts with those displayed in his edition of Shakespeare’s poems, she argues that, as a marketing strategy, they reflect the cultural significance and increasing commodification of translation in the mid-seventeenth century; moreover, they make The Art of Poetry Jonson’s own poetic manifesto, thus blurring the distinction between author and translator.
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Notes
- 1.
Victoria Moul, Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 3. See also Robert B. Pierce, ‘Ben Jonson’s Horace and Horace’s Ben Jonson’, Studies in Philology, 78.1 (1981), 20–31; Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981); Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Joanna Martindale, ‘The Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom: The Horace of Ben Jonson and his Heirs’, in Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, edited by Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 50–85; and more recently Marie-Alice Belle, ‘Autour de la question des “communautés de lecteurs”: Discours liminaire et amicitia horatienne chez Jonson et ses contemporains’, in Horace et l’invention de la vie privée, edited by Line Cottegnies, Nathalie Dauvois, and Béatrice Delignon (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), pp. 359–80.
- 2.
Ben Jonson, Poetaster or The arraignment, as it hath beene sundry times priuately acted in the Blacke Friers, by the children of her Maiesties Chappell (London: M. Lownes, 1602).
- 3.
See Gabriela Schmidt, ‘Enacting the Classics: Translation and Authorship in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster’, in Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture, edited by Gabriela Schmidt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 111–45. This did not go without prompting acrimonious responses from some of Jonson’s contemporaries, most particularly John Marston and Thomas Dekker, who were the butts of Jonson’s satire in Poetaster. See in particular Matthew Steggle, ‘Horace the Second, or Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and the Battle for Augustan Rome’, in The Author as Character: Representing Historical Writers in Western Literature, edited by P. Franssen and A. J. Hoenselaars (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), pp. 118–30.
- 4.
See in particular Marie-Alice Belle, ‘(Auto-)portraits de l’auteur en traducteur: autorité horacienne et ethos du traducteur en Angleterre au xviie siecle’, Camenae, 17 (2015), 1–15.
- 5.
An exception is Victoria Moul, ‘Translation as Commentary? The Case of Ben Jonson’s Ars Poetica’, Palimpsestes, 20 (2007), 59–77, and Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition, pp. 175–8.
- 6.
Moul, ‘Translation as Commentary?’, p. 59.
- 7.
Essays of John Dryden, edited by W. P. Kerr, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), I, p. 238. For Roscommon’s criticism of the same translation in the preface of his own 1680 version of the Art of Poetry, see Dillon Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay of Translated Verse (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1684), sig. A2.
- 8.
D. M. Hooley, ‘“But Above All He Excelleth in a Translation”: Ben Jonson’s Horace’, in ‘A Certain Text’: Close Readings and Textual Studies on Shakespeare and Others. In Honor of Thomas Clayton, edited by Linda Anderson and Janis Lull (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2002), pp. 150–72; for a negative appreciation, see Charles Martindale, ‘Unlocking the Word-Hoard: In Praise of Metaphrase’, Comparative Criticism, 6 (1984), 47–72 (54).
- 9.
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 10.
Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 3, 4.
- 11.
A notable critical exception is Marie-Alice Belle’s study of the paratexts in all editions of Horace in the period, including this 1640 one. Marie-Alice Belle, ‘Horace Englished: Modes de l’appropriation dans le paratexte des traductions anglaises des œuvres d’Horace (1557–1640)’, in À chacun son Horace. Horace dans les débats poétiques en France et en Europe aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, edited by Nathalie Dauvois, Michel Jourde, and Jean-Charles Montferrand (Paris: Champion, forthcoming).
- 12.
Neil Rhodes, ‘Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation’, in Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 107–20.
- 13.
Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, edited by Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 45–55 (p. 46).
- 14.
‘To the Readers’, in Sejanus His Fall [1605], edited by Philip Ayres, The Revels Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 50.
- 15.
Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden, edited by R. F. Patterson (London and Glasgow: Blackie & Sons, 1923), p. 9.
- 16.
Ben Jonson’s Conversations, pp. 82–3.
- 17.
In his 1816 edition of Jonson’s works, William Gifford mentions the existence of three different extant versions of Jonson’s first draft of the Ars Poetica, which differ sometimes significantly; however, no manuscript for this version has emerged, although four manuscript extracts from the second edition, which is described below, are listed in the online Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700. See William Gifford, ed., The Works of Ben Jonson in 9 Volumes (London: Printed for G. and W. Nicol et al., 1816), Vol. 9, p. 76: ‘Many transcripts of this version got abroad; these differed considerably from one another, and all perhaps, from the original copy. In the three which have reached us, though all were published nearly at the same time, variations occur in almost every line.’ He does not give any details about locations, however. For the four manuscript extracts, see CELM, online: http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/jonsonben.html#bodleian-rawlinson-other_id512843, accessed 15 July 2016.
- 18.
Daniel Heinsius, ed., Q. Horatii Flacci Opera Omnia, cum notis D. Heinsii. Accedit Horatii ad Pisones epistola, Aristotelis de poetica libellus (Antwerp : Plantin, 1610).
- 19.
See Colin Burrow, ‘Introduction’ to The Art of Poetry, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, edited by David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Vol. 7, pp. 3–8.
- 20.
For textual choices, see Burrow, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–67. Jonson, however, is notorious for revising his texts at every opportunity, even after they had been published, which casts doubt on the validity of such a way of thinking about his texts. For a useful distinction between ‘new intentions’ and ‘final intentions’ see for instance G. T. Tanselle, ‘The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention’, Studies in Bibliography, 29 (1976), 167–211.
- 21.
Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–53), hereafter Ben Jonson; The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, online: http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/, accessed 15 July 2016.
- 22.
Michael Hattaway cautiously agrees that I. C. may be Clayton and finds Gifford’s attribution to John Cleveland ‘unlikely’ (The New Inn. Ben Jonson, edited by Michael Hattaway, The Revels Plays (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 213, note 1). See also Herford and Simpson’s Ben Jonson, Vol. 11, pp. 429, 451. For the Gifford attribution, see The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. 5, p. 453. The poem is not retained in the canon of Cleveland’s works by the editors of his poetry, Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington, however (The Poems of John Cleveland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)). Neither are the two poems attributed to a ‘I. Cl’ in memory of Ben Jonson and published in Jonsonius Virbius (London: E. P[urslowe], 1638), which are perhaps by the same James Clayton (pp. 27–8).
- 23.
Ben: Ionson’s execration against Vulcan; With divers epigrams by the same author to severall noble personages in this kingdome. Never published before (London: Printed by J[ames] O[kes] for John Benson, 1640). The imprimatur states that it was issued on 14 December 1639 and published in 1640 (while the Horace volume, also published in 1640, was only authorised on 12 February 1639/1640). It seems that Benson had in the meantime come across a text of The Masque of Gypsies, which justified a new edition, but the ‘novelty’ of the 1640 volume was hyped.
- 24.
On Windsor as a bibliophile, see David Rogers, ‘Antony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’, in Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature: History and Bibliography, edited by Gerardus Antonius Maria Janssens and Flor G. A. M. Aarts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), pp. 179–94 (p. 187). Catherine Somerset, Lady Windsor had danced in The Masque of Beauty and The Masque of Queens (see The Jonson Encyclopedia, edited by D. Heyward Brock and Maria Palacas (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 326).
- 25.
His translation of Horace, whose ‘main concern was with Horace’s metre’, seems to have met with approval. See Valerie Edden, ‘The Best of Lyrick Poets’, in Horace, edited by C. D. N. Costa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 135–60 (p. 150).
- 26.
Alastair Bellamy, ‘“Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse”: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603–1628’, in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, edited by Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 285–310 (pp. 285–6).
- 27.
For Benson’s various activities, see F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 60; Henry Robert Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: The Bibliographical Society / Blades, East & Blades, 1907), p. 22; and Faith Acker, ‘“New-found methods and … compounds strange”: Reading the 1640 Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent.’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2012, pp. 12–22.
- 28.
Hyder E. Rollins’s assessment of Benson’s piracy is now outdated. See William Shakespeare , The Sonnets: A New Variorum Edition, edited by Hyder E. Rollins (London: J. B. Lippincott, 1944), Vol. 1, p. 54, and Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Benson’s Alleged Piracy of Shake-speare’s Sonnets and of some of Jonson’s Works’, Studies in Bibliography, 21 (1968), 235–48.
- 29.
The term is used by Colin Burrow, in ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, in Shakespeare, The Critical Complex: Shakespeare’s Poems, edited by Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 1–14 (p. 4). Cathy Shrank, after Margreta de Grazia, has recently argued, however, that Benson’s miscellany has been unfairly treated by the critical tradition. Cathy Shrank, ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: John Benson and the 1640 Poems’, Shakespeare, 5.3 (2009), 271–91. See also Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Poems, edited by Orgel and Keilen, pp. 65–88.
- 30.
On the shift from Benson’s 1640 Poems to Malone’s 1790 Sonnets, see Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 152–76.
- 31.
Shrank, ‘Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 277. See also Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 158.
- 32.
This is the beginning of what Jerome de Groot (among others) calls the royalist ‘rush to print’ and attributes mainly to Humphrey Moseley, who is discussed at length by Warren Boutcher in this volume. Jerome de Groot, Royalist Identities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 67. See also Line Cottegnies, L’Eclipse du regard. La poésie anglaise du baroque au classicisme (Geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 224–7.
- 33.
Poems By Thomas Carew Esquire. One of the Gentlemen of the Privie-Chamber, and Sewer in Ordinary to his Majesty (London: I. D. for Thomas Walkey, 1640); Poems: by Francis Beaumont, Gent. (London: Printed by Richard Hodgkinson for W. W[ethred], 1640); Thomas Randolph, Poems with the Muses looking-glasse (Oxford: L. Lichfield for Francis Bowman, 1640).
- 34.
As Helen Pierce remarks, ‘it is difficult to assign particular political sympathies to Marshall on the basis of his output’, although he worked for several prominent royalist patrons. ‘Text and Image: William Marshall’s Frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike (1649)’, in Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression, edited by Geoff Kemp (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), pp. 79–86 (p. 84). See also Iamartino and Manzi in this volume for Marshall’s frontispiece to Romulus and Tarquin.
- 35.
David Barker, ‘Cavalier Shakespeare: The 1640 Poems of John Benson’, Studies in Philology, 95.2 (1998), 152–73.
- 36.
Barker, ‘Cavalier Shakespeare’, pp. 153, 154.
- 37.
Robert Greene, A Groats-worth of Wit (London: Printed for William Wright, 1592), sig. F1.
- 38.
Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (London: Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623), fol. A3. For the myth of Shakespeare as the natural genius, see Grace Ioppolo, ‘The Idea of Shakespeare and the Two Lears’, in Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, edited by James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 45–56 (p. 48). Jonson notoriously added: ‘My answer hath beene, Would he had blotted a thousand’ (Ben Jonson, Vol. 8, p. 583).
- 39.
‘Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and his Poems’, sig. *3.
- 40.
Acker, ‘“New-found methods”’, p. 12. Acker further argues that Benson thereby shows his ‘awareness of current tastes and early marketing methods’ (p. 7). See also Michael Schoenfeldt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 134. For a presentation of Benson’s Shakespeare’s collection as more indebted to Donne than Jonson, see Megan Heffenan, ‘Turning Sonnets into Poems: Textual Affect and John Benson’s Metaphysical Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 64.1 (2013), 71–98.
- 41.
See David Gants, ‘The 1616 Folio (F1): Textual Essay’, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/benjonson/k/essays/F1_textual_essay/9/, accessed 2 August 2017.
- 42.
Arthur M. Hind, Engraving in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952–64), Vol. 3, no. 119, p. 169.
- 43.
The Works of Sir John Suckling, edited by Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Vol. 1, p. 72. For the commentary, see pp. 266–78.
- 44.
Q. Horatius Flaccus: His Arte of Poetry. Englished by Ben: Jonson. With other Workes of the Author, never Printed before (London: Printed by J[ames] O[kes] for John Benson [and Andrew Crooke], 1640), sig. [A8]r–v.
- 45.
‘The Greek and Roman denison’d by thee, / And both made richer in thy Poetry’, sig. [A10].
- 46.
Sig. A8v. See Belle, ‘Autour de la question des “communautés de lecteurs”’, pp. 379–80.
- 47.
For the status of marginal annotations in Jonson, see for instance E. Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 130–57, and Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 180ff.
- 48.
Hooley, ‘“But Above All He Excelleth in a Translation”’, p. 157.
- 49.
Hooley, ‘“But Above All He Excelleth in a Translation”’, passim.
- 50.
Joanna Martindale, ‘The Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom’, p. 54. See also Belle, ‘Autour de la question des “communautés de lecteurs”’ and ‘(Auto-)portraits de l’auteur en traducteur’.
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Cottegnies, L. (2018). The Paratexts to Ben Jonson’s Translation of Horace’s Ars poetica (1640): A Contemporary Reading of Jonson’s Poetics. In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_10
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