Abstract
Shakespeare is, as Ben Jonson had it, of his time and endures time itself. Jonson’s poem in the front matter to Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) provides a context, one way of many into his contemporary poet and playwright, who defies and invites comparison. Despite the complexity of the verse, with shifts worthy of a master, Jonson (1573–1637) was not afraid to give his dedicatory and commemorative poem a title that signaled his affection for Shakespeare (1564–1616) in whose remembrance he wrote: “To the memory of my beloued, The AVTHOR MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: And what he hath left vs.”1 Like Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), Jonson was a great innovator of verse and drama, and their presence must have kept Shakespeare on his toes and given him a community of rivals who may or may not have been friends (we are not sure what Shakespeare’s relation to Marlowe was in life) but who also made each other better as poets and playwrights.
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Notes
E. K. Chambersemends “deere” to “cleere,” and, as G. Blakemore Evans notes, the Holgate MS, fol. 110 (Pierpont Morgan Library), and Additional MS. 30982 at the British Library read “deere.” See Chambers, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), 2:224
Evans, “Early Critical Comment on the Plays and Poems,” in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, with J. J. M. Tobin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1971.
A good example of an accomplished scholar writing a general book for what he calls “a non-professional audience” is Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (2000; repr., London: Penguin, 2001), vii.
Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Modern Poetry (1927; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1957), vii.
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Walter Kaufman, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 3.
The Platonic Socrates, particularly in the tenth book of Republic, shows skepticism over the role of Homer in Greek education and would prefer that poetry serve philosophical and political ends. This is an attempt to displace poetry with philosophy. Still, Plato is also uncomfortable with the rhetoricians, comparing these professionals with someone devoted to education without financial interests—Socrates, poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric are not—as his student, Aristotle, recognized—easy to separate. To persuade is, for Aristotle, the end of the rhetoric: “Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.” Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (1924; repr., New York: Dover, 2004), 1355a.
Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1941; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), Book X, 595A–608B.
Jonathan Hart, “The Author Writes Back (and Speaks Up),” Primerjalna književnost 31, no. 2 (2008): 15–37.
Clifford Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (2000; repr., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 3.
In a well-known passage, Philip Sidney gives us a view of the historian as lost in a slowly vanishing archive: “The Historian, scarcely giueth leysure to the Moralist, to say so much, but that he loden with old Mouse-eaten records, authorising himselfe (for the most part) vpon other histories, whose greatest authorities, are built vpon the notable foundation of Heare-say, hauing much a-doe to accord differing Writers, and to pick trueth out of partiality, better acquainted with a thousande yeeres a goe, then with the present age.” See An apologie for poetrie. Written by the right noble, vertuous, and learned, Sir Phillip Sidney, Knight, At London: Printed [by James Roberts] for Henry Olney, and are to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the George, neere to Cheap-gate, Anno. 1595. In the opening paragraphs of “Preface to Shakespeare,” Samuel Johnson also says famously, “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life.... His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.” See Mr. Johnson’s Preface to His Edition of Shakespear’s Plays (London: J. and R. Tonson, H. Woodfall, J. Rivington, R. Baldwin, L. Hawes, Clark and Collins, T. Longman, W. Johnston, T. Caslon, C. Corbet, T. Lownds, and the Executors on B. Dodd, 1765), A4v-A5r. In Jerusalem, William Blake takes a contrary view to Johnson’s: “He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars./General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer:/For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars,/And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.” See William Blake, “Jerusalem,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed., ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 205.
Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London: Will Stansby, 1616).
See Rosalind Miles, Ben Jonson: His Life and Work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 166–69.
David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Sarah Van Den Berg, “True Relation: the Life and Career of Ben Jonson,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson, ed. Richard Harp and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–13
For records on Shakespeare’s life, see, for example, E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:1-18. See also Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 27–29.
F. P. Wilson, The Plague in Shakespeare’s London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927)
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977)
Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984)
Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985)
J. Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)
F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992)
Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
See John Seeley, The Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883).
On natural slavery, see Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Dover, 1992), bk. 1, chs. 4–5
Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959)
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (1982; rev., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Herodotus, The Persian Wars, trans. G. Rawlinson (New York: Modern Library, 1942)
François Hertog, “Herodotus and the Historiographical Operation,” Diacritics 22 (1992): 83–93
Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)
Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
For an important earlier discussion, see Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, Chatto & Windus, 1962).
See Thomas M. Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Introduction. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_1
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