Abstract
As we have observed in various contexts, but specifically in relation to the Epistle to Volpone and the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, there is a demonstrable connection between Jonson’s sense of his place as an author within the state (the law of the land) and his respect for the formal ‘laws’ of literature, often (though not always) derived from classical precedent. We have also observed that this respect, although the emphasis might vary from context to context, was that owing to ‘guides, not commanders’. Thirdly (a point which shadows the other two, and which I want here to develop), we have seen how Jonson’s appeal to the ‘laws’ is always a function of his attempts to define himself as an author by differentiating his own writing from that of various precursors, notably that of the ‘playwrights’ who wrote simply to entertain the audiences of the London theatres, and of the ‘amateur’ coterie poets of the court and its hangers on. In respect of both of these categories, though for different reasons in either case, the appeal to the ‘laws’ is (for at least the first half of his career) concomitant with a defence of print culture, though there are cases — Spenser is an example — where Jonson will also invoke aspects of the ‘laws’ to draw lines between himself and others who have gone before him into print.
I am not of that opinion to conclude a poet’s liberty within the narrow limits of laws which either the grammarians or philosophers prescribe. For before they found out those laws there were many excellent poets that fulfilled them. Amongst whom none more perfect than Sophocles, who lived a little before Aristotle.
Discoveries, 2579–84
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The ‘affirmation’ of order in ‘To Penshurst’ is certainly not unproblematic, as Don E. Wayne has demonstrated at length in Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison, Wisconsin, 1984). My point here is that Jonson starts in the poem from such a notion of order, whether or not he actually succeeds in representing it.
See J. T. McCullen, ‘Conference with the Queen of Fairies’, Studia Neophilologica, 23 (1950), 87–95.
See O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (San Marino, California, 1938), pp. 3–8.
See J. D. Redwine Jr, Ben Jonson’s Literary Criticism (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970), xxii–xxiii, on the equivalence of summa epitasis and catastasis.
See T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 1947), especially pp. 228–51 and 294–6.
See T. H. Howard-Hill, ‘The Evolution of the Form of Plays in English during the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990), 112–45.
See J. D. Redwine, ‘The Moral Basis of Jonson’s Theory of Humour Characterization’, ELH, 28 (1961), 316–34.
See Katharine Eisaman Maus, ‘Facts of the Matter: Satiric and Ideal Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination’, English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 42–64, reprinted in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W. H. Herenden (Newark, Delaware, 1991), for a recent assessment of the ‘frustrated murderousness of Jonsonian comedy’ (p. 65).
A. C. Swinburne, A Study of Ben Jonson (London. 1889). p. 39.
Dryden’s claim about Morose is in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford, 1964), p. 91. On the Induction to The Magnetic Lady, see p. 66. Note that Jonson does not entirely disavow humour-characterisation in his tragedies, something which generations of critics who have habitually compared them unfavourably with the supposed psychological realism of Shakespeare’s tragedies would doubtless echo. But he never develops this, and in particular never explains how a theory associated with the fictionalised representation of contemporary attitudes might square with the standard Renaissance expectation that tragedy should be both true-to-life and historically verifiable, something alluded to by the foolish Fitzdottrel in The Devil is an Ass when he confesses that he gets his history ‘from the Play-books/And think they’re more authentic’ (II.iv.13–14). See J. A. Bryant Jr, ‘The Significance of Ben Jonson’s First Requirement for Tragedy: Truth of Argument’, Studies in Philology, 49 (1952), 195–213.
See L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London, 1937), especially the chapters ‘Social Theory’, ‘Drama and Society’, ‘Tradition and Ben Jonson’ and ‘Jonson and the Anti-Acquisitive Attitude’; also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), pp. 26–45; Don E. Wayne, ‘Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson: An Alternative View’, Renaissance Drama, 13 (1982), 103–29; Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, New York, 1985), pp. 292–301.
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984). 16. Susan Wells, ‘Jacobean City Comedy and the Ideology of the City’, ELH, 48 (1981), 37–60, p. 38. Karen Newman has pursued this, in respect of the representation of women as creatures of the city in Epicoene, in ‘City Talk: Women and Commodification in Epicoene’, ELR, 53 (1989), 503–18, reprinted in her Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991).
See Lawrence Danson, ‘Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self’, PMLA, 99 (1984), 179–93. On the contemporary rationale for what I have called proto-capitalism, see C. B. MacPherson, The PoliticaI Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962).
See Christopher Ricks, ‘Sejanus and Dismemberment’, Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 301–8.
See Richard S. Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven and London, 1981); G. A. E. Parfitt, ‘The Nature of Translation in Ben Jonson’s Poetry’, SEL, 13 (1974), 344–59; Robert Shafer, The English Ode, to 1660 (New York, 1966), pp. 106ff; Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven and London, 1980), chapter 1; Stella P. Revard, ‘Pindar and Jonson’s Cary-Morison Ode’, in Classic and Cavalier: Essays of Jonson and the Sons of Ben, ed. C. J. Summers and T-L. Pebworth (Pittsburg, 1982), pp. 17–29.
See Richard Dutton, ‘The Significance of Jonson’s Revision of Every Man In His Humour’, Modern Language Review, 69 (1974), 241–9.
Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison, Wisconsin, 1984); Stanley Fish, ‘Authors-Readers: Jonson’s Community of the Same’, Representations, 7 (Summer 1984), 26–58.
See Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg, PA, 1988); William E. Cain, ‘The Place of the Poet in Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and “To My Muse”’ Criticism, 21 (1979), 34–48; Don E. Wayne, ‘Poetry and Power in Ben Jonson’s Epigrammes: The Naming of “Facts” or the Figuring of Social Relations’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 23 (1979), 79–103.
On the differences between Spenser and Jonson as would-be laureatepoets, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA, 1983).
M. McCanles Jonsonian Discriminations: The Humanist Poet and the Praise of True Nobility (Toronto, 1992), p. 217. I must not pretend that McCanles’s general thesis endorses my own; he goes on to invoke — the theme of his book — ‘the centuries-long tradition of the vera nobilitas argument which governed his self-identity and yielded him the means of achieving it’. McCanles finds in ‘the vera nobilitas argument’ a central validating point of authenticity in his career — a sticking point, in my terms — which eradicates the kinds of tensions which I find in Jonson’s work. My own thesis will probably be listed with ‘the most recent atacks [sic] on Jonson, those of Rowe, Evans, and Riggs [which] view him in new historicist fashion as driven by the same kinds of self-loathing, resentment and obsession with power ascribed to court life in general by [Frank] Wigham’ (p. 268).
See Scott Wilson, ‘Racked on the Tyrant’s Bed: Pleasure and Pain and Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, Textual Practice, 2 (1989), 234–51.
Samuel Johnson, ‘Abraham Cowley’, in Lives of the Poets, 2 volumes (London, 1925), vol. I, pp. 1–45, p. 13.
Don K. Hedrick, ‘Cooking for the Anthropophagi: Jonson and His Audience’, Studies in English Literature, 17 (1977), 233–45, p. 244.
Copyright information
© 1996 Richard Dutton
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dutton, R. (1996). The ‘Laws’ of Poetry. In: Ben Jonson Authority Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372498_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372498_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39376-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-37249-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)