Abstract
We actually know nothing of the personal and professional relationship between Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare beyond the fact that the latter’s company (the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men) staged six of Jonson’s plays (Every Man In His Humour, Every Man Out of His Humour, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist and Catiline) while Shakespeare was alive, and Jonson records that Shakespeare himself acted in the first and third of these. But what we like to think we know beyond this (the mythology) is deeply embedded in the literary culture of Britain, and reveals a good deal of what later ages made of what was — only belatedly and for a very mixed bag of reasons — hailed as a golden age of English letters. In assessing Jonson’s criticism of Shakespeare, we need carefully to steer round the very potent constructions that those later ages have placed upon their relationship.
I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any.
Discoveries, 665–6
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Notes
See S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford and New York, 1970); ‘Shakespeare and Jonson: Fact and Myth’, The Elizabethan Theatre, II, ed. David Galloway (Toronto, 1970), pp. 1–19.
S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life, revised edition (Oxford, 1987), pp. 256–7.
Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), p. 126.
On the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds and the 1598 Act for the Punishment of Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars, see E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV (Oxford, 1923) pp. 270, 324–5; see also, Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (London and Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 26, 110.
John Cocke, ‘A Common Player’, quoted in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, IV, pp. 255–7.
For a fuller account of possible allusions to Shakespeare in Every Man Out of His Humour and other early plays, see E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare’s Impact on His Contemporaries (London, 1982), pp. 100–3.
See David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1989), p. 20.
See David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown (Cambridge, 1987), p. 75, on Kempe as Dogberry, but also more generally on the clowning tradition in the Elizabethan theatre; see particularly his analysis of Jonson’s handling of the clown’s role in the two versions of Every Man In His Humour, pp. 96ff.
Ian Donaldson, The World Turned Upside-Down (Oxford, 1970), pp. 47–8. 18. See The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1963), p. xxii.
On Bartholomew Fair as a parody of The Two Noble Kinsmen, see Muriel Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of His Time (Cambridge, 1976), p. 111; and R. Dutton, Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge 1983), pp. 168–9.
See, for example, J. F. Danby, ‘Sidney and the Late-Shakespearian Romance’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets (London, 1965), 74–107; Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: the Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965); Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1973); D. L. Peterson, Time, Tide and Tempest: a Study of Shakespeare’s Romances (San Marino, California, 1973).
For a modern attempt to apply ‘tragicomedy’ to Shakespeare, see Joan L. Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1972).
W. H. Herendeen, ‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts’, in Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio, eds J. Brady and W. H. Herendeen (Newark, Delaware, 1991), pp. 38–63, p. 60 note 13; see also pp. 44–6.
William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, general editors Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1988), p. xlv.
Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson / Jonson and Shakespeare (Lincoln, Nebraska, and London, 1988), pp. 186–7. As McDonald acknowledges, his is not the first challenge to the usual division of the two men into separate camps, though it is one of the most sustained; see his survey of previous work, pp. 190–91, notes 6 and 7.
See Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson: His Vision and His Art (London, 1981), especially pp. xv–xvi and 199–232.
In ‘A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1693). For modern comment on the poem see T. J. B. Spenser ‘Ben Jonson on his beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare’, in Elizabethan Theatre, IV, ed. George Hibbard (London and Basingstoke, 1974), pp. 22–40; Peterson, Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson, chapter 4; Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet (Chicago, 1981), chapter 3.
See Richard Dutton, ‘The Birth of the Author’, forthcoming in Look About You: Elizabethan Theatre — Essays in Honor of Sam Schoenbaum (Newark, Delaware, 1996), ed. R. B. Parker and Sheldon Zitner.
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© 1996 Richard Dutton
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Dutton, R. (1996). Jonson and Shakespeare. In: Ben Jonson Authority Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372498_5
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