Abstract
Ancient Rome, republican or otherwise, loomed large in Jonson’s creative and political imagination. Not only was he well-read in the writings stemming from that period, he was committed to scholarly reconstructions of classical Rome for both comic and tragic dramatic purposes. Rome fascinated him as both an aesthetic and political community, providing him with clear paradigms against which to measure his contemporary situation. Jonson used this comparative dynamic in different ways at different times — in alternately ambiguous and precise fashion depending on the context. In his 1601 ‘comicall satire’ Poetaster he explored the aesthetic community or republic of letters of Augustan Rome, creating for dramatic purposes an ahistorical triad of writers vying for the ‘Emperor’s’ favour — Ovid, Horace and Virgil.1 In the later tragedies, Sejanus, His Fall (1603) and Catiline, His Conspiracy (1610–11), he employed Roman, and ostensibly republican, political communities for the purpose of comparison with his own age. This chapter will use the tragedies and a consideration of the source materials they were inspired by to account for this comparative dynamic and these distinctly ‘Roman frames of mind’ in Jonson’s dramatic canon.2
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Notes
See Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Arnold, 1983).
See also Tom Cain’s introductory essay to his edition of Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
The phrase is self-consciously borrowed from Katherine Eisaman Maus’s seminal text, Ben Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Franco Moretti, ‘The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty’, in John Drakakis (ed.), Shakespearean Tragedy (London and New York: Longman, 1992), pp. 45–83.
See Angela G. Dorenkamp, ‘Jonson’s Catiline: History as the Trying Faculty’, Studies in Philology, 67 (1970), 210–20
and Michael J.C. Echeruo, ‘The Conscience of Politics and Jonson’s Catiline’, Studies in English Literature, 6 (1966), 341–56.
For a detailed and scholarly account of Jonson’s engagement with Lipsius, see Robert C. Evans, Habit of Mind: Evidence and Effects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (New Jersey and London: Associated Universities Press, 1995).
See also Daniel C. Boughner, ‘Jonson’s Use of Lipsius in Sejanus’, Modern Language Notes, 75 (1960), 545–50. Lipsius’s edition of Tacitus, published in 1574, was standard. Jonson shared his qualified understanding about the possibility for employing Tacitean theory in contemporary politics, feeling that what the Annals did demonstrate was the evil of tyrannical government.
See Kenneth Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). For a detailed investigation of these linguistic concurrences, see Evans, ‘Sejanus: Ethics and Politics in the Early Reign of James’.
See Titus Livy, The Early History of Roma: Books I—V trans. Aubrey De Selincourt; intro. D.M. Ogilvie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971);
Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. and intro. Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 [1956]);
and Niccolà Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker; intro. Bernard Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
See Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism. On the influence of Italian political humanism on English Renaissance drama, see, for example, G.K. Hunter, ‘English Folly and Italian Vice: The Moral Landscape of John Marston’, in Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (London: Arnold, 1960), pp. 85–112;
J.W. Lever, The Tragedy of State (London: Methuen, 1971); and Barton, ‘Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus’.
Niccolô Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Quentin Skinner has indeed argued that Machiavellï s language can be regarded as Ciceronian rather than Tacitean, which has important implications for Jonson’s characterization of Cicero in Catiline. See Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
See also Ronald Syme, Tacitus 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
See Daniel Waley, The Italian City-State Republics 3rd edn (London and New York: Longman, 1988).
B.N. DeLuna, Jonson’s Romish Plot: A Study of ‘Catiline’ and its Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
For a related reading of Shakespeare, see Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
David Stockton, Cicero the Politician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Geoffrey Hill, ‘The World’s Proportion: Jonson s Dramatic Poetry in Sejanus and Catiliné ’, in Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies (London: Arnold, 1960), pp. 113–32.
See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, who discusses James’s relationship to the ‘spectacle of power’ and see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London and New York: Methuen, 1986).
On Anne of Denmark’s involvement with the Jacobean court masque, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Enacting Opposition: Queen Anne and the Subversion of Masquing’, in her Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
and Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Court Masque’, in S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds), Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992), pp. 79–104.
See Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, p. 183 and Peter Womack, Ben Jonson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 9–14.
Anthony Miller, ‘The Roman State in Julius Caesar and Sejanus’, in Ian Donaldson (ed.), Jonson and Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, in association with the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, 1983), pp. 179–201 (p. 194).
Christopher Ricks relates this to a general theme of political and sexual dismemberment in the play: ‘Sejanus and Dismemberment’, Modern Language Notes, 76 (1961), 301–7.
Tullius Cicero, The Speeches, trans. R. Gardner (Chicago: Loeb Classical Library, 1958).
Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster’, in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, 2nd edn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991), pp. 181–204 (p. 181).
Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson, His Vision and His Art (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), p. 58.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 59.
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© 1998 Julie Sanders
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Sanders, J. (1998). Roman Frames of Mind. In: Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389441_2
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