Abstract
In conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden, Jonson is by turns belligerently scornful, ironically dismissive, intemperately vain, lucidly perceptive, and (on rare and moving occasions) clairvoyantly honest about himself. In one of these moments of deep self-knowledge he reports that, while visiting Sir Robert Cotton’s country estate, ‘he saw in a vision his eldest sone’, who appeared to him with the mark of the cross on his forehead, ‘of a Manlie shape’, and full-grown, as Jonson believes ‘he shall be at the resurrection’.1 Meanwhile, a letter arrived from Jonson’s wife to confirm that the boy had died. The sincerity of this account is beyond question, even without the support of Epigram 45, ‘On My First Son’. And it reveals, aside from Jonson’s emotional integrity, his belief that the shape of the immortal soul is the perfection of manliness. This idea, though not the striking metaphysical context of the occasion, is always near the centre of Jonson’s thinking about life and art. It motivates his choice of a name — Eustace Manly — for the only moral survivor of the social wreckage he dramatizes in The Devil is an Ass. It stands behind his public image as the master of a literary circle known as the sons of Ben. It colours his language when, as ‘Judge & Professor of Poesie’, he praises the work of a younger poet ‘with some passion’ by declaring, ‘My Son Cartwright writes all like a Man.’ 2 What Cartwright made of this compliment, or whether he deserved it, are questions that no longer matter.
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Notes
Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925–52) 1: 139–40. This edition is identified as Jonson in further citations.
See Appendix A in The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951) 831.
Jonson 8: 592–3. This passage, like many others in Discoveries, is a free translation from Seneca the elder (see Jonson 11: 244). But here and elsewhere I’m assuming that an idea didn’t matter less to Jonson just because he found it in an author he admired.
For a brief and witty account of Jonson’s invention of his public self, see Edward B. Partridge, ‘Jonson’s Large and Unique View of Life’, The Elizabethan Theatre 4 (1972): 145–50; for a subtle and persuasive account on an extended scale, see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983) 101–84.
See the Conversations with Drummond, in Jonson 1: 138, 140, 136.
Jonson 1: 138–9.
For a portrait of Jonson which takes into account both kinds of competitiveness, see W. David Kay, Ben Jonson: a Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1995): on the one hand, Jonson approached classical authors in a ‘spirit of emulous rivalry’, Kay writes; and his attitude towards his contemporaries was ‘complicated by his strong sense of rivalry, which issued in ridicule of those whose works he thought inferior or in jealousy of those whose accomplishments he admired’ (98).
Jonson 8: 609–10. For a full discussion of the matters of principle which separated Jonson and Jones, see D.J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: the Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949): 152–78.
Ben Jonson, Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) 321, 326, 67. Further citations from the non-dramatic verse refer to this edition.
Jonas Barish, ‘Jonson and the Loathed Stage’, in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blissett et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) 27–53. The essay reappears, slightly modified, in Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 132–54.
Recently scholars have addressed the question of Jonson’s attitude towards the homoerotic environment of the Jacobean stage. See, for example, Richmond Barbour, ‘When I Acted Young Antinous”: Boy Actors and the Erotics of Jonsonian Theater’, PMLA 110 (1995): 1006–22, and Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 67–80. In my view neither Barbour nor DiGangi is sufficiently alert to the signs that Jonson found homoerotic attraction threatening, and inflected his representations of it with obvious distaste.
Both Barbour, ‘Boy Actors’ 1012–13 and DiGangi, Homoerotics 75–6, are in my judgement too eager to accept this apparent invitation.
L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1937) 200–6.
R.B. Parker has shown how important these alternatives are by discussing the choices made by modern directors and actors in playing the scene; see Volpone in Performance: 1921–1972’, Renaissance Drama ns 9 (1978): 158–60.
See Parker, ‘Volpone in Performance’ 159, and especially the comment quoted here by Frank Hauser, who directed the Oxford Playhouse production in 1966: ‘The point I wanted to get across in the actual staging of it was that she is seduced, not wholly seduced, but tempted by it.’
See Edward B. Partridge, The Broken Compass: a Study of the Major Comedies of Ben Jonson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) 161–77; and Jonas Barish, Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) 147–86.
Jonson 8: 625.
See Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 83.
See Karen Newman, ‘City Talk: Women and Commodification in Jonson’s Epicoene’, ELH 56 (1989): 507–10. William W.E. Slights takes this line of argument a step further, observing that ‘what Jonson repeatedly registers in Epicoene is a deep concern that the theatre as an institution might be having a disastrously effeminizing effect on his entire city’. See Ben Jonson and the Art of Secrecy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) 99.
For intelligent commentary on this gesture, and on what it implies about Jonson’s take on the theatrical and the erotic, see Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing 99–100, 105–6.
See Barish, Prose Comedy 212–15.
The review by Gillian Reynolds (in Plays and Players August 1978: 16–17) does not do justice to the vitality of the production, but it includes accurate information and two fine photographs.
See G.R. Hibbard, ‘Ben Jonson and Human Nature’, in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blissett et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973) 78–9.
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Huebert, R. (2003). A Shrew Yet Honest: Ben Jonson. In: The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503168_3
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