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Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding and the Rapes Of JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE The comparison of Shakespeare and Jonson has for some time been looked upon with disfavour, no doubt because in former times the practice was discredited by over-use and over-simplification. Since the time of Dryden it had been a familiar literary game to match Shakespeare and Jonson against each other in order to praise the one and express critical reservations about the other - Jonson almost always coming off worse. This collection, which derives from a conference held in the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, considers the two writers independently and in the context of each other and seeks to set the record straight, not only on the value of comparison, but also on the relative merits of each of the playwrights. Scholars from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the USA have written essays ranging over many topics, including studies of individual plays by Jonson and Shakespeare, special themes in their work, and staging and theatre audiences. The essays reveal the distinct and varied nature of each writer's dramatic genius. Ian Donaldson is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra. He is the author of The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding and The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations and the editor of Ben Jonson: Poems and Transformations in Modern European Drama. The Humanz"tz.es Research Centre/Macmillan Series General editor: Professor Ian Donaldson, Director of the HRC This series is designed for publications deriving from the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, Canberra. The series, which is an occasional one, will include monographs by the academic staff and Visiting Fellows of the Humanities Research Centre, and collections of essays from the Centre's conferences and seminars. Ian Donaldson (editor): JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE Ian Donaldson (editor): TRANSFORMATIONS IN MODERN EUROPEAN DRAMA J. E. Flower: LITERATURE AND THE LEFT IN FRANCE Oliver MacDonagh, W. F. Mandie and Pauric Travers (editors): IRISH CULTURE AND NATIONALISM, 1750-1950 JONSON AND SHAKESPEARE Edited by Ian Donaldson in association with Palgrave Macmillan © Australian National University 1983 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-32388-5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1983 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world Distributed in Australia by Australian National University Press PO Box 4, Canberra ACT 2600 ISBN 978-1-349-06185-3 ISBN 978-1-349-06183-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-06183-9 Contents Proeface vii Notes on the Contr'ibutoros xiii 1 The Fool as Clergyman (and Vice-versa): an Essay on Shakespearian Comedy Timothy G. A. NeLson 2 Hal and Hamlet: the Loneliness of Integrity 18 Der'ick R. c. Marosh 3 Remembrance and Revenge: HamLet, Macbeth and The Tempest 35 MichaeL NeiLL 4 TrooiLus and Croessida 57 F. H. Langman 5 Shakespeare's and Jonson's View of Public Theatre Audiences 74 A Z.vin B. Ker>n.an 6 The Idea of the Play in A Midsummer' Night's Droeam and BarothoLomew Fairo 89 D. H. Croig 7 Comic Procedures in Shakespeare and Jonson: Much Ado About Nothing and The ALchemist 101 F. H. Maroes 8 'Sportful Malice': Duping in the Comedies of Jonson and Shakespeare 119 Ann B~ake 9 The Rusticity of Ben Jonson 135 J. B. Bamboroough 10 Staging Jonson 156 Peter' Bames v vi Contents 11 Stage Perspective and Elevation in CoPioLanus and Sejanus 163 Fru.ncis BePPY 12 The Roman State in JuLius Caesar' and Sejanus 179 Anthony MiZ LeY' 13 Insubstantial Pageants Preserved: the Literary and Musical Sources for the Jonsonian Masque 202 PeteY' WaUs Index 219 Preface The papers in this volume derive from the Humanities Research Centre's conference on Jonson and Shakespeare held at the Australian National University, Canberra, from 14 to 18 May 1979. Not all of the papers delivered at the confer­ ence are printed here, nor (alas) is it possible for a book of this kind to capture all of the conference's livelier exchanges and events. The week's activities included a pro­ gramme of Shakespearian and Jonsonian films (introduced by Neil McDonald), leading to an animated discussion on the problems of filming Shakespeare's plays; a concert of Shakespearian and Jonsonian music presented by Hartley Newnham and his Melbourne-based group, La Romanesca; a demonstration at the conference dinner of Elizabethan danc­ ing by Alan and Elizabeth Brissenden, culminating in a pavan danced by members of the conference; and a number of dis­ cussions on the staging of Shakespeare's plays, including a talk by one of Australia's leading Shakespearian directors, John Bell of the Nimrod Theatre, Sydney. Three of the papers published here were not delivered at the conference: those of Peter Barnes and Peter Walls, who were unhappily pre­ vented from travelling to Canberra to give them in person, and that of Francis Berry, which was written and discussed in the Centre in the weeks immediately following the confer­ ence. All of the published papers, however, were written in response to the general stimulus of the HRC's 'Drama Year', which brought together scholars and lovers of the theatre from several different countries, and saw the staging of six different drama conferences as well as many related activities. The aim of the Jonson and Shakespeare conference was tc encourage discussion of the two writers' work both indepen­ dently and, more especially, comparatively. At one time, tht practice of comparing Jonson's and Shakespeare's work waf looked upon with some disfavour. The reason was quitE simple: the practice had become discredited through over-usE and over-simplification. Since the time of Dryden, it hac been a familiar literary game to match Shakespeare anc Jonson against each other in order to praise the one anc vii viii PPeface express critical reservations about the other. ' ••• naming him with his great cotemporary', wrote Francis Gentleman of Jonson in 1770, 'is pairing authors as poult­ erers do rabbits, a fat and a lean one'.[1] Yet paired they inevitably were, and Jonson -great in bulk and in repu­ tation in his own lifetime - was now inevitably cast as the lean rabbit, the writer whose powers and proportions so regrettably failed to measure up to those of Shakespeare. Just how damaging these set-piece comparisons might be is apparent in Hazlitt's treatment of Jonson in his ~ectuPes on the EngLish Comic WPitePB in 1819. 'The superiority of Shakspeare's natural genius for comedy cannot be better shewn than by a comparison between his comic characters and those of Ben Jonson', Hazlitt begins ominously, and proceeds at once to itemise the two writers' characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Jonson is a grub, not a butterfly; his works are derivative, and read like translations; they are cramped, laboured, dry, literal, meagre, repulsive, un­ amiable, leaden, obtuse, obscure, forced, tedious, cut and dried, cross-grained, mean, mechanical, extravagant, improb­ able, scholastic, crabbed, clogged, far-fetched, pedantic. Worst of all, says Hazlitt himself now seemingly un­ stoppable, as he warms to the pleasurable task of compara­ tive denigration Jonson never knew when he should stop: 'ALiquando suffLaminandus e~t, is as true of him as it was of Shakspeare, but in quite a different sense.' Shakespeare for Hazlitt is indeed quite different: fantastical, delight­ ful, full of spirit, felicity, and mastery over his subject, exuberant, liberal and unrestrained, touching the springs of nature.[2] The entire comparison reads more like an exhi­ bition of fixed critical prejudices than a genuine explor­ ation of the two writers' different styles of imaginative apprehension and creation. That Jonson is routinely dis­ advantaged by comparisons of this sort - that his more positive qualities are indeed sometimes scarcely admitted to exist - is obvious. What is less obvious but no less import­ ant is that Shakespeare too may suffer through the perpetu­ ation of certain simple comparative ideas about the nature of his, and Jonson's, art and genius. For Hazlitt, like others before and after him, was the inheritor of a well-established set of neatly-contrasted ideas about Jonson and Shakespeare, ideas which were in many cases first formulated in the seventeenth century, hardening into critical commonplaces in the course of the eighteenth century. One regular way of contrasting the two writers, for example, was in terms of art and nature: Jonson's writing was seen as an instance of laboured and learned art, while Shakespeare's was the product of wild and untutored nature. PY'eface ix The contrast may have originated in the lifetime of the two men: Jonson himself notoriously reported to William Drummond of Hawthornden 'That Shaksperr wanted Arte' - though he was later to modify this verdict in his affectionate poem to Shakespeare's memory. By the mid-century, the contrast was well established. 'Comparing him with ShakespeaP', wrote Richard r'lecknoe of Jonson in 1664, 'you shall see the difference betwixt Nature and Art.' The verdict is repeated throughout the eighteenth century. Shakespeare, wrote Lewis Theobald in 1733, 'owed all to his prodigious natural Genius', while Jonson owed 'all his Excellence to his Art, by which he sometimes strain'd himself to an uncommon Pitch'. 'Nature in him was almost lost in art', William Collins concurred. Jonson's merit, wrote David Hume, 'has been totally eclipsed by that of Shakespeare, whose rude genius prevailed over the rude art of his cotemporary'. As Pope, with understandable tartness, wrote: 'Not one but nods, and talks of Johnson's Art, I Of Shakespear's Nature ••• '.[3] And there were other, similar, contrastive com­ monplaces about the two writers.
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