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. Jonson's work, for example, was constantly said to exhibit the quality of judgement, while Shakespeare's exhibited the power of fancy, in which Jonson was thought to be sadly deficient. Jonson was a servile imitator, while Shakespeare was a true original, beholden to no-one for his ideas. Jonson was cold and en vious and spiteful in his remarks about Shakespeare, who fortunately was warm and generous and bore no grudges to anyone.[4] Few of these generalisations will survive close scrutiny. One only needs to glance at the eight large volumes of Geoffrey Bullough's NaY"Pative and DY'amatic SouJ"ces of ShakespeaJ"e to realise that Shakespeare was not so wholly original as once was imagined; while the comparatively meagre source materials for Jonson's comedies show that Jonson was not always a mere imitator. The work of such scholars as T. W. Baldwin and, more recently, Emrys Jones has scotched once and for all the myth that Shakespeare's genius was in some mysterious sense 'untutored'; and we now know (conversely) that Jonson was in all probability less formidably learned than once was imagined, and that he prob ably picked up some at least of his classical learning at second hand from Renaissance encyclopaedias and other di gests of knowledge.[S] The contrast between Shakespeare's luxuriant fancy and Jonson's prosaic rationality is equally difficult to sustain. Much of Jonson's work (The Sad Shep hePd and The Vision of Delight, for example, or the speeches of Volpone or Sir Epicure Mammon) is more startlingly im aginative and lovingly fantasticated than the traditional X antithesis would ever lead a credulous reader to suspect. As for the notion of Jonson's alleged malignity towards Shake speare, that - as William Gifford in 1816 so strenuously and cantankerously tried to demonstrate - is based almost wholly upon speculation, prejudice and misreading. But like many notions concerning the two writers, it proved very difficult to eradicate. Many of those who generalised about Shakespeare and Jonson during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evidently did not have an intimate or extensive knowledge of Jonson and his works. What was needed, for Jonson's sake and for Shakespeare's, was a moratorium on comparative judgements until the work of each writer - and especially the work of Jonson was more fully known and comprehended within its own imaginative terms. Knowledge and comprehension of Jonson's work have in some ways been slow to come. As Peter Barnes argues in his essay in this volume, Jonson is still not properly assimilated and accepted into the repertory of the English theatre today; he is still in a sense our great unknown theatrical classic. Yet there are signs (seen, for example, in the rehabilitating work of Peter Barnes himself) that this situation is changing. Academic interest in Jonson's writing has certainly quickened over the past generation, and many recent studies have deepened our understanding of the methods and impulses of his art. It is therefore possible to return today with new sensitivities and new intentions to compare Jonson's work and Shakespeare's: not in order to perpetuate old myths, nor to punish Jonson for the crime of not being Shakespeare, nor to repudiate the premises upon which Jonson's art is based, nor even in the hope that we ourselves may be entirely free of the kinds of prejudice which seem so easy to detect in the critics of the past; but to attempt rather to reveal through more detailed and informed comparison something of the characteristic manner and achievement of both writers, the two great dramatists of the English theatre. Six out of the thirteen essays in this collection are directly concerned with comparisons of this sort. The sub jects of these comparisons are various: Shakespeare's and Jonson's views of the Roman state; Shakespeare's and Jonson's views of public audiences; their differing atti tudes to duping, to play-acting, to comedy; their skills in enforcing thematic ideas through details of stagecraft. Of the remaining seven essays, four are concerned directly with Shakespeare, and three directly with Jonson. Several of these essays also attempt, however, to bring Shakespeare and Jonson into a brief comparative alignment. J. B. Bamborough, F. H. Langman and J. C. Eade have Proeface xi offered valuable advice in the preparation of this volume, and their help is gratefully acknowledged. All Shakespearian quotations are taken from Peter Alexander's one-volume edi tion of The CompLete Woroks of WiLLiam Shakespearoe (London and Glasgow, 1951); all Jonson quotations are from Ben Jonson, ed. C. R. Herford and P. and E. M. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925-52): here and in other old spelling u/v and i/j spellings are regularised and words in small capitals are changed to upper and lower case. I.D.
NOTES
1. [Francis Gentleman), The Droamatic Censoro (1770) vol. ii, p. 461. 2. William Razlitt, Lecturoes on the EngLish Comic Wroiteros ( 1819), reprinted in The CompLete Woroks of WiLLiam HazLitt, ed. P. P. Rowe, after the edition of A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London, 1931) vol. vi, pp. 38- 45. Hazlitt picks up Jonson's comment on Shakespeare: 'hee flow'd with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stop'd: SuffLaminandus eroat; as Augustus said of Hateroius' (Discoveroies, 658-60; M. Seneca, Controoverosiae, vol. iv. praef. 7, 'sometimes he needed the drag-chain'). 3. Converosations with Droummond, 50; Richard Flecknoe, A Shorot Discourose of the EngLish Stage, printed with Love's Kingdom (London, 1664) sig. G6r; Lewis Theobald, Preface to The Woroks of Shakespearoe (London, 1733) p. xxxiii; William Collins, 'An Epistle: Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer' (1743) p. 56; David Hume, The History of EngLand (London, 1807) vol. vi, pp. 192-3; Alexander Pope, 'The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace' (1737) 11. 82-3. Pope had a shrewd sense of the way in which these contrasts developed: see his edition of The Woroks of Shakespearo, vol. i (London, 1725), Preface, p. xi. 4. Judgement/fancy: see e.g. lbomas Shadwell and Robert Gould, in Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, vol. xi, pp. 531, 547; Charles Churchill, The Rosciad (London, 1763) 11. 271-84, and for a dissenting view - 'Barry Cornwall' (B. W. Procter), Memoiro of the Life and Wroiting of Ben Jonson (London, 1838); imitation/ originality: see e.g. Nicholas Rowe, 'Some Account of the Life etc. of Mr William Shakespeare', prefixed to xii PPefaoe The WoPks of William Shakespeape (London, 1709); Peter Whalley, Preface to The WoPks of Ben Jonson (1756) vol. i, p. vi. For Jonson's alleged envy of Shakespeare, see William Gifford's compendious account, 'Proofs of Ben Jonson's Malignity, from the Commentators on Shakespeare', in his edition of The WoPks of Ben Jonson (London, 1816). 5. T. w. Baldwin, ShakspePe's Small Latine & Lease GPeeke, 2 vols (Urbana, Ill., 1944); Emrys Jones, The OPigins of ShakespeaPe (Oxford, 1977); J. B. Bamborough, Ben Jonson (London, 1970) pp. 10-11. Notes on the Contributors
J, B. BamboPough is Principal of Linacre College, Oxford, author of The LittLe WoPLd of Man (1952) and Ben Jonson (1970), and editor of VoLpone (1963) and The AL~hemist (1967). He is currently preparing a critical edition of Burton's Anatomy of MeLan~hoLy. In 1979 he was Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra.
PeteP BaPnes, English playwright, is author of The RuLing CLass, LeonaPdo 's Last SuppeP, Noonday Demons, The Bewit~hed, LaughteP, Red Noses, BZa~k Death, and other works. He has edited, adapted and directed many of Ben Jonson's plays for the stage and for the BBC.
FPan~is BePry was formerly Professor of English at Royal Holloway College, London; in 1979 he was Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre, Canberra. He is the author of The ShakespeaPe Inset and other books of criticism and poetry.
Ann BLake is a Lecturer in English at La Trobe University. She is at present working on a study of John Marston's plays for the Boys' companies.
D. H. CPaig is a graduate of Sydney and Oxford Universities, and Lecturer in English at Newcastle University, New South Wales. He is at present engaged upon a study of the life and works of Sir John Harington.
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 WoPLd Upside Down: Comedy fPom Jonson to FieLding (1970) and The Rapes of Lu~Petia: A Myth and its TPansfoPmations (1982), and editor of the Oxford Ben Jonson: Poems (1975).
ALvin B. KePnan, A. w. Mellon Professor of Humanities and Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton University, is author of The CankePed Muse (1959) and The PLot of SatiPe
xiii xiv Notes on the ContPib~toPs
(1966); he has edited Volpone and The Alchemist for the Yale Ben Jonson, of which series he was General Editor, In 1979 he was a visitor to the Humanities Research Centre and Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University, Canberra.
F. H. Langman is Reader in English at the Australian National University, Canberra. His principal interests are in Wordsworth and Shakespeare.
F. H. MaPes, Reader in English at Adelaide University, is editor of the Revels edition of The Alchemist (1967) and is currently editing Much Ado About Nothing for the new Cambridge Shakespeare, He is a general editor of the Oxford Studies in Tudor and Stuart Literature, and has edited The MemoiPs of RobePt CaPey in this series (1973).
DePick R. C. MaPsh is Professor of English at La Trobe University. His books include The RecuPPing Mipacle: A Study of Shakespeape 's Last PLays (1962), ShakespeaPe's Hamlet (1970), and Passion Lends Them PoweP (1976).
Anthony MilleP is a Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, and has edited a selection of Ben Jonson's poetry (1981).
Michael Neill is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Auckland. He is the author of a number of articles on Renaissance drama, including studies of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and Ford.
Timothy G. A. Nelson is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales. His published work includes essays on Shakespeare, Donne, Harington, Pope, and aspects of comedy.
PeteP Walls recently completed an Oxford D.Phil. on Jonson's masques, He has been Lecturer in English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is now Lecturer in Music at the same university.