BEN JONSON: AUTHORITY: CRITICISM By the same author BEN JONSON: To the First Folio MASTERING THE REVELS: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama MODERN TRAGICOMEDY AND THE BRITISH TRADITION NEW HISTOR1CISM AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA (co-editor with Richard Wilson) SELECTED WRITINGS OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (editor) * WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: A Literary Life * A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM: A New Casebook (editor) * Also from the same publishers Ben Jonson Authority Criticism Richard Dutton Firs I publ ishcd m Greill B riwin I '1% by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmi lis_ Basingslokr. Hampsh1rc RG21 6XS and London C ompan ics and rcprcsrniJii ves lhrnughoul lhc world A cat.ah 1gw: l't:C~ m.i for th i ~ bnoJ... is ;Jvai lahlc from Ihe Brit"h Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39376-3 ISBN 978-0-230-37249-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/97802303 72498 F1r'1 puhl"hcd in thr Unilctl State' of Amcri<:<1 19% hy ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Div i;ion. I 75 Fifth A venue. Nev. York. :---J.Y 10010 ISBr" 978-0-11 ::!- l.'i~43-3 L1brary '>f C' ongrc;s Cualogi ng -1 n- Pohl iGiion Data Dolt<>n_ RidMrd. 1948 Ben Jon,nn. auth<>rity. c-riticism..- Richard DuHon. p. nn. Inc lud~; hi bl iographic al rdcrenas and indn. ISH~ 978-0- 1 I 2- I SH4~--> I. J.,n_,on. R~n. 157Y'-I h17-Knowle<lge- -Lilcr~tun.:. 2. CrilKi>m­ Eng land- -I !i "'" y- I 7th .:en tury _ .l. Auth< •ri ly in Iitnatu rc _ L Till~. PR2642 .L:iD~3 1996 X22' J- -dc20 95-26 79-1 Cll-' (J'J Ric·hmd Dull<Hl I'-!96 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-62981-9 A II right> rC.<CI vcJ. N< • I'CIJl< •dtKt ion, C< •PY nr transmissi< >n '•f this publication ""'Y I"' made withoul wrillen penni~>i<m. 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X '/ (> ) 4 ~ 05 04 0_1 0" 0 I 00 '!') <J)( 97 <)f, Contents List of Plates vii Preface viii Acknowledgements xi Chronology of Jonson s Life and Work xii A Note on Texts xxi 1 The Lone Wolf 1 2 Poet and Critic 40 3 Poet and State 70 4 The 'Laws' of Poetry 105 5 Jonson and Shakespeare 140 Appendix: Selected Critical Texts by Jonson 163 Notes 218 Select Bibliography 236 Index 241 V To Maura List of Plates 1 Title-page from Every Man Out of His Humour, 1600 Quarto (The British Library) 2 Sejanus 1605: Quarto Sig Ml recto (The British Library) 3 The Masque of Queens: dedication to Queen Anne (The British Library) 4 Volpone, 1607: the Dedication (The British Library) vn Preface Ben Jonson has been with me all my academic career, from studying The Alchemist at school (and playing Sir Epicure Mammon), via a doctoral dissertation, through articles in journals, to a book and editions of his masques and his poetry. With each encounter I have found the man bigger than the frame within which I con­ fronted him, more complex and challenging than I had been led to suppose. My most recent book, on the censorship of English Renaissance drama, largely grew from having no real explana­ tion of how it was that Jonson - whose plays antagonised the auth­ orities more often than those of any other dramatist of the period - very nearly became himself Master of the Revels, the official who censored and licensed w7orks for the public stage. In as much as I can say I found an answer to that question, it lay in a complete reconsideration of the history of the period, of its power relations, and of the place of the theatres - strung be­ tween courtly patronage, commercial imperatives and the oppo­ sition of the London authorities - within those power relations. Questions of patronage, of rival factions, of differences between the style and the substance of power, of the distance between Westminster and London, of the mixed nature of audiences, came to predominate over earlier notions of a seamless, unproblematic Elizabethan or Jacobean 'world picture'. And the drama, rather than parroting universally held opinions, increasingly seemed to interrogate the era it represented. That is, it gave voice not to certainties but to the tensions inherent in a period when unpre­ cedented social and economic changes (most obviously reflected in the growth of London to be the largest city and busiest trad­ ing centre in the known world) were subtly but remorselessly transforming the traditional political structures of monarchy, aristocracy and their underpinnings.1 Parallel to this, the nature and status of all writing was changing as literacy spread and the printed word became an increasingly familiar commodity. In this book I hope to show how Jonson's criticism, which once struck me as rather predictable and unimaginative, is a similarly com­ plex response to those tensions and pressures. vm Preface IX Over the past decade these issues, as they relate to Renaissance literature, have been addressed most urgently by critics variously described as new historicist, cultural materialist and revisionist. Some of my own recent writing has been described (rather loosely, I should say) as 'new historicist', but I do not consciously ally myself with any of these camps. I share with some of them, how­ ever, a conviction that writing does not simply mirror the society that produces it, but rather is involved in that society's definition of itself, in its structures and its norms (which are the sites of power). That is (as the new historicists would argue) writing is essentially shaped by the configurations of power from which it emanates and by which it is 'authorised', and in the end its only function may be to reiterate that authority. But, in articulating the configurations of power, it may (as the cultural materialists have argued) firstly expose those configurations as changeable constructs, not immutable ones, and secondly help to shape - or give credi­ bility to - alternative configurations.2 WTtere I part company from both camps is in the conviction that either scenario is always necess­ arily the case: that writing inevitably reinscribes the authority that begets it or that the 'alternative configurations' which it articu­ lates thereby acquire authority of their own. These seem to me matters determined by forces other than writing itself - politics, economics, technology, demographics, war: the processes of social and cultural change. Writing, in and of itself, is only an enabling agency, and must meet as many dead ends as it does open doors, depending on the circumstances of its reception. The contradic­ tions within, and mixed fortunes of, Jonson's literary criticism seem to me to bear out the truth of this with peculiar force. Stephen Greenblatt has described the reciprocal processes of literary and societal interaction as part of 'the circulation of social energy', and a peculiar fascination of observing it in the early modern period is that we see there the shapings of our own world. In particular, we see the shapings of modern authorship, and the beginnings of the development whereby certain writings have acquired a special status as 'literature', distinguishing them from other, less prestigious writings. The Oxford English Dictionary in­ forms us that the term 'literature' only acquired this distinctive sense in the early nineteenth century, but the cultural pressures that led to its emergence - and the attitudes that lie behind such a usage - go back much further.3 Indeed, they might be traced back to the emergence of the term 'critic' in what is now (at least X Preface in academic circles) its primary sense - 'one skilful in judging of the qualities and merits of literary or artistic works'. The OED gives the first use of critic in this sense as by Francis Bacon in The Advancement of Learning (1605). Bacon figures in Jonson's Dis­ coveries, as we shall see, as something of a cultural hero, and The Advancement appeared when Jonson was approaching the height of his powers. This book is an exploration of the ways in which Jonson's own literary criticism relates to the emergence of this sense of 'critic' as a term during his lifetime, to the developments in the culture that required such a coinage. The chronology which follows at­ tempts to highlight the complexities and inflections of his career, which epitomised many of those developments. That career is often represented (not least by Jonson himself) as more rounded and self-determined than it actually was, and it will be a particular concern of this book, starting with the Chronology, to emphasise its more fortuitous and less-than-coherent elements, since - as we shall see - they generated much of his criticism. Acknowledgements I want to thank a number of people and institutions who helped to make this book a better one than it might otherwise have been, and to bring it to press despite numerous other pressures on my time. Firstly thanks to David Kay and Scott Wilson, who both read the book at an advanced stage, saved me from numerous errors and made many helpful suggestions.