51 Chapter 2. JONSON: Volpone If Shakespeare Was Able to Allude to Our World As a Stage and to Man As an Actor Who Must Play

51 Chapter 2. JONSON: Volpone If Shakespeare was able to allude to our world as a stage and to man as an actor who must play many parts during his lifetime, Ben Jonson too continues the analogy when he says, in his Discoveries, "I have considered our whole life is a play."! While both Shakespeare and Jonson make extensive use of the analogy, it is interesting to note the difference in their perceptions of man as an actor. In Shakespeare's comedies it is often a situation of disorder that drives a character to assume a false identity, as has been illustrated in the Introduction. The playing of roles frequently proves successful in contributing to a movement towards the restoration of the state of order. Hamlet's "antic disposition" serves a positive purpose. He is able to wander freely and discover information not otherwise open to access and thus discover the truth about his uncle. However, the deceitful strategies of characters like Edmund (in King Lear) and Claudius (in Hamlet) are condemned. Thus Shakespeare's attitude to role playing is complex and, where the objective is positive, tends to be understanding, humane and sympathetic. Ben Jonson's plays seem to reveal, however, a more simplistic view of dissembling. In his scholarly expose of "the anti-theatrical prejudice" discernible almost world-wide, Jonas Barish shows how Ben Jonson clearly harbours "elements of deep suspicion toward theatricality as a form of behaviour in the world" to an extent surprising in a man of theatre.^ The assumption of a false identity or demeanour is considered an act of unequivocal deceit and condemned. Nevertheless, in the plays, Jonson seems to show a duality of vision. On the one hand there is a definite contempt 1 Ben Jonson, quoted by Leo Salingar, "Comic Form in Ben Jonson", Dramatic Form in Shakespeare and the Jacobeans ^Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1986) 168. 2 Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 133. 52 shown for those of his characters who engage in play acting (which he perceives as an expression of their falseness). Yet, on the other hand, there remains, quite incontestably, the virtuoso ability (surely proclaiming the joy of the "maker") with which he creates these role players. Whether in The Alchemist or in Volpone (1606) it is greed that leads the characters to play roles in order to garner more wealth. Deceit is their method and material gain their goal. Their dissembling is deliberate and quite devoid of any nobility of purpose. Excessive greed has made beasts of men and the anti-acquisitive attitude that Renaissance England inherited from the values of the medieval church makes Jonson deplore this.^ "Mischiefs feed / Like beasts till they be fat and then they bleed." (V. vii. 150 - 51).^ As the animal imagery suggests, it is only after the fattened beasts bleed that a state of order can again be ushered in. While the beasts feed off their victims and while innocence (Celia) and filial loyalty (Bonario) are denied there is appalling disorder seen in vice-infested Venice. Order is restored only after the mischief- mongers are apprehended and punished. It is only then that a sense of credibility can be re-established for virtue. Thus, in a sense, Ben Jonson also seems to point to a state of disorder when he presents multiple examples of disguise and dissimulation, for it is this corrupt world (which generates the urge to dissemble) towards which his attack is aimed. He is a satirist par excellence whose vision of the post-lapsarian world is one in which images of deception proliferate. 3 L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson., (1937; Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962) 168-91. -t Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. David Cook (1962; London: Methuen, 1966) 182. This edition is used throughout. AU further references to this text are indicated by act, scene and line numbers given in parentheses. 53 Though both are great dramatists of the same period, the genius of Shakespeare and that of Jonson isjworlds apart. Shakespeare's drama often encourages an identification by the audience, an emotional involvement. On the other hand, Jonson's art is characterized by its critical attitude. David Cook refers to Jonson's style of writing as "highly stylized, highly disciplined, formalized."^ The characters, far from being round creations that we can imagine stepping off the stage and walking out into the real world, are, instead, flat characters displaying the few traits relevant to their maker's intentions in the action of the play. As Eliot says, Jonson was not trying for the third dimension.*^ Thus the audience is never meant to take the character for real, to suspend his disbelief, as it were, nor to identify or empathize with them. Jonson's objective is to unfold a scenario where his actors demonstrate the action while members of the audience react critically and unemotionally to what they see. It is hardly surprising that George Parfitt introduces a comparison with the Theatre of the Absurd and the theatre of distancing or alienation^ or that Robert Brustein mentions Brecht's Jonsonian phase in The Theatre of Revolt.^ Michael Scott also iterates that a certain alienation effect is achieved by Jonson's balancing of satiric caricature with dramatic illusion.'' The nearest literary neighbours of Jonson's plays are the comedies of Moliere and the Restoration age in which we are invited to laugh at (rather than with) the majority of the characters. 5 David Cook, Introduction, Volpone. by Ben Jonson (1962; London: Methuen, 1966) 13. 6T. S. Eliot, "Ben Jonson". The Sacred Wood (1920; London: Methuen, 1974) 119. ^ George Parfitt, Ben Jonson: Public Poet and Private Man (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1976) 140. 8 Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.. 1964). 9 Michael Scott, Renaissance Drama and a Modem Audience (London: Macmillan, 1982) 55. 54 Yet Sackton'sio contention that in order for tlie audience to feel the need to review their own moral position as a result of their witnessing the play, it is necessary for them to feel some degree of closeness or sympathy for the characters is also valid. Jonson creates characters who are either fools or criminals but succeeds in endowing them with such vitality and such a degree of commitment to what they do (as this analysis will show) that we cannot help but feel something for them. It is "the vitality of the rogues" that draws our "partial sympathy", 'i Thus there is a definite degree of self-reflexive consciousness in Jonsonian drama that the character is an actor demonstrating some aspects of life according to the vision of the playwright. The audience is to react to this in an analytical manner. M.C. Bradbrook speaks of the undeniable detachment of Jonson's audience. She also refers to the "animals" in Volpone as creatures that are viewed like caged animals in a zoo.'^ Hazlitt goes so far as to refer to Jonson's characters as "machines" in comparison with Shakespeare's "living men". 13 f^g comedy of humours is eminently suited to this self- conscious analytical system. Though the notion of humours in the human body is an old one belonging to the world of physiology and takes into account only four specific humours (or secretions) in the body which are responsible for equilibrium or lack of it, Jonson uses the concept in a broader, more psychological sense. His characters are examples of the presence of an excess of one or another humour or, in other words, of personalities with one markedly strong trait. 10 Alexander H. Sackton, quoted by S.L. Goldberg, "Folly into Crime: The Catastrophe of Volpone". Jonson: Volpone. ed. Jonas Barish (London: Macrtullan, 1972) 161. 11 S.L. Goldberg, "Folly into Crime" 169. 12 M.C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of his Time (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1976) 31. 13 William Hazlitt, quoted by Anne Barton, Preface, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1984) x. 55 This form of characterization is close to caricature and thus lends itself to an unemotional critical viewing. The purpose of comedy, as Jonson saw it, is clearly to make us laugh. It was not in triumph but with regret that he attacked Shakespeare's drama for its intermingling of sentiment and melancholy in the comic genre. Ben Jonson's comedy is undoubtedly didactic and follows Sidney's definition: "Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which [the dramatist] represents in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one."*'' Thus in Jonsonian comedy we are shown only those aspects of character that are to make us laugh. If the characters are 'flat' it is easier for us to laugh and condemn. Elaborating on the theatre situation, Peter Womack makes the valid point that the laughter of the audience is penetrative. It is heard: it reaches the actors on stage, thus influencing the timing and pointing of the representation. It is "imperious". The actor must wait for the laughter to die down before he can go on to the next line. This "arrests the disappearance of the 'actor' into the 'character'" since it reminds him that he is in "the business of raising, controlling and reacting to laughs". Richard Schechner also comments on the importance of laughter to the process of performance. When "the performers hear the audience laughing, they perform as a response".'"' Laughter clearly signals appreciation of the actors' histrionic abilities, thus implicitly encouraging and endorsing the pact between the play-makers and the play-players, to use Samuel Selden's terminology.

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